Hello, and thanks for continuing to subscribe if you haven’t unsubscribed. I never check the stats (metrics are for cowards who don’t trust their intuition, and maybe I don’t like having my feelings hurt). Also I did not realize the direction my Substack was heading in was half-Peggy Hill’s ‘Musings’ column (with links to Silver Jews songs), and half-"guy with opinions about what other people do with cameras”.
Anywho, the feelings expressed in the last post I wrote wouldn’t dispel themselves quietly or easily. And while negative drive is fun for a while I decided to try and transform these feelings into a useful expression, and I decided that if I can learn “bad” things from the online world of photography, I must also have learned good things. So I wrote the following list:
Titles don’t make a bad photo better, and they can really ruin a good photo. Just tell us the camera, lens, and film stock in the heading. If you really want to tell us more then put it in a comment. Your photo should indicate what’s important about itself without any explanation.
Do your own research before asking questions on Reddit. Google has 99.999% of the answers to your questions about film stocks, lenses, and shutter speeds.
Any photo is 1000x better if it has a person in it, and 10000x better if that person is facing the camera to any degree.
Mood is more important than emotion/feeling, both are more important than being clever.
Crop in more when you need it. Sometimes the actual scene is hidden in a smaller portion of the entire frame.
People who make videos about cameras know more about cameras than they do about taking photos.
The worst kind of criticism is flattery because it doesn’t teach you anything. The most dangerous kind of criticism comes from people who are too scared to post their own work.
If you think you suck, you probably do. But that’s okay. You can't get better at your work if you can only see it as good and perfect.
The best way to get better is to always have a camera on you. You can't get better if you don't shoot pretty much every day in every kind of lighting condition.
People who know how to take a good photo don’t flex with their setups. You can buy all the medium format, Contax T2s, and Leicas you want, and it doesn’t mean your photos of night time gas stations, bored girlfriends, basketball hoops, and imports w/ spoilers will be good. You can shoot all that with a disposable camera and get the same boring photos. A good photographer can do good work with a disposable camera.
Anyway, that’s the list I posted to Reddit (on a subreddit with a name too rude to share here.) It was pretty well received, and I only got a few butt-hurt comments, mostly about point #3 (having people in pictures makes them better.) The willful misinterpretation of that “rule” took a few different directions, one being “I don’t like when photographers place a human being their landscape” to “I don’t like seeing pictures of people, ever.” I’ll admit I did not respond well (telling people they’re only mad because they don’t know how to photograph humans).
I don’t purport to have all the answers. Or any portion of the answers, really. But I’ve been sharing my own photos online for over a decade and looking at everyone else’s photos for that long and longer. I’d like to believe that my analysis has lead to some synthesis. Does it make sense to add a human subject to every photo? No. But I think the crux of my point, what made people react strongly, was the idea that photographing humans is a necessary step in elevating your photographic practice. And that “answer” is 100% in my possession and also true.
I’ll probably address the larger issues and rewards of photographing humans in a future post. Suffice it to say, if you endeavour to be “artistic” in photography then there is nothing that is either off limits or imperative in your practice, other than what you see the need to express. Maybe you’re only photographing abstracted shadows on concrete walls. Maybe you’re only into macro photographs of spiderwebs. I’m here to say that the most dangerous game is mankind, and hunting it is its own special reward.
Outside of experimental weirdos, the common thread in stills photography & motion picture filmmaking is humancentric narratives. We have the technology to create completely abstracted imagery free of narrative constraints or the attention span. Yet we can’t get enough of seeing people. Even when we’re tired of everyone in our daily lives we derive comfort from seeing people on TV. If you’re in the camera game, you’re in the people business.
Thanks again for reading, or at least opening the emails. For your interest I have thousands (well, a singular thousand plus more) of film photographs online of varying degrees of competence, interest, and time-worthiness.