Olá,
one very true statement about photography is that it’s artful painting with light.
But why shall it now be painting with gear? Yes, gear doesn’t matter, it’s the photographer that matters, … yep, no dispute.
Though when it comes to choosing the right gear – the tool – just the tool to paint with light, then, looking around on what’s available and what might have the characteristics you’re looking for – then in all honesty gear matters.
Gear matters not in bigger, higher, wider, lighter, faster, more pixels, no. Gear matters in other qualities.
First and foremost, to create your best work, you need a tool that is an extension of yourself, that you like and with which you bonded over many thousand experiences. This is a very subjective aspect, utterly personal, and initially very much driven by the industry & friends marketing you’ve been bombarded until you got it. Still it’s a personal choice of haptic, smell, visual forms that fits optimally to your taste and ways. “This is the way”.
With some experience, which equals lots of faulty perceptions, plans, money burned, frustrations, … with such experience certainly not sooner, but later, much later you start to realize that some sayings aren’t far from reality either: “invest in lenses”, “shoot film”, “pixels are not pixels”, “less is more”, …
What do we need to paint with light, aside from personal preferences.
a) a sensorical surface (analog, digital, whatever your choice)
b) an optical construction (being a hole, a complex lens system or anything between)
c) a case, a camera that combines a) and b) and allows the user to manipulate parameters of light exposure and object distance in some way.
That’s pretty rudimentary and we all know that, so what’s the fuzz.
Well, first we need no more than that. All other feature loaded brochure stuff is comforting, or in some cases even the opposite, but not relevant for basic work.
To paint your picture with light, you need a palette, yes light brings the color palette to our “picture”, actually surface, but as in any communication that surface must understand the language of light. Not only that, but it needs to interpret it in a way we as a photographer want to understand it, more contrasty, black & white, softer, color-shifts, what not.
The surface needs to be sensitized to the expected interpretation formula we want to extract from light.
In the past we had film, many different film products, not just rebranded same-same but different like today, each with his own contrast, grain, color-shift levels, and we had lenses of diverse characters, sharp, reflective, soft, that were interchangeable thanks to more common camera mounts (plate, m39, m42).
In a digital world you don’t need that, “it’s all done in post”. Not yet, you still need a machine that captures the light as complete and perfect as a microscopic measuring device through a perfect lens without any abberations, distortions, soft edges, … Yes you can fix things in post, but you’re adding information or distorting information that wasn’t there to begin with.
Assuming “Post” Software is as good as you think it is, at least good enough, then it’s still easier for it to get the best possible quality from the physical device to do it’s work with or without AI.
What do we do today?
We have one major sensor manufacturer that dictates the industries’ capabilities, a few are stepping aside now for differentiation, but use the same architecture principles never the less.
We have multiple lens manufacturers that use maths and AI in extensive way and have all materials at hand to produce flawless lenses, even the “cheap” guys from yesteryear have come lengths to join in the mathematically correct and uniform point of perfection, big mount, big lenses, lightweight and lightning fast focus-motors and glass or plastic lens elements with plastic or metal bodies to fit the commercial boundaries of the finance and marketing department. But all share the same look-a-like quality in lens, more or less, undistinguishable by the visitor of a photo exhibition.
Now, that all capabilities are the same, manufacturers need to differentiate and talk about sizes, numbers, pixels, features, bouncy and wobbly, or sealants, just to get one foot ahead this quarter, losing out the next, when the competitor kicks in with a very similar solution.
The photographer now has his optimum platform to paint with light in post. Yes, in Post. No light painting happens in Pre, in the shoot anymore. The Firmware and the converters and editors later make the picture. But again, all align in fashion’s feeding the demand for target platform styles “street”, “nature”, “fashion”, “docu-mood”, “moriyama-style”, all identical again – this while they’ve got all the possibilities in their software to now paint whatever comes to their mind.
To their mind, not much else comes than buying old cameras (darkroom boxes these are) to look cool and state it’s shot with x,y,z camera, scan it and then equalize in post as they’ve done before.
Realizing that this process doesn’t cut it, they chose old “characterful” lenses. Why? Is the software incapable of distortion, vignetting, abberation, whatever? No, it’s plenty capable and easy to do, more so every single day. No, old lenses are cool.
What’s cool about scanning that old lens film from an old camera or digitally shooting with that old lens on a camera it wasn’t made for and then manipulating it in post again to the target platform fashion standards again. All? maybe, but you’re just again stuck in the same-same market of look-a-like pictures.
I say, paint with gear before painting with light, chose a camera-system that has a wide range of characterful older lenses, buy one type of film, use it well and often until you understand its characteristic and so the lens’s characteristic. Chose one element (film, lens) at a time for a long time to get to know this other one. Create your palette for painting with light.
Or learn your “post” software well and apply it to any recent camera lense system of the biggest 8 manufacturers, size and megapixels don’t matter – “post” does it, unless you have extreme world-record enlarging in your head – for what? one photo covering all your walls in a room?
And while you get your technical skills right, understand to keep yourself either fully digital or fully analog from creation to the final product. Then use whatever communication platform you feel appropriate.
You got the skills and communication sorted?
Great. Now learn art, learn from real artists, understand their time, their thoughts, the context, may it apply today, too? Buy books of philosophy, about ancient scientists, and go-see original art paintings (books are only good to understand their context, style, history, because graphically they’re a very bad representation of the qualities of the artist’s original art). Watch out for the original paintings only, not a copy of those, or if so, only to understand the difference and torrential fallback a original student’s copy is from an original master painting even though it shows most elements of the original. Analyse what makes the difference.
And understand light, watch it, learn and measure it. Do it by looking at the shadows, the coloration of textures.
Now use your tools, technical skills and artful understanding of painting with light to re-create a 1.000 copies of the master’s work, before you create your own – visibly and notably individual art.
this is when you moved from painting with gear to painting with light – a lifelong adventure. that is why real artists and professionals don’t call themselves artists and professionals. they call themselves apprentices and amateurs.
Bom dia,
pessoist.
o pessoist comenta 