Biggest eye openers?!

[andrewdoeshair]

Oh man, so many moments...

Here's one: I had always thought that flash was used when it was too dark out and you needed to make the image brighter. My brain nearly exploded when I learned that flash can be used to make an image darker (background compared to the subject) when it's too bright out.

A huge moment for me was when I stopped defaulting to wide apertures. I used to shoot everything wide open and only adjust my shutter speed when needed (not just because I thought bokeh made my pictures look super professional, ha, but because I was afraid to put my ISO up and get noise) but one time I forced myself to stay between F8 and F11 for a day at Disneyland and I found the joy of having backgrounds in my images. Now I rarely shoot any wider than F4 unless light is an issue or I specifically want to isolate a subject from an unfortunate background.

Another "ah ha!" moment was when I stopped thinking of zooming as a replacement for walking, and started thinking of it as "how much background or context and how much compression do I want around the subject?" Aside from shooting nature that I can't get close to, I've mostly stopped zooming as a way to avoid walking, and started zooming to gain or lose the amount of background and compression I'd get in a image (and then I walk after getting the look I want).

The biggest moments I've had with editing were to straighten my horizons (nobody told me! It took me like 2 years to figure it out) and then to get everything close enough on camera that editing isn't even necessary. It's a lot more fun to edit a photo that barely needs it than it is to try to perform a miracle in LR. If I neeeed to fix an image I usually don't even want to.

 

[TCampbell]

ugg... there are a lot of "eye openers" over the years. Can you narrow it down to a category?

Lighting... (I'll just stick to this area).

I was always frustrated with the term "soft" lighting because the word is... unhelpful. What you REALLY want is gentle transitions from highlights to shadows. And to get that you want light that appears to come from a broad area rather than from a pinpoint source. That's "soft" lighting. Diffusers don't soften the light if the diffuser is tiny. The diffuser needs to be physically large.

Quite a few of the things that have helped me are related to the math of photography (how f-stops really work... how the inverse square law works, etc.)

When shooting outdoors in the sun, always use a flash. It doesn't matter if your subject is in the sun (in which case you need the flash to help reduce the extreme nature of the shadows) or if the subject is in full shade with a sunny area in the background (in which case the background will appear horribly over-exposed unless you use a flash. )

Something else my old boss told me (when I started apprenticing at a very young age)... anytime you see a photo you like... STUDY IT. Figure out WHY you like it. Is it the modeling and posing? What about the lighting? How many lights do you think they used? Where do you think they are positioned? What sort of lighting modifiers does it look like they used? What focal length and f-stop do you imagine they may have used? Constantly having to think about such things really helped me learn what each piece of gear (and how it's used) is doing for the shot.

In general, lighting can do far more for your photography than camera or lens could ever possibly do. You can completely control the viewers perception and emotion of a shot with lighting. If used correctly, it really can contribute heavily toward conveying a specific mood.

There are many many more eye openers and lessons learned over the years. Some of them aren't so meaningful anymore (we don't so much need to worry about how we feed the leader onto the take-up spool to make sure the film really does advance when we wind the camera. But at one point in my life that was an important lesson.)