Cameras have become ubiquitous. Everyone with a smartphone carries one, and they're now quite powerful, with advanced hardware and sensor design.
Since nearly everybody has a camera, most people can take decent pictures, right? I'm not talking about pieces of art but passable snapshots, if not better.
Maybe not.
For many years my nephew and I went to spring training to watch the White Sox get ready for the season. After quite a few of these annual expeditions, I realized we didn’t have any proper photos of the two of us at the ballpark. (I do not consider a smartphone "selfie" a proper photo.)
This situation had to be remedied.
Strolling around a still mostly-empty park one day just after the gates had opened, I looked for a reliable volunteer to take the picture. Seeing an usher, I figured that was a logical person to ask. After all, his job involves observing things, and he’s obviously familiar with the park.
I handed over the phone. We smiled, he clicked, I thanked him, and my nephew and I walked on.
Looking at the screen, I was amused by the result. It was spectacular in its awfulness: a masterclass in how to butcher a snapshot. He'd done a pretty good job capturing the right field foul pole and lots of clear blue sky. My nephew and I were in there, sort of, at the very bottom of the frame. The foul pole was growing out of his head and one of my arms was chopped off.
I tried again with another usher. And we got…….another lousy photo.
At this point, I decided to turn it into a game. How many tries would it take to get a decent shot (if ever)?
Walking around the entire concourse, I asked each usher we encountered along the way to take our picture. The resulting photos were hilariously poor, each one in its own unique way.
The only exception was the final attempt: with heavy cropping and editing, it was usable. See below.
Once the laughter subsided, I had an “ah-ha” moment. As someone who had been shooting for years, I realized I’d been taking my "photographer's eye" somewhat for granted. I assumed that some of the more rudimentary notions of how to take a passable snapshot were basic common sense.
Those ushers proved me wrong.
These perfectly capable, observant people didn’t fail at the task because they were careless. They failed because even the most basic compositional concepts aren’t innate. You’ve got to learn them.
There is a difference between operating the tool – the camera – and creating the art. The camera only handles the execution.
Every art form has some sort of barrier to entry. If you hand a clarinet to someone who has never before picked up the instrument and ask him to play something, there’s a good chance the sound produced will be rather unpleasant. The learning curve is high; a master clarinetist is respected.
Photography, on the other hand, has a deceptive, frictionless entry point. You press a button and an image appears. Because the technical barrier with a smartphone camera is almost nonexistent, many people assume the artistic barrier is low, too. Photography is perhaps the only art form where people confuse operating the tool with creating the art.
Developing the photographer's eye is a gradual process which requires patience and active practice.
Curating Chaos
The real world can be visually messy. Photographers manage scenes, organizing them until they’re distilled into a cohesive visual narrative. They look for lines, shapes, or patterns, and relationships between various elements. They might employ isolation or negative space, or exclude the background to create order out of chaos. They scan the edges of the frame for distractions.
Translating Three Dimensions into Two
We live in a 3D world with depth perception. A camera flattens everything into a 2D image. The photographer must carefully construct scenes using techniques such as layering (foreground, middle, background), leading lines, compression or expansion, aspect ratio, and the manipulation of light in order to add dimension.
Seeing vs Noticing
Non-photographers' vision is literal; they look at the world broadly. They see recognizable objects, and their brains filter out the extraneous. Photographers observe detail: geometry, framing, the quality of the light, etc.
Immediacy vs Intentionality
Photographers anticipate. They wait and watch for the right conditions. The right moment. They are patient. They notice light, movement and elemental relationships. They've learned to deliberately craft images.
It takes a great deal of time and effort to learn to see good photographs.
This is why it’s so cringeworthy when some well-meaning soul pays a photographer a compliment like this: “It must be nice to have such a good camera.”
A great photograph isn’t a lucky accident born from expensive gear. It’s the result of countless hours of practice. It's a skill. The magic doesn’t happen inside the camera, it happens in the mind of the person standing behind it.
As for me? I still cherish those hilariously awful spring training photos. They sit in a folder on my hard drive as a permanent reminder: the photographer's eye isn’t factory-installed. But luckily for all of us, it can be built.
