The act of photography involves many factors including being in the right place at the right time (event, lighting, context), the vision to pick out the captures and finally your underlying ability to deliver these moments coupled with a working knowledge of your camera’s capability.  That brings us to our 3 part lesson today – Never stop pushing for clarity.  Clarity in your workflow & process, clarity in your subject, and clarity in displaying your best work.  Clarity in these areas defines the connective nature of photography – sharp images draw our eyes and give us a defining focal point.  Nothing delivers this lesson from planning to workflow to production better than a portrait with a very sharp set of eyes.   Pushing for clarity is a three-fold process – a clear goal of what capture you would like to walk away with, a sufficient knowledge of your equipment in order to properly capture your vision and finally, a defined approach to post processing in order to finalize your vision and help your share your best work.

This week’s assignment we put together for this article encompasses the need to push for clarity – Our goal was to deliver portraits in various lighting conditions to challenge your abilities and push your camera settings to discover yours (and your camera’s) limits without resorting to art filters or editing which conceals the shortfalls of our ability to create a good capture.

1)  Photography should be about having a clear vision of what you intend to capture.  Sometimes this intent is built in a matter of seconds as is the case for photo journalistic assignments or perhaps sports events.  In other cases, vision is defined over coffee, dinner or perhaps conversation with friends, sometimes organized by committee for assignment, or maybe even just specific shots you decide on in order to build up your portfolio.  Regardless of the reasons which might present themselves for you to pull out your camera, it’s important for you to define the subject, the environment (whether you show it or not) and the overall context of the shot you’re going to eventually present to friends, family or a prospective client.  Having clarity of what your photographic subject is will help you achieve stronger composition, better dial-in the settings which will best represent your subject and most importantly, eliminate the feel of a snap shot that looks like you walked by and clicked the button.

2)  That leads us to – Push to become better every single outing – know your equipment, use your equipment and seriously, you paid good money for a good camera – use it to the best of its ability and invest time and effort into learning what your camera can deliver.  Don’t be a photographer that uses “creativity” as a shield for not knowing what settings to use to properly expose & capture a sharp image.   Knowing what your camera can do translates to what you can get away with – our photo set today runs the gamut of really terrible lighting conditions requiring super high ISOs to the very last one shot in perfect studio lighting.  The photographs below range anywhere from ISO6400 in a sodium-lit tunnel (first 2 images), perfect golden hour back-lighting (photo 3) to ISO100 in the studio (very last image).

The characteristic which defines all of the shots regardless of the lighting condition is sharp capture of the eyes – we had to deliver a head shot – that meant sharp eyes and defined features – the challenge was the various and mostly less than ideal light we had to work with.   As we touched upon in the Zoo Photography Tips, sharp eyes define the subject and can allow you to get away with murder (metaphorically speaking) as it gives a focal point to your viewer that they can connect with and delivers an emotional anchor for your photograph.  The range of lighting conditions challenges your skills as a photographer to step up to the next level – “It’s too dark”, “My lens isn’t good”, “It’s an entry level DSLR” – these aren’t valid excuses preventing you from taking any of the photos below- cameras available today far exceed anything that film stalwarts ever had to work with during the heydays of film.  If the old cameras without autofocus, super-high ISOs and modern lenses could capture exceptional photos in war zones and sporting events, there’s nothing stopping you from delivering a great kids or pet picture.

Sometimes a support system such as a tripod or monopod might be in order depending on your combination of light, focal length and general hand stability, but if you’re going to go through the effort to setup, shoot and edit photos, you may as well make sure it’s the best representation of your subject that you can deliver.  Strangely enough – only the studio shot is using a tripod whereas all of the “poor light” shots were completed hand-held.  The shots below turned out well not because of the equipment we were using – they turned out well because we had a clear vision of the shots we needed to get, knew what our cameras allowed us to capture in the given environments and finally, we had;

3) A Mental benchmark or reference for the final image you intend to deliver.  Post production in Lightroom or Photoshop should be treated in the same way as the film days – develop in order to best represent the qualities you captured in the frame. Understanding what you want to achieve in post production helps to narrow down what work is required of you to present it well.   Therefore, post processing is about finishing the image – by this stage, you should have done everything to ensure the lighting, framing, composition and emotion is already included and you’re only visiting Photoshop or Lightroom in order to better bring it out of the frame.  If you want to accelerate your knowledge of the first two parts of today’s lesson, step away from this section as much as you can.  Get things right in camera from the beginning and you will learn faster.  There’s nothing wrong with post processing if you’ve done everything you can during the capture process to get as close as possible to your vision, but until you explore the limits of your actual photographic skill, you will continue to shortchange your learning curve by relying on post production to “fix” things that you could otherwise have tackled and built experience on in the field.

Now, for those that haven’t been to my workshops, I would like to clarify that this has nothing to do with digital art where you add, create or remove elements for composites and or artistic representation, what I’m advocating is using & improving the technical capabilities of you & your camera to ensure a capture which retains the most detail, maximizes your subject impact and most importantly, gives you latitude when you do get to post to have the most creative range because you’ve got the best file to start with.   This is a photography blog and my first priority is to offer advice into maximizing your shooting experience so that you can best capture your life moments when they present themselves.

Push yourself to be a better photographer by having a clarity of mind when shooting, having a clear understanding of what your equipment is capable of delivering and clearly presenting your subject as a completed work.  Til next time, happy shooting!