Different Stroke for Different Folks

Don't start caring about your photographs. Be happy with the pictures your telephone makes.


image: goodreads.com

LensRentals has some highly informative articles. One of them was a guest post, which led me to Gray Photography. Gray Photography has some good shots and some good tips, so I started reading their articles also. I found some nice stuff like this long writeup explaining exactly how they were able to get a dramatic late-evening shot with zowie lighting during the afternoon, using flashes and camera settings.

Then I came found 7 Steps for Getting Great Camera Flare. Here is where we parted ways. Excuse me while I stomp on someone else's heart for a moment.

This, to me, is a bad picture. To my mind, a photograph is about the subject. The point of a picture is not to draw attention to the optical failings of your lens*. To me, this picture needs to be taken again without pointing the camera straight into the sun. Yes it captures a moment. Maybe it even looks like you were there. But a picture dominated by flare is a picture that sucks. People who don't know how to use a camera do this sort of thing and throw that picture away when they go pick up the prints. I might crop the bottom and try to process the flare out of the top, to at least salvage a bad shot and show the facial expressions without an orange glow all over the people. This sort of tomfoolery grates on me, like handycam-vibration intentionally induced in a movie camera to make it seem as if you were there during an earthquake or something.

Click through to this page and see what you think. I think the lady is crazy for thinking this sort of thing is great. She thinks it's great. Hence the title of this post.


image: Gray Photograpy

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*unless you are Ken Rockwell discussing the optical failings of a lens