A Chico Photographer on Photo Groups

 Oh, photographer's groups. . . and why I'm pretty reluctant to be a part of one. So, the first time I joined up was in Bellingham WA, about a thousand miles from where I am now in Chico, California. I don't speak of this much but photographers, as a group, have a rather high percentage of assholes. I'm not sure why this is. Male photographers in particular: they certainly aren't all assholes, but seems like a lot of them are, compared to the general populace. So the first photographers group I joined had a couple of "pro" photographers and a couple of hobbyists and one guy who used to be a pro commercial photographer but he had quit. At first I liked all these guys well enough, but pretty soon I got tired of the guy who was sort of randomly hostile for no particular reason. He founded the group and slowly he managed to drive everyone out of it. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why he started the group to begin with. His buddy seemed nice enough, but shortly I got a little tired of his holier-than-thou attitude, not just about photography but about pretty much everything. He's one of these guys who says "Anything I can do to help, just ask me, anytime." And then you do ask him something, some simple question, once, and you're ostracized forever. For the record I'm not one of those guys who says "anything, anytime" because I really, really would not mean it. I'm also one of those guys who usually gives detailed answers to anybody who asks me for a little help, I just don't promise that, because some time or other I won't mean it. Same guy lent me his book about his trip to India looking for his guru wherein he pretty much proceeded to play the right fool. Only he'd written the book in this pompous, elevated style and he hand bound the book and signed it and then proceeded to freak out like I wasn't going to return it to him. Of course I returned it. After a while i realized that the hostile guy was always saying the thing that the holy guy wanted to say but was too holy to do so. Yuch. There were two or three other guys in the group including me and we never managed to get anybody new to show up more than once ( surprise! ) and after a while the whole thing fell apart.

Fast forward and I inadvertently got added to a Chico Area Photographer's group through the magic of Facebook. It's OK probably, for a lot of folks-- there are some 70+ members whom I don't know whatsoever. But only two or three people are ever posting anything. Yes, I could post, sure I could. One of the latest postings was some guy ranting and raving about how much other photographers should share everything they know, and bring him along personally on photo shoots as an assistant so that he can "watch and learn" and how despicable it was that these other photographers weren't doing that. Um, yeah. Well, last time I checked there was a huge amount of teaching material available for free on the internet. Then there are these things called "books" and a whole huge population of people called "teachers" who quite frequently disseminate information, often at places called "schools". As often happens on Facebook, people went "Here here! Yes you are so right, why, every other photographer is personally responsible to educate you!" and nobody suggested to Mr Ranty Pants that he might actually be responsible for his own education. I don't know. In my case my dad taught me a hell of a lot, but later on the things I didn't pick up, or things I forgot, or things I never truly understood in the first place I looked up and studied and memorized. Failing that, a lot of things have been learned through experience, trial and error, or some combination of applying book knowledge to the ever changing conditions of real life. While I am sure that there's a place for peer based learning, and I have for sure published teaching pieces about photography ( and I might do it again ) I never signed up to teach everyone in my path about photography. A big part of this has to do with the fact that a lot of people who think they want to learn photography, don't. If I do sign up to teach, I'm going to expect to be paid. This brings me to my next point about photo groups.

Unless a photo group has a really clearly stated mission, it's likely to end up populated with a hodge- podge of people with a lot of different ideas, goals, and expectations. It can get messy. In this case we've got photographers: some are pro and some are amateur, and that's a big enough rift right there. There are also models, MUA's and I don't know what else. What I see right now are a couple of strong personalities ( one in particular ) milking the rest of the group for free labor on her own photo shoots. I just received a personal complaint that she doesn't treat people very well--- but here's another thing, if your group lacks a mission statement it might also lack any kind of codes of acceptable behavior. Under those conditions, sometimes, you get a wolf, or possibly two, but really one is enough, whose mission becomes eating all the sheep as rapidly as they can consume them. Contrary to how it may seem, I'm not real big on structure or discipline. I'm also not real big on groups unless they have, or can develop at least, a reason to exist. Mostly my experience with groups is that they accomplish what an individual can accomplish with an efficiency which is inversely proportional to the number of members of the group. Back to my earlier point though: one of the bigger problems with photo groups is that pros and amateurs have distinctly different interests. The primary imbalance is that pros expect to be paid, and when they are shooting quite often they're being paid to shoot, and to edit, and indirectly to do outreach and marketing. If they aren't busy, then they aren't doing terribly well as pros. You might have trouble putting together an all pro group in a given area because too many are in direct competition with each other. If there's an all pro group there will be an agenda, or agendas amongst it's membership. An all amateur group might work better, but you run the strong risk of the blind leading the blind, of bad info being spread from member to member--- whatever, I mean if it's all about point and shoots and potlucks then it's all hunky dory. I've just never been interested in that. In an all pro group I myself am concerned about the agenda's. In the particular group I'm in, about 90% of the membership don't appear to be participating at all, less than ten percent are posting anything and one aggressive "pro" is just using the membership to exploit free labor from naive amateurs ( gobbling up the sheep ).

Come to think of it that potluck group sounds pretty good. If we can all agree to leave the cameras at home that could work out just great. We all arrive hungry and carrying food, we all leave full and happy, and in between we all had a great time.

Some basic photography tips.

Cameras do lie. They lie a lot. They like to lie. One of their favorite ways to lie is by having very shallow dynamic range compared to the human eye. Dynamic range in this case means the ability to handle extremes of light and darkness. HDR ( high dynamic range ) photography attempts to overcome this shallow range by using multiple frames of the same image, shot at different exposure values, and then recombining those frames to compress said range into a single image. It's still a lie, but it can look pretty cool, or it can look pretty bizarre and ugly.

In the old days before HDR people like Ansel Adams used some pretty tricky techniques in the field and the darkroom to get very similar, ( but typically more artful ) results to HDR photography, including the combining of multiple frames shot at different exposures. "unsharp mask" was also created in the darkroom, "dodging and burning" and so on. A lot of the stuff that you see today in photoshop was originally discovered or invented, or at least studied by photographers who died before we were born. We owe them some respect if we're going to call ourselves "photographers."

The art of photography is the most important thing. It's a human art. Technique and technical matters come second. That being said, if you aren't going to learn anything about how your tools work, why not? You learned to read, you learned math, so what's the problem?

Cameras have parts similar to the eye and parts not so similar.
The general sensitivity to light is called "ISO" or formerly as film speed "ASA". Think of it as how well you can see in the dark, or how much bright light is more than you can stand. High ISO like 1600 means very sensitive to light. Low ISO like 100 means not so sensitive, but can handle bright light.

"Aperture" is very like the pupil of your eye, it also helps to control how much light enters the camera to be utilized. A smaller aperture lessens the transmission of light. Larger apertures let more light in. It's that simple; except that small apertures also increase "depth of field" which means more of an image will be in focus from front to back. A very small aperture, such as a "pinhole camera" has such great depth of field that it doesn't even need a glass lens, just a pinhole. You don't have to focus a pinhole camera, everything is in focus. Small apertures can also help a crappy lens look a bit sharper.

"Shutter speed" is the last aspect of controlling the quantity of light entering the camera. This is also similar to your eye, sort of. Did you know that 24 frames per second was discovered to be "persistance of vision?" This is the rate at which your eye can basically stop motion. It's pretty slow. This is one area where cameras tend to beat the human eye on two points: a very long (slow) shutter speed can allow a camera to see in the dark. Your eye can't do that. You can stare at the same night scene as long as you want and it won't get any brighter. Conversely a fast shutter speed, say 1/4000th of a second can freeze motion like your eye can't. They call it "shutter speed" because it's very like opening and closing a shutter. In the old, old days some cameras had no shutter-- you simply removed the lense cap, and then put it back on again. You can still do this, especially with a pinhole camera. It's fun. Shutter speed generally does not affect image quality such as depth of field, like aperture does, but this confuses people because a slow shutter speed can cause images to come out blurry if anything moves or if you shake the camera. That's why so many pictures shot in low light tend to come out blurry. Moving on. . .

You can buy a camera and put it on "auto" and take a lot of pictures. Now that we have digital cameras, you can shoot thousands of pictures and it costs you nothing. Sooner or later you will get lucky and get some nice shots. You won't know how you did it. You won't be able to do it again without taking a lot more pictures until you get lucky again. You will miss a lot of great shots because your camera on auto will make some dumb decisions which ruin the shot. One of the dumbest decisions a camera can make is choosing from about 2 dozen autofocus points all over the frame. Cameras can make many many many dumb decisions. Wouldn't you rather make your own? At least you can be proud of them after the fact.

Oh yeah, "f-stops" are aperture measurements. A big number is a small aperture. Like F22, it's small but not a pinhole. Memorize that. Big number is a small aperture, lets in less light, but has greater depth of field, also called "depth of focus" but don't say that, because other photographers will peg you as a novice. A big aperture is a small number, like f2.8, or f1.4 or f1.2. It lets in a lot of light, but the depth of field will be shallow. With a big aperture like f1.2 a portrait photographer can have your eyes and lips in focus, the tip of your nose soft, and the background all nice creamy blur. The out of focus blur is called "bokeh". The quality of this blur is like fine wine to a photographer. Don't ask me why, we're funny that way.

If you can remember that big numbers in f stops like f22 are small apertures which let in little light, and that big numbers in shutter speeds like 1/4000th of a second are fast shutters which also let in little light, it will be helpful to you. ISO is the opposite. Big numbers means more light sensitivity. Somewhere a photographer invented this system just to confuse the hell out of you.

I brought up f1.2 in case you wondered where they get those strange numbers. If you had a lens whose maximum aperture is f1, that means that the ratio of the focal length of the lens relative to the internal diameter of the lens is a one to one ratio. Not exactly, though, I've simplified it for you because it involves the focal length of the lens relative to the film plane, but close enough. An f1 lens is a FAT lens ( literally and figuratively ). If you have one, send it to me.

So, those are most of the basics of how a camera controls the quantity of light used to produce an image, and the why of it: a camera with with a much much wider "dynamic range" would not need any of these controls but even our eyes have limits like pupils ( aperture ) persistence of vision (shutter speed) or ultimately the sensitivity of the "rods and cones" and the optic nerve ( ISO or ASA referred to as film speed )

If any of this confuses you just remember that a simple camera is just a box with a hole in it, and every other camera is just a variation on that theme.

Next time maybe, "white balance" AKA "color temperature" expressed in "Kelvins" if anybody wants to know.