Don't be a Recipe Follower!

[Buckster]

Close all the schools and libraries! Burn all the books! Smash all the calculators and computers to bits! If someone wants to be an engineer, let them discover Pythagorean theory, Pi, and so on by trial and error on their own so they'll truly understand it! Parents, stop giving your kids "recipes" for what's poisonous and dangerous! Let them learn on their own so that they truly understand it!

The alternative to using or starting with a recipe that already works, is to learn everything (not just photography) from scratch on your own, with no helpful hints or pointers from anyone else (what recipes are), which is patently ridiculous.

 

[cgipson1]

When you get a recipe from somewhere, please, I beg you, take it apart and try to understand it at a deeper level. Explain it to yourself in whatever terms you understand. .

You are an optimist, aren't you? This would require "work" and "thought"... most are not interested in that, they just want the shortcut! (although they usually put more effort into their logos!)

 

[KmH]

Disagee with you Amolitor. HUGE disagree. You have equated photography skills as unteachable through mimicry. You would have been better to offer "it annoys me when you ask... therefore don't do it". Skills are learned through mimicry all the time. It's how you learned, as a wee tot, to tie your shoe laces. Unless you're one of those brilliant children who read how to do it in a book and then applied the skill.
The whole point of a forum like this is to share recipes and skills. It may seem annoying to share these skills you've already learned and find easy, but others are still in the tot phase. They need a jumping off point. Mimicry fulfills this. Then it's up to them to learn why it works.
After all, if we are not here to learn something we'd all be at Chapters with our nose deep into Kirby. Coming back to the forum with topics like "Already figured this out" and "Thanks for nothing". Or worse; being in a small podunk town with no reading material and posting "My duck at 500 yards taken with a macro lens".

You missed the point.

Why mimic when you can experiment?

Because we each only have 1 life time. So, why fumble around and waste time experimenting until you manage to re-invent the wheel (the basic recipes, the fundamentals)?
We are about 200 years into the age of photography and millions of man-hours have gone into developing the fundamentals.

Experimentation not based on a solid grounding in the fundamental recipes wastes a butt-load of time, because a vast majority of the experiments yield unusable results.

Pablo Picaso had a huge impact on the art world. But in his youth, his art teacher father made him master the basics by making him do drawing/painting in a realistic style. On that solid foundation Picaso was later able to experiment and develop his Cubist style. That development took Picaso about 10 years.

 

[rexbobcat]

Disagee with you Amolitor. HUGE disagree. You have equated photography skills as unteachable through mimicry. You would have been better to offer "it annoys me when you ask... therefore don't do it". Skills are learned through mimicry all the time. It's how you learned, as a wee tot, to tie your shoe laces. Unless you're one of those brilliant children who read how to do it in a book and then applied the skill.
The whole point of a forum like this is to share recipes and skills. It may seem annoying to share these skills you've already learned and find easy, but others are still in the tot phase. They need a jumping off point. Mimicry fulfills this. Then it's up to them to learn why it works.
After all, if we are not here to learn something we'd all be at Chapters with our nose deep into Kirby. Coming back to the forum with topics like "Already figured this out" and "Thanks for nothing". Or worse; being in a small podunk town with no reading material and posting "My duck at 500 yards taken with a macro lens".

You missed the point.

Why mimic when you can experiment?

Because we each only have 1 life time. So, why fumble around and waste time experimenting until you manage to re-invent the wheel (the basic recipes, the fundamentals)?
We are about 200 years into the age of photography and millions of man-hours have gone into developing the fundamentals.

Experimentation not based on a solid grounding in the fundamental recipes wastes a butt-load of time, because a vast majority of the experiments yield unusable results.

Pablo Picaso had a huge impact on the art world. But in his youth, his art teacher father made him master the basics by making him do drawing/painting in a realistic style. On that solid foundation Picaso was later able to experiment and develop his Cubist style. That development took Picaso about 10 years.

That's not the same thing as "it's dark out. What ISO should I use?"

There are too many variables to account for. In painting, you are in control of every aspect of the final product, well, unless you're painting still lifes.

How is experimenting with your settings to get a correct exposure reinventing the wheel? There was no wheel in the first place since every photographic experience is different from the previous one....

That was what I meant.

 

[Derrel]

I've often warned against the new breed of digital photography books that are basically "recipe books". Same with newbs who get utterly addicted to combing through other peoples' Flickr pages, combing through the EXIF data, and as one poster last week said, "Trying to correlate EXIF data with the settings for good photos." Uh-uh. Good photos do not result from mere EXIF data--they come from skillful use of a camera and lens and lighting. A buttload of newbies seem to forget the whole "lighting" aspect of photography.

One of my favorite photography how-to authors was always the late John Hedgecoe. His many books taught their readers how to find or create different lighting conditions, and how to position themselves in relation to the light, in order to set themselves up in the right place, with the right lighting conditions, so that success was likely.

Speaking of recipes, last week I was reading a profile of a famous photographer, a guy known for his sublime mastery of light, and the interviewer asked him about one of the biggest problems he saw in today's new internet/digital age and he mentioned basically, recipe-learning. Well, okay, he said, "Trying to learn lighting from following lighting diagrams." He mentioned that diagrams typically do not show any nuance, and the actual and IMPORTANT DETAILS cannot be diagrammed out...and that because of that, many who are learning often suffer failure because the diagrams are just not "telling" the "cooks" all the important little tips.

I think I understand your concept, amolitor. I agree with it too, for the most part. UNDERSTANDING is more important than blind, recipe-following. Of course, some people would challenge your fundamental position, and likely would argue that blind, rote memorization is better than understanding and comprehension of the fundamentals.

 

[Tee]

Mimicry is a fine starting point! My point, perhaps poorly expressed, is that it's a very very bad ending point.

Try the recipe out, see if it works for you. If it does, great. But don't stop there, dig into it and try to get why it works. You'll fill in a little technical stuff as you go, and you'll develop a little more ability to tinker with the recipe, and maybe even make up your own. If it doesn't work for you, DEFINITELY do not stop there. It's easy to just discard it and move on, but it's when the experiments fail that the scientists get excited, and ideally you should too. Why doesn't it work? What's it supposed to do, and why?

If you can figure out why the recipe does not work for you, then you've really learned something interesting. AND as a bonus, there's an excellent chance you'll be able to adapt the recipe so that it does work for you.

Photography as a practice is arguably plagued by equipment makers who, for every problem, make a gadget you can buy to solve that problem. This isn't quite the same thing as blindly following a recipe, but it's a closely allied issue. It feeds off the same desire to have a simple and straightforward plug-tab-A-into-slot-B solution to everything, and it extracts quite a bit of money from hobbyists.

Honestly, most photographers who pursue this as a serious hobby or profession begin to to understand more than actions, presets, and Dutch tilts. However, just as I was a kid learning how to play basketball, I was more interested in mastering Kareem's skyhook than I was at the fundamentals.

I respect your love for the classic artform of photography. However, it's a pedestrian hobby and thus, one must expect a wide range of interest and intent.

 

[Dao]

I told my 2nd grade daughter to memorize 1+1 to 12+12. After that, she'd no issue with substraction. Then I asked her to memorize 1x1 to 12x12.

So now, when she do division, she has no problem using the addition, substraction or multiplication she memorized.


It was hard for her in the beginning for her to do. She do not understand why, just memorizing them.

 

[amolitor]

This is essentially an attitude that, to one degree or another, tends to affect all of us. We all want to know how to do that thing that we've never seen before. Even if it's extremely advanced and sophisticated. How do you light an F1 car in the studio? A Chimera Gingundo-7000 suspended, wait wait, let me write this down, 6 feet over the car and.. We all want to do it. We all tend to communicate in those same terms. I do it myself, quite a lot: Duplicate the layer, add a layer mask, paint this, curves that, POOF. I've written dozens of posts that look just like that.

It's just something that we can struggle against a little. I don't suggest this is a moral code, although I do think it's just a Good Thing. I suggest it because it will help you out.

I'm also not suggesting that you need a PhD in optics before you press the shutter button. Just a little technical understanding will help you. Unpack it a little bit. I'm not even sure your technical knowledge needs to be correct. If you think of photography as photons being pushed around by superintelligent viruses all wearing little purple sorcerer's hats, as long as your understanding has some sort of predictive power, as long as it matches reality a little bit, breaking down the recipe in terms of the hat-viruses will probably help you to use that recipe a bit better, with a bit more flexibility.

 

[manaheim]

I've often warned against the new breed of digital photography books that are basically "recipe books". Same with newbs who get utterly addicted to combing through other peoples' Flickr pages, combing through the EXIF data, and as one poster last week said, "Trying to correlate EXIF data with the settings for good photos." Uh-uh. Good photos do not result from mere EXIF data--they come from skillful use of a camera and lens and lighting. A buttload of newbies seem to forget the whole "lighting" aspect of photography.

One of my favorite photography how-to authors was always the late John Hedgecoe. His many books taught their readers how to find or create different lighting conditions, and how to position themselves in relation to the light, in order to set themselves up in the right place, with the right lighting conditions, so that success was likely.

Speaking of recipes, last week I was reading a profile of a famous photographer, a guy known for his sublime mastery of light, and the interviewer asked him about one of the biggest problems he saw in today's new internet/digital age and he mentioned basically, recipe-learning. Well, okay, he said, "Trying to learn lighting from following lighting diagrams." He mentioned that diagrams typically do not show any nuance, and the actual and IMPORTANT DETAILS cannot be diagrammed out...and that because of that, many who are learning often suffer failure because the diagrams are just not "telling" the "cooks" all the important little tips.

I think I understand your concept, amolitor. I agree with it too, for the most part. UNDERSTANDING is more important than blind, recipe-following. Of course, some people would challenge your fundamental position, and likely would argue that blind, rote memorization is better than understanding and comprehension of the fundamentals.

This is essentially an attitude that, to one degree or another, tends to affect all of us. We all want to know how to do that thing that we've never seen before. Even if it's extremely advanced and sophisticated. How do you light an F1 car in the studio? A Chimera Gingundo-7000 suspended, wait wait, let me write this down, 6 feet over the car and.. We all want to do it. We all tend to communicate in those same terms. I do it myself, quite a lot: Duplicate the layer, add a layer mask, paint this, curves that, POOF. I've written dozens of posts that look just like that.

It's just something that we can struggle against a little. I don't suggest this is a moral code, although I do think it's just a Good Thing. I suggest it because it will help you out.

I'm also not suggesting that you need a PhD in optics before you press the shutter button. Just a little technical understanding will help you. Unpack it a little bit. I'm not even sure your technical knowledge needs to be correct. If you think of photography as photons being pushed around by superintelligent viruses all wearing little purple sorcerer's hats, as long as your understanding has some sort of predictive power, as long as it matches reality a little bit, breaking down the recipe in terms of the hat-viruses will probably help you to use that recipe a bit better, with a bit more flexibility.

Ah. This sounds like you're referring to things like "I do lomo photography!" (or whatever the hell that look is) ... where people glom onto how to reproduce a specific resulting look from a certain method or "recipe". If THAT'S what you mean... then yeah... I agree. COMPLETELY.

I mean, yes, sure, go see how that lomo thing works and figure it out, but good lord please move on to something else now. Why just be like everyone else?

But then this also gets into my thing where I don't get how people can sit and rattle off their "influences" or types of photography they're trying to achieve... or what their "style" is. If you're just copying other people, then what part of the photography is really you and yours?

I mean... it works... don't get me wrong... but bleh. Why bother?

 

[Dao]

I think follow or copy what other people do is not an issue. Once you keep doing that for awhile, a normal person should be able to pick up something if that person pay attention. Following GPS will get me from Point A to Point B the first time. I may have trouble the next time if GPS is not available. However, if I use GPS and go from A to B for many times and pay a little more attention, I will not need the GPS later on. And that I think I can say I learned. And that is my knowledge. So if someone ask me direction, I can tell them how to get to Point B from point A.

So I do not against copy what others do. I bet if I told someone to use 1/4 flash power, f/5.6 with shutter speed of 1/160 and ISO 200 to shoot at that indoor party, he/she may not know why, but is that work for him/her, and she continue shoot for 3 or 5 events, that settings should become his/her knowledge. And based on that knowledge, he/she maybe able to alter it for different events.

 

[Compaq]

Close all the schools and libraries! Burn all the books! Smash all the calculators and computers to bits! If someone wants to be an engineer, let them discover Pythagorean theory, Pi, and so on by trial and error on their own so they'll truly understand it! Parents, stop giving your kids "recipes" for what's poisonous and dangerous! Let them learn on their own so that they truly understand it!

The alternative to using or starting with a recipe that already works, is to learn everything (not just photography) from scratch on your own, with no helpful hints or pointers from anyone else (what recipes are), which is patently ridiculous.

Why live in an either-or world, when we can live in a world of all, nothing, and everything in-between?

Every good maths teacher wants their students to understand Pythagoras's law and how it applies. They want their student to see past the specific and into the general. That is amolitor's point, I think. Aspiring photographers should not stop at following recipes for specific situations, but dig deep and see in what other situations the recipe could work, or how the recipe should be altered. To see past the specific and into the general is a skill that needs honing. That honing is thinking.

 

[The_Traveler]

This is essentially an attitude that, to one degree or another, tends to affect all of us. We all want to know how to do that thing that we've never seen before. Even if it's extremely advanced and sophisticated. How do you light an F1 car in the studio? A Chimera Gingundo-7000 suspended, wait wait, let me write this down, 6 feet over the car and.. We all want to do it. We all tend to communicate in those same terms. I do it myself, quite a lot: Duplicate the layer, add a layer mask, paint this, curves that, POOF. I've written dozens of posts that look just like that.

It's just something that we can struggle against a little. I don't suggest this is a moral code, although I do think it's just a Good Thing. I suggest it because it will help you out.

I'm also not suggesting that you need a PhD in optics before you press the shutter button. Just a little technical understanding will help you. Unpack it a little bit. I'm not even sure your technical knowledge needs to be correct. If you think of photography as photons being pushed around by superintelligent viruses all wearing little purple sorcerer's hats, as long as your understanding has some sort of predictive power, as long as it matches reality a little bit, breaking down the recipe in terms of the hat-viruses will probably help you to use that recipe a bit better, with a bit more flexibility.

Holy crap, yes.
I am totally disinterested in helping people who want to take 20 well exposed shots a year but own a D600. The P mode was invented for them.
OTOH, anyone who wants to create art - even bad, derivative, duplicative art but unknowingly - can count on me whatever hardware/software they have.

 

[imagemaker46]

When I make cookies I used to follow the recipe out of the book. Now I don't use the same recipe but add and subtract some things, make minor changes to the baking time and temps, and each time they are a little different. Baking cookies is a very basic form of cooking, I'm not interested in taking it any further, don't plan on being a chef.

With photography, there is the same basic principle, you can some of it learn it from a book and many people are quite happy with leaving it at that point, so long as they aren't interested in becoming anything more than that. I do run into people all the time that are constantly asking me "what exposure you using" I have no problem telling them, what I am shooting may not be what they are shooting, lens difference makes a huge difference. These people aren't looking for a shortcut but more of reassurance that they are one the same page as me, they look to someone that is more experienced. There are lots of people that are looking for every possible shortcut they can find, unfortunately these are the "buy a camera open a business" types. I have no time for people that won't take the time to understand photography, but find it easy to pretend they do. There are no shortcuts to making cookies, you still have to use the same basic temps and times to cook. It takes time to be very good with a camera, it is easy to look at a photo and figure out the basics of how it was done,. I look at some pictures and admire the work that has gone into it, the same way I admire how a great chef can make a great cookie.

 

[table1349]

Someone didn't get the memo: Photography Recipes

 

[snerd]

I've often warned against the new breed of digital photography books that are basically "recipe books". Same with newbs who get utterly addicted to combing through other peoples' Flickr pages, combing through the EXIF data, and as one poster last week said, "Trying to correlate EXIF data with the settings for good photos." Uh-uh. Good photos do not result from mere EXIF data--they come from skillful use of a camera and lens and lighting. A buttload of newbies seem to forget the whole "lighting" aspect of photography......

Well, that would be me you're referring to. I won't go look for the thread, but I thought I tried to later explain that I wasn't looking to "correlate EXIF data with the settings for good photos", I was simply looking to learn how all of this stuff interacted. I've also found out that using any of those settings in the type of photos I like to take turn out terrible! I'm simply looking to learn everything about this stuff and that was an initial phase I found interesting, looking through all of that data. A starting point, if you will. I can see how it sounded pretty amateurish to you professionals, but please don't forget that you started from square one back in the day also. Don't discourage noob enthusiasm, it's the lifeblood of photography.