Single-Serving Photo

Thanks to a surge in “community” features being implemented on practically every website, it’s now easier to solicit feedback about your photographs than it is to fall out of a boat and hit water. In other words, pretty damn easy!

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Fantastic, you might think, the more feedback the better! Well, true, except that a lot of people calling themselves “serious hobbyists” or “beginning professionals” simply seek out the most positive feedback they can get and live in a world totally isolated from how completely awful their work really is. Paul Indigo asks a question on his blog, Beyond the Obvious: do photo enthusiasts really want to learn? In his article, Paul wonders about the true intentions of people who demonstrate fundamental misunderstanding of the art concepts of photography and blame it on insufficient equipment or software. If these people want to learn, shouldn’t they be more open to feedback? (more…)

If you haven’t, you may want to read the first two parts of the Art Concepts series, Part 1: Texture, and Part 2: Composition.

In this, the third bite of our feast of art knowledge, I will talk about an elusive concept called positive and negative space. Traditionally, negative space is defined as the “empty” areas within an image. As you will soon see, even that which is empty can be very tangible. (more…)

This article is part of a series. If you want, go back and read Art Concepts in Photography, Part I: Texture.

I come from more of a fine art background; my parents both work in the arts and photography for me is an extension of my involvement in art as a whole. By talking about the fundamental concepts of art as they apply to photography I hope to help you improve your work and also understand the works of others.

Because this is only the second part in my Art Concepts series, I want to study the more general and fundamental stuff first. In the last episode, we looked at texture. Texture is a fairly specific element, so today I thought I would take a big step back and talk about composition.

When we say “composition,” we refer not only to the relative locations of the points of interest in a piece (which is the most discussed aspect), but also to their sizes, shapes, colors, and other variables that contribute to the balance (or imbalance) of the work. That’s what we’re going to look at today. (more…)

In one of my previous posts I mentioned the “focal length reciprocal rule” and it occurred to me that not all of my readers may know what that is. Rather than find someone else’s article about it (of which I’m sure there are many) and link to it, I thought I’d just write my own.

The goal of the rule (which is more of a guideline than a rule, actually) is to give you an idea of whether a photograph will come out blurry if you’re holding the camera in your hand. It is a somewhat simple formula to determine how various camera settings combine to compensate for camera shake. I use the rule constantly while I’m out shooting because I don’t like to bring a tripod to most places and there’s no use bringing home a whole CF card filled with blurry photographs.

Not only will I explain what this reciprocal rule is, but I’ll give you real examples of how to use it in the field. (more…)