reasonable doubt

It takes a long time to get good at photography. This year marks my tenth with an SLR, meaning my tenth where I have had some control over the bits of the process that matter. Our age of instant results means that it’s possible to get good much more quickly – time under these circumstances is measured in the number of photographs that you take, and then assess with a critical eye. When I started out, this meant taking 24 or 36 shots, sending them off, and appraising them a week later. Nowadays, of course, a single shot can be assessed moments after it is taken. This is, generally, A Good Thing.

When did I start taking good photographs? Well, when I say “good” I mean “not so bad that your eyes bleed a little”? It was when I abandoned my do-it-all-for-you Canon EOS 300, and bought a Nikon FE- a manual focus (mostly) mechanical camera, with a single, 24mm lens. I went on to use this combo, plus a couple of cheap primes, for a couple of years, and it was great. Really great. I learn so much, because I couldn’t just let the camera take over. It wasn’t clever enough, so I had to be.

I mentioned in the last post how I like a manual focus lens on my e-p1, and it is for exactly this reason – the thought process is just a little more involved. The fact is, once I was the one worrying about focus and exposure, the whole act of taking a photograph became more creative, more abstract, and something interesting happened. Without realising it, I stopped worrying about subject.

This is something the beginning photographer, unless they are particularly aware, often doesn’t realise. The subject does not make the photograph. The name photograph itself means, essentially, drawing with light, and it turns out that this is the most important thing that you can concentrate upon.

Think about it. How many of the great photographs depend exclusively on the subject? Very few. There are, of course, great photographs of historical events, and occasionally the event itself is sufficient to make the photograph great (the astonishing images of the “Tank Man” at Tiananman Square are perhaps The most obvious example*). However, a great subject is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition – most certainly not the latter. There was a point where I must have realised that the subject itself did not make the photograph. As we have all discovered after returning from a particularly picturesque destination, taking a photograph of a spectacular sunset does not, unless you know your craft, make for a spectacular photograph of a sunset.

The secret here is light. This is what one is photographing. Not a subject, not a thing, but the way that that thing is represented in two dimensions, represented by the interplay of light. Don’t believe me? Go and take a look on Flickr. Note down the photographs that really take your breath away. In how many of those photographs is the subject itself of much interest? How many of these “things” would you stop and photograph yourself if you were to walk past them? Yes, quite. Sobering.

A humbling lesson for me, certainly. So often, I’ll go out, and just not be able to find anything to photograph. Maybe I just shouldn’t go so far afield.

*this is a better example than you may think. There’s a fair chance that the photograph that you think you know is not the photograph that you think you know. Very similar images were taken by at least three different photgraphers, all from very similar angles, and are used pretty much interchangably. A very rare example of the circumstances being far and away the most important thing about the image (I hope that I am in no way denigrating the photographers or the photographs in question. They remain extraordinary, and taken under extraordinary circumstances. They’re just not quite as unique as you may believe.).