Digital Photography Secrets - What's Really Import

217479655

For starters, I don't think there are any digital photography secrets! Amazing artists with cameras have been making beautiful pictures for years,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and a quick trip to the library provides us with both fabulous galleries of pictures from remarkably talented people, and plenty of text books that handle the technical aspects of making great creative images.
But neither of these resources is much use until we've developed the ability to see what is really there.
One of the things I really love about my world is the interaction of light on water. I'm really lucky to live about ten minutes walk from the beach so once the rain stops we get out our walking shoes and head for the water's edge. The variations of colour on the water never cease to amaze me. In winter there are really delicate variations of light in the stormy winter skies pale pinks greys golds even some rare patches of blue and white. One of my all time favourites is the time around sunset when there is the combination of blue and gold in reflections. If you add in a small wave pattern to break up the colours there occurs the most amazing jigsaw puzzle dance of colours that just makes me tingle with delight...but it was years before I started to notice things like that.
One of the best ways to train yourself to "see" is simple: just carry your camera. My experience has been that taking the camera with me acts as kind of declaration of intent to my brain, and I look at my world through different eyes. It's not that the world is different,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], rather I'm just looking more intensely at what my eyes a responding to,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], noticing colors,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], light, contrast,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and the relationship between various parts of the scene.
The other part of "taking the camera" is the downside. Life is transient; light and motion ensure that everything in our world changes from moment to moment. If you've left the camera behind, there will never be the chance to capture exactly what you see...there might be a "next time" but it will only be similar,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], never the same. You've also lost the chance to record the image the first time around, review it, and analyse how you might change some of your artistic and technical choices.
Brings me back to my point about digital photography secrets. There are no secrets, the technical "right answers", and the artistic guidance of the masters are both available to us. They're only "secrets" because we haven't learned them yet. So where to begin?