Contradictions in photography advice

The biggest contradiction to consider is that the photographer has an emotional context from when they took the photo, that a random viewer does not.<p>This is at the heart of why so many people overestimate the impact of their photos. They remember being at the Tetons, awake cold and alive at dawn, taking the picture (for example). Or they remember a particular photo session with a model, perhaps someone they knew.<p>The photographer remembers the moment. But the viewer gets <i>only</i> what is inside the frame of the image.<p>The crucial thing is that it is totally OK to take pictures for yourself! You don’t need to blow some random person’s mind in order to truly enjoy photography. I think sometimes that gets lost, especially with beginners.<p>Often people are inspired to take up photography because they loved some images they saw. But delivering that impact to a broad audience is super hard to do. It requires a far more analytical and self-critical approach than most people want to sustain in a hobby.

<i>&gt;To Crop Or Not To Crop? Point: Never crop. Cropping is cheating. Get it right in camera. Zoom with your feet. If you have to crop later, that only means you blew the composition. Counterpoint: It’s almost impossible to “get it right” in camera every time — the real world gets in the way. That pelican on a piling out in the harbor and you’re only sporting the one prime? Zooming with your feet isn’t an option, so it’s all about the perfect crop in post.</i><p>That point-vs-counterpoint is leaving out a critical difference between cropping vs zoom-with-your-feet: <i>the geometric relation between the foreground and background objects will change</i>.<p>Cropping is more comparable to a post-processing version of &quot;zoom magnification&quot; at the expense of pixel resolution. Or flipped around, zoom lenses can be thought of as in-camera &quot;cropping&quot; with max pixel resolution but at the expense of crop boundaries being irreversible. The geometric relations between objects are still the same if your feet don&#x27;t move in both cases. (Edit add for clarity: zoom and telephoto prime lenses are the same for purposes of &quot;in-camera cropping&quot; being compared to zooming-with-feet.)<p>Zooming with the feet alters how the background looks in relation to the foreground subject -- which may not be your artistic intention. Examples:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slrlounge.com&#x2F;glossary&#x2F;compression-definition-photography&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slrlounge.com&#x2F;glossary&#x2F;compression-definition-ph...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dolly_zoom" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dolly_zoom</a><p>In other words, &quot;zoom with your feet&quot; may get you the <i>wrong composition</i>.

A lot of this is not photography advice, because it&#x27;s not about what print you put on your wall eventually. This is mostly learning advice, eg which path promises the quicker way towards improvement for somebody starting out.<p>And as with most learning advice, both sides of each argument are great advice. As somebody who is learning a craft, throw a coin and re-evaluate every once in a while.<p>Using primes or zooms? Using vanilla VSCode vs a highly customized environment? Putting every picture through a raw converter with split toning vs taking candid snapshots? Using copilot vs typing everything yourself? Flash vs natural light? Microservices vs monolith?<p>All answers are right answers. The whole point is that not knowing an answer to each means that the photographer should explore the topic until they have formed an opinion. No matter how, and no matter where their opinion ends up on.<p>And naturally, online places tend to attract people of equal experience who discuss each of those topics, without realizing that they&#x27;re all just taking part in the same learning experience.

this is like a rambling of a mad man, it reminds me of the many, many posts on any XXX photo gear forum where majority of the time people will dedicate their time arguing about edge sharpness performance of lenses or pixel peeping and only a small portion of the forum is dedicated to actual pictures, and when you see those pictures you quickly close out of the forum because 99% are visually just not interesting.<p>use the auto mode and don&#x27;t worry about it. if you acutally want to have some control then learn the relationship between shutter speed, aperture and ISO. I learned this very long time ago through a Sunny 16 rule on my Leica M6 and outdoors during the day that rule works just fine with today&#x27;s digital cameras that have 8+ stops of dynamic range anyways.<p>otherwise photography is about in interesting picture. unless you crop it so much that it&#x27;s so pixilated that it hurts your eyes no one will scrutinize it or chastise the photographer that they took it with a tripod or cropped it and this article is just a gigantic self serving vent that really doesn&#x27;t give anyone any better advice on photos.<p>here&#x27;s an example of acceptable cropping of a very iconic image: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.redd.it&#x2F;6lpvu9dzkv111.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.redd.it&#x2F;6lpvu9dzkv111.jpg</a>

As a professional photographer, I&#x27;ll say that a lot of these are just overhashed and oversimplified arguments that most photographers don&#x27;t consider or even think about, with the possible exception that high ISO causes noise.

Having a hobby which is pretty much &quot;trying every hobby to find the right one&quot; I&#x27;ve been doing multiple variants of photography. Drawn and painted art. Some quickly aborted starts at creative writing. A half decade shattershot effort at solo gamedev(involving a branching multi-artistic art-sound-code-design efforts) and several other probing efforts.<p>I thus could consider myself as an experienced advice-reader and advice-evaluator.<p>My conclusion is that everyone is addicted to bullshit advice that signals about discipline and purity. If you want to get into anything the best approach is to stop reading generalist advice. Either probe it in a spotwise creative fashion on your own or do follow-along practical work flow tutorials. Advice for overall approaches and strategy is a waste of time at best or actively harmful and will undermine your enjoyment

Lots of bad photographers can’t seem to figure out photography is art. All the rules get in the way of them understanding that. I do wonder if photography attracts people who were never interested in other art forms. Certainly the best photographers have an artists mindset.

<i>“Zoom with your feet!”</i><p>Nothing in photography annoys me more than advice conflating zooming with repositioning the camera. A wide angle lens up close gives a <i>completely</i> different result than a zoom lens from far away.<p>I&#x27;ve been seeing this awful sentiment for nearly two decades now.<p>Here&#x27;s my advice: try everything and try to capture whatever feeling you had in the moment. If you convey the feeling, you&#x27;ve succeeded.

I&#x27;ve been a photographer for years and it&#x27;s the first time I&#x27;ve heard most of these. Crop vs no-crop, who debates that? Raw vs jpg? DSLRs allow you to store both simultaneously.<p>As for lenses, it all depends on what works for you. A zoom used to be my go-to for the longest time, but nowadays I much prefer the prime (a Sigma DG Art). It also depends on what you&#x27;re taking photos of. Shoot a lot of wildlife and a zoom is your best friend. Shoot a lot of architecture and a prime with excellent distortion correction is far better than most zooms. I just happen to shoot more architecture nowadays, so the prime is what I pack. It&#x27;s all about using the right tool for the subject.

&gt; RAW vs JPG<p>Most cameras have an option to save both the raw (which depends on the camera make, probably .dng&#x2F;.cr2&#x2F;.nef) and also a JPEG using automatic white-balance and exposure options, so you can have the best of both worlds of a quick workflow (using just the JPEGs) or tweaking exposure&#x2F;balance&#x2F;tone in 12&#x2F;14 bpp.

It&#x27;s a nice comparison of advice that I was pondering with when I started photography. As an advice I&#x27;d like to give about the comparison: stick to one of each options for a series of pictures. Do not change these principles too often.<p>It pays off to develop an intuition about whichever option you choose.<p>Just personally, I try to limit my max ISO, I do crop pictures, but I do not alter them. Fujifilm has awesome color grading, so I only need JPG. I love my prime lenses and I don&#x27;t wanna use zoom anytime soon. And all these things were different 5 years ago.

I&#x27;m old enough to remember that the preference for prime lenses over zoom was because early zoom lenses were crap. Even now, (mumble) decades later, intellectually knowing that thanks to improvements in glass and cadcam manufacturing techniques, today&#x27;s zooms are much better than what I grew up with, I still don&#x27;t use them.<p>And I&#x27;ve been listening to the whole crop-no crop thing most of my life too. BUt ECB didn&#x27;t crop! people say (though he sometimes did). I try to shoot to get it &#x27;in camera&#x27; as close as I can to what I want, but as the article says, sometimes you just can&#x27;t. You still get to choose what your final image is going to be. And that&#x27;s the thing about &#x27;rules&#x27; and &#x27;advice&#x27;--they&#x27;re just some guidelines, things to think about, but they&#x27;re highly contextual, depending on the situation.

I kind of regret not having started shooting raw earlier. Sometimes I want to print an old shot and my options are very limited by the profile applied by the camera. But back in the time, I tried raw, and it was too much hassle. Maybe now the shot I worry over wouldn&#x27;t exist because when I&#x27;d stuck to raw I&#x27;d have given up the hobby entirely.<p>So the takeaway is to try things repeatedly and see what works. The article also argues in that direction. Though I think there&#x27;s much nuance lost in how the article stays in the extremes. The camera I always have with me is not a cell phone but a proper digital camera that fits in my pocket. These are amazing!

working pro for more than a decade now, maybe some off this was relevant very early on but it&#x27;s really just all web forum gear chatter. What people miss is that a photographer&#x27;s job isn&#x27;t using a camera or lamenting settings, it&#x27;s lighting. Done artificially or by modifying what&#x27;s available, you have to master both. The camera is incidental and what he&#x27;s describing his just picture taking. If you&#x27;re interested in photography it&#x27;s more useful to take a studio lighting course and learn about fixtures and modifiers than worrying about iso.

Related, Tom Sachs <i>Paradox Bullets</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-Evrm03Y5hI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-Evrm03Y5hI</a>

I&#x27;m a surf photographer and rely on my camera automatics a lot. They are allowed to move freely within defined limits.<p>99% of my pictures are technically fine.<p>I only use full manual if the picture job needs it.<p>Most of the time setting the aperture is enough (and the camera allows to set the exposure time and ISO automatically, but set limits which to automatics is not allowed to cross). On the other side action&#x2F;sport photography is mostly shutter time bound - then the other side around.

my mom thought all photos had to be taken with us kids squinting into the blinding sun (her with the sun in her back) in order to get enough light for the camera

I always crop, but always and only 8x10. Why? Because I saw the results from my past clients. There is something about that ration, whether it is genetic or historical, that makes people feel more drawn to my photographs.<p>And I agree with all of his points. Modern cameras have made people focus more on the technical and less on the art. I sold a photograph I took with a point and shoot Canon A series for $150 multiple times.

Almost all &quot;advice&quot; is ultimately an artistic decision: It&#x27;s an arbitrary rule that each photographer can change.<p>However, there are rules that DO help improve the quality of photos, especially if you&#x27;re a beginner. Then, to move beyond being a beginner, it&#x27;s good to know how to break the rules (as with any art or discipline).

Rather than contradictions think of photography patterns like design patterns.

When photographing people, photography is about people.

&gt; RAW vs JPG<p>As a new photographer, I‘m disappointed at how bad most cameras are at HDR. No in-body exposure stacking &#x2F; combining, no HDR tone mapping, ancient JPEG format with only slow adoption of newer formats. Getting certain landscape shots without a blown out sky is genuinely impossible without post editing (or graduated ND filters, which feel like a workaround to me). Smartphones get this right.<p>I’m someone who actively dislikes editing, on a computer or elsewhere. I love going outside, I love the challenge of getting a good photo. But once I press shutter, I want to have it. I want it to be fully baked.<p>I want a camera to be more than just a good sensor + dials. I want it to take good pictures, not just good measurements in the form of a RAW file.

I&#x27;ve been doing photography as a hobby since I was a kid, learning from my dad who also did photography as a hobby. We&#x27;ve both won numerous awards, although I have not won as many as my dad, and none of them are particularly prestigious (mostly local &#x2F; regional contests, often tied into a fair)<p>Pretty much all of the stuff being discussed here is meaningless, although a table stakes that every person should learn. The most important thing in photography is learning about light and lighting, how light works, how the camera interacts with light, and how to capture and harness light. Every single thing you see with your eyes, and every single thing you capture with your camera is just a reflection of light off your subject and the subject&#x27;s surroundings. If you don&#x27;t understand light, you cannot formulate a composition, and if you can&#x27;t formulate a composition it doesn&#x27;t matter what settings you use on the camera, it&#x27;s not going to be a good photo.<p>I love the technical aspects of cameras, both film and digital, and I delve very deeply into that myself out of my enjoyment of these aspects, but they&#x27;re really ultimately not important to the actual art of photography and taking good photos. They&#x27;re just tools. What matters most is composition. I see a lot of great photos online that are taken with smartphones, and there is nothing wrong with that. I have complicated gear because I enjoy futzing with complicated gear and some of the things I do visually are not possible (easily) with a phone, but for the most part these days I take most of my photos with a phone and some have even been printed and hung in galleries.<p>There&#x27;s no reason to worry about any of the meaningless things this article talks about until you understand light, composition, and have figured out what you want to say with that photo. Keep in mind your phone, and any camera you can buy today has more digital resolution than any of the professional grade digital gear available just a decade ago, and in some cases more digital resolution than was available on 35mm film. Even with the revival of film today, you get more stops of dynamic range on a current-generation professional mirrorless camera than you can get on 35mm film.<p>These technical details basically have ceased to matter within the last 3-5 years, all that matters is composition, storytelling, and lighting.

&gt; Photography is an art form and that means you get to do whatever you want. Edit freely [...]<p>This has made me lose faith and interest in (most of) photography. While I can&#x27;t speak for the past, modern photography often feels dishonest to me. Many photographers heavily retouch their images, yet allow viewers to believe that the final result reflects reality.<p>It would be more honest if photographers acknowledged that their published work is a creative interpretation rather than a direct representation of reality. But of course, admitting this would diminish the &quot;wow&quot; factor.

The third law of photodynamics: For every piece of loudly-spoken advice, there is a piece of equal and opposite counter-advice.