c.d.embrey
Offline
Upload & Sell: Off
|
 p.2 #2 · Backdrop lights bleeding? | |
shatterkiss wrote:
cgardner wrote:
Mastering the technical stuff in a systematic way is the quickest way to get the technical roadblocks to creative perceptual vision out of the way.
It's also the quickest way to instill habits based on dogma rather than one's own thought processes. You end up a subscriber to a system, rather than someone who has encountered problems and learned to reason through them; when the system doesn't address a problem or situation, the subscriber is left high and dry while the independent thinker has been taught to improvise. The systematic approach may teach you to answer the "what?" more quickly, but it leaves you scratching your head at the "why?" - it creates a technician, not an artist or craftsman.
The question that needs to be answered is it your aspiration to be a photographer for a mall portrait studio or to work in editorial and advertising (or maybe to do top end portraits).
snip
You say that there's a specific and correct way to use a meter (dome facing the camera) because that's what the manuals say. Every working pro I've either been taught by or worked with/for has instead metered individual lights with the dome facing the light, often shading it with their other hand to avoid picking up light from other heads. As part of the process they'll probably also take a central reading facing the camera, but that's just one of an array of readings that essentially gives you a map of the light in the frame. No one reading is your guide to a "proper exposure", they're just the range of light and shadow that inform your decision of how to expose the frame and what your photo will look like. There's no right or wrong, just a series of creative decisions that might or might not serve your intent in crafting the photo.
I learned to block extraneous light from hitting the dome back in the 1970s. Learned this trick from working professionals.
Photography is subjective, not objective. No right or wrong answers, just answers that work!
I'm sure there's a point of view between yours and mine that's healthiest and best for the fledgling photographer. You point out that you're an engineer and technical by trade, whereas I went to art school for things other than photography and the areas in which I'm not self-taught were learned by assisting and working as a photographer. I just worry that in your relentlessly-systematic approach you cover the "Light, Science" but have left out the "Magic". Even the most technical book on photographic lighting that I know of, and the one that I recommend first, remembers to include the magic. I'd love to see the point in your tutorials where you say, "now forget everything I've said, throw this all out the window, go out there and break my rules and develop your own approach to photography." Where you tell people to stop being housepainters and start being Degas or Ferran Adria or Jimi Hendrix.
One of the first things I learned after getting out of film school was much of what I had learned had little to do with the reality of a working set. On-the-job training trumps book-learning every time.
The point of all this is to learn to have your own unique style(s). Don't be a housepainter. Don't paint-by-the-numbers. Remember, there is more than one way to skin a cat, and one size does not fit all.
|
