The Online Photographer

'Those Who Cannot Do, Teach,' but Why Is That?

Reader TC wrote, yesterday: "I've always found it strange how, with street photography, unlike other genres, people who don't really know how to do it very well seem more apt to try to tell other people how they should do it."

Mike replies: Well, of course! If someone is naturally good at something and has never experienced problems, how would they know what the problems are?

A little story. When I was at Dartmouth I roomed for one trimester with a guy who played number one singles on the Dartmouth tennis team and was ranked fourth in the Ivy League at the time. Because I had played tennis all my life and had always had problems with my serve, I asked him if he would give me a lesson and some pointers. I had taken lots of tennis lessons, so I knew how they went. He said sure, adding that I had picked the right guy, because he had a great serve. He did, too.

As we were talking down to the courts, he paused and indicated to a small outcropping of granite (New Hampshire is "the Granite State") some 20 yards away and said, "see that rock? Watch this." He uncoiled a ferocious serve and nailed his target. The ball zinged off the rock and went forty feet in the air. "That's how you serve," he said. Impressive. I thought, "this is going to be good."

But...no. Once we got to the court, that's all he did, again and again. He would say, "you do it like this," and then execute a few flawless serves. I then served, and he would say, "no, no, not like that! What are you doing? Like this," and then demonstrated a few more times. A few more rounds of this, and he was getting very annoyed—why was I was doing it all wrong? All I had to do was do it the right way, like he did. He was showing me how. Except he wasn't, of course.

Being a teacher-type myself, I even tried to help him a little with his teaching skills, which was funny. I tried to ask him about various elements of his serve, but every time he'd say, "I don't know. I just do it." I tried to get him to look at various aspects of my serve so he could tell me what I might change. That didn't work either.

That was as far as we got. He couldn't analyze a single thing about his own serve, much less anything about mine. He had zero suggestions as to what I could try to correct or change. He simply got exasperated with me because I wasn't doing it right, and then we gave up. The lesson lasted ten minutes, about eight minutes of which was mainly frustration for each of us.

Meet everyone where they are
The best serve lesson I ever got, on the other hand, was from a gentle and famously patient teaching pro at the Woodstock Club in Indianapolis who actually didn't seem to be much of an athlete. This man had a reputation for being able to teach tennis to anyone. When I arrived for my lesson—I might have been about 13 at the time—he was standing on one side of the court throwing a ball to a five-year-old from ten feet away, teaching the kid how to time his swing so he could hit it. I watched this for fifteen minutes while I waited. By the end, the little kid was actually hitting the ball, and about one out of three was finding the sweet spot on the racquet face and sailing surprisingly far, almost up to the net. The little kid was beaming, bursting with pride, calling to his mother to look. I swear, I learned some things just watching. With me, he said, "the first thing you need to learn is how to get the ball into the service court reliably. Once you can relax about that, then you can work on improving." By the end of my lesson, I had learned a reliable spin second serve that I used for the rest of my tennis-playing life.

Because I was always interested in teaching, after the lesson I questioned that pro about his teaching methods. He told me, "I try to meet everyone where they are," which has stuck with me. With intermediate students, he tried to pick something that he thought the student could improve in the hour. With all students, beginners especially, he was looking for ways to increase the student's confidence and sense of accomplishment, to give them a little of the sweet taste of victory. He said it really didn't matter to him what the level of the student was—he got as much satisfaction teaching a five-year-old how to hit the ball for the first time as he got from coaching a top high-school or college player. He himself, he told me, played at the level of a solid club player.

In pool, the best teachers aren't necessarily the best players. The guy I took lessons from, Jerry Briesath, couldn't hit his stroke any more, because of essential tremor, but he still worked with famous professionals. And all the way down to schlubs like me.

Sometimes great "do-ers" are also great teachers. Sometimes they aren't. Sometimes great teachers are not "do-ers," and sometimes they are. But the two are different things, and being one of them isn't proof of the other.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Charles Rozier: "Re doing vs. teaching: I think the arts, particularly past the early technical stages, are a different world. In my experience, time spent with a real artist (or a top level pro) can be much more valuable than any amount of more prosaic 'instruction' from others. In that situation one may be forced to learn by observation, imitation, and osmosis. Although it's a big plus if the master happens also to be a good teacher, it's not the essential thing."

Mike replies: True enough. I once asked David R. Godine, founder of the publishing house of the same name, how to get started in publishing. His suggestion was to get a job at a small publishing house doing anything at all—even pushing a broom—and then keep your eyes and ears open and absorb all you can. And of course what you suggest is the time-honored way to become a studio professional photographer—you assist for a few years while you learn, then strike out on your own. That's the classic model; I'm not sure if it's done that way any more.

T. Edwards: "Another great post—you're on a roll. I've always been fascinated by the relationship between coaches and elite athletes. I remember watching Tiger Woods out on a practice green before some major tournament. He'd stroke a couple of balls towards the hole and then huddle with his caddy and coach for an animated (though out of earshot) conversation. I would really would like to have been able to hear what they were saying because I always wondered what those two guys could possibly have to say to Woods who—at that time—was head and shoulders better than any other golfer on the planet."

Romano Gianetti: "Just yes. As a member of a University faculty, I can assure you that be an expert (even the expert) in a field and be a top teacher in the same field are two completely separated skills. The only impossible combination is that you know zero and can teach well—the other three are surely possible."

Trevor Small: "My son, who teaches senior school physics and chemistry, tells me that a lot of teaching consists of breaking down complexity into simple components, in the correct order and in the correct relationships. A very different skill set to actually doing the task, in many cases."

Edward Taylor: "I have written about this misconception many times. Whenever you see a criticism of a posted photo (like on Fred Miranda's site) the photographer (or his/her defenders) frequently responds with a request to see the critic's work. 'If you're such an expert, let's see your portfolio! You don't even post here.' In other words, if one cannot do top-notch work, one should not be critiquing. This is, of course, nonsense. One critiques as a consumer or a coach, not a performer. Rumor has it that Mark Spitz's swimming coach couldn't swim. Movie critics don't make movies. Art critics are not necessarily artists. I can say that I love The Beatles and hate the Stones, even though I am not one-thousandth as talented as either one. The best critics are not the best producers of art, obviously. And, since we are talking about art, everyone's opinion is valid and no one's opinion is valid. I just know good art when I see it."

Robert Stahl: "Having taught photography the past 46 years your article especially resonated with me, Mike. Thanks for this topic and your insights. In my view, it's a somewhat rare occurrence to be talented as both a teacher and creative practitioner of photographic seeing. Three who have excelled wonderfully at both skills are the late Ernst Haas, Freeman Patterson, and Sam Abell."

Geoff Wittig: "Having taken workshops in both photography and oil painting, and having taught some oil painting, I have an opinion on the subject. (My wife would say, 'I'm not surprised....')

"Mike is absolutely right. Skilled artist and good teacher are two independent skill-sets, often with little overlap. In my experience, a genuine desire to teach and the commitment to do it well are by far the most important factors. Without this, you're unlikely to learn much no matter how gifted the artist.

"I have met brilliant artists producing exquisite work who can't explain their workflow or why they chose a particular color palette. Watching them paint a demonstration is frequently unhelpful. A great teacher, by contrast, explains the logic behind her choices every step of the way; why this subject at this time of day. Why this composition and value structure. Why this area is emphasized and that one muted and softened. How the drawing is nailed down, how the technical tools like value structure, warm/cool color contrast, paint handling/brushwork and judicious details are used to serve the artistic goal for the picture. It's like a magician revealing his work; you can start to comprehend how to build your own art by incorporating some of that logic and technical skill. What you're trying to say with your art remains up to you; a good teacher gives you the tools to accomplish it."

Daniel: "Brings to mind Mickey Mantle talking about a conversation with Ted Williams. Subject was hitting the ball. Williams peppered Mantle with questions about almost every aspect, from stance to grip to timing ball rotation. Mantle finally said, 'Hell, I just swing the bat when the pitch looks good.' Over-analyzing is not teaching. Williams was a major league anal analytical type. He did not connect with Mantle on the explanation of fine points in hitting a baseball even though both were great hitters. Not every great teacher connects with every pupil."

Bob: "I recently retired after 45+ years as a flight instructor. I considered myself an okay pilot but a really effective instructor. The key, I think, is just what you said—teach the students on their level. Identify their weak points and use plain, clear language to suggest ways to improve. I’ve also taken a number of acting classes; the really good teachers took the same approach."

Simon: "We all remember poor teachers, and this can reinforce the notion that teaching is an inferior discipline to supposed excellence. But I think this is misleading. Like your tennis coach, a great teacher can do more for the sport and the individuals he/she works with (and on a deeper level than mere technique) than a grand slam winner ever could. In professional cycle racing the greatest achievers are not usually good at supporting others, whether in a coaching or mentoring role, or tactically when in the team car. The driven nature of 'winners' and their leadership role within the group, combined with their innate talent, mean they invariably don't understand the role of their journeyman teammates. With photography I think I have learnt more from the 'why' than the 'how.'

"Although learning things like the rules of composition help one understand why some images work better than others, it is not difficult to use a camera. However, it certainly is hard work trying to make meaningful images that stand the test of time. One thing that appears to link all great photographers is a sense of purpose, of needing to produce significant, meaningful work."

The One That Got Away

The phrase "you should have seen the one that got away" comes from fishing, of course. But it ought to come from photography.

When I recommenced photographing regularly this past Fall, I got fish-slapped by something I knew but had almost forgotten: to photograph is to get pictures, but it's also to miss pictures. Every day I go out, I return with a mental list of the ones I missed. Sometimes there are none, but often there are two or three.

Those misses get burned into my brain. I have a very visual memory. When I think of a person, I used to worry about my memory because of the lengthening amount of time it was taking the name to come to mind. But then I realize that I can recall the face instantly. So there's nothing wrong with my memory: it's just that it's the visuals that come to me first. Being very honest, I can remember missed pictures from decades ago, a few of them anyway, and still see them in my mind's eye.

I'll give you just a few examples from recent outings:

One*: I'm at the Tractor Supply, and the woman ahead of me, who is also buying dog food, is talking to the clerk. Like a lonely old man, which I imitate sometimes, I butt into the conversation, and she immediately engages, and we trade pleasantries about our dogs. Then I notice husband, standing off a few steps, looking glum, irritated, resentful and bored, and giving me a bit of the stinkeye for chatting up his woman. (Or so I imagine.) Cut to the parking lot: their German Shepherd is sitting in the driver's seat of their dark silver pickup truck, illuminated gorgeously by the setting sun. All I had to do was ask; the worse that could happen would have been a refusal, and that's no big deal. The camera was right on the passenger seat of my car one parking spot away. But because of the husband's attitude I thought, naw. Result: potential picture of perfectly lit German Shepherd in the truck cab looking anxiously back at his masters, in tones perfectly suited to B&W, is burned on my brain, taunting me (still, and it's been a few months now).

Two: On another dog walk, it was too dark to take the camera. Dusk. On the way back I hear voices on the lake, and when I got a view between two houses I see: opposite shore, black; foreground objects, silhouetted; the water of the lake, bright with the reflection of the darkening sky; and, set in a perfect composition, is a bass boat with the motor off, one fisherman standing at the bow with his line in the water, a second one standing by the motor with his line in the water as well, all pretty much silhouetted. All of it a perfectly composed picture just staring at me. It would have taken some effort to get the shot; I would have had to find something to loop the leash to, would have had to trespass on an absent neighbor's lake frontage, which I'm not above doing occasionally when the houses are empty; and I would have had to ask the fishermens' permission, because they were close enough to the shore to talk to. I don't know if I could have brought it all together. But maybe. A potential catch that got away.

Three: Just two days ago. It's been one of those dreadful winter days, dark, wet, all grays and browns and blanketed with oppressive overcast like the world itself is depressed. I'm just driving to town for Chinese food. Why take the camera? It's a decidedly unpromising situation to encounter any photographs. But. The local Mennonites and Amish don't like being photographed, so I don't photograph them. But I'm not above getting a picture of a horse and buggy when the opportunity arises, as long as the people inside aren't featured. I've got a lot of desultory tries littering various folders, but no standout picture yet. So what do I see that night? An empty Mennonite buggy with a gaunt horse standing motionless in a parking lot by the lake. I just glanced at it on the way by, but as the car passes all the elements snap magically into visual arrangement and bam, there's the picture, just waiting. Eminently gettable. All I would have had to do was pull over. There was no one around. I would have offended no one.

Four: When I had just had the loaner Sigma for a few weeks, I was going out to walk to dog on a beautiful evening, and I almost took the camera with me. I argued with myself: it's hard enough to handle the leash; Butters tugs at me when I'm trying to hold the camera still; I've seen the route a million times, and know all the pictures. It's always the same, more or less. So then, not a hundred yards down the road, what do I see but one of the two or three most spectacular skies I've ever seen in the Finger Lakes, which is really saying something. A great dramatic heap of distinctly defined clouds above the opposite shore, lit up all around the rim by the setting sun behind it, with one giant crepuscular ray coming out of one side. It was so stunning I just stood there staring. To add insult, I was passing right by virtually the only spot on my walk where I have blanket permission to walk down to the lake's edge whenever I want to. All I needed was the camera with me and I would have had a picture I would have been proud of for the rest of my life. One of top two or three missed pictures of all time.

The photographer's burden
Damn. You just never know where they are going to come from, and you never know when. There's no guarantee that you would have actually gotten the picture that was there; all you know for sure is that there was a good opportunity there waiting for you, sometimes staring you right in the face. Served me right. Carrying a camera is the photographer's burden. But you gotta do it. Take the camera.

Why don't these picture opportunities appear when I'm not actively engaged in photographing on a near-daily basis? I don't know, but that's the way it is for me. Once I start actively photographing again, they start to appear here and there. And—I'll just speak for myself—I know the best of the ones that got away are going to live on in my visual memory, sometimes for a long time.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

*The TypePad compositor is very irritating when it comes to numbering things. If I type "1.", it immediately thinks I want to go into list mode, and supplies a "2." at the beginning of the next paragraph as soon as I hit return. There's actually a whole column in this: many, many modern interfaces add intrusive "helper" features just because they can, forgetting that control is actually more satisfying than being "helped" when you haven't @#$%! asked for help. Spellcheck gone awry is only the most common example of this. I say: stop helping, and give me control.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Len Salem (partial comment): "The counterpart of 'the one that got away' is the one that serendipitously happens. Many years ago I was on holiday in Los Angeles, exploring with my then film camera. I saw a warehouse in a commercial district painted pink and standing out against a blue sky. In the UK no one ever painted warehouses pink. So I started taking a few photographs of it from different angles when I saw, out of the corner of my eye and about to come into frame, a jogger wearing a T-shirt in the exact same shade of pink as the warehouse. I waited a second or two and got that image. I would share it here but it is still in storage after a recent move and being pre-digital it is not on my computer. But I feel that photo was gifted to me somehow by a benign photo god."

John Krumm: "This is indeed a good sign that you are getting thoroughly back into photography. I have to tell myself to leave the camera home sometimes, because I'm doing something with my wife, and I want to be mentally present, but the occasional lost image flicks by. And think about all the lost images you never see, all the walks you skipped, early morning treks you passed on, country drives you canceled, and unexplored roads you drove by, eager to get home. As much as having the camera with you, you also have to be out there in the first place."

Mike Peters: "Wear your camera every day, every time you leave the house. In the winter or if it's raining, it's always under my coat. In the summer it's just there. I haven't left the house without a camera since the '80s. Most times I never use it, but when I see something, it's always there."

xf mj (partial comment): "The tension between dog walks vs. photo walks: I hear ya, Mike. I have tried so many elaborate leashing arrangements, while I attempt to hold the camera still for a shot, to somehow keep my tugging dog tethered and out of trouble. None of them really work, because sir Rocco always interrupts my composing somehow, or at least threatens to, and that distracts me from getting the shot and even just hunting the shot. Instead I'll hastily take pictures just to prove that 'Ha ha ha, Rocco, you didn't foil that one!' even when in reality the picture is just a tosser because of my haste. Of course I gotta be grateful to him because he is what gets me out of the house most times, especially in the dead of winter."

David Zalaznik: "Hi Mike, enjoyed the post. Your comment about asking permission of the fishermen struck me as something that I have rarely done beforehand. My goal has always been serendipitous moments and stopping to ask permission all too often would change the situation from what brought me to that moment. I start taking the pictures and, if they become aware of me working, I will stop for a moment, smile or wave and hold up the camera and go back to shooting.And I always take the time to talk afterward. I can think of only a handful of times in a 35-year career in photojournalism that the subject had an issue. Now, the clarification to that is I would take the photo only if I am on public property. And that goes for the Amish as well. They have a constitutional right to practice their religion and I have a constitutional right to practice my craft."

hugh crawford: "The mind is basically a camera, so they don’t really quite get away. My favorite film scene on that topic."

Dan Khong: "It is OK to miss a shot. For as long as there is still breath in our bodies, there will always be other opportunities."

Raymond Lee: "My father came to Hong Kong empty handed at the age of 12. His first job was an assistant store keeper for a rich family which had a son who spent money on photography. It's 1950. He ended up learning photography and darkroom techniques.

"Fast forward many years and I was 10, maybe 12, and I learned from him the basics. It's the early '70s.

"I didn't end up a photographer. (Nor did my father.) But I have been taking pictures since then. I like looking back at them. They remind me of occasions that I might have forgotten, or not, but they let me savour those moments.

"But I remember at one stage, probably towards the end of when film was mainstream, maybe around the mid-'90s, I made a comment to a friend while she was showing me around in Shanghai (where I visited for work): she asked, do you want to take a picture of this (some historical building)? And I said, I'd rather spend time looking at it and capture it in my brain. I did. I still remember that exact moment, and that exact scene, although the rapid changes in the city must have made it unrecognizable by now.

"So, my point is, if I can capture a moment with a camera, I'll do so. But at the same time, I always slow down to try very hard to impress the image in my brain. That way, if I missed a shot, there's a backup somewhere in my head—although theses days, in my 60s, memory is less reliable than early days floppy discs."

What Is the Story

In my "Secret Art" article (which fell off the front page of newyorker.com today, so that's over with, I guess), I wrote: "...numerous events can be commemorated with a single picture. It just has to be a good one, and to tell enough of the story...."

To which blogger Ann Althouse responded, "What is the 'story'?"

I love that. It is indeed the question. It's the question photojournalists and newspaper photographers have to ask themselves all the time. (Sometimes I'd be hired to tell a fake story, like the time I was hired to photograph a protest and only six protesters showed up. The police almost outnumbered the protesters. My job therefore became to fake the pictures by making it look like there were more protesters than there were. The client used a picture of three shouting protesters holding up a banner flanked by two policemen, all crowded into the frame. What you couldn't see was that, not counting me, that was exactly half of the total number of people at the event!!)

"What's the story?" is also an idealistic question. In practice there's also the matter of "...and what worked as a photograph?" Lots of times we know the picture we would have wanted, but it didn't work, and instead we got the birthday girl on the porch admiring her own cake. So then that becomes the picture of the 11th birthday because the one that would have told the story better didn't turn out to be such a good picture. To steal (and mangle) a quote from Robin Kelsey's Photography and the Art of Chance, the world is a mix of order and disorder, and what works as a picture is the sum of a series of accidents. Put shortly, you have to try your hardest to get what you want but then, later, when you edit, you have to put all that aside and also be totally open to what worked and what didn't.

I think one of the drafts of my article had a section about just how difficult family photography really is. That part survived as only one sentence: "Creating a comprehensive record of a family’s life is inherently challenging—it’s an extended, ambitious, and multifaceted documentary project...."

A neighbor once let me photograph his five kids playing energetically in their backyard. (With a manual-focus but autoexposure film camera.) None of them would cooperate in the least, so I had to get what I could on the fly. It was a real camera-workout, and challenged my shooting skills. I felt afterwards that although it's an ordinary subject, photographing moving kids in action is actually pretty difficult, right up there with the hardest shooting challenges I've faced. Well, the same thing is true of being a true family photographer, I think. It's an ordinary and natural thing to do, but to do it exceptionally well is very difficult, and requires skills, in at least some aspects, that most people struggle with. I doubt there are very many people with a truly comprehensive photographic archive of their family's life. I know I don't have one. My attempts are sporadic and inconsistent, the results not very well organized and incomplete.

It hasn't stopped me from trying, of course.  :-)

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)

Book o' the Week

Grit and Grace: Women at Work in the Emerging World. Unfortunately, this will be the posthumous swan song of the indefatigable documentarian Alison Wright, whose untimely death at 60 in the Azores this year meant she never got to see it published. Wright's photography was inextricably entwined with her life's dedication to social justice, a sense of acceptance of humanity, and a roving search for beauty and color.

The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you wish to support this site.

Our link to B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

A Thought on Good Technique

[Comments have been added.]

What part of your own practice of photography does technique play? I took this a couple of nights ago—saw it from the car, and though, hmm, maybe someday under the same conditions I could take a picture of that. Which then struck me as being a crazy thought—Jay Maisel's admonition to "always shoot it now; it won't be the same when you go back" came to mind. So I turned around, went back, heaved my lazy butt out of the heated driver's seat, and shot it. I dealt with the low light by taking five or six series of brackets and then just looked for the best one. But of course it could have been better technically if I'd had a tripod. I have a great tripod—an ideal one, really—but I keep it in the back room behind the bookcase. It wasn't doing me a lot of good there. What would be wrong with storing it in the trunk?

I'm not sure my indifferent technique here hurts this—it's properly exposed (I can't look at the sky without thinking about how to properly expose a picture of it). But better technique in steadying the camera might have helped. I'll never know, will I?

Anyway the idea came to mind that I'm not taking much if any joy in good technique—good craftsmanship—these days. There's no moral imperative to use good technique. Part of ignoring it is a protest against the tunnel-vision attitude of technique-above-everything that pervades the internet these days. (And possibly also a protest against 750-page manuals.) But being a good photographic craftsperson can be part of the fun, no?

Mike

Book o' the Week
Eye and Brain by Richard Gregory, Fifth Edition. "As far as I know nothing in the past 50 years is a better explanation of how humans see." —Hugh Crawford

The link is a portal to Amazon. Thank you kindly for helping support The Online Photographer!

The following logo is also a link if you click on it:

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ken Bennett: "I think good technique is necessary but not sufficient for good photos. That is, using proper technique is important all the time, but good technique by itself is not enough. The reason that the technical part of photography gets so much attention online is that it's measurable, while the aesthetic parts are not; but the combination is what makes a good photo. Light, composition, and the moment are crucial, but without solid technical skills it's hard to make the photo that you see.

"You should carry the tripod in your car. I have one in the back of my truck and often find use for it."

Harry B Houchins: "I carry a small pillow-size beanbag in the car. When I see something as you did. I stop and use the beanbag on the roof of my car. Doesn't take nearly as long to set up as my tripod. Which, true be told, I hate to carry around with me even in the woods."

John Krumm: "Maybe there's a lazy way to do this one. Put your camera in continuous mode (not bracket). Use a high enough ISO to get a good enough shutter speed for a sharp shot. Shoot 12 or more images. Up to 36 images. Then do a 'means stack' in Photoshop, and watch your noise go way down while detail remains good. Adjust photo as needed. This is what Brooks Jensen does all the time with his G9."

Robert Roaldi: "There's no need for self-flagellation. No one is judging your photos, and if they are, screw 'em. Lots of photos have noise/grain in them, some have some motion blur, sometimes the exposure is off. Sometimes these things matter, oftentimes they don't matter at all. Do you enjoy looking at the scene? Unless someone is paying you, that's the only criteria that matters. People worry way too much."

MikeR: "More winter pictures of Keuka, please! I've only stayed at Keuka Lake in mid-summer, usually July or August. This year it will be late August. We'll rent a couple of big houses, so that the family, comprising about six to nine sub-families, can get together for the first time since 2019. When there, I've always wondered what it would be like to live in one of those houses in mid-Winter. Much fewer people, quiet, solitude. Neat photo opportunities! I even investigated once, and found that winter rentals are almost non-existent. Either the houses are closed up, or their owners have returned from wherever they go in the summertime. So, please more Winter Keuka pictures!"

William Shannon: "I think that this image was well worth going back for. The palette of blues defined by the geography, the sky and the time of day and the warm window lights reflecting off the water offer a feeling of warmth piercing the cold. I like the exposure and in this case I think that tripod sharpness might cut into the feeling offered by the photograph."

Darlene: "What part of your own practice of photography does technique play? Having good technique is a fundamental part of the craft. Being able to predict the technical results is having an understanding of the craft. I practice good technique and always have a tripod stowed in my vehicle. A shutter release cable is stashed in there too because I never know if I will be toting around film or digital.

"I also have an excellent pair of sunglasses to protect my eyes from the sun. Without my vision, I would find photography very frustrating to practice."

Kirk Decker: "I'd suggest that good technique isn't found in the use of a tripod. Good technique is that you knew how to take an acceptable image without a tripod. Had you been super captivated by the scene you would have, no doubt, started to dive into the bag of camera steadying tricks that a person with good technique, such as yourself, knows. It is a very nice photo by the way. I think actually listening to that little voice that tells you to stop and take the photo is 90% of the struggle.

"I should add that I am a huge fan of tripods and if one is available, you should use it. But, to paraphrase a '70s saying, 'technique will get you through times of no tripods better than tripods will get you times of no technique.'"

Dave (partial comment): "Mike, The photo looks fine. The thin branches in the foreground are sharp enough on the screen in front of me. (17 x 10", 2–3 feet viewing distance.) The thing that grabs me is the mood of the photo, rather than whether it's as technically as good as possible. A good, rich darker blue without magenta creeping in. Dark, but easy to see the distant 'layers.' I'm glad you turned around to take that photo!"

The Difference Between Youth and Age

A spread from Bystander, the
bible of street photography

I mentioned I didn't take any street photographs on Street Photography Day last Sunday. I'd like to expand a little on that.

The difference between youth and age is that when you're older, you've learned what you're not. Those rose-tinted contact lenses fall away from our eyes as the years wear on. When you're young, life is a sort of vague infinitude of casual impulsive ambitions that are going to be fulfilled magically one day. But with every additional year you get under your belt, well, there goes another one.

This is why young boys argue about which supercar is best. Rob's going to have a Ferrari; Joe's going to have a Lamborghini. It's serious enough that they've had to learn how to keep the argument from getting too passionate because it could cause a rift in the friendship, and they both know that. What's never questioned is the assumption that they're going to have cars like that when they grow up. Because of course they are. The future is vast—and in it all things are possible.

I might be getting that example wrong. Maybe 12-year-olds today don't care about cars. I've heard that older teenagers don't. If they do care about vehicles of some sort, maybe Ferraris and Lamborghinis don't enter in. Even my plucked-from-the-air boy names are probably wrong: those are 12-year-old boy names of my era. Today's 12-year-olds would be named Ethan, Noah, Jacob, Aiden or Jayden. Joseph was only the 20th-most popular boy name in 2010 and Robert didn't make the top 50. In fact, I have no idea what boys of today aspire to. I don't know any 12-year-olds. But you get the point.

Jimmy
For males, of which I am one, the most reliable reality test when it comes to vague aspirations being shut down by the passing of the years is no doubt sports. I played tennis when I was a kid (it exploded in popularity as I passed through youth*) and while I never exactly thought I was ever going to be "all that" as a tennis player, still, age first impinged for me when players younger than myself were, first, playing in the big tournaments, and then winning them. Jimmy Connors was five years older than me (rank of the name James in popularity the year Connors was born: 1). That was the way the world was when it was the way it was supposed to be. Today the Big Three—the astonishing triumvirate of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic—are 24, 29, and 30 years younger than me, and they're all old. And I haven't hit a tennis ball since before any of them were born, except—and this is true—in my dreams.

So anyway: who am I kidding? I'm never going to be a street photographer. I don't have the personality for it. I would almost wager that if I went through my entire archive looking for one great street photograph—just one—which no one would disagree fit the category and the quality of which no one would dispute either—I wouldn't find that unicorn!

The difference is that when I enrolled in photography school in 1982 and honestly thought I was just about the luckiest guy in the world because I got to do photography all day every day, well, of course I was going to make great street photographs. If not immediately, someday.

At my age now, it doesn't take a genius to know that that "someday" is never going to come.

And that's all right. The real key to success is to figure out what you're actually good at. Without illusions. Doing so involves an honest and objective appraisal of who and what you are—but it also involves a clear-eyed view of what you're not.

Mike

*It's done very well during the pandemic, too, being a naturally socially-distanced activity.

Book o' the Week

Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz (Laurence King Publishing, 2017). First published in 1994. In this revised edition, the story of street photography is brought up to date with a re-evaluation of some historical material, the inclusion of more contemporary photographers, and a discussion of the ongoing rise of digital photography.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Here's Bystander at The Book Depository. The following logo is also a link:

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Knack Mac: "Figuring out what you aren’t going to be good at is so important at any age. When very young, I wanted to be an architect. When I went to college, I was in engineering rather than architecture, but I was given a photo assignment by the yearbook to capture first-year architecture students working late Friday on their assigned big project. They worked into the night, and I noticed a friend who was an architecture student wasn’t there. Later I asked him where he had been. He said he had finished the assignment Wednesday. He admitted he had talent for architecture those other students didn’t. They would be doomed to designing bathrooms when he was doing skyscrapers.

"I realized then it is unwise to compete against people with more talent. Better to find something that you either do have a talent for, or in which there just isn’t a requirement for much talent. I took that to heart and realized I was going to be competing against engineers who had more talent than I did, so I left engineering. I went into something that required less talent: marketing."

["Knack Mac" ended up as CEO of Miller Brewing—so maybe his talent for knowing what he didn't have a talent for is something talented young people would do well to listen to and learn from.... —Mike]

Phil S.: "On sports being the locale where many young men first give up a dream, there's an achingly beautiful song called 'Speedtrap Town' by American singer-songwriter Jason Isbell that features these lines:

Well it's a Thursday night but there's a high school game
Sneak a bottle up the bleachers and forget my name
These 5A bastards run a shallow cross
It's a boy's last dream and a man's first loss.

"I always thought that pretty well summed it up."

Sroyon: "Hmm, you (claim that you) are not good at street photography...but do you enjoy it? If yes, then why not do it anyway?  :-) 

"I get what you're saying, but I also think there's something to be said for pursuing something one is not good at, purely out of love. Maybe not as a profession, because most professions require some level of proficiency. But why not as an amateur (Latin: amare, to love)."

Mike replies: Oh, I do not enjoy it at all. It's torture. As I said, I don't have the personality for it; it's awkward and agonizing for me. I much prefer making pictures in situations where I have permission to do so, or at least where I feel like I'm not bothering anybody. I've written about this at length several times over the years. But I agree with you—if I did enjoy it, I would have no problem doing it just for the fun of it and the love of it. That's a good enough reason. But no, I don't enjoy it.

Shooting Skills: Contrast for Clarity

Here's a simple shooting skills exercise that might be of use to you if you've never worked on it before. It's best if you give it about two hours. The purpose is to make you more aware of tonal contrast as a way of making a main subject more clear.

You can do this with any camera, including a phone (these illustrations were taken with my old iPhone), and with either a zoom or prime lens. It's equally useful for color or black-and-white. And definitely don't worry about whether the pictures you're seeing are "good shots" or not. This is just an exercise, for practice. However, you should be "single-tasking," not multitasking. Do this when you have a clear stretch of time during which you can concentrate entirely on shooting.

What you do is look for any picture in which there's a plain or obvious single main subject, and try to take a picture of it with a background that tonally confuses with the main subject and then, a background that tonally sets off the main subject.

What you'll notice is that the changes are often not drastic. Often the difference is either just a slight change of angle or of camera position—maybe walking a few steps, getting a little higher or lower, or being more aware of backgrounds. The purpose of the exercise is to start making those little changes more automatic. What you're changing is your visual thinking, your awareness.

For practicing, the subject can be anything. Here, the subject is just an odd flower that reminded me of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus virion we've been seeing in scanning electron microscope and transmission electron microscope pictures. In the first exposure I made the lower boundary of the head of the plant (I'm not naming it because I have no idea what it is!) confused tonally with the yellow-green plant behind it:

Note that you might actually prefer this version, but don't pay attention to aesthetic impressions for now. You're just doing an exercise, not trying to second-guess which alternative might actually work best.

Just a slight change of camera position puts the whole head of the plant against a contrasting background.

Here's an even more mundane picture, but an excellent example of what we're looking for here. A telephone pole:

The subject is in direct view and is clear visually. The bottom third of the pole is set off against its background. But other than that, the background isn't helping; neither is the background "giving" us anything, i.e., doing any work in the picture. But take just a few steps to the left and notice the improvement in the perception of clarity:

Now the whole pole is clear against the background and the background itself is stronger because it's simpler. There's no technical trick here and the lens and sensor don't matter. It's just a matter of seeing, is all.

Mindless groove
If you've never done this exercise before you might not find a suitable subject for the first five or ten minutes. A hint: look at the world, not at the viewfinder. It will become easier as you go along and start to get the knack.

Most people don't have the stamina to do a shooting exercise for two hours. After about about 45 minutes, you'll be getting tired of the drill and be eager to say "that's enough of that."

But keep walking and keep looking. It's the second hour when most of the benefit accrues. You're bored and fed up. Finding examples is no longer challenging, and you start rejecting poor opportunities that you've learned won't really work very well. In the second hour you start to get into a more "mindless" groove. Your mind wanders and you start thinking about other things. Maybe taking fewer pictures, but still looking—ah, there's one. Yeah, this works. That's when you start to cruise, and that, I think, is when it starts getting to be second nature.

Because that's what you want. You want it to something you kinda don't think about—so that during normal shooting you'll just juke and move a little bit here and there to get rid of undesirable tonal mergers. And you'll see those problems when they come up without having to think about looking for them.

But I know that most people will quit before two hours. They don't have the stamina. Heck, some people get tired of any kind of shooting before the two-hour mark. If you want to be good at any skill you have to have enough determination to put some hours in.

Note that you can do the opposite too—you can de-emphasize an unwanted element, say by moving a little to put it against a tonally similar background so it doesn't show up as well. A few weeks ago I was shooting a car on the street and I noticed that two dark-green trash bins were vivid against a patch of light background. A change of shooting position didn't make the car look worse but camouflaged the trash cans against the dark shadowed side of a garage, de-emphasizing them. Using this trick you can sometimes "take something out of the picture" without taking it out of the picture.

I think I had something else to say about this exercise, but I can't remember what it is. If I remember, I'll add it later as an update.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim Metzger: "I took a class with Moose Petersen many years back. One of the exercises involved putting a small stuffed bear in a tree and asking the participants to set up a shot as if this was going to be a wildlife photo. Since this was pre-digital we had no way to exchange images but Moose just walked from tripod to tripod, glancing through the viewfinder for no more than a second or two. He declared only one of the eight participants would have a 'good photo.' The other seven were perplexed as to how he could know this. It was all about having a 'clean' background. That lesson stayed with me for the last 20 years or so and it is the first thing I explain to people who want some tips for better photos."

Jim Richardson: "Excellent! You can often tell much about a photographer by how they achieve 'separation' in a picture, making sure that competing elements get their own space. It becomes even more important when you are trying to maintain the visual presence (and thus meaning) of a small element in a composition, a small figure of a person in the distance, for example, that you don’t want to lose in the clutter. And silhouettes require this sort of thinking lest the graphic shape become indecipherable. In another realm, old time newspaper printers in the backshop always advocated that they liked photos with good contrast. Photographers (like me) often misunderstood their advice, thinking they meant we should print on No. 4 paper to get more 'contrast,' when what the actually wanted was clear separation of tonal areas."

[Ed. note: We have two Jim Richardsons who comment hereabouts. This Jim is the National Geographic photographer.]

Rodger Kingston: "I think I pretty much do this when I'm photographing, but I've never done it as an exercise. Interesting. I'm curious enough that I'll give it the two hours and see what I get. Who know, maybe this old dog can learn a new trick."

[Ed. note: Rodger is a major collector of vernacular photography and has published numerous books of his own work including 2019's Train to Providence as well as books of selections from the Kingston Collection.]

Peggy C.: "I learned this exercise years ago. It's also a good one to use when my photography is in the doldrums. I will carry my camera around and set myself a task. For example, isolating one set color against a dark background or a pattern of only one kind. I don't expect to really get anything great but it's good for my creativity. Works equally well for my painting."

Pros van Heddegem: "Thank you. Excellent elementary exercise! Good to mention this two-hour 'rule': learning is indeed also a matter of discipline."

John Krumm: "You inspired me to look through my Flickr feed to find shots where I more clearly simplified the background to emphasize contrast, or maybe emphasized it in another way. Looking forward to trying your exercise as well. Even doing that was helpful. Here’s an album of some that stood out to me."

Robert B: "Just to elucidate the biological facts: your flower is some species of allium, i.e., garlic, onion, or leek."