Mike Powell

Photography seems to be easy. Nowadays anyone with a cell phone can capture images. Many people do so every day and all of the social media filled with those images. Is that really photography? That’s a huge question and your response to it is significantly influenced by the way that you look at the purpose of photography.

Is photography simply about recording and documenting a moment in time? If so, a simple box camera of the past or almost any modern camera or cell phone can easily fulfill that role. Underlying that view is the assumption that somehow reality is objective. Police interviews of eyewitnesses, however, have repeatedly shown each person has an individual perception of reality. In essence, we all have built-in filters that alter and shape our perceptions and interpretations of what our eyes are seeing.

In my personal view, photographers are trying to shape your perceptions of a subject through a series of creative choices they make. As I was reviewing some recent photos I took of irises in a neighbor’s garden, I really liked the one below and thought about what was going on in my mind when I took the shot.

When I first looked through the camera’s viewfinder, I realized the background was really cluttered, which I knew would distract the viewer’s focus from the flower and therefore changed the camera’s aperture setting to f/5.0 and moved closer to the flower to provide a more blurred background. I wanted to be sure that I did not get any motion blur, because I was shooting at an awkward angle, so I settled on a shutter speed of 1/400 sec (at an ISO setting of 400). The sunshine was a bit bright and I used exposure compensation of minus 2/3 of a stop to darken the image a bit from what the camera wanted to use.

The final, and arguably most important, step was composing the shot. With a static subject like this, I try to compose the shot in the camera, so minimal cropping is necessary when processing the image on my computer. In this case, the image below was not cropped at all. (With wildlife subjects, I do not have the luxury of carefully composing the shot, so cropping is often necessary.)

I wanted to draw the viewer’s full attention to the fully open iris flower, so I focused on its yellow beards. However, I also wanted the viewer to get a sense of the partially opened blooms and buds and chose to include them in the composition. When I saw them with my own eyes, all of the flowers were equally in focus, but as you can see in the photo, I used the camera settings to ensure that deliberately chosen elements were in focus, while others elements remained visible, albeit blurred.

Over a dozen years ago, when I was first starting to get serious about my photography, I had to consciously make the kinds of decisions I have tried to describe above. Now I am familiar enough with my camera’s settings and know what effect they will have on the photos that I make many of these decisions simultaneously and instinctively. I usually have an idea in my head of the kind of image I want to produce and use most of my conscious mind to think about the composition.

So, is photography hard? Taking a picture is easy, but bringing a vision to life is harder. It may not be possible for another person to walk in your shoes, but photography can help another person to see with your eyes (or at a minimum to experience the world in a way in which you want them to.)

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.