The Perceptive Photographer

This week marks the 300th episode of the podcast. So first off, thank you to everyone who tunes in and listens to the podcast. It really means the world to me that you all tune in and check out what is going on with the podcast. As I mention about a third of the way into this week's show, this podcast is about all the experiences that I have about how photography impacts my life both just every day and creatively. It isn't about gear, techniques, or fads, so I know it has a niche market. I do appreciate that you come back every week to listen.

I have been asked a lot recently about what I think about some of the new tools digital photographers have at their disposal. Many programs now offer "AI or machine learning" to help edit photographs. Now with the click of a few buttons, you can replace skies, change expressions, or quickly composite images together.

In today's podcast, we talk a little about a few issues that arise when you think about the nature of computational photography and the language and words we might consider when talking about photography moving forward.

In the end, I think we all want to make interesting photographs, and the composition and framing are so much of that experience. The more you can be aware of composing, the more interesting and accurate stories you can tell. Being aware also gives you something else that is critical to photography--repeatability. You can repeat something repeatedly because you understand what happened and not just got lucky once with an accident. At the end of a day of photographing, knowing that we're able to get the image you wanted because you understood the composition's impacts making the editing and selection process that much more fun.

In this week's podcast, we look at the impacts of muscle memory on our photography. Muscle memory, or the body's ability to do something without thinking about it, is an important aspect of working as a photographer. This memory allows us to be able to quickly and efficiently do our jobs. From settings on the camera to keyboard shortcuts in a program, being efficient can really make a difference in how we can do our work. Yet, there is a downside. Anyone who has spent too much time hunched over a desk knows that bad things can happen when muscles remember bad things. Hunched over a desk can make our backs and necks hurt for days as the muscles unwind. In our photography, bad muscle memory can reinforce bad habits or make us a little lazy in our approach to editing and working. Spending some time to sort out what is good and bad about our muscle memory habits might make us better photographers and a little less sore.

In this week's podcast, we look at a possible photographic approach and discuss how you approach knowing when enough is enough when creating the image. For many of us, our approach to getting an image completed is incremental. We take small steps in our approach to framing, editing, shooting, and printing. While this method works, I propose that by making more grand shifts earlier in our process, we can get to a better result faster. We can get a better image, better concept, and better experience with the work by taking big leaps of faith in our workflow and trusting that going too far sometimes and backing off can produce more interesting images.

After reading a brief snippet about how Forbes creates its top 200 most brand valuable companies, I got to thinking about what formulas do we use in our photography when we assign a photograph a star value of 1-5. This week's podcast looks at how we approach and think about our rating systems for our images.

Everything is connected. When you photograph a leaf, it is part of a tree. A leading line doesn't just start and stop in your frame. It extends beyond the frame. In this week's podcast, we look at how our approach to seeing the whole and its parts can impact how we view the world and the images we make. Small shifts in our awareness of how everything is related in an image and how those relationships extend beyond the frame can help you make more meaningful work.

I had a conversation with a friend a while back about photography and at one point, relating to photo editing, I asked him, Why do you care what someone else does so much? There was a long, almost uncomfortably long pause. The answer that he gave didn't really matter much to me, but that pause really got me thinking about the idea of why do we care about things the way we do.

So this week's podcast dives into the notion of caring about your work and how it impacts you and the viewers of your work.

When I was younger, I worked for a high-tech startup that had to lay most of the company off in order to survive. They didn't do anything but prolong their demise, but the language used during the layoffs has stuck with me. I hadn't thought about it in a long time but recently heard someone say it when talking about photographs. The phrase used when I was laid off and in the review was This isn't personal. It's just business. The thing that stuck with me all these years is that it is business to the sender of the message, but nothing but personal to the receiver.  This week's podcast examine the impact of that phrase when talking photography.

Sometimes when we look at a photograph, we just don't get it. We move on and don't give it another thought. However, assuming the photographer was attempting to make something meaningful with there work, the photograph does have something to say. I have grown to think that it is our job to try and understand our reactions to photographs so that we can better understand the photographer. While we may not fully appreciate the images, if we can walk a mile in their shoes we might gain some deeper understanding into who they are and how they move through the world. In turn, maybe someone will offer us the same kindness. In this week's podcast, I talk about how spending the time to think about the experiences of someone that led to the making the image can tell us a lot about who we are and how we see the world even in someone else's image.