[gaweidert]

With a camera, you need to understand the technology and how it works if you are to get the images you want. You also need to be able to form the image you want in your mind before you try to capture it on film or digitally. I photograph because I can't paint.

A very good book on this subject is out there. It is called "Perception and Imaging: Photography a Way of Seeing" by Richard Zakia. It went through 4 editions. It is a huge expansion of a small book he first published in 1975 called "Perception and Photography".

He became interested in the psychology of how we perceive and show the world while working on helping to develop the Zone System. Ansel Adams who besides his many talents, was also gifted with an eidetic memory. Through experience he developed and carried his own personal zone system around in his head. He could remember the exact conditions of every photograph he took and the techniques he used to make the print. The Zone System was developed to help people look at and portray the world in the same way,

I called Richard Zakia "Uncle Dick". Awesome guy. He got to meet many of the giants on 20th Century photography along the way too.

"I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristic, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them."

Ansel Adams - 1981

[dsmithhfx]

The Zone System was developed to help people look at and portray the world in the same way,

Oh dear. How tedious. Great quote by Adams by the way.

[normhead]

I think I have pushed it beyond the point of being fun anymore. I need to take some pictures before I post again.

Boy do I need to take some pictures. But, other matters are pressing.

[SpecialK]

I wish someone would explain the nuts and bolts of this who can do so succinctly...

Not quite succint but pretty good, with examples.

How to Read Your Camera's Histogram | explora

[leekil]

Let's just say determining what is a masterpiece, intentional or otherwise, is not an exact science.That's an even more convoluted philosophical argument. If you keep reducing this statement to fundamental principles, it becomes an argument over what is beautiful and what isn't, which is an emotional argument, not a logical one.Personally, I think Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a good model to analyze buying behaviour. I would put buying a camera at the "esteem" or "self-actualization" levels, I don't think it fills our need to belong to a group (at one time, it might have, but smartphones have completely usurped that role). Expressing ourselves through a creative act becomes self-actualization when we obtain gratification from creating, whether or not other people affirm our creations. To complete this circle, at this point the objective qualities of our gear are no longer important, you can create as easily with crayons and paper as with $30,000 worth of photographic equipment, if you have the motivation to do so.I think this is the point where our tools take over our emotional well-being. The tool becomes a talisman, a good luck charm that we have an unhealthy dependency on.I think I have pushed it beyond the point of being fun anymore. I need to take some pictures before I post again.

Originally posted by pathdoc
A good image is a good image and can be appreciated on its merits
That's an even more convoluted philosophical argument. If you keep reducing this statement to fundamental principles, it becomes an argument over what is beautiful and what isn't, which is an emotional argument, not a logical one.

But isn't art emotionally based?

Genrally, you can speak of a photo being technically good or not, and can separately be artistically good or not.

Lee

[normhead]

But isn't art emotionally based?

Genrally, you can speak of a photo being technically good or not, and can separately be artistically good or not.

Lee

That assumes that there is some inherent value to technical merit. The course I took at Ryerson was Photo Arts, not Photo Tech. and it incorporated technical photography, like for circuit boards, etc., but unless you are discussing industrial photography applications, there just is not a category called "technically good"." You can speak of photos being technically appropriate. There simply are no technical standards you can apply to declare photographs, "technically good." by. That set of standards hasn't been published, and probably couldn't be.

[pathdoc]

Ansel Adams who besides his many talents, was also gifted with an eidetic memory. Through experience he developed and carried his own personal zone system around in his head. He could remember the exact conditions of every photograph he took and the techniques he used to make the print.

A gift beyond measure, and one I wish I had because it would serve me inestimably in my own profession. We histopathologists call it "ocular mileage", but we have the advantage that many of the common things and some of the less common things we see have the same essential structure over and over again, every time we see an example of that disease, so we can engrave it on our brains. What took us half an hour to work out as a trainee springs to mind in minutes or even seconds as a practising pathologist. In the photographic world, unless we take a lot of still life, architecture or scenery, nothing is ever really the same over and over again, and those without an eidetic memory or the personality necessary to repeat the same shot a hundred times with subtle variations can't learn that way.

But isn't art emotionally based?

Genrally, you can speak of a photo being technically good or not, and can separately be artistically good or not.

Perhaps I should have been clearer and completed the sentence as "...on its merits, regardless of the equipment on which it was taken."

[K-9]

One thought I had about why technical discussions are more relevant that technique discussions:

Technique varies from subject to subject, hour to hour. How I shoot one waterfall at 6a is not how I'll shoot another waterfall at 8a or how I'll shoot the mountain sunset at 8p.

Excellent point. There are a lot of people who have no concept of this. However, there's no reason why this can't be discussed in a forum thread. Although, I'd bet that a thread on "technique shooting ____________ at different times of the day" would get a lot less views and posts than the the "what camera should I upgrade to" thread. One will make you the better photographer, and one will not, yet the more popular choice is always about gear.

[osv]

"I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristic, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them."

Ansel Adams - 1981

good post... ansel adams was a gear freak, and he lived in the darkroom, dodging and burning for hours on end.

"Adams’s technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium. Weston and Strand frequently consulted him for technical advice. He served as principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally, to many other photographic concerns. Adams developed the famous and highly complex “zone system” of controlling and relating exposure and development, enabling photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization. He produced ten volumes of technical manuals on photography, which are the most influential books ever written on the subject."
Ansel Adams Biography - The Ansel Adams Gallery

tech discussions are necessary because knowing the limits of your gear can take your photography to the next level, and beyond.

[normhead]

Excellent point. There are a lot of people who have no concept of this. However, there's no reason why this can't be discussed in a forum thread. Although, I'd bet that a thread on "technique shooting ____________ at different times of the day" would get a lot less views and posts than the the "what camera should I upgrade to" thread. One will make you the better photographer, and one will not, yet the more popular choice is always about gear.

Many concepts in photography are difficult to grasp without working experience gained while studying. For every guru saying "This is the way it is. Try this out", there are ten internet bullies who will shout him down. In the class room it's easy. Expel the offender, get on with the work. If you're an ignorant loud mouth who'd rather talk theory than learn what we're trying to teach here, you're gone.

Not so on the internet. The ignorant loud mouth bully gets the same voice as the experienced working pro and it's left to the poor participants to try and sort out what's what. Another reason I ask to see people's images before I accept their advice.

In photography, if you aren't producing great images, your voice counts for nothing. Art directors don't select your images based on your ability to spout baseless B.S. on internet forums. Even if your opinions are theoretically correct and scientifically grounded, that counts for nothing.

You're pictures are either worthy of being bought and sold, or they aren't. The rest of it is internet fluff.

The Buddha said "it's possible to achieve Nirvana without believing there is a god", implying you can be a good person through practice without acknowledging divine guidance.
As photographers, it is possible to achieve great images without a technical understanding of photography. Everything you need to know you can achieve with practice. It is debatable what if any value is added by theoretical knowledge. Does theoretical knowledge add to the value of your images? or is it time wasted ,that could be used experientially learning your camera?

Personally if there an explanation of how to achieve a desirable image using new techniques that I'm not aware of, that comes first. The theory is speculative lilly dipping in areas where i will never have any real expertise, that while interesting in a naval gazing kind of way is not particularly important to my photography, but is sometimes useful to help explain my technique to someone else.

The most relevant question asked my lens design teacher was "Do we really need to know this?" His answer, "No, but as an academic institution we'd like to think you're smart enough to understand this stuff if we're going to graduate you." We covered the basics of lens design pretty quickly, and spent probably half the class learning how to calculate times to be a navigator in road rallies with a pencil and paper, his outside the classroom passion. I'm sure we could have learned a lot more, I understand refraction, learned to do basic refraction calculations using different densities of glass etc. , CA and a few other basic concepts, but there's just no need for a photographer to understand the different methods of correcting for CA. He just has to buy the lens designed to do what he wants. There are no brownie points for being able to technically analyze the design. To the photographer that is extraneous information.

My approach has always been, learn technique to produce exceptional image, use theory to help explain it. I know of not even one great image where someone studied the science behind the photographic process, lenses sensors etc. has led to an exemplary image. Those are all taken by guys who develop technique, based on playing with the camera, finding out what it actually does, understanding how it works, not why it works.

SO this is my class room teacher moment.

Photography is an art, not a science, a collection of techniques that deal with finished and un-evolving pieces of technology. When you buy a camera, it does what it does, that's it. You have to learn how to get the best out of it. Trial and error is king. Results are all that matters.

An ignorant idiot who isn't smart enough to understand optics or sensor technology but intuitively takes great pictures is a photographer. A Ph.D who explains the ins and outs of sensor technology and optics but takes lousy pictures isn't. Get used to it.

[Nicolas06]

Some people with that attitude are going to be in for a rude awakening!
More sophisticated equipment can be less forgiving of poor technique.

Yes and no. Better lens are sharp at wider appertures, large format camera are more forgiving if you exposure is off to fix it in post and better high iso pictures. Advanced AF system make complex focussing technique of the past a matter of keeping the subject on rougly the right place of the view finder and let the camera do the work. A K1, 645Z or D810 give your dynamic range that require HDR on a m4/3 or maybe even a K3.

A good part of the technique is also to get around the limitation of the gear and more advanced gear get you the result more easily. I agree that a film chamber would be quite complex to use and many MF camera are complex but the 645Z changed that making things easy again. A Camera like a D5 + the pro Nikon lenses just react faster, is more accurate, easier to run than your entry level APSC rebel or K30.

Sure if the guy is totally dumb he will not make anything of it and if one is a better photographer it will get better result than the other even if his gear is a bit worse. But some shoot would require quite some technique with a K5 is easy with a K1 or D5.

I am not after K1 because it is expensive, because the lens with the same reach are heavier bigger, because what I shoot would not benefit that much, because also I am no pro. But this doesn't mean that in some case there not a whole world difference.

Whatever we say, A K30 + 55-300 will struggle to compete toward a K1 with a 150-450 for wildlife, sports and action. It happen to not care one bit, but this is here.

Hey even for more basic stuff I found out that K5 AF was more miss than hit in shallow dof setting while K3 does it just fine. That why I sold the K5, if you wanted precise AF, you had to MF it.

[pepperberry farm]

...and sometimes I just get lucky....


(:

[normhead]

...and sometimes I just get lucky....


(:

That's all good technique does in wildlife and landscape, it increases your odds of getting lucky.

[goatsNdonkey]

To the original poster, K-9, one of the things I like about this forum is that people here do ask questions about the not merely technical all the time, though not always as the opening or title post of a discussion thread. While how to get the sharpness one wants with particular equipment in particular circumstances is important, other photographic aims and aspirations clearly get voiced unapologetically. Consider the bokeh thread in the Lens Club section of the forum, in which the often intangible qualities of the unsharp and how they contribute to a picture are examined and reveled in! I read technical articles in photo magazines (often Peterson's Photographic cover-to-cover) for a few decades (roughly starting in the mid-60s,) and I don't remember seeing the word bokeh, yet it's a concept quite easy to find on this forum.

A while back I started a thread asking what photography rule-of -thumb Pentaxians had given up (or were trying to give up) following < https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/173-general-photography/321945-what-photo...following.html > And when one considers how guidelines and rules-of-thumb are often (if not always) short cuts for remembering how to make pictures more technically good, it is easy to see how many of the responses described how people had moved beyond a purely technical goal in making their pictures. So, I would say that, while the technical might seem to dominate, it is easy to scratch through that surface and discover the richer experience and knowledge of forum participants that goes well beyond that.

[K-9]

To the original poster, K-9, one of the things I like about this forum is that people here do ask questions about the not merely technical all the time, though not always as the opening or title post of a discussion thread. While how to get the sharpness one wants with particular equipment in particular circumstances is important, other photographic aims and aspirations clearly get voiced unapologetically. Consider the bokeh thread in the Lens Club section of the forum, in which the often intangible qualities of the unsharp and how they contribute to a picture are examined and reveled in! I read technical articles in photo magazines (often Peterson's Photographic cover-to-cover) for a few decades (roughly starting in the mid-60s,) and I don't remember seeing the word bokeh, yet it's a concept quite easy to find on this forum.

A while back I started a thread asking what photography rule-of -thumb Pentaxians had given up (or were trying to give up) following < https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/173-general-photography/321945-what-photo...following.html > And when one considers how guidelines and rules-of-thumb are often (if not always) short cuts for remembering how to make pictures more technically good, it is easy to see how many of the responses described how people had moved beyond a purely technical goal in making their pictures. So, I would say that, while the technical might seem to dominate, it is easy to scratch through that surface and discover the richer experience and knowledge of forum participants that goes well beyond that.

Discussions of bokeh did seem to arise around the time of all the gear discussion trends. It was just called blur or background blur before it rose to popularity. It's also a word primarily used when typed in a forum like this or written in a magazine. It's rarely heard verbally in photographic discussions, although I have heard it here and there at photo shoots I've attended in the past few years. Come to think of it, when it is brought up in person, it's always from that one photographer of the group known to be the tech/gear guy.