XtremeCamera

After a dozen or so frames the deer notices you and take off deeper into the woods. You slip the camera back into your pocket and continue your walk, confident in your believe that you just made some cool photos of a deer.

Back home you head over to your computer, attach the USB cable to your camera and computer and you tell your computer to import those cool photos to your photo management software. At this point you are so excited you can’t help but to feel like its Christmas morning and that big red bicycle is sitting under the tree.

After a couple of minutes the photos appear on the desktop all neatly arranged with a decent size thumbnail. Quickly you click on the first thumbnail and up pops the first photo. You feel your heart sink. You click another, and another and another. But the time you’re through you feel sick to your stomach, like you were sucker punched by the deer itself.

This is what you see:

Every photo is soft; you can barely make out the leaves on the trees. Your own eyes could hardly see the deer and the camera’s ‘eye’ saw even less, so the images show what could be a deer, or a bear, or an old stump. There is no contrast to speak of; the Program mode chose shutter speed over aperture so the depth of field is sicken-ly narrow. Worst of all, that so-called deer, “Was it even a deer?” you begin to think, takes up about 10% of the photo, the other 90% being those bland trees, some of the road, and a good amount of a cloudless sky. They are all, in a word, terrible.

So what went wrong?

Let’s not even bother to touch on the fact that your amazing brain can, and does, organize all the visual elements of every scene so that you can pick out the important stuff, isolate, and deal with it. Your brain didn’t register those nasty trees, the road, the sky, nothing… just the deer. You never know, you might have needed to take flight so your brain protected you. Your camera didn’t care, and what your camera saw is exactly what you got.

Photography is, naturally, both a learned skill and an art. Without a bit of both your photographs are simply a visual recording of the events that happen around you. Had you, the person described above, taken the time to think with a ‘photographic’ bent, you would have most probably not even bothered to take the camera out of your pocket. Well, perhaps you might have had this been the only deer seen in these parts for years and you wanted some proof when you told your friends, family, neighbors, about what you saw. Other than that, if your intention were to create a photograph, you would have walked on.

The skills that a learned photographer carries with him/her are such that in a matter of a second it can be recognized as something that can be photographed or not. A skilled photographer can analyze a scene instantly, and knows just what can be done to get the best possible photograph. The neophyte photographer does not possess these skills and therefore often times will attempt to photograph something that without a lot of elements being different shouldn’t have been photographed.

The “art” comes in after the skills have done their job. If a skilled photographer decides that something can be effectively photographed the artistic side comes into play and working hand in hand with the skills goes about setting up the shot the best it can to deliver a powerful visual statement.

Art with skill results in photographs that have a natural balance to them, an interesting angle, an interesting subject, or a combination of them. A skilled photograph results in a technically good photograph, exposed well, a good choice of shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc, but lacks any impact.

Most of the time the skilled photographer without any artistic talent will produce a technically good photograph that is boring, while an artistically talented photographer without the proper skills will produce an interesting image, or an image that does have impact, but will be so technically lacking as to render itself abstract. Neither image will stand the test of time.

When a photographer learns the skills of being a good photographer we say that the photographer has learned the “craft of photography”. This person can, and often does, create images that most people will find agreeable, if somewhat boring. I know many photographers that make a decent living as a wedding photographer yet doesn’t possess an ounce of artistic talent. If a skilled but non-artistic photographer is satisfied with working for Sears Portrait Studio, then we should applaud them. Not everyone can be an artist, yet the skills can be learned by most.

When a talented graphic designer, painter, or other artistically gifted person picks up a camera and expects to be able to create equally talented photographs its often a disaster. Because this person with visual talent is able to create a great logo, paint a great landscape, or otherwise create cool and interesting things, without the skills of a photographer that artist cannot properly apply those artistic talents to the photographic medium.

Over the course of my life I have known both artistic yet unskilled photographers, and skilled photographers that lack artistic sensibilities. Fortunately, I have met many photographers that have both in abundance. As in real life, here in XtremeCamera’s Member Gallery you will find all three. For some strange reason that I cannot put my finger on, it seems that all three are equally represented.

So, which are you? Skilled? Artistic? Both? Neither?
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