Photography learning II

My best photograph will be the one that I am going to take tomorrow - Ansel Adams.

This is what one of the pioneer of photography quoted when asked about his best photo.

So photography, like life, teaches you new things everyday and like life here too you will have to keep improving and rectifying your mistakes.

As I have shared some time back, after I visited Agra and Humayun's tomb, the things I need to improve upon, today too I share few things that I have learned or noticed in the last couple of months in which I have been extensively involved with photography.


Being Hasty - First of all on this list is what I often do when I see some nice people or things and want to click them as quickly as possible. .. so as  a result I get a lot hasty and pictures comes out blurry or out of focus

The above pic was taken while I was on my first photowalk to Rastrapati Bhawan and honestly after clicking those buildings for some time, I was kind of getting bored . Just then my eyes fell on these two sisters who were looking so cute dressed in same dress and at that very moment I thought to click them. I was so excited seeing that I thought that this pic was going to be the best of the walk.  But when I came back and checked this at home , I could see that the girls have come so out of focus. Had I steadied myself a bit or calmed myself  first I would have really captured them better.

Ask people if you can take their photos - Although in street photography the sense of being voyeuristic helps you portray people candidly, without them being conscious about getting clicked but I do feel that by doing so you at times miss out on other angles that would have reflected things in a better way.

As in the above pic, the pic is nice just because the girl was not only looking at me but was smiling. And this all happened because we had spent some time playing around with each other standing at bus stop.

Taking straight photos, although I have corrected the symmetrical flaw that I had with my earlier photos that I took of monuments but now I see quite a lot of issues with the horizontal axis of the photos. As you can see in the below pic , the monument seems to be falling to the right. 

At present its more due to that fact that my hand is not yet accustomed to handing the big bulky camera and I tend to slant towards one direction or other but it has been so apparent in my photos that I seriously need to keep it in mind every time before pressing the shutter down.

Less post processing - as I am currently spending a lot of time on touching them up in software. 


The left pic below is what the camera produced and right is after some post processing was applied to it.

Could I have managed this without PS ? Yes and No. 


Speaking of this picture only, yes may be I could have done better with the camera itself but in general, I will have to quote Ansel Adams again :


“Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.”. 


So its not always possible to capture the correct color and tones with your camera as it too is a machine and you too are human so quite prone to errors.


Earlier I was strictly against using any software to enhance the photo as I used to feel its against the principle of capturing that moment correctly but now I have understood that although its still quite an important thing to be right at the first time  and many times just by knowing your machine well you can get similar results out of the camera too but at the end what matters is how the photo is presented to the viewers. If post processing helps you to convey your photo in a better way then there is no harm in it. In fact I have learned that most of the photographers shoot RAW, and since we cannot view RAW directly we have to always apply post process to them. But the final idea is to spent less time on computer and more on the field :)

Taking less snaps or be ruthless in deleting them... someone very rightly said that more snaps you take more things you learn but they take up so much space that at times its quite difficult to manage and since there are so many pictures that sometimes you get bored in correcting them that it takes a while before you transverse to the good ones and by that time you lose interest. So with advent of digital cameras, people do have the liberty to click as many pics as they want and honestly even famed photographers don't get a perfect shot all the time in first go. But at the end you should be able to discard them quickly too.

Thats all for this time.... Will share more as a learn more :)