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Photography today , whats wrong with it, my struggles

The Sparrow

Graduate Poster
The Sparrow
Joined
Sep 21, 2015
Messages
1,658
Location
Central Canada
So after a long absence (back when there wasn't even digital photography) I got back into the hobby. Buying a mid range camera and eventually a few lenses. (I specifically will not reveal brand names or model numbers - more on that below).
I got really heavy into it, then kinda burned out. I'm tentatively trying to get back into it, but with a different mindset.

Here are the things that kind of spoiled the joy (for me)
1. hanging out in photography forums -particularly the gearhead types like dpreview
Way too much my gear is better than yours, or I'm better than you because I am so critical that I buy 5 or 6 copies of the same lens and keep only the best one. or I spend $6k on a 50mm fixed lens because when I shoot wide open and then pixel peep on the corners at 75X magnification I notice that the $5k lens is a tiny bit blurry.

2. post processing with cookie cutter settings that make photos look synthetic and frankly all the same.

3. Cliche shots, there are so many of them and it is just so hard not to find yourself copying other cliche shots, because that's what looks good..I guess?

4. Taking zillions of photos, because you can, because digital doesn't cost you more per shot. So I fall into a trap of not really planning shots, or thinking about shots, or having something creative to say.

5. Looking at zillions of photos, because of the internet you can, and too much of a good thing just exhausts your appetite.

So, I wanna start taking pictures again, and maybe talk about photography, maybe here, without talking about 'gear', or 'buying gear', or 'what gear is better', or 'how do I set up photoshop to make my pictures really 'sell'.

I guess I wanna try more to just focus on the art, or finding a personal vision, or what the point is of taking pics, why do we do it, what for.

Anyone want to discuss?
 
I had several hundred dollars of film photo gear but I was never as picky as some of those people. Actually I still have it all, but no film.

I guess I got out of taking photos as art once everyone got into the game. Yes, just the odds say that out of every 1000 pics, one is going to be great. I still like to think I have an "eye". (Well, I did win the photo contest last month for "Blue"...!) But I don't see it as an end or a purpose now.

I'm getting some better detailed pictures with my phone than I got with my early digital cameras. I have taken to adding several seconds of hi-def video just in case I can capture the perfect composition or expression in a single extracted frame.

I do, however, like that I can carry all that gear in my pocket rather than a tote bag the size of a breadbox.
 
You should come visit us in the monthly photo contest.

And yes, gear snobs are to be avoided in pretty much all endeavors. Unless, of course, you're a gear snob, then you should seek those folks out and hang with them and relish their peculiar insecurities.

I find I plan shots still, even tho I can shoot zillions of pics. I'll often go on walks, frame a shot, then before I hit the shutter release stop and put the camera away because I just realized it would look so much better if I was there in the early morning with the low sun on the water and maybe a little mist. So, I make note to stop by some free morning.
 
I get what you're saying, but if you don't like some of the things that come with digital photography, don't do them. You can, after all, still get a nice digital SLR (even the entry models are powerful and capable of good work), shoot carefully, ignore the call to post process to smithereens, and ignore the geeks.

I do a fair amount of photography (and have since before digital came along) and I am happy with it. I have a decent camera and lots of lenses - some left over from the film days and still compatible - and take lots of pictures. We travel a lot, so it makes sense to have a nice camera to shoot the penguins and lions and blue footed boobies.

My wife and I shot slides for many years, and we got used to trying to be careful with composition and exposure and whatnot in the camera. Now we can be a bit more wasteful than we were when film was expensive, but there's no reason you can't still be careful.

I would suggest that if you want to take pictures, do it. Most decent cameras will give you a good image straight out of the camera, and nothing but the lure of free pictures compels you to take many instead of few.

One more specific suggestion I'd make, if you're having difficulty with motivation and the like, is to dip into an area you're not accustomed to, such as macro photography, where not only does one get a view of things which is unique to the camera and not just a recording of what was there, but also allows some thought on composition and abstraction separate from the subject.

And remember that one of the great virtues of digital photography is not only that you can take thousands of pictures, but you can delete them. Nobody has to see what you don't want them to see!
 
The Sparrow said:
So after a long absence (back when there wasn't even digital photography) I got back into the hobby. Buying a mid range camera and eventually a few lenses. (I specifically will not reveal brand names or model numbers - more on that below).
I got really heavy into it, then kinda burned out. I'm tentatively trying to get back into it, but with a different mindset.

Here are the things that kind of spoiled the joy (for me)
1. hanging out in photography forums -particularly the gearhead types like dpreview
Way too much my gear is better than yours, or I'm better than you because I am so critical that I buy 5 or 6 copies of the same lens and keep only the best one. or I spend $6k on a 50mm fixed lens because when I shoot wide open and then pixel peep on the corners at 75X magnification I notice that the $5k lens is a tiny bit blurry.

2. post processing with cookie cutter settings that make photos look synthetic and frankly all the same.

3. Cliche shots, there are so many of them and it is just so hard not to find yourself copying other cliche shots, because that's what looks good..I guess?

4. Taking zillions of photos, because you can, because digital doesn't cost you more per shot. So I fall into a trap of not really planning shots, or thinking about shots, or having something creative to say.

5. Looking at zillions of photos, because of the internet you can, and too much of a good thing just exhausts your appetite.

So, I wanna start taking pictures again, and maybe talk about photography, maybe here, without talking about 'gear', or 'buying gear', or 'what gear is better', or 'how do I set up photoshop to make my pictures really 'sell'.

I guess I wanna try more to just focus on the art, or finding a personal vision, or what the point is of taking pics, why do we do it, what for.

Anyone want to discuss?
Click to expand...
I paid for my last year of college with a film camera (About 3 different bodies/lenses/outfits) Spent every Saturday after the football game in the darkroom, till 2 or 3 in the morning. Even met my wife because I wanted to shoot a baloon rally.
I enjoy it, for me. i've gone digital, but I use Lightroom, not photoshop--and not even very often on that
O don't care what people think, I shoot what interests ME! and my family.
As for the gearheads, I know a guy who could do things with an Instamatic (Remember them?) that made Hasselblad users cry and throw their stuff in the trash...
 
Naive cheerleading here, but the level of craft I see here from about a dozen regulars just blows me away. Beautiful stuff, with personality.
 
Good responses. I appreciate them.
I pulled this off the front page of flikr. It somewhat illustrates my personal dissatisfaction.

It is not terrible or anything, but there's something very cliche-dramatic for me (though certainly there are more extreme examples). And there's a synthetic 'smoothness' to it that I'm just a bit tired of seeing. And the tones and lighting, it is kind of unreal, a characterization of what it probably really looked like.

Not a fan.

What do you all think?
 

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The Sparrow said:
Good responses. I appreciate them.
I pulled this off the front page of flikr. It somewhat illustrates my personal dissatisfaction.

It is not terrible or anything, but there's something very cliche-dramatic for me (though certainly there are more extreme examples). And there's a synthetic 'smoothness' to it that I'm just a bit tired of seeing. And the tones and lighting, it is kind of unreal, a characterization of what it probably really looked like.

Not a fan.

What do you all think?
Click to expand...

It has its place, but also not my thing generally. I prefer a bit more realism. There is a reason we can ours a photo contest, rather than a photoshop contest. ;)
 
The Sparrow said:
What do you all think?
Click to expand...
I think I see Captain Kirk fighting the Gorn. Star Trek really loved those sloping rocks.

I've still got a higher-end film camera and multiple lenses, in addition to a couple of digital SLR's and lenses for those. Somehow I seem to wind up taking more pictures with my phone.
 
I'm not a big fan of high dynamic range, though I am sure it has its place. Of course this could be my own foible too. As mentioned, I shot slides for many years, and those are high in contrast and low in dynamic range, an effect I rather liked to exploit. The black and white image posted here looks like a desaturated color image with filter effects added. Nowadays it's quite possible in most cameras to change a color image to monochrome and to add the effect of standard colored filters, in this case amber or red to darken the sky. It looks like an attempt to make a relatively undramatic image look more striking, with little effect. I could be wrong, of course, but it does not look like an original black and white. It's rare to find this without either special effects or a true black and white sensor, as the color sensors generally used, even when the results are OK, just don't produce the same shades from the same colors.

e.t.a. although one should not generally judge an original image from the downsized JPG on line, the black and white here looks soft in the foreground, and excessively sharpened, with JPG artifacts around the edges of the rock ledge either from the compression, the sharpening, or both.
 
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I mentioned earlier that macro can be a good way to rekindle the photographic eye. So can closeup that is not actually macro. It's been a good year for flowers, and I've been out chasing bugs. Back when I was shooting film I didn't do much of this, because it's so easy to miss, and waste film. An ideal application for digital photography where you can toss the misses.

I recently got a very old 55 mm. macro lens, which is very sharp but hard to use on bugs because one has to go so close. Bumblebees are hard to grab because they flit from flower to flower, and they always face the wrong way, but it's fun to keep at them. This on a DX format camera.

good to the last drop.jpg

A while back during winter, I chased milkweed beetles around. Here's one made with a typesetting lens in a microscope adapter. Also on a DX (crop sensor) camera. I have a set of these lenses in various strengths, all slow, fixed aperture and focus - one just moves the camera to focus. When they hit they're pretty sharp.

milkweed beetle 2.jpg

Another approach, not quite so macro as the last, is with a big telephoto lens. You don't get macro, but you can get an effective closeup from far away, and the depth of field makes for a nice "bokeh" in the background. This butterfly and dragonfly were done with a DX camera and a 500 millimeter lens. The butterfly is a full frame, the dragonfly cropped in a little.
500 butterfly.jpg

500 dragonfly crop.jpg

Get close!
 
I haven't done any photography in quite a while, except taking happy snaps on my iPhone. My DSLR is, I think, at the bottom of a box I never got around to unpacking when I moved. I have gone totally off Flickr because Yahoo sucks, and it won't even let me log on any more because reasons. Furthermore, it won't let me download full-resolution copies of the photos except one at a time, and there's no way I'm going to do that for the 600+ photos I've got there. I could go back to the originals, but they're buried amongst many thousands of others on my backup drive.

You could say I've gone off photography a bit.
 
I confess. I have instagrammed.

ksr7db4m.jpg


uHFHS3om.jpg


qIev99Qm.jpg
 
bruto said:
I mentioned earlier that macro can be a good way to rekindle the photographic eye. So can closeup that is not actually macro. It's been a good year for flowers, and I've been out chasing bugs. Back when I was shooting film I didn't do much of this, because it's so easy to miss, and waste film. An ideal application for digital photography where you can toss the misses.

I recently got a very old 55 mm. macro lens, which is very sharp but hard to use on bugs because one has to go so close. Bumblebees are hard to grab because they flit from flower to flower, and they always face the wrong way, but it's fun to keep at them. This on a DX format camera.

View attachment 36834

A while back during winter, I chased milkweed beetles around. Here's one made with a typesetting lens in a microscope adapter. Also on a DX (crop sensor) camera. I have a set of these lenses in various strengths, all slow, fixed aperture and focus - one just moves the camera to focus. When they hit they're pretty sharp.

View attachment 36835

Another approach, not quite so macro as the last, is with a big telephoto lens. You don't get macro, but you can get an effective closeup from far away, and the depth of field makes for a nice "bokeh" in the background. This butterfly and dragonfly were done with a DX camera and a 500 millimeter lens. The butterfly is a full frame, the dragonfly cropped in a little.
View attachment 36836

View attachment 36837

Get close!
Click to expand...

Ooh! That second one looks like a Box Elder Bug. I haven't seen one of those in years.
 
Trebuchet said:
Ooh! That second one looks like a Box Elder Bug. I haven't seen one of those in years.
Click to expand...

Now that I look it up, I see it is a Box Elder bug, not a milkweed bug as I'd been led to believe. Which makes sense, since we are surrounded by box elders. They're quite a plague in winter, but at least they and the lady bugs give me something to chase after when there are no flowers out.
 
Macro shots ARE a lot of fun. Good work there.

I like the third dice shot a lot.

I'm enjoying the responses here.

I think maybe I'm just trying too hard and am caught up to much in trying to make 'art'.

It is kind of like, I don't have a clear sense of what photography is "for". What is its purpose.
Photojournalism is actually a good one for me, because the purpose is clear and the mission is accomplished. Nature can be that way too, but more in the sense of documenting or capturing the facts and natural appeal of something like a colourful insect, as opposed to trying to make a 'dramatic' shot of a sunset or mountain.

Maybe I am not making a lot of sense but it is helping me to talk it out. :)
 
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