This photo shows that owning gear is not enough to make you a photographer, you need to know how to use it
Nov 8, 2018
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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You may argue whether gear matters or not, but one thing’s for sure: owning fancy gear doesn’t make you a photographer. And this image captured by Detroit-based photographer Holly Romaya is a perfect example that proves this point.
Holly spotted this scene at her local mall while she was shopping and looking at Christmas decor. There was a photo shoot going on, with lights and cameras all set up. And then, she noticed that one of the lights was set up like this:
Although she’s not sure what exactly the shoot was about, Holly believes it was a rather big event, judging from the gear and the place where it was set up. But no matter how big is the shoot you do, I guess you should learn how to use all your gear first. Only then will the gear actually matter.
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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10 responses to “This photo shows that owning gear is not enough to make you a photographer, you need to know how to use it”
Good illustrated point taken.
Before you judge think… maybe some pro just switched umbrella position for a while to avoid closing and opening umbrella. It’s easier to take it out, turn head and put in. Done.
The position of the strobe seems off too, such is why the photographer took a photo of it, plus turning the umbrella around is easilier than turning the strobe or signal to it off ?
With that, are we to assume that the area where the tree and music stand is NOT the area that was being photographed? If you just switch the umbrella position the flash bounce is then directed away from that area (to the right).
I did exactly the same thing to help the optical trigger to “see” the signal of a 2nd strobe. Especially in bright places this can be helpful. But it’s funny anyways.
Maybe they wanted to use the light unaltered and didn’t want to put the umbrella on the ground to be trampled and broken
This is dumb. It’s impossible to draw any conclusions from this photo and even if you could, who cares? DIY Photography should be about helping photographers elevate their game, and you can’t do that if you spend all your time shitting on noobs.
There is no alternate explanation for this. The photographer did not know he/she was doing. Yeah, let’s write a whole blog piece about it.
We need to understand the context instead of jumping to conclusions. I do not see what the person was trying to photograph. Maybe the light was two soft when bounced, maybe the photographer was looking for a bit more contrast or punch with a harder light, maybe it was simply on backwards.
Without the rest of the pieces to this puzzle why would we want to automatically assume the person does not know what they are doing.
That’s an Alien Bee light. Those are cheap lights. It’s very plausible that a local “discount” photographer hired a team of “no experience necessary” photographers to work the mall holiday event. While it’s possible that the flash is backwards. It’s more likely that the set-up employee didn’t know what they were doing.