On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 8:43 PM, Bill <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The best you can do is go through your work, first removing the obvious junk
> first. The out of focus, the very badly exposed, the ones that won't make a
> good print for purely technical reasons.
> After that, you can start culling based purely on aesthetics, culling out
> the ones that fail for non technical reasons, and this is where training in
> the arts comes in.
>
> A good strategy for teaching yourself composition (after doing some reading)
> is to take the images from a shoot, take out the good ones and don't look at
> them again. They have done their job, they have shown you that there is
> hope.
>
> Study the failures, ask yourself why the image failed. By doing this, you
> determine what doesn't work. Eliminate what doesn't work from what you are
> doing, and eventually, you will find that more of what you are doing works.
> Keep putting the images that work into a folder, either real or digital for
> a year. After a year, open that folder, arrange the images by date and watch
> how your photography has progressed.
I have to admit that out of all the replies so far, the section
quoted above is the most useful. I guess it provides a brief and
adapted description of your edit workflow. In general it matches how
I would approach this, and what I want to accomplish in the long term.
(I've yet to reach the one year milestone.) :)
> You have yet to separate the aesthetic from the technical, and you think
> that you can wrap aesthetics up into a formulaic approach that will allow
> you to make judgement calls regarding your images, but until you have the
> ability to judge the final image for what it is, separate from the technical
> elements that make it what it is, you are going to find this to be a
> disappointing avocation.
I agree with your statement, and as said in previous replies to
other posters, I do try to edit my images first based on what I think
is aesthetically pleasing to me, and then on the technical qualities
when alternatives are available. I was just debating the approach for
the second part.
(Beyond this point in my reply, I go off-topic, especially since I
know that some of the mailing list members love to argue, myself
included. Thus one can easily skip the rest.) :)
> One of the things I have noted over the past decade is that the very geeky
> avocation of photography has attracted geeks from other interest groups,
> especially computer geeks.
At least, by the above observation, we are all geeks in one way or
another, thus we all have crazy ideas from time-to-time. :)
> The new photographer who has cut his teeth on
> computers is used to success via formulaic approach.
On the contrary, a good computer geek (or as we call them
"hackers" in the good sense), is far from "formulaic approaches". It
involves a lot more creativity that what people usually think.
(Indeed perhaps a lot of the industry has morphed into software
assembly factories, but there are some original "codes" are works of
art in their own right.)
> I want this as an end result, and to get there I plug in this line of code,
If this were true we would have by now programmed programs to
program our programs. (And SkyNet would be up-and-running.) :D
> You would do better to read some books on composition than to try to make
> what you are wanting into a numbers game.
But to get back to photography and "formulaic approaches". Like
all crafts, even photography has its own so-called "magic-formulas"
that are preached in most materials, especially when it comes to
composition. But in the end I understand that the author has to
address both the beginner and the advanced; plus he can't describe
into words the creative process without sounding too "formulaic".
(Don't take the above as me dismissing those materials.)
> As technical a craft as photography is, the successful photographer masters
> the mechanical parts to the point of not having to think about them any
> more, and then concentrates on the aesthetic, in much the same way that the
> person learning to drive masters using the controls on the vehicle to the
> point that driving is more or less automatic, allowing the person to enjoy
> the drive.
To keep the analogy with driving, I guess that the equivalent of
"artists" in the automobile world are the Formula 1 drivers (or
similar). However I bet that they master their controls well beyond
"driving more or less automatic", up-to taking highly informed
decisions almost subconsciously. Thus I guess that at least some of
the artists in the photography world have done similarly, i.e.
mastered the technical details beyond "automatic".
(As a small case-study, looking at what books are published by
Ansel Adams --- according to http://www.anseladamsbooks.com/ --- three
are technical, the rest are "albums", none(?) are about technique.
Although I most concede two things: (1) I clearly see that the
"albums" are technique "manuals" without too many words; (2) this is
only one data-point, and there are countless other counter-examples.)
Ciprian.
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