Disillusionment is a Positive First Step

(This is Lesson 1 of my How It’s Done Series)

 

Lesson one shouldn’t really be called a lesson. Lesson one would be best described as deprogramming. The first step in becoming a functional, self aware digital photographer is to purge yourself of years worth of photography misconceptions. Since the dawn of consumer photography the photo industry has been selling the idea that there is a little bit of magic involved in the making of photos. The camera manufactures have a long track record of taking control away from the photographer and transferring it to camera engineering. To market their consumer level cameras they have sales pitches like, “So easy even grandma can do it” or “You just click and we’ll do the rest.” The manure is piled even deeper for professional level photo equipment with hundreds of user generated reviews proclaiming the magical nature of certain lenses, and hundreds more sentimental forum posts about the mystical film cameras of yesteryear. You have to let go of these notions. Your DSLR camera is an appliance with just four controls – aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and focus. Knowing how to operate these four basic controls is what determines whether or not you can take a decent photo.

 

If you are reading this you’re probably the owner of a brand new DSLR, and the ravings of a zealot aren’t going to diminish the materialist lust you feel for your shiny, new camera. She’s a pretty little machine, and you paid a lot for her. I don’t blame you for being so easily smitten. Just remember, I am trying to help you out. It’s in your best interest to feel as dispassionate about your equipment as possible. Here’s an idea. Try to think of your camera as a copy machine. That’s what I do. In my mind’s eye my camera is a twenty year old manila colored copier parked somewhere near the back of a bail bonds office in Montgomery, Alabama. Why do I choose a copy machine? Because a copy machine is essentially what your camera is. Taking a photograph is just making a two dimensional copy of the scene in your camera’s lens. There is no magic. The image sensor records the light and that information is stored as one and zeros in the camera’s memory card.

 

Are you still thinking unhealthy thoughts about your camera? You might need to take drastic measures. Go down to your basement, find a rusty nail, use the nail to make a bunch of unsightly scratches in your camera’s case. If that doesn’t work maybe you should find some puke green spray paint. Be careful not to get any paint on the front lens element.

 

Now that we have thrown that sack of puppies in the river it is time to bring on the next round of disappointment. You need to buy photoshop. Everyone tries to get away with not owning photoshop and everyone who is truly serious about photography eventually ends up buying photoshop. Save yourself a year or two of flailing. Buy photoshop now, or at least start saving up for it. I wish someone would have laid this fact out for me when I first got into photography. For those readers that think photoshop is all about making fake photos or amping up average shots, you have the wrong idea. Photoshop is the digital darkroom. Sure you can use it to create special effects, but the primary use of photoshop (for me) is to color correct photos – to make them look as similar to the original scene as possible. During the age of film the photo lab did for you what photoshop does now (color correction). Back in the time of film cameras nobody ever asked, “was that picture photo labbed?” If you are thinking that using photoshop is somehow impure you have no idea what photoshop is used for.

 

Here is something else you need to know about your new DSLR. The company that built your DSLR added a lot of automatic junk to your camera to help the average nonthinking photographer take better looking pictures. This added junk works great in average situations for people that don’t really care about overall image quality, but it is disastrous to a photographer shooting in any nonstandard situation, or using a better than average lens. Your camera is making decisions for you that should only be made by you in photoshop. Most cameras when left to their own devices automatically add sharpening, saturation, and mid-tone contrast without you even knowing it. Why is that so bad? Because there are many photo situations where you don’t want these effects. Probably for close to 50% of the photos you take these automatic changes made by your camera are the wrong choice and hurt the image rather than help it. Here is one example – imagine you are taking close up photos of flowers and you want the flowers to be in focus and the background to be a creamy out of focus blur. Your camera doesn’t know you are trying for this effect. It just goes ahead and auto-sharpens the entire frame. Now your out of focus background is full of jagged pixelated artifacts. Here’s another example. Lets say you are taking a picture at sunset and there are lots of shadow areas in your photo that you hope to keep detailed. Your camera doesn’t know that it is sunset and it goes ahead and adds mid-tone contrast because your camera thinks mid-tone contrast is great. Now, instead of having nice detailed shadow areas you have featureless black blobs in your photo. The added mid-tone contrast crushed the shadow detail.

 

Fortunately, there is good news. You can turn all this junk off. Get out your camera manual, figure out how to navigate the various menus, and turn down these settings: in camera sharpening, saturation, and contrast. If your camera has more auto features that you aren’t sure of, you are probably better off turning them off also. Leave a comment if you have a question about a specific feature. The greatest feature of a DSLR is the ability to shoot naked of all added garbage. Your DSLR has an awesome image sensor, and if you were smart it also has a great lens. Use the sensor and the lens – that’s it. Turn off the other stuff. Your computer does the other processing stuff better than the camera. Most importantly you make better processing decisions than your camera’s algorithms. Remember, your camera is programmed to handle average situations not all situations. You don’t want your camera’s faulty logic baked into your image files. You want your image files to be light, crisp, and free of nonsense.

 

The best way to avoid the in-camera automatic nonsense is to shoot in RAW mode. What is RAW? It’s a file format where your camera only saves the actual image information from the sensor to the compact flash card. Absolutely nothing is added to the file. When you shoot in RAW it’s all about the lens, the image sensor, and you. No Japanese camera engineer is making imaging decisions for you when you shoot in RAW. The maximum amount of detail is saved and you are free to make all the processing choices in photoshop. I will dedicate a coming lesson to RAW format so I’m not going to get too deep into here. For now, I recommend shooting in RAW so that when we get up to that lesson you’ll have some RAW files to play with.

 

OK, so this lesson was primarily bad news. If you read this far you are more disciplined than I was as a beginning photographer. When I first started out I hated hearing that I needed to spend yet even more money on photography by buying photoshop ($600), and then I had to work with cumbersome RAW files. I thought the magic of my camera and a dash of talent would hurdle me above those uncomfortable obstacles. After three years of beating my head against the wall I found out I was wrong.

Now a quick review of what we learned today.

1. Don’t think sentimental thoughts about your camera

2. You need to buy photoshop

3. Turn off all the automatic image processing stuff your camera offers, or better yet start shooting in raw format

The next lesson should be more fun. Stay tuned. If you have a question or suggestion please leave me a comment.

Click here to continue to Lesson 2