Blog - My Soapbox
Facebook is stalking me
Back in August 2011 I quit facebook. I had asked them to delete my account and my data. And I didn't contact them in any way since, to keep them from re-activating my account. They are a bit sneaky about that.Today I've received a mail from Facebook telling me that Fred Suchandsuch (name changed) wants to be my friend on Facebook.
I don't like to receive mails like that. But what I find outright shocking is that in that mail they included a list of other people who over nine months ago had asked to be my friends.
"Other people have asked to be your friend on Facebook. Accept this invitation to see your previous friend requests"
Excuse me? Facebook is still using the very data that I asked them to delete 9 months ago and they're playing the emotional blackmail card.
From now on Facebook mails are going to my spam folder.
Have you had anything like that happen to you?
Switching Lightroom 4 process version could turn into a lot of work for you
Update: Apparently this is by design and can't be avoided due to the changes between the processing versions. Wow, Lightroom 4 is really off to a less than stellar start if you ask me.
Article:
Doesn't anybody at Adobe work with custom tone curves? That's hard to believe. I have just found a second issue with them.
Issue #1:
Adobe released Lightroom 4 and they pretty much messed up the migration of tone curves when converting the catalog from Lightroom 3 to Lightroom 4. You can read all about it here, the story is still ongoing as of writing this.
I use custom tone curves a lot, so I filed the original bug report right after finding out about this issue.
This is why I'm now part of a group of people alpha testing a fix that should recover the lost tone curves after an upgrade and that will hopefully make it into the full version of Lightroom and into an update for those who already upgraded.
As far as I can tell, Adobe hasn't issued a warning about this to their existing user base and we can only hope that power users with tens of thousands of pictures (and potentially with as many tone curve adjustments) won't get too many nasty surprises due to the bug.
Here comes issue #2:
During testing of the alpha script, I noticed something else, that I find quite disconcerting: I know changing to the new process will change the appearance of pictures, which is why Adobe suggests an A/B preview, but when I had the tone curve open when switching a picture from process version 2010 to 2012, I noticed this:
The curve does keep its overall shape, but the quite elegant few points of the curve get replaced by a ton of individual points.
WHAT .. ON .. EARTH .. IS .. THIS?!
Doing a quick change to the mid tones, or to how the shadows are rendered is a simple fix with the original curve. The replacement curve is 100% useless for that.
The only way to make the curve usable again is to start over and re-create it from scratch.
If this is by design, then it means that those of us who use custom tone curves extensively (I'm one of them) won't be able to benefit from the 2012 process for any of their existing images unless they are ready to start from scratch on them. In that case I'd really like a word with the person who made that decision.
Do We Still Need Photoshop?
The Hoopla
With Creative Suite 5.5 Adobe is introducing a new subscription pricing model. For many professionals this is a welcome way to spread out the cost for the software over a year instead of having to do the big upfront payment for the software.
Customers can still buy individual products or product suites, but you will now also be able opt for a monthly plan. I will mainly look at what this means for photographers and Photoshop. But just as an example, instead of buying the Design Premium Suite for a retail price of $1899, if you commit for a yearly plan, you'll apparently get it for a "rental fee" of $95 per month or $1140 per year. Mind you, this is not
a payment plan, so you won't own the software at the end of the year. Adobe is offering upgrade pricing for those who paid for a year though.As mentioned, you can still buy the products, but as I understand it, as opposed to being able to upgrade from older versions (I believe you could skip up to two versions), with the new pricing model you can't skip versions anymore to get upgrade pricing.
And this seems to be the biggest rub for a lot of people. Enough of a rub that Adobe went ahead and closed (and apparently even removed) the comments on the blog entry where they announced the change.
International
International pricing of Adobe products has always been one of my pet peeves. In Germany and other European countries, prices for Adobe products are dramatically higher than the US prices, in some cases we Europeans get to pay more than a 100% premium for the same software.
Back in 2007 when I interviewed Adobe product manager John Nack I brought it up, but mainly got an evasive answer.
This might also explain why a lot of people on this side of the pond appear to use pirated versions of Adobe's products.
Skipping A Beat
Over the years a lot of photographers have become Photoshop users. Photoshop isn't the most intuitive product - I usually compare it to a huge toolbox full of tools but without a good instruction manual - but it is very powerful and many photographers have taken the effort to learn its intricacies, to adjust their workflow and to master it to a certain degree.
As I said, I'll mainly look at photographers in this article, but this might also be true for small agencies.
While Lightroom has pretty much taken over when it comes to 98% of my pictures, many photographers have spent years and year refining their Photoshop workflows, they have learned tricks and spent time learning from tutorials. The investment not only on the financial side is huge.
But for monetary reasons many individuals and agencies have also had to adopt a model where they would skip a version or two before they upgrade to a higher version. This possibility is now pretty much gone, so my guess is that the sentiment of many Photoshop users is that they are now expected to pay double or triple the amount they used to pay in the past.
What's Great
Not only is Photoshop a powerful tool, it has also created a massive ecosystem of books, trainings, tutorials, video classes and even entire user organizations.
Aside from that ecosystem, let's have a quick look at what makes Photoshop so great.
The thing that intimidates new users most is also one of Photoshop's greatest strengths. It is a collection of hundreds of powerful image manipulation and design tools and if you know how to use them, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it.
Layers, masks and layer modes let you do everything from complicated composites to things as simple as slapping a layer of text to an image. The mix of vectors and pixel graphics and the resulting flexibility is unsurpassed and I love being able to use smart objects to treat pixel graphics almost like vectors.
Profiles allow for a color-managed workflow in pretty much any color space you like and over the years many specialized tools have found their ways into Photoshop, from handling animations to stitching big panoramas to 3D and perspective work.
The plugin model is another part of that ecosystem, with a ton of add-ons available to do virtually anything you can imagine.
What's Troublesome
But its strengths can also be seen as weaknesses. Photoshop tries to be everything for everyone and its user base is so diverse that it is hard to find a common thread. Illustrators use it, it has its applications in the pre-press processes, it has even medical uses and of course there are the photographers.
Because Photoshop wants to be for everyone, it feels like a big piece of patchwork rather than an integrated application.
What I Use Photoshop For
The uses for Photoshop have become less and less over the last years, especially for photographers. One of the main reasons for that change are products like Lightroom or Aperture.
There are still a few areas where I tend to resort to Photoshop. These include simple illustrations that use layers and masks, adding text to images, more complex cloning operations, adding transparency and stitching images.
That's pretty much it. I do everything else in Lightroom.
So, Do We Need Photoshop?
I can only answer that question for myself, and it's pretty much a resounding no at this time. The few uses that Photoshop still has for me are easily covered in the CS4 version that I still own and there are a lot of great alternatives out there that cover a lot of Photoshop's bases.
What Are The Alternatives?
One of the strongest alternatives on the Mac platform at this point is Pixelmator. In its new 2.0 version it supports layers, layer masks, over 100 file formats, plenty of filters, and even some of Photoshop's "killer features" such as content-aware fill. For €23.99 it's a bargain. Is it a full Photoshop replacement? No, but it covers 95% of what I need as a professional. The one item it doesn't have and that's high on my wish list is 16 bit support, but for most of the things I use it, I can live with that. If that's a must for you, I suggest you have a look at PhotoLine. It's not as pretty, runs on Mac and Windows, and it supports 16 bits and more, for a mere €59.
As a Mac user I can cover most of the remaining 5% with the tools that Mac OS X already has on board and I'd be surprised if Windows didn't have similar things on offer. I use the ColorSync Utility to do color space conversions, which includes converting pictures to CMYK, so they are ready for a printing house. Preview, one of the Mac's most underestimated apps, lets me use any ICC profile to soft proof images. And Image Capture (the second most underestimated OS X app) serves as a great front-end to any scanner.
When I got my MacBook Air with its 128 GB SSD, I went through a long software list to decide what I needed on the road and what I could go without. Lightroom made it onto that list, Final Cut Pro X did, Scrivener too, and even Apple's 4 GB heavyweight XCode development environment.
The one thing that I left off the system was Photoshop.
That was half a year ago. So far I haven't really missed it.
We Need Less, Not More
Haven't been up on my soapbox in a while…
I have taught photography to over a thousand of students, among them many really good photographers who often weren't aware why they were great, but I have also been surprised at times as some of the more professional appearing ones weren't even able to do basic things like setting up custom white balance for a specific light situation.
There is a part of me that loves to see all the nifty photo gadgets that brilliant people come up with, but I've also been watching the development
of the camera landscape with a concerned eye.There are a lot of automated sub-systems in our cameras. Focus, exposure and white balance are the important ones among quite a few.
But the smarter these systems seem to get, the more decisions they take away from the photographer, the more the photographers lose the ability to make the right decisions.
I've seen this over and over again this year during the workshops.
It's not the photographers' fault of course. The philosophy of the camera manufacturers is quite understandable: take as many of the complicated photography stuff as possible and make the decision (and set the setting) for the photographer. This way many of the less technically inclined people out there can pick up a camera and quickly get results, which will make them happy, and as a result they will buy more cameras.
The big issue with this approach is that even though the automatic systems get it right most of the time, the camera will never be able to know the photographer's intention. How can the camera know that I'm not at all interested in exposing for the face, but instead I want to show a silhouette? How should the camera know that I actually want this shot to be bluish cool and unfriendly instead of giving it a caribbean sunset white balance? And how should the camera be able to anticipate that I deliberately want to blow out the sky in this picture?
The philosophy of me as the photography trainer is substantially different from that of the manufacturer: if you want to tell a story (and let's face it, a good story is usually what makes a good photograph), you need to make the tools that help you tell that story do the right things. The tool in this case is your camera. And making it do the right thing means to know how to make it expose, focus and white balance in exactly the way you want.
And that's a skill set that more and more photographers have either lost, or they never had the incentive to learn.
Relying on the automatisms of the camera and getting it right 80% of the time might be good enough for many photographers.
I want those remaining 20% to be under my control too.
My Beef With CFLs
This one's about compact fluorescents (CFLs) and the completeness and smoothness of their spectrum. Or rather the lack thereof. If you want the short version: CFLs pretty much suck for photographers and videographers. If you want to find out why, read on.
Have a look at this picture:
Illustration: Chris Marquardt (License)
I'm not a color scientist (but I play one on a podcast) - and as a photographer I'm dealing with color reproduction a lot. I love good skin tones in portraits and in general when I'm in photo geek mode (and when I'm not having an artsy phase), I kinda sorta like the colors of things to be faithfully reproduced in my photographs.
Tech information: The spectra in the above picture have been taken with a small hand-held spectroscope that is using a diffraction grating (1000 lines per millimeter) to make the light spectrum visible to the human eye. It's not a precise scientific instrument, but it certainly is good enough to show a qualitative picture of a light spectrum.
It's Not Easy Being Green
Okay, so what are we looking at in the above picture? It is the spectrum of different light sources. Different parts of the spectrum correspond to different wavelengths, and the spectrum of visible light lies in the range of about 400nm (nanometers) to 700nm. White light is a mixture of all sorts of different wavelengths.
If you shine that light source onto Kermit the frog, Kermit will reflect mainly the green parts of the light source's spectrum. That reflection then hits your eye and you see Kermit being green.
If the spectrum of your light source contains a lot of different wavelengths (a complete spectrum), chances are there will also be light in the wavelength of the color of the object you illuminate, which in turn results in the color reproduction being rather accurate.
Are you still with me?
If the spectrum of that light source contains holes (e.g. parts of the spectrum are just not there), and if those holes coincide with the color of the object I'm shining that light at, the object doesn't get a chance to reflect its color.
In terms of Kermit, this means: his shade of green will look different, and the color reproduction is out the window.
Metamerism
The effect of an object changing its color appearance under different light sources is called illuminant metameric failure. Yep, that's a mouth full. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.
My super simplified and entirely non-scientific version of it is that especially under fluorescent light with it's typically very incomplete spectrum, you can almost be sure that the color you see is not the actual color. Let that sink in for a minute.
Enter Photography
Scroll back up and look at the spectra again. Notice how smooth daylight and incandescent light are, and notice the gaping holes and sharp lines in the other light sources? The picture doesn't give you any quantitative information, but it says a lot about the quality of light. The peaky-ness of some of the light sources has to do with what gasses they are filled with, or what other medium they use to produce light.
Yellow Vapors
One of the more extreme cases (and one that's not on the above chart) is the very yellow sodium vapor light. Here in Germany we often see these light sources used at zebra crossings. About 90 (!!) percent of the spectrum of those lamps lies at a thin peak around 600nm, which we see as yellow.
(image source)
Next time you're at a zebra crossing, have a look at your blue jeans... good luck trying to see the blue in them.
White Balance
How does your camera handle different color temperature light sources? The mechanism is called white balance and it is mainly the camera's way to shift the spectrum up or down. But guess what happens if the spectrum only has one sharp peak as is the case for sodium pressure lamps?
Errrrrrr rrrrrrright.. you can move that up or down the spectrum as much as you like, you'll NEVER EVER get a good skin tone out of it.
Now back to the fluorescent lights - and the CFLs, aka Compact Fluorescent Lights. They are little fluorescent tubes, made to fit in light bulb sockets. Nothing more and nothing less.
No matter how warm the manufacturers make those CFLs to resemble the color temperature of our good old light bulbs, the spectrum will still be comparatively incomplete. And no matter how hard your camera's white balance tries to shift that perforated spectrum around, it will not change the fact that parts of the spectrum are missing and some colors will just not be rendered as they should.
Back To Daylight
It's actually really really simple: If you want the best color reproduction, your best friend will always be daylight. Although rather warm, incandescent light bulbs are actually a pretty good choice too. Their spectrum might be leaning a lot more towards the red than afternoon daylight, but at least it is pretty complete and can usually be made into something very neutral with either good white balance, or with some of the profiling solutions out there.
As long as the industry doesn't come up with fluorescent light that has a more complete spectrum, you should never expect good color rendition from them.
I'm all for saving energy and being green, but from a photographer's perspective I am really sad that CFLs will sooner or later be everywhere.
And I haven't even started talking about their flicker and what that means for very short shutter speeds and for videographers...
Do you have any fluorescent light photography stories? Tell them in the comments!
Update: I have not covered LEDs yet, simply because I don't have any white LED light sources here, but their mechanism to produce light is similar to fluorescent lights and therefore peaks and holes should be expected.
Update 2: I also didn't cover flash yet, it is difficult enough for me to photograph the spectra of continuous light sources with my little handheld spectroscope at the moment. I'll try soon though.
Update 3: For many more spectra and a much more scientifical discussion about them, please see this excellent resource.
You DON'T want to make money? Really?
Picture by chotda on flickr
Man is it SOAPBOX time again today. Hold tight. Lean back. Get the popcorn out.
This story was handed to me by a friend. Let's call him Thomas. Thomas lives in Germany.
Thomas recently got a recommendation by another friend of mine (let's call him Michael) to check out the work of a Science Fiction author (let's call her Sue). "If you're a fan of Heinlein, Gaiman and Gibson, you've GOT to read her books, she's excellent! A real discovery!"
Being the modern guy he is, Thomas got online to buy one of her books. The original English version, not the German translation. Not as a hardcopy, but as an eBook.
With the iPad on the horizon (first deliveries in Germany will start in about a week) he also wanted to future-proof his investment. Buy it now, start reading on the iPhone, continue reading on the iPad as soon as it arrives. Sounded like a plan.
Apples iBooks app and iBookstore aren't an option here in Germany yet, so he looked into Kindle. Turned out the book in question wasn't available in the German Kindle bookstore. Bummer.
Next stop Stanza. Yes, it's not available as a native iPad app just yet, but with the Kindle app having made it to the iPad, there is a chance that Stanza will be allowed in too. So Thomas installed Stanza on his iPhone, fired up the built-in book search and lo and behold, there was the book in question, available on the BooksOnBoard store right from within Stanza. For $12.72. He hit the "Buy" button, was transferred to the BooksOnBoard web store in Safari, he registered an account with BooksOnboard, diligently filled in all his information, got to the book page, put it in the shopping cart, clicked the check out button in anticipation, and ...
"This title is not allowed for sale within your country. Item failed to add to cart! Please close this window and try again."
OUCH. BIG OUCH.
After some more research Thomas had to learn that it seemed impossible to legally buy the book in question as an English version in Germany in any eBook format.
Thomas was ready to spend $12.72 of his hard earned money for this eBook. He happily wanted to throw money at an online store (e.g. the entire chain: the shop owner, the publisher, the author, and even the government if you take taxes into account). But for some very stupid reason he wasn't allowed to. What's wrong with this picture? Everything!
And this is where Thomas had it. He wanted the book. "If they don't want my money, I'm savvy enough to get a hold of this eBook in another way."
20 minutes later he not only had a copy of this one eBook on his hard drive, but about 500 others too. Five friggin hundred. Why? Because he couldn't find the book on its own on BitTorrent, but instead had to download it as part of a ridiculously large Science Fiction book collection.
Just to make it clear: this download was not a paid download. At this point let me add a quick word about BitTorrent: No, not everything on there is illegal. By far not. BitTorrent is first of all a great technology. The telephone is a great technology too, and I don't even want to start thinking about the amount and kind of illegal activities that the telephone is being used for at this very moment...
Back to the story:
Let's do the math. Thomas was ready to pay $12.72 to BooksOnBoard, and I'm sure they would have loved to take the money and give him the book. Instead he now had 500 not-quite-so-legal eBooks sitting on his hard disk. Assuming the same price, those books summed up to over $6000 in lost sales potential.
Book industry? Government? Authors? Collecting Societies? I don't really care who's fault this is, but are you reading this? Instead of losing a sale of $12.72 you have just lost the potential to make $6000. If Thomas wasn't such an honest soul, that lost potential could have easily multiplied many times. "Look what I just downloaded, let me send you a copy..."
Imagine the amount of people searching for (not necessarily legal) ways to get a hold of digital goods, that they cannot get otherwise for ridiculously stupid reasons.
PS: Honest soul that he is, Thomas of course deleted the 499 eBooks that he had to download to get to this one book. And he hasn't shared the downloaded copy with anyone. Not even with me. He's now trying to find out if there is a way to send Sue a donation, because he loved her book so much that he wants to give her something in return. Which will probably be way more than what she would have earned if he had bought it the "normal" way.
What is your take on this?
Who needs a camera profile?
Compare the following two images and then tell me which of the two is more accurate.
Hard to tell, right? Both images are based on the same RAW file from a Canon 5D Mark II, managed in Lightroon, neutrally white-balanced using Lightroom's WB eyedropper on the middle grey patch in the lower of the two rows of grey patches in the color chart on the top. Both files were then exported to JPG with sRGB profile embedded. The only difference is that the top image uses the camera profile that Lightroom assigns to camera images by default ("Adobe Standard"), and the second image is based on a custom-built camera profile based on the ColorChecker card present in the image.
(Note: Lightroom's "Camera Profiles" are not the same as ICC profiles)
The differences between the two images are subtle indeed, the camera and the Adobe Standard profile that gets applied in Lightroom do a remarkably good job, especially with a custom white balance. In fact I'd happily use this outcome for all sorts of professional projects (and have actually done so in the past) - as long as the spectrum under which those pictures have been shot is at least somewhat daylight-ish. With daylight-ish I mean an as full as possible spectrum, one that you'd get outside in the shade at 3pm on a summer's day. Not one that you'd get from a yellow sodium light at the side of the road.
So the question is: why would anyone want to use a camera profile if the output is as good as it is?
Let's first take a look at what profiling does. Consider the color chart in the image below.
In the lower half it shows four rows of color swatches, and all of these are very precisely manufactured to be of a very specific color. Whenever you take a picture, there is an analog process involved where photons hit light-sensitive cells that accumulate a charge based on the amount of photons, and are then read by circuits and converted to numbers. These numbers are then read by software, magically converted into other numbers and finally interpreted as colors and translated into brightness levels of individual red, green and blue pixels on a screen. Or converted into various amounts of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink and squirted onto paper. It seems like a miracle that in the end we get to see our pictures at all.
But I guess you get the idea, it's a very complex process with quite a few areas of variability, and in order to make sure that we get consistent results, a profiling process can be of great value.
So back to the color swatches. The manufacturer knows pretty much exactly what color values the individual swatches have. If you shoot a picture, it's very likely that your camera and the attached software don't interpret the colors exactly the same way. Blue tones might be a bit more violet than you saw them, greens might be a bit less vivid and reds might be slightly over-pronounced. In an every-day snapshot type of situation this is no biggie, in the analog world, this is even the norm, because every film you choose will have different color and contrast characteristics, but we're in the digital world here and what if you want to get just that little bit more accurate?
Here's where the profiling software comes in. It looks at the picture, finds the swatches (that have been shot with your specific camera under specific light conditions and therefore look slightly different than expected) and it can easily tell that the blue in your picture is different from what it should be and the green is too bright and the red is too dark and so forth. Based on this information the software builds a profile, which in fact is just a lookup-table with mappings from wrong to right color.
All in all this used to be a tedious process that required a great deal of care, expensive software and hardware, and could only be afforded by the professionals who had to get color exactly right, for example in areas like product photography.
Enter ColorChecker Passport by x-rite. After reading up on it and receiving a few recommendations I've finally spent the 100 bucks for this little gadget, and I must say I pretty much instantly fell in love with it.
The chart comes in its little rugged plastic case, so the delicate color swatches are well protected, and it can be swiveled so you can set it down and it will stand by itself.
And if you are a Lightroom user, the process couldn't be easier. In fact this solution is built around Lightroom and RAW and it won't make much sense on its own.
All you have to do is install the software (make sure you download the latest version from their website) which adds an export plugin to Lightroom. Then during your photo session (which ideally takes place under consistent light conditions) you shoot a well-exposed reference picture of the ColorChecker chart and that's all you need to think of during shooting.
After importing your pictures into Lightroom find the one with the ColorChecker, and export it using the ColorChecker export preset. Within less than a minute the software will analyze the picture, find the ColorChecker automatically, create a new profile and prompt you to restart Lightroom to make it aware of the new profile.
Now all you do is switch to the develop mode, select the newly created profile from the Camera Calibration section and you're mostly set. For more accuracy you can also white-balance based on the grey swatches in the upper chart, the bottom middle one is neutral, the ones to the right create warmer tones, the ones to the left make the image slightly cooler.
Still sounds difficult, but after working with it for 5 minutes it was second nature.
This is the first camera profiling solution that I can envision using regularly because it's not only fast, it also almost seamlessly integrates into my existing Lightroom-based workflow.
Move your mouse over this picture to see the differences the profile can make:
Is the difference so big that I'll from now on use it everywhere I go? Absolutely not. It's great to get that extra bit of accuracy where it's needed, and it's definitely quick and simple enough for me to use, so it'll be more than just a paperweight (believe me, I have too many gadgets that I don't really use because they are either too complicated or because they don't add enough value to my photography). It'll clearly help me get better colors in some situations where the light spectrum is difficult, but on the other hand there are many light situations that I don't want to correct for, many of them for creative reasons, so that's where I will happily leave it in the camera bag or at home. And this is true for both my personal projects as well as customer projects.
Is it as accurate as the bigger and much more expensive systems? Probably not. I've never had the need to work with one of those, and with the type of photography I do, I doubt that I ever will. But under light sources with an uneven spectrum (fluorescents for example) it's clearly more accurate than just using the good old white balance and it renders very pleasing colors. It's a logical next step that is lightweight enough in its approach.
Is it for everyone? No. It only makes sense if your workflow is RAW + Lightroom. There it integrates nicely and takes a lot of pain out of the camera profiling process.
Will you be a better photographer if you use the ColorChecker Passport? Let me ask you this: Has buying that new lens made you a better photographer? How about that new camera body you got for yourself last Christmas?
In short: nope.
Photography is still about capturing wonderful moments, telling stories with your pictures and making an emotional impact.
And I would even go further and argue that getting more accurate and neutral colors in your pictures can do both, help the story and the emotion or be completely in the way of telling the story that you want to tell.
Try to imagine the following images perfectly color balanced - I bet you most of them would lose their impact right away.
Bands and Weddings
On the weekend, Monika and I shot a wedding. We usually don't do that for clients, but this one was different, as friends of ours got married. But what does it take to shoot a wedding? I actually get that question a lot. Most of the time the question comes in an email and it is phrased more like "What equipment do you recommend for shooting a wedding?"[insert sound of alarm bell here] Wrong question. Entirely wrong question. If someone cooks a great meal for you, you don't compliment them on their pots and pans, now, do you? You don't need to know what word processing software (or what notepad and pen) your favorite authors use to write their books. You don't ask a painter what brushes they create their art with.
You enjoy the meal, the book, the painting for what it is.
Why is that so different in photography? "Wow, that's a big camera. You must take great pictures with it" is actually an insult. It de-values our creative side.
But don't worry, you're not alone, and if you are new to photography, it's very easy to fall for what the industry tells us. Which basically is this: Buy new gear from us and your pictures will be so much better.Wrong, industry. Dead wrong! Some of the best pictures I've seen have been taken with (by today's standards) inferior equipment. A picture is maybe (if at all) 10 percent about the technical quality, about the image sharpness, about the lack of chromatic aberrations, about resolution and about the number of megapixels. 90 percent of the image is YOU. It's your eye, your sense of composition, your sense of placing things in the frame so they play with each other in a way that helps you bring out that image you had in your head before you pressed the shutter button. It's about timing too, actually one could argue that it might even be mostly about timing. Even in landscape photography, where the clouds have that tendency to not wait in that beautiful spot until you're finished setting everything up for the picture.
So I'm not blaming you for asking the equipment question. I'm blaming the industry. Heck, even I have fallen for it, buying things that I didn't need and that didn't benefit my photography at all. I'm just glad I haven't spent $150 on a white balance device yet. And probably never will. The good old grey card ($5.95), a sheet of white paper ($0.01), or even the good old Pringles lid (unfortunately they stopped making the opaque ones, but some yoghurt lids will do the trick too) are all it takes. Everything else is Voodoo unless you get paid big $$$ for a job and need to impress your customer, or unless you really need 100% color accuracy in product photography, for print, or in high profile fashion stuff. I don't need that accuracy. Our eyes aren't scientific measurement devices. They are much more easily influenced by the light conditions surrounding us, which is why you should try to edit your images in consistent surrounding light conditions, but I digress.How did I get here? Oh, I know, we talked about how the industry makes us buy more and more stuff, and how we forget that photography is actually about learning to see, about anticipating how the viewer will look at our picture, what will make them explore our photograph in which way and how we can guide their eye to what we deem important in a picture.
Photography is about telling stories. Stories that have arches, tensions, reliefs, and in the end it's about one of the most basic things: it's about evoking emotion! If I look a picture and it moves me in one way or the other, I couldn't care less about the technical side of things.
When was the last time you've bought something for your photography that didn't help you at all? Let us know in the comments what that was.
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