It’s a public holiday and I’m working my way through old photos in hopes of finding some stray winners I’d forgotten about. I’ve always been my own biggest critic, editor, and curator. I think it’s good to develop our own tastes as photographers over time. It’s important to connect to our own photos without judgement, reflect on the image and the subject choice, consider the chosen settings, and remember our original photographic vision for the scene versus the actual image.

The key is to do this without judgement. Not every photo is going to meet your developing creative tastes. Not every photo is going to work at a technical level – some will be blurry, some will be rushed, some subject choices will seem odd, and some photos will seem dull. All this is absolutely OK. It needs to happen for growth to happen.

I love the way the sunlight hits the sundial to reveal the texture of the metal in the photo above. All of the rust spots, built-up debris, weathering, and patina is visually interesting. The old Zenitar Fisheye would be a specialist lens on a 35mm camera, but on the half-sized sensor of the Olympus it works out to an equivalent focal length of 32mm and functions as a nice wide lens with a sharp centre and mushy corners. In situations where I want to get close and get in as much of the scene as possible, it’s a great lens.

There’s a little blown out highlight right up the top, but blown highlights and blocked shadows are not necessarily bad things, and in the above photo it’s very small and not distracting. There are so many other elements that make up a photo! Consider these questions: is there any detail in the highlights/shadows that you want to preserve? Will preserving those details add to your photo? If you make a photograph and part of the image features a glowing light bulb, for example, should you decrease the exposure to bring down this highlight so that the filament inside the bulb can be seen? Will doing this compromise other elements in your photo? How integral are those highlights and shadows to your photographic vision? Instead of the sensor having to manage dynamic range that exceeds its capabilities, can you simply reframe the image instead to include less heavy highlights/shadows?

In the photo above, my decision to focus on the car door was made easy by the fact that the window at the top was allowing in a lot of light. The E1 has an old sensor that doesn’t manage high dynamic range so well, so it made sense for me to cut out most of the light from the window in my viewfinder composition so as to preserve the details in darker areas and on the car door. In effect, the old sensor didn’t need to work so hard to contain all of the dynamic range in the scene.

The red paint on the left, the curved red painted area to the bottom right, and the window at the top all serve to frame the weather-beaten door and its message. It may not be the most exciting photo in the world, but it works for me and it’s a good example of connecting a scene to a photographic vision through careful composition and technical knowledge. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not always good at that and plenty of photos don’t meet my own tastes, but I keep learning.