Photography Tips

We were just in London to see the Leonardo show. I pulled out my camera for the first time since I went to Istanbul to spend a few days in a tutorial with Kemal Nuraydin of the Istanbul Photo Workshop, a training experience I highly recommend, by the way. Yesterday I was out in Paris taking a few more pictures and remembered, oh yeah, somebody asked what I learned. I don't know. Maybe my head is spinning from all that travel. It took me a while, but here, finally, is the answer.

First, I don't think Kemal would think much of this picture. Nor do I, except that I like it anyway. It is close to the picture I wish I had taken.

We were at Saint Paul's, where they have an ongoing demonstration -- tents all over and in England they let them stay up. Mayor Bloomberg, we should not be getting reminders on what freedom of assembly means from anywhere on Earth, much less the country we revolted against. Remember when they were the oppressors?

Okay. Back to photography. Lesson One. Do not do what I just did and take a photo on the fly. If you want to photograph something in any kind of serious way, plan to spend some time on it. In this case, adding one more tent to the mix and staying for a week would not be too much.

This was an interesting group of people, from what I saw, well-educated, well organized and with no serious prospect of a job. What was scary was not that folks were camping, right outside St. Paul's. It was that these people, who even in scruffy mode appeared to be eminently hirable,  have had their careers stopped in their tracks by the still unchecked greed of a few. These folks and many others are out of work for the foreseeable future so others can have a bigger megayacht, buy a fifth house, or impress their friends by paying a record price for, say, a shark in formaldehyde.

Okay. Back to photography. Lesson Two. Find a topic that interests you, so that during that day or week or forever, if the topic is something like your kids, you will continue to be motivated to delve more deeply into the subject and to find ways to document it well.

Did I mention that Kemal was editor of National Geographic Turkey? He was, and they were well-served, too. So these comments are either general comments on photography or related to NatGeo-type work. If you want to do, say, fine art photography, I guess you would document your own imagination as if it were something out in the world.

Lesson Three. Practice time is important. Learn your camera controls so well that you can change them in the dark. You never want to have to stop and wonder how to make sure the subject is backlit, or the shadows are right or anything technical at all. When you are working, you want your whole focus to be on the subject.

Lesson Four. Do whatever it takes to change the angle of your image. Raise the camera, lower it, whatever, but avoid the "stand and deliver" thing. That is what I was trying above, not that it worked out so well.

Lesson Five. Get the best equipment you can afford.

Lesson Six. Get a great small camera, so you will always have something with you, even when you are not on a project. Kemal has the new Sony hybrid. Another instructor that was with us for a day, Tomas Tomaszewski, uses a Leica. I guess this suggests a Lesson Six-A, which is that, even though you might separate your serious work from your "on the fly" stuff, you never stop looking for pictures.

There was plenty more that he had to say, but that's enough for now.