You can be a good photographer.

I've been taking, or rather making, photographs for a long time.  Since I was in high school, actually.  I am by profession a high tech kinda guy, but I have also been a journalist and found that to be very satisfying.  I gravitate toward journalistic photography.  I am a semi-pro, meaning I get paid for my work but I don't try to use it as my sole source of income.  I have written articles and provided photographs for newspapers and magazines, and photographed college sports for the NCAA.  I'm not saying I am the world's best anything, but I've learned a lot over the years and applied what I learned to make myself better.  Almost everybody has a digital camera these days, even if just in their phones, and I decided to write this blog to help others improve their skills in a simple way that anybody can understand.

I started out with a Nikkormat 35mm camera with a 50mm f/2 lens.  I shot Kodak Tri-X black and white film, and also whatever color film was available at the time.  I really liked Kodachrome and Ektachrome slide films, particularly when you underexposed them a little.  For portraits I liked Kodak Vericolor.  Yes, most people reading this will be laughing at taking photos with actual film, but hey, I admit I'm a geezer.  Imagine being limited to ISO 400.

Being a broke college student, I could not afford good glass, but I was able to eventually outfit myself with some inexpensive wide angle and telephoto lenses.  Everything was manual in those days, although I did have built-in light meters.  But having to manage all the settings was a really good way to (1) waste a lot of film, and (2) really understand how the camera/film/lens combination works.  There's no substitute for going manual to teach yourself.

Eventually digital cameras got good enough and inexpensive enough (relatively speaking) that I moved into digital photography.  I have to say, the modern cameras make taking photos so easy that pretty much anybody can, with a little patience, make some really good photographs.

Now, I am going to be sacrilegious for a moment and say that there are a lot of good photographers out there who augment their incomes by teaching classes, holding seminars, and getting paid to generally teach people a bunch of hooey.  The fact is, photography, like most art, is a subjective endeavor, and each person has his/her own tastes.  There are a few basics you need to know to improve your photography and change your snapshots into photographs.  These things are easy, but you need to practice them.

And that is what this blog is about.  I am going to show you examples of the photographs that I make, and tell you how I made them.  You don't have to like my work, but you should at least try to understand the thought process, so that you can apply it to your own photography.  I guarantee you will get better.

Now, let's talk about the photo I posted at the top of the blog.  Here is the straight out of the camera (SOOC) shot, just reduced in size to fit the blog requirements:

This was taken with an Olympus OMD EM5-II camera with a pretty good wide zoom lens.  I use this setup when I travel because it's small and light and unobtrusive.  The shot is pretty boring SOOC, although I did manage to blur the background and get a decent exposure.  But otherwise it is all very meh.  In particular, the placement of the center of attention, the woman with the camera, is dead center in the frame and I don't find this appealing. When I shoot the street, I am looking for a situation, and I use the camera to get an image that I can work on later.  So I cropped it thusly:

Ah, this looks much better to me.  The woman is now just a little off center in the frame, but the crop has enlarged the grouping of the man and woman and the grouping is very off-center.  But more importantly, I think the snapshot I took has taken a step toward a story.  The significance of the woman has changed.  She is more separated from the background, and now you are wondering what she is looking at.  And that's mainly because the crop made her larger and pulled her closer to the viewer.  It has also removed some extraneous clutter from the background and corrected the composition mistake I made in not getting anything below her knees into the frame.  By cropping in, you no longer really care about that.  Actually, that wasn't a mistake so much as just one of those things that happens when you do street photography.  You often just get what you get.  The next instant after this shot was taken, she moved and there was no longer any reason to take a photo.

Another thing I wanted to point out here is more subtle.  The woman is looking off the frame to the right.  From a storytelling perspective, we need to put some space in front of her to emphasize the distance.  So the crop does that as well, creating the implied distance.

Now, go back and look at the black and white version I posted at the top.  In the color versions, the colors are mostly muted and not distracting, so it works.  But in general, I have found that a black and white treatment of people shots helps you focus on the story by removing the distraction of colorful clothing.  Famous Canadian photographer Ted Grant once said,  "When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes.  But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!"

I don't know if I would go that far, but certainly it focuses attention differently.  I think this may be due in part to a hundred years of black and white photojournalism.  We are are wired to view black and white shots such as this in the context of a news story, and some times an art gallery.

So, next blog I will talk a little about what goes into making a good photograph.  Spoiler alert: it's not about the camera.