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Hold the camera at arm’s length so it is easy to see.

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This is the third in a series on the biggest myths in photography. Number 8... "Hold the camera at arm’s length so it is easy to see." I am not sure where this came from, but for some reason or another people, decided that they could see the image better on a little screen than could looking through a viewfinder. Camera manufactures quickly saw that they could save some money by eliminating viewfinders all together on lower priced camera. Today we find ourselves back to the same place where we were 100 years ago with the need to throw a dark cloth over the back of the camera to see the image for framing. LCD screens are very difficult to see in bright light and often impossible to see on a sunny day with sunglasses. Since the beginning of photography, photographers have known that holding the camera steady is the secret to sharp pictures. Without the ability to brace the camera against your face, holding the camera steady becomes very difficult. People often ask me questions

My pictures are just for fun. I don’t care what happens to them in a year, much less fifty years.

This is a second in a series of 10 posts about the biggest myths in photography. Number 9. My pictures are just for fun. I don’t care what happens to them in a year, much less fifty years. Part of my business is restoring old photographs. A common comment I hear is, “I wish my parents (aunt, grandparents, fill in the blank) had taken better care of these pictures. I guess they didn’t know they would be important.” The best known photographer of the twentieth century was Ansel Adams. He was also a musician. He considered making a photograph the equivalent of writing a song – the composition. (Funny how the same word applies to both music and photography.) The print and its display is then the performance. Both were equally important. His photographs now sell for tens of thousands of dollars largely because he put care and technique into making his photographs. We may not be Ansel Adams, but we can value photographs for what they are and take care in the making and keeping of them. The

If I take enough pictures, some of them are bound to be good.

This is a first in a series of 10 posts about the biggest myths in photography. Number 10 - If I take enough pictures, some of them are bound to be good. This is related to the old saying about given enough monkeys, time, and typewriters, they would eventually write all the works of Shakespeare. Maybe. But it would take a LOT of time and they would go through a lot of typewriters. Photography is a learned skill. It is not hard, but like any other skill such as woodworking, playing a musical instrument, or public speaking, it is not automatic, and therefore requires a little bit of training. Professional instruction is not necessary, but would certainly go a long way. If I decided to build a table, I could go out and buy a saw, some wood, and start randomly cutting wood and gluing pieces together. Given enough time I might end up with something that looks like table. But I would save a lot of time and trees if I did a little research on the details of table making. It is the same with p

Give Photographs Some Respect

My mother often comments about how serious I was as a child. I think I just took some things seriously that others regarded as less than serious, things like photos and music. I always took music very seriously, and I always saw the value of photographs. I got my first camera in the fourth grade I knew right away that I was documenting my childhood and that the photographs would be important in fifty or sixty years. I knew this because I knew how important the fifty year-old photos of my parents and grandparents were. Since then I have made somewhere around a million photographs. Tens of thousands of them are in my file cabinets either as negatives, slides, prints, or digital files on CDs. The best ones are in the form of books. Some of them are just documentation while others are very significant, but all of them are important for one reason or another. I have always been concerned that many people haven’t given much respect to photographs. I have made quite a bit of money restoring o

Testing

Somewhere around 1980, I did what I called my “Ultimate Film Test.” Actually it was more than film. I took about 8 or 10 camera and lens combinations, in different formats, and bought a dozen or so rolls each of a half a dozen different types of film. I set up a little still life in my backyard consisting of some flowers, a lawn chair, bird bath and so forth. I then photographed the same scene with every possible exposure and film combination with each camera. The next step was to make identical 8x10 prints from every exposure, carefully labeling each of the hundreds of prints as to the camera, lens, film type, and exposure. By sorting the prints in different ways, I could easily see what difference changing the exposure made, the differences in film types, and the differences in cameras and formats. By using this extensive testing method, I no longer had to rely on other people’s untested opinions, or hearsay. Since at the time I was working with a lot with professional photographers,