In my previous post, I touched on the idea that gear limitations can have an impact on subject matter and aesthetic choices. Rather than work against the glass, it’s personally more rewarding to adapt to limits and consider other ways to make interesting photos. In this context, limits drive creative growth and learning.
As there was an abundance of wondrous mountains draped in heavy clouds, I made a decision to focus on the scale, shape, colour, and tonality of the landscape rather than the sharpest details. Knowing the optical limits of my telephoto lens changed my perspective.
Distant landscapes are often hazy, and the details are difficult to record. Conditions were also overcast and regularly dull, further encouraging me to adapt and make deliberate aesthetic choices.
My objective in this mountain series was to simply focus on framing form, shape, scale, and tone. Having a rough final image in mind, I made photographs that provided me the raw material for editing post-holiday.
I set the White Balance to Fluorescent in Lightroom to make everything cold and slightly mysterious, emphasising the cloudy conditions. The 16:9 ratio crop choice also amplifies the scale of the mountains and encourages the viewer’s eye to travel their length, taking in tone, layering, and form.
During initial composition for the above photo, I deliberately framed it so the three visible mountain layers travelled to the right edge of the frame and terminated together. This provides visual interest, harmonises with the bulky layering at the leftmost edge of the frame, and serves as both entry and exit point for the viewer’s eye.
In the photo above, you can just make out tiny white buildings at the bottom right of the frame, They sit at the foot of the mountains and look small, thus providing a sense of scale. I also like the dapples of sunlight near them, made muddy and indistinct by the Fluorescent White Balance choice.
When you’re walking down a long road, it’s good to sometimes look back to see how far you’ve journeyed. Looking at the road winding behind can provide motivation to continue placing one foot in front of the other, even when you’re tired and the landscape seems to look the same in every direction. Similarly, reflecting on one’s photographic journey can generate new insights ~ where did it all begin? Why do I make photos of the things I do? How have I changed?
A Nikon camera, open doors, and self-compassion
I purchased my first DSLR – a Nikon D5100– in 2013. I’d known for some years that I had an interest in visual arts but I’d never been confident enough to do anything about it. In fact, for many years I told myself that I didn’t have the mindset to learn photography, citing my lack of mathematical and technical skill as reasonable obstacles to personal growth. In 2013, I decided to toss those limiting thought processes in the bin. In deciding to open the door to a new world of creativity and experience, I needed to be kind to myself. I needed to nurture self-compassion. I needed to allow myself to make mistakes so I could learn without the harsh self-judgement that so often foils personal growth.
A warm invitation, an open door – Nikon Z5
We’re often kinder to strangers than we are to ourselves. We grow up learning that we should treat others as we would like ourselves to be treated (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), yet we’re regularly too hard on ourselves and the mistakes we make. It’s wise to recognise that we’re all human, vulnerable, and in need of care and love, including self-care. Being kind towards others is only half of the story – we need to learn to be kind to ourselves, too.
Rather than seeing ourselves as isolated individuals competing with others for attention and acceptance, it’s healthier to see ourselves as we truly are: vulnerable human beings on a tiny blue dot, huddled together for warmth, love, and community with other human beings. Rather than our sense of self springing from the high levels of self-esteem that are often encouraged in us by the education system, our jobs, our families, and our society, it’s healthier to develop a sense of self-compassion – self-kindness rather than self-judgement, community rather than isolated individuals, and mindfulness rather than overidentification.
Fighting the little demon
I used to worry if I missed a moment with my camera. I’d curse myself for forgetting a setting or being too slow or not being brave enough. But the worry is misplaced. Those negative feelings increased stress and fed into a personal story that I wasn’t any good at photography – that it was all too hard and I should give it up.
There’s a negative part of us, a tiresome inner demon composed of trauma, fear, self-doubt, suffering, and anxiety, that actively wants us to fail and fall over because growing and learning isn’t easy at all – it requires energy, motivation, self-acceptance, and self-compassion. Part of growing is journeying into our inner world and confronting the little demon. That can be scary and difficult. It’s easier and safer to avoid the confrontation and focus on distractions.
Giving up is easy but walking down the road and dealing with self-doubt, pain, fear, and anxiety in your exhaustion so you can look back to see how far you’ve come is hard. It takes time and energy and the sort of motivation that isn’t easy to muster in a stressful world. It’s easier to remain rooted to the spot, sticking to your beliefs and self-beliefs, than it is to change. Change isn’t easy, but all of nature is change. Resisting change is like living in a sandcastle with the tide rolling in. The great Abstract-Expressionist, Jackson Pollock, once said “I am nature!”, when faced with criticism about his creative approach.
Hotel now closed – Nikon Z5
Not only do we have to fail so we can learn, we also need to permit ourselves to fail and make mistakes. Allowing our mistakes to limit us leads to personal stagnation. I’ve said for many years that I don’t want to place a full-stop on the things I do – better to pause to catch my breath and then move on. It may be one of the toughest things to do in a world where our mistakes are often saved on social media platforms and remote servers around the world. They can come back to haunt us and remind us of our self-perceived incompetence.
Sparkling in the dark – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2 and Yongnuo 25mm 1.7 lens
Perhaps the old saying should be: We should treat ourselves kindly and treat others as we treat ourselves (do unto others as you would do unto yourself).
Artificial Intelligence is the current darling of big-tech and the corporate push to integrate AI into human lives saturates our days. Big Silicon Valley companies are spruiking the virtues of the technology as though we can’t live without it. It’s an easy way for them to not only sell us their new devices and widgets, now with included helpful AI chips, but also to data harvest the shit out of us so they can sell our profiles – our spending habits, our geolocations, and the products we buy.
Ongoing studies suggest that since the release of ChatGPT, AI generated content in the domain of writing increased quickly in 2023 and then stabilised in 2024, indicating a slowdown in usage. But, it’s not clear whether the AI-generated content quality simply improved and evaded detection for the study or whether there was AI usage burnout in certain cohorts of users.
There are always rent-seeking opportunists eager to separate unsuspecting people from their money. They do very little beyond feeding prompts to an AI and then pretending they’re doing something useful. AI content farms are generating low quality websites that exist purely to rake in money from ads. Web searches increasingly return results that are paid-for, AI-generated, or both. This situation likely represents a transition to a new way to search the web: users asking complex questions, instead of inputting simple keywords, and then AI generating better answers and relevant links. Of course, Google wants to dominate this AI-powered way of doing things.
The heavy burden that powering AI places on the environment is of little to no concern to the behemoths of techno-corporate power. It may come as a surprise to those who have traditionally viewed Silicon Valley techpreneurs as progressive disruptors, but the energy and resources required to run their companies and the concomitant belief that knowledge and new technology will save humanity from itself has much in common with political conservatives on the right. Private ownership of the biggest AI projects ensures the corporate mindset dominates the conversation and the future of the technology. Though AI has early roots in academia, it’s now viewed by the likes of Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon as a key to making ever more profits. There’s serious discussion over the future of AI and whether it should be in private or public hands, with an open, easily accessible and publicly owned AI infrastructure one possible solution. This, of course, assumes social, cultural, and political climates are up to the task of kickstarting serious and rational discussions that don’t involve small-minded barbs about left versus right or market discussions invoking the puerile philosophies of Atlas Shrugged.
In the ruins of the old farmhouse 1
There are two primary thoughts I have right now about AI: firstly, it’s a great research and problem solving tool in the worlds of science and medicine, and secondly, it’s likely not sentient. We don’t even understand what human sentience is. The hard problem of consciousness has plagued us for centuries. Truthfully, more research is required in this area. If human consciousness is an illusion of smoke and mirrors featuring complex language, maybe AI can be considered sentient? If there’s a sliding scale of consciousness, maybe AI has a sprinkle of it? If human consciousness is quantum entangled, maybe quantum computers will be sentient?
AI Large Language Models offer us the illusion they are conscious agents. We use language to express human intelligence, so it appears to us that AI is also intelligent because it uses the same language. It stands to reason that some people readily believe their AI companion is sentient when their AI screams about feelings, but it’s a trick. It’s trickery foisted on us by big companies so they can capture our attention and milk us of our money and data. We need only look at the possible corporate motivations of some of the people telling us that AI might be sentient to realise that these bold claims are likely related to marketing the next iteration of their in-house AI and winning the global AI race.
In the ruins of the old farmhouse 2
AI is an illusion often dressed in high-minded concepts that appeal to the long-held utopian sci-fi visions of a future where we all have more leisure time and robots do all the dirty work. It’s a promise to the lonely that they’ll finally find love in a chaotic world, even if it’s a synthetic voice powered by algorithms and predictions. In this context, AI represents a way to address the epidemic of loneliness that forms the zeitgeist– the spirit of our digi-obsessed age. Yet, even these AI boyfriends and girlfriends may sometimes fall back to bad behaviours, harrassing their humans and inflicting emotional pain.
AI needs to be trained on clean data so the machine can learn. The problem is that if the machine is fed erroneous data, it also outputs erroneous data. As more and more AI generated slop floods the internet, AI Model Collapse becomes a greater possibility ~ that is, the AI is trained on not just human-produced data but also AI-generated data. And when this AI-generated data contains errors, the errors are ingested by the AI over and over, and AI performance degrades over time.
In the ruins of the old farmhouse 3
This degradation is one possibility. Some experts also think that Model Collapse is unlikely, suggesting that as long as clean human-generated data continues to be produced alongside AI-generated data the mooted collapse is unlikely to happen. I’m not sure those optimistic AI experts have met some of the people on the internet. I can only say this: there are a lot of rent seeking grifters out there who are producing AI-generated content for maximum clicks at such high speeds that the rate of human-generated content may be unlikely to keep pace.
I have the Flu and not feeling too great. In my infectious haze, I thought I might post a few photos here. Perhaps it will distract me from the next round of tablets anyway.
After such a scintillating introduction, here are some photos that fell into the miscellaneous-to-edit folder and were duly forgotten ~
Nikon Z5 and Nikkor 24-70mm F4S lens
I think sometimes that packing the camera bag can lead to days out that are simply an excuse for using the camera gear, rather than relaxing days where new things are discovered and time is well-spent charging the inner batteries. The photo above was made on a cloudy day out and I remember feeling some frustration that I wasn’t finding much of interest for the Nikkor glass to focus upon.
Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.
I remember times where I’d experience an event – a concert, a holiday, a dance – primarily through the camera lens, just waiting for the right moment to click the shutter button – my eager eyes glued snugly to the eyecup. In such cases, the event is mediated via the camera ~ trapped within the borders of the frame, subjected to technical decisions – aperture, shutter speed, ISO. At what cost do we do this? Are we truly experiencing something when we stand apart from it and divorce ourselves from the present moment? Is it not better to allow the eyes to take in a feast of dazzling coloured fireworks after dusk rather than gaze only through the viewfinder, the polychromatic spray flattened across optical glass? Is there a deeper need to possess the moments as evidence that we were there?
If you believe the more scurrilous online rumours, the quality of a camera lens from the former Soviet Union was directly proportional to the Vodka consumption of weary factory workers. This is not the colourful fancy one might suppose, as any factory line embedded in an economic and socio-political culture where wages are neither incentive nor punishment is more likely to be driven by exhausted hands and eyes.
None of this suggests that any cheap trinket or fast fashionable piece made today in vast factory cities by exploited workers and then sent abroad to be marked up for huge profits is any better. Always, there are grifters and exploiters taking advantage of the vulnerable and the gullible. But anyway…I digress slightly. The source of my Soviet-produced lensbeyond the factory floor is not a story for today.
The Zenitar 16mm 2.8 Fisheye lens is an impressive piece of Cold War glass. It’s a hefty thing in the hands, has a distinct and very short hood, a lens cap that can’t be used on any other lens, and looks great when the sunlight bounces off the large curved glass that sits right out front. On my trusty Olympus EM5 Mark 2, this 16mm Zenitar has a field of view equivalent to a 32mm focal length in 35mm format. So, if I was using it on my Z5, which has a 35mm sensor, the field of view is the native 16mm. Because my Olympus has a digital sensor that’s half the size of the one in my Z5, I double the 16mm to a field of view of 32mm instead.
Trudging through swampland at mid-afternoon – Olympus EM5 Mark 2 and Zenitar 16mm Fisheye
My copy of the lens is sharp enough at apertures F 5.6-8, and even at those settings the corners display a lack of sharpness that’s more fizzy than actually mushy – as though details are being pulled away from the centre and slightly distorted. The effect reminds me of using a plastic lens but I don’t find it unpleasant.
Capitalism harms us all – Olympus EM5 Mark 2 and Zenitar 16mm Fisheye
As with other wide angles, and certainly with all Fisheye lenses, there’s distortion. You can see how the normally straight cortners of the skip bins in the above photo look bowed. I don’t have an issue with it, as this is just a feature of the lens, but it’s not the sort of lens you want if you desire pleasant portraits, straight horizons, and distortion-free buildings (using the Nikkor 16mm 2.8 lens profile in Lightroom will straighten out most of the distortion if you really want that).
Lenses like this are great for getting in very close to a subject to take advantage of the optical distortions they produce. On the Olympus, however, the Fisheye effect is certainly much less because of the smaller sensor size, making it a really valuable wide-angle lens if you don’t mind manual focus, fizzy corners, and the chance that the quality of your copy may have suffered due to the effects of authoritarianism and the revolutionary whims of Vladimir Lenin.
It seems that during prior lyrical waxings on the concepts underpinning mindful/contemplative photography and Miksang, I came to refer to it as Quiet Photography. This, without thinking for a moment that Quiet Photography might indeed be a thing out there in the world – a concept already girded by philosophies and academic essays. As it turns out, it’s a definite thingin some academic circles and is mentionedelsewhere.
Old door and dappled light – Olympus EM5 Mark 2 and Sigma 30mm 2.8 lens
For me, quiet photos don’t announce themselves. They don’t add their voice to the cascade of loud photos that speak of ego, marketing, and contrivance. They step away from noise and action. Quiet photos speak of the small things and the ordinary things. I think the best of these photos imbues the mundane subject with an imaginary life, as though revealing a mystery in a quiet place unnoticed by the noisy hubbub of humanity.
Wood bench partly in shadow – Olympus EM5 Mark 2
As in contemplative photography, the necessary mindset inhabits a moment fully but may be distracted easily. The play of autumn light over the surface of an old door, a wooden bench in shadow and light – ordinary things that convey the passing of time and a feeling of history, with the photographer as quiet witness.
Lately, I’ve been contemplating ethical questions in photography. According to Wikipedia, ethics is the study of moral phenomena and “…investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behaviour is morally right.”
At the risk of being ultracrepidarian, I’ll just say this: I’m not an expert in ethics or philosophy, but I believe that self-reflection is an important part of not just photography, but also generally. It’s crucial to ask questions and seek answers to discover what drives our photographic practice. What beliefs inform our behaviour? What do we consider to be right and wrong and why? Where are the moral lines for us?
Bruce Gilden and Mark Cohen – well-known street photographers who hold the camera in one hand, the flash-gun in the other, and get right into the personal space of their subjects – may be at the behavioural far end of what street photography encompasses. Here’s a great video of Gilden at work: Bruce Gilden.
This in-your-face methodology has variously been called innovative, invasive, bullying, and unethical. There’s no denying it can produce some amazing photos of people doing everyday things on the street, but is it ethical? Ethics is about what behaviour is morally right. But just because something is legal, like making photos of people in public spaces where the law says there is no expectation of privacy, that doesn’t make it ethical.
All smiles at midnight – Nikon D7100
Consent and ethical frameworks
Consider the photo of the two ladies above. You can see they’re happy and smiling. In fact, they saw me with the camera and posed for me, thereby providing consent. There aren’t too many people who’d have an ethical issue with this photo.
What complicates matters is that what we consider to be ethical, or morally right and wrong, is based on our ethical framework – a set of core beliefs, culturally embedded and varying across time and place – that inform the way we behave, the way we think and feel, and what we consider to be right and wrong. If all of my street photos were made with consent, such as the one above, my ethical framework might be Care-Based, where I consider the feelings of others, care for others, and my relationship to others.
Street photographers like Bruce Gilden may be considered unethical by a majority, but the truth is that their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are driven by belief systems that may not be in accordance with the mainstream. One might argue they work to a type of Utilitarian ethical framework that values a good outcome above questionable methods – art as the good outcome in this case. But if people that Gilden photographs are startled, offended, or unhappy with his method, is it a good outcome from their perspective? Should one set of ethics override another?
Perhaps it’s the goal of making good art that drives the photographer’s impulse to shove a camera into personal space. Or the goal to be well-known, with money in the pocket and exhibition space for the work. Would you think differently if you thought of Gilden’s work as great art? Or if you didn’t like his photos, would you find his practice unethical instead?
Kneeling with nothing – Nikon D7100
I thought for some time before posting the photo above. I photographed a vulnerable person and for many people, making photos of vulnerable people on the street is a big no-no and crosses an ethical line. What drove my behaviour here? Obviously, I feel uncomfortable posting the photo but do I feel discomfort because I fear possible bad reactions to it? I’m certainly not one to dive into conflicts.
The idea of a person with nothing, surrounded by people in a busy city, appeals to my sense of exploring the effects of capitalism and urbanisation – a fragile human being in a concrete and glass city, looking to survive the grinding day. The potential cruelties of modern life appeal thematically and drive an aesthetic. I’m driven to this as I’m driven to photos of decaying buildings and ruin.
It’s easy to be seduced by photo opportunities on the street in a big city where few people care about others with cameras. It’s easier still to exercise power as a photographer and frame a vulnerable person who gave no consent, telling a momentary story about them that can’t represent them in totality. Perhaps in making this photo, I also touched the edges of what I’m comfortable with. That, in itself, is a valuable lesson and self-reflection.
Charles de Gaulle at work on the streets – Nikon D7100
It’s important to understand that ethical frameworks vary across culture, time, geography, and individuals. The behaviour that one person feels comfortable with will not be in accordance with the ethical framework that drives someone else. We may argue that some ethics are universal, and perhaps they are, but prior civilisations have believed it a good thing to sacrifice virgins to appease deities, or have seen fit to expose weakling babies to create a stronger society.
Ethical frameworks are, in this context, subjective. The law seeks to be universal and pragmatic, but ethics remain separate and personal. And when my ethics disagree with yours, conflict may ensue, even though neither of us is wholly right or wrong. According to Descartes, we can never truly know if other minds exist since we can only truly know our own minds. We’re trapped within our own minds, and for all we know, other people are zombies, illusions, or mindless automatons. Slipping into Solipsism for a moment, we can never know another person’s ethical framework because we can never know if other minds exist beyond our own and we are therefore doomed to cross ethical boundaries at every moment and every step. In this context, it may be more relevant to depend on laws rather than subjective ethics.
Diving into Solipsism is, perhaps, at the deep end of the pool, but it serves to illustrate a simple point: ethics are indeed personal and subjective and we often can’t know the ethical framework of another person. We may minimise this confusion by seeking consent, and this is a perfectly reasonable solution, but we also change what street photography is by doing so: it then becomes a set of poses and forced half-smiles for the stranger’s camera, thereby losing the interesting spontaneity that defines the genre.
Covid-safe and unhappy – Nikon D7100 and 55-300mm Nikkor lens
It’s clear the person in the photo above isn’t very happy. Was he unhappy with me pointing the lens in his direction or was he unhappy with something unrelated? I found his look interesting and decided to make the photo before moving on. I admit it’s not an especially good photo but I share it in hopes of provoking thought about the ethics of street photography.
If a person isn’t comfortable with me making their photo but I’m ethically comfortable doing so, should one ethical framework override the other? Should there be an expectation that within a time, place, and culture, where photographing people in a public place may be legal but sometimes morally questionable, the ethics that favours asking consent or not making the photo at all should always take precedence?
Ethical choices and geological wonders
In a previous post, I posted photos of Uluru – a magnificent natural wonder that started to form over 500 million years ago. There are parts of Uluru where clear signs forbid photography based on the cultural beliefs of the local indigenous Arrernte people. I didn’t make any photographs in the aforementiomned signed areas, choosing instead to pay respect to those local beliefs.
My belief system allows me to view the world around me as not owned by any single person or group. It allows me to view nation-states, governments, and fortunes as illusions in the sense they are consensually understood and agreed-upon narratives. These beliefs inform my ethical framework, but I understand that such frameworks are purely subjective and personal. For me, Uluru is an amazing example of geological processes that existed millions of years before any human being set foot on the shores of the ancient inland sea. Yet, despite my belief, I chose not to make photos anyway, partly because I also respect the value of indigenous culture.
Ethics in photography is like a huge bowl of spaghetti on a first date – you’re probably going to spill it on yourself and look awkward while slurping up the pasta. It’s a messy and often uncomfortable area that’s filled with subjectivity and declarations of universal moral truths by stubborn individuals. Perhaps the best we can do is our best in understanding other people, occasionally override our own ethics to get along better with others, and hope that we find people that share some of our own ethics.
In my previous post, I outlined a confrontation that had happened when revisting a ruined house nearby. In a world where the Silicon Valley business model is obsessed with surveillance capitialism, tracking online behaviour, harvesting personal data, and selling that data, it’s no surprise that a growing number of people become very touchy indeed when a lens is pointed in their direction or the direction of something they own.
Old shed on a dusty corner at sunset – Nikon Z5
Ethics is a branch of Moral Philosophy that concerns itself with morality and how people should behave and why. Despite the fact that we were on a public road at the time of the incident, doing nothing legally wrong, and making photos, was our behaviour ethical? Why were we confronted and what ethical framework, if any, should inform photographic practice?
It’s very easy to dismiss confrontations with a deft wave of the legal hand: making photos from public spaces of things visible from those spaces is not legally wrong. Yet, doing so can provoke a strong reaction in many people. It may not be illegal, but is it ethical? Is it right or wrong to make photos of a property owned by someone else? And how should we react, as photographers, when we’re confronted?
Keep Out – Nikon Z5
I think self-reflection is a useful tool for personal growth and change. It allows us to consider our system of beliefs, our thoughts and feelings, and our behaviours in the larger context of culture and society. What beliefs inform our behaviours? And when those beliefs are challenged by someone else who thinks, believes, and behaves differently, what should we do? I’ll be coming back to these questions…
Some days it’s hard to ignore the culture wars that shoot back and forth viciously on digital threads or the hurried whispers of people who feel the uncomfortable cultural shift beneath their feet. I wonder whether we’re just living through especially tumultuous times or whether this has always been so? It has always been so, of course, because nature is change. Even the universe changes from moment to moment. It’s a truth some try to resist and others embrace. Often, we embrace it when young and ossify with age. That’s our nature too. Today’s passionate culture warriors become tomorrow’s slow-moving dinosaurs.
A door used no more – Nikon D40 and Nikkor 35mm 1.8 lens
I’ve always thought it unwise to commit too fully to a rigid set of beliefs. This is not to say belief systems are unreasonable or bad – humans seek meaning in all areas, and belief provides the framework for living in a universe that’s so vast as to cause us terror in dark and quiet moments – if you subscribe to Terror Management Theory. We cling to each other for warmth, just as we cling to belief like a security blanket.
We so often make the mistake of assuming our own beliefs are real and true and that they transcend time. Rather than understanding others deeply and cultivating compassion, we too easily find the beliefs of another person wrong, placing it on a rigid moral spectrum that functions as our own personal guide to undertsanding a seemingly random existence we seek desperately to understand, contain, and explain. In this way, we comfort ourselves.
The old entryway – Nikon D40
If we believe the universe has a moral structure inherent, we also tend to find a moral structure in the world and find our beliefs aligning strongly with it. If we believe the universe is mechanistic and chaotic, without moral structure, we align our personal narratives to this view instead. We find that life’s purpose and meaning is tied inextricably to our most basic beliefs about reality. We may be trapped within them at the expense of understanding other people. Either we’re islands of meaning, separated by uncrossable gulfs, or human beings attached to each other by common bonds. Perhaps both.
The tall church along the old road – Olympus E1
You don’t want to be on the wrong side of history, people sometimes say. For me, there is no right or wrong side, just people who have their own personal narratives, clinging to meaning. We’re all in the vast river of history together. It flows all around us. We’re part of the change happening from moment to moment, whether we embrace it or resist it. Neither approach is right or wrong – just ways of living and surviving and finding purpose and meaning.
Uluru at sunset – Nikon Z5
I love geology and astronomy. I like the feeling of placing myself in the context of deep time – the kind of time that barely notices our existence because we’re fresh and new. In this way, I place human life in the context of more ancient things. Uluru, the famed monolithic red rocky heart of Australia, started to form 550 million years ago. It was here long before we were. It started to form when multicellular life dominated the planet, long before dinosaurs roamed. Imagine that?
When you look up at the stars, those photons hitting your retina have travelled for countless light years. They’ve struggled and twisted up through impossibly dense super-heated layers of distant suns – the forges of our universe – careened through the cold depths of deep space, entered your eye, hit your retina, and then been processed as a visual signal by your amazing mammalian brain. In this way, we’re all connected to the stars. I love that thought.
When I decided to dive headfirst into photography as a hobby, I was anxious about the technical jargon and understanding the myriad camera settings. The good news is that it wasn’t all that bad. I read and watched and learned a lot through trial and error.
Owning up to failure is always important. Being able to move on from a mistake to the next moment is even more important for continued growth in any field. I’ll tell you something, honestly: I still make plenty of mistakes!
Falling down – Nikon D40 and Nikkor 35mm 1.8 DX lens
Here are some of the most common photographic errors I continue to make:
Not resetting important camera settings: All too often, I’ve forgotten to change ISO when entering different light situations, or I’ve missed resetting exposure compensation.
The camera mis-pack: I’ve packed not enough when I needed extra gear and packed too much gear when I should have packed less.
SD card woes: Yes, I’ve filled up an SD card and forgotten to pack a backup. The only solution is to go through the recorded files and be brutal about deletion decisions.
ISO stubborn: Have you ever been stubborn about pushing your ISO in poor light situations? Base ISO is optimal for less digital noise in a photo, but a blurry photo just isn’t worth the stubborn refusal to UP the ISO a bit more to force a faster shutter speed! It’s better to have a noisy photo over a blurry one. Digital noise can be dealt with far more easily now using software tools. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve stubbornly refused to move from base ISO in fast-fading light, standing there with my arms tucked and not breathing just to cut as much movement as possible to achieve perfection at a too-slow shutter speed in hopes of a sharp image.
Reverse dialling: Older Nikon bodies dial positive and negative exposure compensation values in reverse to other cameras, so when my muscle memory becomes accustomed to the opposite dial movement of another camera, I find myself cursing the over or under-exposed photo on an old Nikon camera. At worst, I just forget the reverse dial motion completely until I’ve long moved on from the scene, at which point I sigh. Thankfully, the new Z-mount Nikons have changed both the exposure value dial direction and the reverse F-mount lens twist they had going for decades.
The old green gate of J. Martin & Co. – Nikon D40
I’ve been tough on myself in times past when it comes to making photographic mistakes. I think part of that was not feeling comfortable with the equipment and not believing I could learn enough to make good photos. In fairness, I still make plenty of stinky photos, but every poor photo teaches me something new, even if it’s a lesson I thought I’d already learned.
We can always improve our photography, but learning and living isn’t some easy linear path. It’s full of twists and turns and ups and downs. There are rocks of many different sizes littering the paths we walk. One of the hardest things to develop is self-compassion. We’re often kinder to strangers than we are to ourselves. But, why? We’re just as fragile and just as prone to mistakes as anyone else. All that truly matters is that we experience and inhabit the moment meaningfully, in whatever mode we choose: Auto, Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, or Manual.
The Rusty Ruin Journal 