In The Photography Manual of Life James 1:17 tells that “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”

God’s in control of the light so I’ll be found on my knees seeking that light and if I come up short with a leftsided log jam histogram, my faith will still be in Him who died for me. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the LIGHT!

Know the light, every good photographer does and every bad one can – see John 3:16 for further instructions from the manual.

Have a wonderful New Year!

Fast forward twenty years, and his statement is true. Today’s digital shooter does not have to think very much about focus, exposure, processing, etc. That was the very foundation of good photography for 150 years.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve fully embraced digital photography and I love it. But I’ll bet if you gave a monkey a decent digital camera for a day, that monkey would have a lot of in focus well exposed shots. He’d probably be considered a genius for the raw and wild quality of his images.

Good composition, thoughtful approach to subject matter, and caring about the craft and art of photography will always trump “spray and pray”.

We were probably just jealous because film was so damn expensive down under!

“Click & Chimp” :)

On a more serious note, I went to a talk in NYC last week featuring a photographer who has shot a few stories for Nat Geo, which he was discussing. When I asked him how many frames he shot for one particular story, he replied, “about 45,000 (!)” [emphasis mine].

I thought that was a crazy number (especially since it was film), but as the group talked more about this; his point was that too many photographers don’t ‘work’ a situation properly. He talked about his approach in the digital age: It’s one thing to run up and reel off 8GB of shots, it’s another to use ‘chimping’ to your advantage, to see how the shots are developing (pardon the pun) and make adjustments to get to the final frame. He would shoot hundreds of shots and often the last few were the ones the editors liked most; but those looked much different, in terms of composition, point of view, story elements than when he first started.

It’s similar to looking at old contact sheets of photographers and seeing how they worked a situation to come up with the frame that eventually got published – just that they did it in their heads and not on and LCD screen.

Anyway, I love the shirt – just don’t wear it on location in front of the creative director!