Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Adding creative lighting effects after the shot has been taken is easy, but nothing beats doing it properly.
There are a million-and-one ways to add creative flares and effects to your shots in post-production after you’ve taken the image, but nothing beats the look and feel of an image that has used in-camera flares and bokeh effects.
How many people remember my interview with Eric Kim? This was a huge deal for me! I remember when I first started shooting street, his blog was one of the first that I came by. It was filled with so much information, but what was more interesting to me were the interviews he did with other street photographers. These interviews helped me discover so many photographers, Brian Day, Damian Vignol, Josh White… I could name so many. I just remember thinking, my work is going to be next to theirs… again it was just really exciting for me.
TikTok, the video-based social media app, usually conjures visions of teens mimicking the latest dance craze, but it’s probably better described as short attention span YouTube. In 2017, ByteDance, the Chinese-owned parent company of TikTok, acquired the Musical.ly app, which had gained a toehold with an under-18 demographic by becoming a replacement for the comedy-oriented Vine app along with a burgeoning lip synching community.
First, a little backstory to this piece… For much of my young career, I shot Canon. Be it the 1D, 1D2, 1DS, 1D3, 1DS2 and 1DS3, let’s just say I had a thing for the ergonomics of that chassis. In every camera I would replace the focusing screen with the cross-style manual focusing option and would never use AF. To make things even more difficult, I only shot primes. In the beginning the main zoom from Canon was the original EF 28-70mm f/2.8L, and if you have used one, you know the drawbacks. It was also a time when there were not a lot of solid third-party lens options; Sigma had never dreamed of an ART lens and Tokina was even further behind.
Street Photographers are not known for their reserve. We are happy to give advice on gear, framing and technique. But I believe the best photographers are those who also seek advice and look to learn from others. But not all advice is equal, and some ideas are outdated, narrow minded, or just plan wrong. In this article I am going to go question some of the advice that has almost become folklore in Street Photography, and pose the question, is it time to move on?
Figure to ground means that a subject or idea (figure) is clearly defined against a background. This can be achieved through technical means, ie depth of field, or compositional means. My preferred method is to make sure that everything in my photographs fit neatly in place. Unless elements are specifically interacting then they do not need to touch. No lampposts coming out of heads in portraits, no walls going through bodies.
Everything where it needs to be, like pieces of a puzzle.
Out of all the kit I own, my drone is probably the most flexible tool my the arsenal. Need to know what your roof looks like? Drone. Want a badass picture of the top of your head? Drone does that. Want to make it look like your significant other is being sucked into a spacecraft that’s en route to the Andromeda system? Drone definitely does that.
I’ve been planning to try something like this for ages, but my anemic first-generation Mavic Pro shook and bucked around like a sad robot with vertigo any time I attached anything weighing over a few grams to the exterior.
We fortunately are beginning to find ourselves in a world where we’re all starting to open up a little more about mental health. It’s great! It’s the age of empathy and humility now; and I think once we begin to empathise properly with each other – we’ll be in a much better place. We’ve all got the same prehistoric brain, and it’s actually surprising how you can begin to essentially ‘re-program’ your thoughts.
Last night, I did an ‘Ask Me Anything’ session on Instagram Stories and someone asked the question: ‘Do You Photoshop Your Pictures?’
My reaction was the same one most photographers have:
“Yes, just like 99% of photographers out there, I do some post-production on my pictures. Even in the film days, photographers like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn edited the hell out of their photos.”
And then I realized — that would have been the dumbest possible response.
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, author Jared Diamond describes two systems of invention transmission: 1) idea diffusion: imitation of an idea, and 2) blueprint copying: literal copying of an idea. Diamond uses the development of writing systems as the medium to discuss the concepts, noting that written writing systems probably only rose independently in Sumeria (3000 B.C.E.) and in ancient Mesoamerica (600 B.C.E.) with all other writing systems being influenced by the transmissions via trade and war.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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