When does the “Decisive Moment” Happen?
Many great photographs were made in this manner, though not out of sheer luck. Usually, they’re pre-composed, i.e. the photographer was ready and waiting for the magic to happen. Whether a breaching whale or a baby staring directly at the camera, once you miss that fleeting moment, it’s gone forever. So important was the idea of the “Decisive Moment” that the great street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote an entire book describing it!

Anatomy of the “Jaws” Image
Note the determined look on the man’s face, which is not incongruous with the background image painted on the wall of the building. You’ll agree that this juxtaposition makes the photograph. Was it planned? Not at all. But I had to be ready for it if it happened! Therefore, for this kind of street photography to be a success, there’s obviously more involved than just being in the right place at the right time. You need to pick a location, a background or setting with which to work. Then you hope something magical happens.

I choose this mural and shot several images as people passed by. I got lucky with this particular guy, who looks so determined and in a hurry. The fact that his jaw resembles that of the mural skull was an added bonus! I shot the image from my car window with a Canon Rebel XT DSLR with a 28-135mm lens zoomed all the way out. The photo is uncropped. I decided ahead of time that I wanted the mural in focus rather than the passersby, since I didn’t necessarily want the people to be recognizable. Therefore I switched the lens to manual focus and preset it for the mural. (The fact that I was using a zoom forced me to use critical focusing, as a long zoom’s depth of field can be very shallow.) To further blur the person, I used a relatively slow shutter speed, 1/30 second.

Now, you can try just the opposite in your own experimentation with such photojournalistic street photography. Pre-focus on something closer in order to get the passersby crisp, which will cause the background to blur (assuming you’re using a zoom). Either is acceptable. If you’re shooting close to your subject (a la Gary Winogrand), perhaps you can just shoot with a wide angle lens. This way, everything from maybe four feet to infinity will be in focus.

Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, and Brassai
Many great photographs were made by pre-composing a scene, then shooting at the decisive moment. For further illustration (and much better examples of the genre than I can provide), please see the works of master photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, and Brassai. As you look at their imagery, notice how much of the composition is provided by the background, as opposed to the supposed “subject.” Realize that a true artistic composition is just that, a whole composed of lesser parts. Would my photo of the walking man be of any interest at all if not for the background? Would the background hold its own as a still life? Probably not.

Finding Your Own Way To Shooting the “Decisive Moment”
The photographers mentioned above are famous for capturing street scenes in imaginative and highly artistic ways. Studying their work can help add a new dimension to your own photography.

Realize that while emulation may be a sincere form of praise, people who practice specific techniques (as these folks do a la Cartier-Bresson) may achieve sadly derivative results. It’s really best to study the masters then find your own way. It’s been said that photography is like writing. Everybody can do it, but almost nobody should. If you want something more than a snapshot, concentrate on composition. You’ll also notice that very few of the examples I’ve shown are in color. That’s because black and white adds artistic abstraction to almost any image; color tends to make almost everything look snapshoddy.

Ed Snyder’s All-Holga Exhibition of Beach Imagery – High Point Café, Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia (602 W. Carpenter Lane, 215-849-5153). Runs June 15 to August 15, 2008.

Artist Reception Sunday, July 20, 2008 (4:30 – 6 pm).

What’s a Holga? Basically a plastic toy camera that uses 120 format film.

Wherever I go, I carry an expensive digital SLR and a $25 Holga, the latter essentially a plastic toy camera. Aside from the obvious differences between film and digital, the Holga offers so much more–lens distortion, light leaks, vignetting. Believe it or not, attachments are sold for digital cameras to mimic these “imperfections.”

Maybe it’s the imperfections themselves, and the resulting unpredictability that intrigues me most about Holga images. With the Holga, there’s mystery and surprise that doesn’t exist in the digital world. For even more unique effects, I shoot decades-old film and cross-process color slide film to make the colors shift and the world grainier. It’s my skewed way of capturing the idyllic beach settings and shore life.

The images on display are 12 x 12 inch prints, matted and mounted in 20 x 20 inch black wooden frames. There are ten images in the exhibit. Stop by and have one of High Point’s delicious crepes!

Someone said to me today, “Must be easy shooting statues–they don’t move.” While it’s true that they are immobile, this doesn’t necessarily make them easier to photograph than a hockey game. The character of statuary can change (or be made to change) dramatically with lighting, the seasons, and weather conditions. In fact, if you’ve shot the same statue once before, consider the fact that weathering and erosion can give statuary a whole new appeal, as will the presence of snow and rain.

Photographing Statuary

How do I Start?
Find a statue that interests you. While public parks, museums, and cemeteries are all good venues, I’ll restrict my writing to outdoor statuary, as indoor photography has its own set of challenges (most of which involve lighting and security personnel). By the way, did you know that back in the mid-1800s, there were no parks or museums in America? Around this time, the garden cemetery as sculpture garden came into being. Public parks, galleries, and museums came about later, due to the immense popularity of the Victorian garden cemetery as tourist destination!

Can I photograph any old statue or monument?
Well, not if it’s on private property. Sneaking a shot can be titillating, but if you’re not allowed to display or publish it, your excursion may have been a fool’s errand! If the statue is in a public area, it’s probably okay to shoot it. Also, do no harm. Don’t climb on the statue—you don’t want to break something and be arrested for vandalism. In an old abandoned cemetery, you wouldn’t think it would make a hill of beans difference. But this is not your hill, and these are not your beans.

What kind of camera should I use?
An SLR (whether it be film or digital) gives you the most flexibility, although you can use any camera. The operative phrase is that you know how to use the camera!

Should I use color or black and white?
Hey, Paul Simon was wrong! Everything do not look worse in black and white! In fact, if you’re just shooting the statue, black and white can give you some very interesting and abstract effects. Use this if you want to create a mood or make an artistic statement. Use color if you’re shooting snapshots.

How do I compose a meaningful image?
Okay, now we’re getting to the meat of the article. Allow time to compose and photograph your subject. Pick a good time of day if possible—shooting with the sun behind you provides better direct light on the statue than when it is directly overhead. Shooting at the edges of the day also provides you with nice shadow accents. So now let’s look at the art of composition.

Composing a Photograph

Whether you’re photographing statuary for documentation purposes, creating new art, using the statue as a backdrop for a family vacation photo, or simply because you think it’s cool, you probably don’t want your photo to look snap-shoddy. The famous French photographer Eugene Atget is best known for his artistic documentation of public statuary, which to me is just a series of good snapshots. So, regardless of the type of photo you’re shooting, there are two basic things to consider: lighting and composition.

Lighting
If you happen on a statue, your creativity will be somewhat constrained by the current lighting. Good photographers can make anything work, as long as they know how to operate the camera. Front lighting is best (sun behind you, the photographer); though a backlit statue can be dealt with too. The Eros and Psyche statue was front lit, with background in shadow. I exposed for (took a light meter reading off) the bright surface of the white marble statue, which grossly underexposed the background. This is the effect I wanted, as the background detail was distracting.

For a backlit statue, you have a wider variety of options:

• Expose for the bright areas of the scene and transform the statue into silhouette. Using your camera in Auto mode will normally give you this effect if most of the scene is bright.

• You can also expose for the darker statue and wash out the brighter background, which is what I did with the statue of the two angels at right.

• Another option is to illuminate your subject with fill flash, which will keep the background properly exposed and the statue properly illuminated.

Composition
When we talk about composition, we often forget that the lighting itself is a major compositional element! Both studio lighting and available light can create all kinds of moods. With outdoor statuary, we play the cards we’re dealt–you see the statue on vacation, you have 5 minutes to shoot it. So it’s lit from the side, deal with it. While the absence of light may be the absence of truth, shadows allow the viewer more latitude for their imagination.

How do I compose a meaningful image?

That’s really less subjective than you might think! Here are a few compositional pointers that apply to both snapshots as well as artistic photography:

• If you want your photo to be pretty as a postcard, stand farther back (or use a wide angle lens) and get some of the surrounding scenery in the frame. This also helps give a sense of scale to the statue.

• If you want to capture detail of the statue, get in closer. While you can always crop or enlarge a photo later, you image is generally of better quality if you shoot your original image the way you want the final print to be.

• Meter off the statue as a starting point, then for different effects, increase or decrease exposure to your liking.

• I shoot in Aperture Priority mode mostly, as I want to control my depth of field.

• Use Image Stabilization. Why bother? The statue isn’t moving. Well, no, but you are. Also consider using a tripod and slow exposure if you want a deep depth of field.

• Pick one: Line up a vertical element of the scene with the vertical frame in your viewfinder, or line up a horizontal element of the scene with the horizontal frame in your viewfinder. Either one will give your image the appearance of being “level.”

Don’t be a Fair-weather Photographer

In conclusion, if your attempt at statuary photography was less than stellar, consider coming back to it at a different time of day or under different lighting/weather conditions. The most mundane statue can be magically transformed into a work of art during a snowstorm!

What are the compositional elements of this photograph?

I made this image out the side window of my car while waiting for a light to change. The horizontal legs are part of a stationary statue, and these occupy the upper third of the frame. This helps us meet our compositional goal of the “Rule of Thirds.” The ladder truck and pedestrians helped balance the composition by placing themselves in the lower two-thirds of the frame! I happen to like the way the more distant pedestrian is slightly blurred—this gives a bit of depth to the image. Was there luck involved here? Of course. But you have to be well-practiced in the art of drive-by photography in order to take advantage of such situations.

What kind of camera do I need?

A fast one. Digitally, this means a DSLR rather than a point-and-shoot. The latter has too slow of a start-up and its shutter lag will cause you to miss many a shot. DSLRs are for the most part instant-on and have imperceptible shutter lag. I used a Canon Rebel XT DSLR with a Canon 28-135mm lens.

How about a long lens?

Well, yes, you’re doing candid photography so you want to be able to zoom in a bit. But be respectful of people. Privacy is not something that should be abused. See how the image above appears to be compressed? As if the objects in the scene are sandwiched on top of one another with little space between? This effect becomes more pronounced the longer the zoom. For drive-by shooting, you probably want something like a 80-200mm lens.

Shooting through glass

Auto focus is great when you need to shoot in a hurry (continuous auto focus is potentially better as it tracks the subject to keep it in focus as the camera or subject moves). However, auto focus systems will generally lock on to the object that’s closest to the camera. If you catch your car’s door frame in the viewfinder, that’s what will be in focus. If your windshield is dirty, it’ll focus on the dirt! One solution is to shoot out an open window. Another is to place your camera into “Mountain” mode, which is the sort of permanent landscape mode. This keeps the most distant objects in focus.

Safety First!

Don’t jeopardize the safety of your passenger(s), yourself, or anyone outside your vehicle. That said, you can always just shoot while waiting for a light or while pulled over to the side of the road.

What camera settings should I use?

Few cameras have a “Drive-By” choice as one of their automatic exposure settings. So what to use? I’ll typically use the highest ISO I can (given the amount of ambient light) so I can use a relatively fast shutter speed. If you shoot while driving, you probably want a shutter speed of at least 1/250 second. Subjects ahead of or behind you (moving in your direction) are easier to capture than subjects crossing in front of your camera. Note in the image above that the pedestrian moving away from the camera is more in focus than the one moving across my path. They may have been moving at the same speed, but their direction is key to freezing the action. I was shooting at a relatively slow shutter speed, as it wasn’t very bright out. My ISO was 1600, with the image-stabilized 28-135mm zoom fully extended.

Composing a Scene

They come at you fast and furious. Not only do you have to keep your camera set for the shot and within reach, but you have to be on the lookout for interesting subjects to photograph. Honestly, I shoot while I’m driving. Yeah, I know it’s unsafe, but great art comes from great pain, you know? I shot this at about 30 mph out a closed side window of my car, as I was driving over a bridge.

Practice!

You’ll shoot hundreds of images before you become adept at drive-by shooting. But you must practice with a familiar camera so that when a photo opportunity presents itself, you’re able to capture it!

One of the only good reasons to have a digital camera with high resolution (5 megapixels and above) is so that you can digitally zoom in on an area of the image and not have that zoomed in portion become all choppy or noisy. The lower the resolution of the original, the worse the magnified area will be. Realize, too, that with most digital cameras, you can choose low, medium, or high resolution. Best to use the highest setting if you think you’ll want to enlarge or edit the images later on.

I made this original image of the bee and flowers with a Canon Digital Rebel XT DSLR equipped with a Canon 28 - 135 mm zoom, fully extended (135 mm). I was about 16 inches from the bee, and a bit frustrated that I could not get a more magnified image. I’d have preferred to get a much closer original shot of the bee since nothing takes the place of a high quality original image. This is the Holy Grail of photography–always do as much work as you can through the lens, because your ability to sharpen, saturate, or recompose an image becomes much more difficult after you’ve captured the image!

Now, getting macro shots of still flower petals is one thing, but a moving bee is a bit difficult to shoot! Even if I were able to zoom in much more, I’d be trying to follow the fast-moving bee all over the place, trying to recompose the scene while attempting to keep the rascal in focus. From this respect, its a better choice to pull back and shoot the wider scene with the intent of cropping/zooming a bit later on.

The caveat here is that you need two things to do this:

1. A hi-res original image and
2. Photo editing software

The Canon Rebel XT is an 8 megapixel camera, so it’s got enough resolution. I used Adobe Photoshop CS2 to crop and magnify the image. Oh, and one last thing–how many shots do you think I took before I got a keeper? Would you believe twenty-six? Sometimes a photographer gets lucky, but skill and persistence usually have a bigger payoff!

Concert shots look so easy when you see them in magazines, don’t they? Try to take one and you’ll see what the artist Georgia O’Keefe meant when she said, “The cliffs over there, you look at it and it’s almost painted for you, you think until you try.”

If you walk away from this article with one thing let it be this: Cameras need light in order to record an image. The less light there is, the more difficult time the camera will have.

Getting a good concert shot is all about the lighting.

However, you must choose between flash and available light. Let’s explore both.

Flash photography at a concert

Let’s start by bursting your bubble: Even though using flash is the easier way to get the shot, there are a couple drawbacks:

• It may not be allowed in the room
• It destroys the mood created by all the stage lighting

Flash is good for freezing action, however. Most cameras automatically set a relatively fast shutter speed (perhaps 1/200 second) in flash mode.

Available light photography at a concert

Ok, first we must realize that most good published performance photographs are shot with available light. It captures the mood, and often the drama of the performance. Secondly we must realize that it is not that easy to make a successful concert photograph. However, here are a few pointers:

Try a test shot with your camera in auto mode.

You might get lucky. You can also try setting your camera for “theatre” or “party” mode, but chances are you’ll just get something that looks like this blurred orangy shot of Shonen Knife’s bass player. If your camera’s auto modes don’t magically give you what you want, you’ve got to go to the next level and start thinking about what you’re doing. The following steps are basic, yet very important for existing light photography.

• Use the highest ISO (light sensitivity) setting available on your camera.

For most digital point-and-shoots, this is ISO 400. For most DSLRs, this is 1600. The DSLR’s image sensor is much more light sensitive (can capture an image in dim light) that that of a digital point-and-shoot.

• Aperture wide — spotlights aren’t enough !
  

While spotlights appear to illuminate the performers intensely, the light is relatively dim compared to daylight. Therefore, you probably want to shoot with your camera’s aperture set wide open, to let in as much light as possible. For a typical digital camera lens, this might be f3.5. To complicate matters, spotlights create such a dramatic difference in light intensity between the performer and the rest of your scene that most auto exposure cameras tend to average the exposure, which washes out the brightly lit performer.

The Solution: Crank your camera’s +/- Av or Ev setting down to -2 and see what happens. Make a few test exposures and adjust accordingly.

• Shutter Speed

See the blur of the bass player’s guitar? This is due to the fact that the shutter speed was relatively slow (perhaps 1/8 second)–either I, the bass player, or both moved during the exposure! An 1/8 second may be the fastest you can shoot under a particular available light setting.

The Solution: Study the performers and try to catch them when they’re least likely to be moving. This could be between songs or while they’re catching their breath between song verses. This is what I did to get the B/W shot at the top of this page. (You may notice that the top of this photo is sharper than the bottom–this is because I was shooting up, focused on the woman’s face. A wide aperture causes a shallow depth of field, meaning fewer things in the flight path will be in focus.)

• Activate your camera’s image stabilization

Most people can effectively hand hold a 50 mm lens at a shutter speed of about 1/50 second. Concert light shutter speeds can be much slower than this! You risk blurring the image if you use a shutter speed less than 1/50 second. Image stabilization might allow you to hand hold the same shot at slower speeds, say 1/30 or even 1/15 of a second, but doesn’t guarantee a sharp image.

The major advantage of digital cameras is that they shorten the learning curve by giving you instant feedback! You can see immediately (in the playback viewfinder) whether or not you captured the image successfully. The trick is to know how to adjust your camera’s settings to get the best shot!

Happy Holidays! Christmas lights are very tempting to us photographers, aren’t they? Unless you have a “Xmas Lights” setting on your digital point-and-shoot, how are you going to make a photo like this?

First of all, you need to find a photo-worthy scene. This image was shot in Love Park (in front of City Hall) in Philadelphia. The Robert Indiana “Love” sculpture is a favorite destination photo site for tourists. Each year when they put up the 50-foot decorated tree behind it, the whole scene bursts into life! That is, at night. During the day it’s kind of mediocre. So how to photograph it at night?

Night Shooting with a Digital Camera

Try a test shot with your camera in auto mode. You might get lucky. Chances are, though, you’ll get something that looks like one of these:

Photo on Left: Too light. Camera’s auto exposure system set exposure for the scene’s average light intensity. This brings out shadow detail while burning out the highlights. How do you fix this? If you want to use the camera in auto mode, find the Ev or Av setting and drop it down to maybe -2 stops. Experiment with tricking the camera this way until you get the results you like.

Photo on Right: Too light and blurred. Same problem with the Ev/Av setting, but in addition, the camera moved during the exposure. How do you fix this? Find something to brace the camera on. A tripod works best, a friend less so. The exposure will likely be long (half a second or more), regardless of what fancy mode you use. Why? Because there just isn’t enough light! Activate your anti-shake or vibration reduction as well, but this is of marginal use in such low light conditions.

Cameras operate on the principle of light hitting some sort of light-sensitive recording medium, be it film or a digital image sensor. Light is key to this process. The less light you have, the more difficult a time the camera will have recording an image. Any camera can take a great picture on a sunny day at the beach. Most need some help from the user when shooting in less than optimal conditions.

Here are some general pointers for shooting Christmas lights:

1. Set the camera’s light sensitivity as high as possible. In most cases, this will be ISO 400 for digital point-and-shoots, ISO 1600 for DSLRs. The DSLR has the advantage here–its image sensor is just much faster, and therefore more light sensitive. DSLR images will be sharper and less noisy.

2. Use a tripod or other solid object on which to brace the camera, as the exposure will likely be long. Most people can effectively hand hold a 50 mm lens at a shutter speed of about 1/50 second. Xmas light shutter speeds can be much slower than this! You risk blurring the image if you use a shutter speed less than 1/50 second. Image stabilization might allow you to hand hold the same shot at slower speeds, say 1/30 or even 1/15 of a second, but it in no way guarantees a sharp image!

3. Turn your flash off.

4. Crank your +/-Ev or Av setting down to -2 stops in order to record only the bright lights, and not the shadow detail of the scene. Bump it up a little if the image is too dark.

The super cool thing about digital cameras is the instant feedback you get! You can see immediately (in the playback viewfinder) whether or not you captured the image successfully. The trick is to know how to adjust your camera’s settings when necessary!

Someone asked me the other day, “How can you get great contrast in a color photograph?” My answer was (and still is), “Sunny day and bright, fully saturated contrasting colors.” Short of that, you’re going to have to do a lot of work with a photo editing computer program.

It’s quite easy to get great contrast in a black and white photograph, provided the image is made up of mostly black blacks and white whites (not innumerable shades of grey between). Upping the contrast is generally very easy to do with photo editing software, your main concerns being 1) loss of shadow detail and 2) burning out the highlights. Color is a bit more difficult, what with there being all those, uh, colors. When you stop and think about it, its kind of unusual to see much naturally occurring contrasting color. Perhaps this is why we find deciduous leaves so much more interesting in the Fall than at other times of the year!

Personally, I find it difficult to create a colorful, contrasty image. I don’t want to be sitting at the computer making it better, or rather, making it look like I envisioned the image should have appeared initially. Therefore, I shoot mostly BW. However, when the rare color opportunity arises, I will dive on it.

Well, this past summer I found myself at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan and caught the exhibit Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era. As part of the exhibition, Janis Joplin’s Porsche (a 1965 model 356c) sat out in the sunny courtyard. You could walk around it, but not photograph it. The guard suggested I shoot it from above, where you could look down at it from the sidewalk in front of the museum entrance. Though I generally believe it’s far easier to get forgiveness than permission, I went outside and shot from above! Another reason to carry a zoom lens.

The photo was taken with a Canon Rebel XT with a Canon 28-135 mm lens. A 135mm focal length is not super long, but it was just right for this application (paired with a 28mm wide angle, it provides a good general-purpose lens package).

Though the graphic appears to have been designed by Peter Max, it was actually done by one of Janis’ roadies! (That’s the likeness of Janis and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, you see near the car’s tire.) Once the contrasting colors grab our attention, the detail of his graphics engage and hold our interest. A good lesson for all color photography, as far as I’m concerned. To learn more about contrasting colors, click here!

I shot this image in a thrift shop. A very photogenic couple was testing out a sofa and I was hunting for people portraits for a book I’ve since written. I told them they looked great together and asked if I could photograph them for the book (it always helps the creative process if you carry your camera everywhere!). They gladly agreed and I came away with a great shot and an introduction to the band “Sunsplit,” in which the couple play.

Notes on the Photo:

1. Paul Simon was wrong–everything does NOT look worse in black and white! In fact, things often look better. For one thing, you don’t have to worry about white balance. The lighting in this store was a combination of frontlit windowlight (daylight) and fluorescent. In color, such lighting would pose a problem. Also, B/W gives an unreal, abstract quality to just about everything.

2. I used a Canon Digital Rebel XT with a 28-135mm auto focus lens. One great thing about a DSLR is that if the light is dim (as it was here), you can up the light sensitivity to 1600 ISO. Sure, things become grainy (or noisy) if you try to enlarge the photo much, but sometimes you just have to play the cards you’re dealt. Evoking a feeling with your photograph is often much more important than it’s technical excellence.

3. Model release necessary? If you’re going to publish the photo and/or attempt to make money from it. An exception being a news item showing people in a public space.

What’s Octoberfest without a pig roast? The woman ahead of me in the meat line was snapping a cell phone shot of her dinner, so I just shot her hand shooting her subject! Its kind of trendy to selectively desaturate a color image these days, and I get caught up in it too. Read on and I’ll tell you how I did it!

The original is just not a great looking photo, is it? Composition-wise, I liked it, but it has its problems. I shot it on the spur of the moment and didn’t have much time to set my controls (Canon Rebel XT with Canon 28-135 mm lens). I figured I could salvage it somehow in Adobe’s Photoshop.

The original was obviously in color, but had an overall bluish tone due to shadows, so I warmed up the image to make it appear daylight-normal. This isn’t necessary if you’re just going to desaturate the image (turn it into black and white), but my intent was to keep the cell phone’s display in color. Since I conceptualized this as my final product, I wanted the display to look natural. As far as a roast pig can appear natural….

Get rid of blue overcast with Photoshop CS:

I used Image->Adjustments->Photo Filter->Warming Filter 85 to about 25% Density on the slider.

Isolate the cell phone image:

Next, I used the magnetic lasso. There are 3 types of lassos–the magnetic one sort of follows the borders automatically, if there’s sufficient contrast. Select the phone’s display by drawing lines around it with the mouse.

Desaturate the rest of the scene:

Right click your mouse to Select Inverse (this lets you keep the lassoed part untouched, while you work on the rest of the image. The majority of the image can then be desaturated (Image->Adjustments->Desaturate).

Brighten up the dull-looking image:

Use the Brightness slider (Image->Adjustments->Brightness/Contrast) to do this. Maybe touch up the contrast a bit too.

Remove bracelet:

I usually don’t alter my images, but her bracelet just distracted from the cell phone. It also appeared that the hand was wearing a surgical glove! All real possibilities as an end product, but I just didn’t want it there. So I used the Clone Stamp tool to stamp over it. Blending the area with the surrounding hand area is much easier in BW than it is in color. With color, you have more subtle hues to deal with.

Sharpen the image a bit:

If you choose to sharpen an image, you always do so as your final step. I like to use Gaussian Blur (Filter->Sharpen->Smart Sharpen->Gaussian Blur) to fake a sharp image if my original is a bit fuzzy.

Summary:

You can easily get carried away with Photoshop, as there are so many ways to mess with your image. The thing I like about photography is using the camera to capture the image I see; I generally don’t use it as a basis for creating something new. I just don’t want all that “after-capture” flexibility; I need limits. Worse case scenario, you can spend the rest of your life making countless variations of the same image! I once asked a painter “How do you know when your painting is finished?” (go ahead, try and draw or paint something, you’ll see what I mean). She said, “Paintings are never finished–they’re abandoned!” It can be exhausting, knowing when to stop.