I’ve been asked by a few people for advice about buying a new camera, and it is always and interesting conversation.  Sometimes, people feel they need to spend a great deal of money to get the best photographs.  I usually end up giving them some advice to re-think how they are going to spend their money.

I should clarify that I’m not going to tell you what’s right for you.  There are tons of articles on the internet that are a lot more philosophical about the subject of choosing the right camera and gear.  What I am trying to share is how you should be spending your money when you buy that first camera, specifically a digital SLR camera with interchangeable lenses.

One thing to keep in mind, is that if a photograph turns out poorly, it probably isn’t the fault of the camera.  Oh sure, technical malfunctions can happen, but in the grand scheme of things, such malfunctions are pretty rare.  In the hands of someone with decent compositional skills, a good photograph can be made with any camera, whether it’s built into a smartphone, or if it is a large format camera.

I recently had a conversation with someone who wanted to buy a new SLR (Single lens reflex) camera and was going to spend about $1,000 on a camera body, and buy 3 relatively cheap lenses.  Considering he didn’t really understand what an “f-stop” was, I tried to convince him that his money might be better spent on a slightly less expensive camera body and get fewer, but perhaps higher quality lenses.  It’s sometimes hard to convince someone their priorities are a little backward, especially if they’ve already talked to a salesman who has greased them up with talk of “better weather sealing” and “more mega-pixels” and a bunch of other sales talk that sounds good but is really a line of BS to make the sale.  Just for the record, for the average users, 10 Megapixel digital SLRs are superior to film cameras, so don’t get caught up when a salesman tries to tell you that you should spend a little more for the 12, 15 or 18 megapixel camera.  When you are first learning photography, in my opinion, it’s a waste of money.  Some of my photographic cohorts would probably disagree with me on that point but that’s just what I think.  I’ve seen people waste money on megapixels who never make a photograph larger than 8×10, and I’ve pushed my old 4 megapixel photographs up to 16×20 with good results.

If you are buying your first SLR camera, spend more money on the lenses and less on the camera body itself.  In fact, I would recommend getting one high quality lens with your new camera body and save any extra cash for future purchases after you have learned to use your camera.

If you are purchasing a digital SLR and a lens, but you don’t understand the relationship between f-stop and shutter speed, you need to step back and be honest with yourself, you’ve got a lot to learn to really use that new camera to the best of its capabilities.  And, if you have no intention of learning some of those details, and you are going to be shooting “all auto everything” when taking photographs…don’t waste your money.  Get a mid-range point and shoot and be happy.

Now, if you’ve got some motivation to learn.  If you have things in mind that you want to use your camera for and you are ready to commit yourself to some learning, then I say go for it.  Get that SLR and lens, and then head to your local library and check out a few books on taking photographs.  You don’t even necessarily need to get a recent photography book to learn what you need to know.

One person I know has often told me that his wife is not happy with the photographs taken at sporting events where her daughter is performing.  It sounds like the camera is set for auto exposure and never leaves it.  I’ve passed on some helpful hints, but I have the feeling she’s still seeing the same results.  You have to take some time to get it to work well.  Spend some time reading, and it will pay dividends!

So here is what my advice boils down to:

1. Determine your budget
2. Buy a high quality, mid-range, zoom lens (consider 18-135mm, 24-104mm, 24-70mm, etc)
3. Buy an entry level SLR (Canon Rebel, Nikon D3000, Sony Alpha 230, etc.)
4. Read your camera manual, as dry as it might be, it will give you good insight into it’s functionality.
5. Go to your local library and check out some books on beginning photography.
6. Check my blog for tips and tricks and other articles.
7. Consider attending a photograph class or a workshop.
8. Practice, practice and practice.

You can get very creative with almost any camera.  Digital SLRs do have features and functions not found in most point and shoot cameras (although higher-end compact cameras have tons of features, and many pros carry one all the time when they don’t have their SLR).  If your set to get an SLR, I would recommend committing yourself to learn more about photograph or else you will be sorely disappointed in the results.

I’m also happy to answer any questions you might have.

I’m pretty sure every artist goes through a slump or something similar to writer’s block.  I know I have a time or two.  I know how to take a photograph.  I know exposure.  I know composition.  I know that I have taken some good photographs, but for whatever reason, I’ve gotten stuck.  Frankly, my photographs sucked.  I get back home and look at them and wondered, “What in the heck was I looking at when I shot this?”

I’ve talked to a few people who have gone through something like this, and I started to recognize some things they all had in common:  withdrawal.  Instead of facing their block head on, they backed down and didn’t get back on the horse.  They waited for something to happen.  In most cases, it would turn around eventually.  It probably didn’t happen all at once, and to a certain extent, I’ve seen some people with insane photographic talent essentially give up the camera after a slump and haven’t really returned.  I have to say that I’ve been there, but I also got out of it, and I couldn’t be more motivated about photography.

You can find a lot written about breaking out of a slump or a block.  I suppose some of it is pretty good advice, but I’m going to share what I feel has a higher chance of helping than anything else: friends.

Yes, friends.  In this case, I mean friends with cameras, friends taking photographs, friends using Photoshop, and friends talking about photography.  Immerse yourself in your friends who are also into photography.  If you don’t have friends who are into photography, join a forum online, or a Facebook group or something similar to that.  Heck, you can e-mail me and I’ll talk photography as much as you want!  Don’t worry about the photographs you are producing.  Let it go.  See what your friends are doing.  Ask them about their photographic outings, and most important of all meet up with them in person and go out to take some new pictures.

Get out there!  Don’t worry about what you’ll be bringing home.  I know that’s tough because photographers fret over their comps, they pre-visualize, visualize and post-visualize the shot they want, they obsess over the lighting, heck they fantasize about the lighting.  STOP IT!  Yes, I’m yelling.  Just stop it.  No expectations.  Hit the trail with your friend or friends, camera and tripod in hand.  You don’t even need to take a photograph, in fact, try not to.  Our tendency is to try to force a shot when we are in a slump, or take to many shots, or too few, or to concentrate too much.  I’m going to yell again, STOP IT!  Let yourself be truly inspired before you unfold the tripod and mount your camera.

I can’t place enough value on that of friends.  I hit a slump not that long ago.  I stopped reading about photography (you can never really read enough or learn enough).  I wasn’t involved in my favorite forum online either.  I hated everything I tried to do creatively.   In some ways, I stopped having fun trying to make a good photograph.

I had been out in the past with quite a few different photographers, but when the slump started, I stopped getting out there.  I withdrew, and I knew it was wrong.  Then I met a new friend.  He is a successful photographer and in many ways embodied what I’d like to do someday with my knowledge and craft.  I know we’ve spend more hours talking about photograph and non-photography topics than actually taking photographs.  I was deep in my slump.  He invited me out to do some photography.  I went, we drove around, B.S.’ed and took some shots.  The couple times we went looking for subjects, I struggled and really wanted to make a good photograph, but it just didn’t happen.  When I got home, I lost the focus of the more important aspect of the trips we took: the friendship.  Not that I had forgotten I had a great friend, but I let the photography over-shadow it, and that’s when I realized I needed to change my focus, and not necessarily my camera.

My friend teaches photographic workshops all over the west.  He works hard and is on the road most of the year away from his wife.  He helps others more than he spends taking photographs for himself.  With that in mind, I figured out that I needed to stop worrying about what I was going to accomplish when I went out.  When I was younger and went out with my friends to do some fishing, it didn’t really matter if we came home without a fish, we always had a great time being outdoors, talking, relaxing, etc.  The same should apply to photography.

So, now my focus was on enjoying friendships.  I started contacting others who I hadn’t talked to in awhile and set up places to go.  Sometimes, the meetings weren’t photographic, we just got together for coffee and talked about photography or whatever suited us.  Soon, and fairly quickly, my inspiration started to return.  I could feel the motivation and the desire to be creative building back up.

The other thing I did, and I highly recommend, is borrowing some books from the library.  I immersed myself in everything photographic, from guide books, beginner books, advanced techniques, and coffee table books.

Slumps happen to everyone, but you can take steps to break out of them.  Don’t let your camera gather dust, pick it up, call some friends, get out there!

It’s a question I’ve received a few times regarding some of my photographs.  It’s often asked with slight negative tone like they are saying, “if you used Photoshop, I’ll be less impressed.”  I saw a comment on a fellow photographers fan page where someone commenting on one of his photographs said, “…tell me u [sic] don’t photoshop these, at least not too much!!”  That actually got a little bit of a rise out of me.  When I’m asked, I usually tell people (as did the photographer who received the comment), I use Photoshop to make some minimal corrections to ensure the final print is representative of the scene I photographed.  But what exactly does that mean?

First I should say that the word “Photoshop” is thrown out there often by people who have never actually seen or worked with the program.  Like “Google” it has become a flexible word that can be a noun or a verb, so I’d like to take a few moments and share some insight into the Photoshop software and talk a little bit about “manipulation” of digital images.

Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems.  Its first published version, Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990.  It grew into the “industry standard” for graphics editing long before digital cameras had become the norm for most photographers.  Today, Photoshop is in its 11th iteration and will probably have a 12th version out this year (2010).  I should mention that in addition to Photoshop, there are many, many other image processing and manipulation software products out there.  However, Adobe Photoshop is considered to be the “industry standard”, but it isn’t the only fully capable product available.

Over the years, the Photoshop brand has been expanded into some similar but different products including Photoshop Elements, a simpler and less complex version of full Photoshop, and Photoshop Lightroom, a software package targeted specifically at photographers.  But, you might ask, “I thought original Photoshop was targeted at photographers?”  No, not really, I’d venture to say that it was targeted at commercial artists for the use in marketing, advertisements, and other commercial ventures.  In the 1990s, a “professional” digital camera, which was 1.3 megapixels, sold for $13,000 (yeah, no kidding), and had pretty poor quality output.  It wasn’t practical for most working photographers to take digital photographs at that time.  Film negatives and slides would need to be scanned into digital files and opened in Photoshop to be edited.  Recently, Photoshop Lightroom has become very popular with photographers  for several reasons, but  I won’t get to in that in this article.  Photoshop itself didn’t have the ability to work with digital RAW files until 2002.  A digital RAW file is a proprietary, unprocessed digital image file that advanced cameras create.  They are sometimes referred to as a “digital negative” and taken on their own, usually don’t look quite right.  They have to be processed (akin to developing film) and edited to look good.

Which brings me back to the original topic of this article, “Was that Photoshoped?”  If a photographer is shooting in RAW mode, which I do 99.9% of the time, the answer is “yes, absolutely!”   And here is the kicker: there’s nothing wrong with using Photoshop, in fact most photographers MUST use it if they want a nice looking photograph!  A camera that creates a JPEG file is actually a manipulated file out of the camera.  The camera uses its internal computer chips to adjust the image into what it thinks it should look like and then compresses the file so it is smaller.  Digital cameras today are amazingly good at that, but not perfect.  Most advanced amateur and professional photographers will shoot in RAW format which gives the photographer the most digital information to work with.

Most people who enjoy photography as an art form know who Ansel Adams is.  His prints are absolutely incredible.  Not only did he make great compositions, his prints have immense depth and dynamic range.  Ansel didn’t have Photoshop, but Ansel was a master at manipulation.  “What did you say?  Manipulation?  Ansel was a purist, wasn’t he?  He used large wooden cameras with big sheets of film and he worked in a darkroom!  He wasn’t like the photographers today “Photoshopping” their images to make them look better.”

I’ll say it again, Ansel was a master at manipulation.  Yes,“manipulation” has a negative connotation, but my intent in using that word is to equate it to what some people (wrongly) think of when they hear a photographer used Photoshop.  Ansel didn’t follow “the directions on the package” so-to-speak, when it came to taking a photograph and creating a print.  He was a master of visualization.  When he saw a scene, he could see what he wanted his final print to look like.  He knew the important elements of the image that should be emphasized to have the effect he would want.  To do this, he used several steps.  First, he would determine how he should expose his film.

Because the human eye can see many more levels of light than film or a digital camera, a photographer must choose what elements of a given scene are the most important to ensure they are properly exposed.  Ansel would do this and adjust his exposure appropriately.  Then, he wouldn’t just develop the film based on the manufacturer’s directions; he would over or under process the film to manipulate how the lights and darks would be balanced.

Once he had his film developed he would choose a photographic paper that would best suit his needs.  For film photography, there are several types of paper.  Some help increase contrast, that wasn’t naturally there, or maybe develops blacks better, etc.  Then the real manipulation would start.  He would make some areas of the print lighter or darker using a process called dodging or burning.  He’d make certain blacks even darker and some whites even whiter thereby <b>artificially</b> creating a greater dynamic range on the print than what the film actually captured.  He would use techniques to increase or decrease apparent sharpness and contrast.  To say the final print represented exactly what your eyes would have seen had you been standing next to Ansel when he took the photograph would be a complete fallacy.  Does that lessen the work that he did?  Not at all.

Do you think anyone ever asked Ansel, “Hey Ansel, that’s a really nice print, was is ‘darkroomed?’”  Of course not!  “Did you darkroom that print?  It’s just too good to be true.”  Well, it’s is probably accurate that the final print is too good to be a true 100% match of what the scene really looked like, but is that really the point of photographic art, or is it to convey the artistic vision of the photographer?  I think it is about vision, and Ansel had incredible vision.

The photographs I put on my fan page or my web site  is based on my vision.  I use Photoshop to “dodge and burn”, to soften and sharpen, to color correct, to change hue and tone, which are all actions a traditional film photographer would use in a darkroom.  Can Photoshop do even more?  You bet it can, and sometimes I do more than “the basics”.  You can do amazing things with it including creating a photo-realistic image from practically nothing, but it’s pretty rare that a photographer goes that far.  And if I go that far, I won’t try to pass it off as a minimally corrected image, I’ll let you know.
So, I would recommend that you not get too worked up about whether and image has been “Photoshoped” because chances are, if it’s been taken in the last 5 to 10 years, it has been, and before that it, was “darkroomed”, and rightfully so.