To be honest, I wanted to give this article a far more pretentious name. Something like “the ten commandments of the photographic faith”… But then I decided it would be needless pomposity - photography has no commandments. Every so often somebody curious and restless comes along and tears down the canons and familiar foundations everyone had thought unshakable. That’s probably how it goes in any field of human creativity. But no matter where your creative streak drags you off to - impressionism, avant-garde - every school of art begins with one and the same thing: with knowing how to hold a pencil. And it is exactly this “knowing how to hold a pencil” that I want to talk about.
Not about how to choose that pencil (2B or 3B), not about what to sharpen it with (a school sharpener or a Swiss Army knife), and certainly not about which fingers to grip it between. In any art school, “holding a pencil” means the minimum skill needed to put an image on paper in which even an unprepared viewer can guess, on the second try, what object was captured. There you go! And although the promising talent may later toss the pencil aside and start painting straight onto the canvas with his fingers, he will still be taught the simplest thing first - “holding a pencil”. And since all of us were taught drawing at school one way or another, I’ll keep using analogies with painters and their work - to my mind these examples will be clearer and more vivid than general reasoning about the nature of photography.
1. Shoot, shoot, and shoot again
If I had to give only one piece of advice, I’d pick this one. Because only practice gives a tangible, meaningful result. Reading forums, studying the books of great photographers, even attending their master classes will not bring you any closer to the cherished goal. No, of course, all of that can be very useful too. But without practice all this knowledge is just dead weight. Whereas if you shoot a roll of film a week or, switching to digital language, a hundred frames a week, then in… six months (well, maybe three) you’ll feel the difference in how you relate to photography and to the result you’re getting.
Believe me, there’s nothing new here - life works this way everywhere. At school I was learning to play the guitar: for a whole month, every morning, I picked up the guitar and spent exactly half an hour trying to form those three chords on the fretboard that the guys in the yard had shown me. After a month those chords produced their first decent sound. In art school, lesson after lesson, students are seated in front of a still life and asked to draw it as best their skill and talent allow. In the first year what usually comes out is crooked jugs and vases with a displaced center of gravity. But each time the jugs get more convincing, and what starts to worry the students is no longer their shape but the inner content hidden behind it.
You need to shoot a lot. If you do it at parties with friends and once a year on a cheap beach vacation - believe me, you have no chance. No chance of taking a frame that will delight somebody beyond your relatives and the neighbor’s dog.
Try it. You’ll taste real photography after a thousand frames shot in a single week. Shot not just click-click-click, but with feeling, with proper pacing… choosing the subject and being aware of every release of the shutter.
2. Careful preparation is the key to success
Even though you need to shoot a lot, that doesn’t mean at all that you need to shoot everything indiscriminately. First of all, work out which genre of photography attracts you. That can be hard, but it’s worth a try. Every genre dictates its own pictorial and technical means. For landscapes you’ll most likely need a tripod, a polarizing filter and a wide-angle lens or an attachment. For photojournalism, on the contrary, you need to squeeze the maximum sensitivity out of your camera (without hurting image quality, of course) and choose the longest focal length available to you at the moment (with a fixed-lens camera you simply have to study what that lens can do and learn to work the zoom). For portraits you’ll need to get hold of a flash, better still more than one, plus umbrellas, a softbox, reflectors, background stands and a heap of other important studio contraptions. And that’s only the technical side. Without this minimum of preparation, shooting in any genre is simply going to be awkward. Note that I’m not saying “impossible”. You can take a wonderful portrait using plain window light. But how willing are you to accept that without a tripod you won’t shoot the lights of a night city, without a long lens you won’t photograph the bodybuilder sunbathing on the roof of the next building, and without reflectors and softboxes you won’t manage to shoot your beloved girl in “glamour” style.
But even once you’ve settled all these questions, stop for at least a minute and think about what it actually is you’re shooting. If you manage to formulate some kind of idea (and I’m not claiming that this is always possible), your photograph will only gain from it.
Having defined the goal, all that’s left is to head for it. Without that, your photographs will reflect only your soul’s restlessness and turmoil. Which, by the way, isn’t so bad either…
3. Breathe deeper and shoot from a tripod
The main problem of every beginning photographer is fussiness and haste. Spotting an interesting frame, he whips his camera up, presses the shutter and hurries on in search of the next subject. Picture a painter who sets up his easel, makes one stroke with the brush, then packs up and leaves. Funny, isn’t it? But that’s exactly what beginning photographers do, because the camera lets them capture a scene in a single instant. But was the chosen viewpoint the ideal one? Was the composition worked out? The horizon leveled? The right exposure compensation dialed in? In “shooting from the hip” mode there’s no time for any of these questions. Yes, there are areas of photography where speed of reaction is precisely what’s needed - photojournalism, for example. But believe me, a good photojournalist walks a long road before he can whip up his camera and answer all those questions within one instant.
This problem has another side to it - a psychological one. It’s quite hard to shift gears and start examining the subject slowly, choosing the best angle and thinking about the aperture, if you never used to do any of that. And here the tripod comes to the rescue. It’s exactly the use of this simple device, even when the light doesn’t demand it, that lets you break your habitual rhythm, break the pattern. The tripod has to be taken out, unfolded, the camera mounted, aimed at the subject, the leg height adjusted, aimed at the subject again, the tripod carried one step forward (hands off the zoom button!), the leg height adjusted once more, and so on. The need to perform these simple actions gives the brain time to think about composition, about the angle and about many other useful things…
Of course, not everything can be shot from a tripod. But try it where it’s possible. And you’ll feel the difference. Shooting will change its meaning for you…
4. Copy the masterpieces
One of the common practices in learning painting or drawing is copying the works of acknowledged masters of the genre. Looking at a masterpiece, the student sees only the result. A result that says nothing about how it was made. You simply have to invent it again. You have to find your own answers to the many questions the author was solving while creating his masterpiece. And although a lot of the questions are already solved and the answers seem obvious (composition, contrast, color treatment), trying to repeat it leads to a far larger set of questions. It turns out that if you (accidentally) shift this object slightly to the right, the composition suddenly falls apart, or that the absence of a single highlight on a glass completely changes how the contrast of the whole work is perceived. It is exactly this - working these questions out and hunting down the answers - that has such an enormous teaching effect.
This practice is easy to carry over into photography. Want to take a good portrait? Leaf through photography books or, at the very worst, glossy magazines. Pick the version you like and try to copy it. Repeat the pose, the lighting, the processing in full. And then try to understand why your piece still doesn’t look like the original. Before a trip to a new and unfamiliar place I always go online and look through a huge number of photographs of that particular spot on the globe. I select the frames that appeal to me and try to work out from what place, from what point and at what time they were taken. Failing that, I buy postcards once I’m there. This lets me draw on other photographers’ experience and build something of my own on top of it, something original. So buy photography books and go to exhibitions, pick out the works that appeal to you there and try to repeat them with your own hands. You’ll learn a lot of new things about photography. The main thing is not to get stuck on copying. At some point it’s worth stopping and going your own way. Or, at the very worst, offering your creations to some glossy tabloid.
5. Analyze what you’ve shot
If you take my first piece of advice, be sure to take this one too. All the more so since for digital cameras the procedure has been simplified beyond belief - detailed information about the conditions and settings is recorded along with every frame. All that’s left is to lay the photographs out in front of you and, using that information, analyze your own failures. Frame too dark? Maybe the aperture was stopped down too far? Or the shutter speed was longer than allowed for flash sync? Too much noise? Wasn’t the camera perhaps in automatic mode, which gave the camera a reason to push sensitivity to the limit and led to a high noise level?
In a word, to correct your mistakes you have to know them. With modern technology, finding the source of the trouble is practically no bother at all. You only have to spend a little time on it…
6. Print your work
Photography has always been bound up with the print. Modern technology lets you go fully paperless: you can shoot “digital” and look at the photographs on a computer or TV screen. But believe me, holding a print feels like a completely different thing. A print can be shown even when there’s no electricity, it can be hung on the wall or sent to grandmother as a gift. Carrying a packet of prints around is far more practical and lighter than lugging a laptop. There are another hundred arguments in favor of prints and probably as many against. After all, how often does something that looks wonderful on screen turn out to be far from magnificent in print? So is the game worth the candle? Is it worth getting entangled with color rendition, choice of paper and many other obstacles on the way to a good print, if you can simply look at your masterpieces on the TV screen? That’s for you to decide. But if you really are striving to take a good photograph, then it has to be printed - because art must belong to the people. Don’t hide your masterpieces in a small cramped little box that hasn’t even grown the rudiments of artificial intelligence yet.
7. A big print as a test of quality
If you’re going to print your work, then not at 4 by 6. Try it, and you’ll be astonished at how radically the perception of a photograph changes once it grows past a certain mystical “watershed” - somewhere around 5 by 7 inches, to my eye.
Depth appears, small details come out. This is no longer a simple snapshot that can be accidentally shoved onto a shelf among the books and lost there. This is a claim to something bigger… And like any claim, it may turn out to be entirely unfounded. A big print, like a magnifying glass, can amplify and reveal every flaw and shortcoming of your work. To some extent this can be your own inner measure of quality: if the photograph only gets better after enlargement, you’re on the right track.
And although above I spoke about a “watershed” around the 5 by 7 size, I’d still advise you to enlarge your photographs at least to 8 by 12 inches. Try it - you won’t regret it…
8. Look for the right level of criticism
When you’re holding a print, you’ll certainly want to show it to somebody. That’s normal. The wish to share the results of your work is common to practically every author. The only question is, show it to whom? There are two extremes here. The first is to limit the circle of your critics to family members or close friends, for whom anything you do will always be the summit of perfection (Adams can go home!). The second extreme is trying to show your work to some eminent, venerable maestro, awaiting his verdict like manna from heaven. But believe me, an honest and decent “maestro” will simply have nothing to say about your work beyond some encouraging, meaningless words about it being “good for a start”. It’s like showing a university professor the solution to a school exercise and expecting something intelligible and useful in return. A school exercise should be shown to your teacher or to the classmate at the next desk (as long as he isn’t a total dunce, of course).
You should share your work with those who are roughly at your level or a little above it. And what matters far more - with those who treat photography as creative work, and not as a way of demonstrating the places your body has visited or the clothes that harmoniously emphasize (conceal) your figure.
The main thing is to sense in good time that your work has already outgrown the current level of your critics, and to set off in search of new ones (which doesn’t mean at all that you can stop talking to your old friends once they can no longer say anything meaningful about your new work).
9. Buy only when you need to
Another problem of most photographers is the striving for technical perfection. Not for perfection of their own craft and experience, but for the technical perfection of their gear. Often, for some people, this process completely replaces every other aspect of photography. First choosing the best camera, then choosing the best lens, flash, filter, camera backpack, remote release, cleaning kit for the best lens, then… And you can already start choosing the very best camera again, since this one is out of date.
I call it technological fetishism. Oddly enough, there are a great many such people. They’re sick with this fetishism to one degree or another, but most of them would rather spend the night on some forum discussing the virtues of a new camera than take a simple walk through the forest with a camera or get up early to shoot the sunrise. So my advice is simple - buy something new only when the need for it is completely obvious to you. When without this camera (lens, cable release) you simply can’t solve the creative tasks in front of you any more. If you don’t know what you need this thing for, or even just have doubts - believe me, you don’t need it. There’s no use in an expensive lens if your frames are still full of camera shake (that is, unsharp because of a badly chosen shutter speed). There’s no use in megapixels if you only shoot on automatic and can’t control sensitivity.
Believe me, simply buying expensive gear won’t teach you that. First, cut your teeth on something cheaper.
Naturally, none of the above applies to those for whom the question of money isn’t a question at all - buy anything your heart desires. It will do your photographs neither harm nor good. None whatsoever. But the money can be spent with pleasure.
10. Enter competitions and exhibitions
Somewhere I read that a writer who spends his whole life writing for the drawer isn’t a writer yet. It takes a certain kind of nerve to put your work before the judgment of a large number of people you don’t know. Not those chosen few you can argue with, quarrel with and forgive the next day. Before the judgment of those you don’t know and maybe never will. Those who will simply let their gaze slide over your work and not even linger by it, because to them you’re not some buddy from down the street, not the girl next door, and not Helmut Newton either. They won’t linger, unless you manage to strike a chord in their soul that makes them stop and look closely at your work.
To show your unique creations, the ones you agonized over, just so somebody can tear them apart or simply not notice them? Honestly, deciding to do that really is very frightening. But without it you won’t rise to the next level of your work. You won’t get that important, necessary appraisal (good or bad) that lets you look at what you’re doing in a new way. So throw off your fears and send your photographs to some competition. Organize your own exhibition in the nearest café or photo-printing shop. Try it. Winning isn’t the point here. The point is taking part. And the reaction of your viewers. Of those who stop in front of your work…
That, essentially, is all. Ten basic ingredients for making a good photograph. Ten rules that will help you develop your craft. And ten commandments that… Just kidding. I hope you remember what I said at the very beginning? That photography has no commandments? Just as there’s no recipe for a good photograph… There is no spoon either… Right, Neo?