Saturday, March 3, 2012

The Kit Lens and Other Techniques- Part 7

Learning What Kind of Photography You’re Interested In

I love Asian food. I love teriyaki chicken. I love rice with soy sauce on it. I love the texture of chicken made over a pan. I love using chop sticks when eating food out of bowl; it helps me to slow down and enjoy my food. I can really taste the mix of the salty alongside the sweet and smell the aroma of the simple ingredients. With photography, you need to SLOW DOWN and SIMPLIFY. It isn’t a race or a textbook. You are creating images of subjects you enjoy. You photograph things you love. Essentially, your photography is a part of you. Your photos reflect what interested you in that moment in time. Take your time, and keep it simple. The more you show in your photograph, the more hidden your subject/intent will be.

The kit lens allows you to do this for the fact that it is a lens. It’s meant to allow you to use your camera to make photos. You need to think ahead of time about what your lens can and cannot do. When a photo opportunity arises, it should be a matter of lifting the camera and taking the photo. After using the kit lens, you’ll learn everything it does well, everything it does badly, and everything you’d like to photograph. Once you’ve narrowed down what you love to photograph, you’ll know if an additional lens is necessary or not. If the kit lens does everything you need, save your money and go on a trip! But if there are things that the lens cannot do no matter what, then you might see in investing in a lens that does what you need. By doing the Prime Lens Conversion exercise, you’ll have figured out what focal lengths you might like. If you want to do bird photography, you’ll know that you’ll need a lens with lots more zoom/reach. If you do primarily indoor, low-light photography, you might want a lens with a larger maximum aperture. In turn, if you like photographing full scenes, you could get a wide angle lens. If you prefer in-your-face portraits, then you can get a lens that is more like what your eye sees, or a lot closer, to isolate your subject. You know now that your feet can help in this as well.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this short series. I tried to cover a lot of information as concisely as possible. There’s so much more, technique-wise, to try to explain. But this is a primer to get all that technical mumbo-jumbo out of the way so you can just go out and make some interesting photos. Even I deal with wanting absolute perfection in every photo and not end up with it. But it’s all about learning. It might take months or years to get to where you personally want to be. As a hobby, however, the photographic knowledge you acquire will let future generations know who you were, what you saw, and what that moment meant to you.



Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for stopping by. Everyone can enjoy photography, whether from a cell phone or a more expensive camera. Gear is rarely the deciding factor of what makes a work of art. If you can imagine it, you can create it.

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