As some may know I have for the past 2 years been attending Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), to get a bachelors degree in photography. I am doing this to improve my photography in an overall sense. Most would agree I do good work and I think so to but we as people can never stop learning. So in that vein I went back to school to up my game. It is also helping on the business side of things as I have classes on that part and not just capturing awesome images. The image below is one I captured recently of my daughter. She was simply playing in our yard.
Photography Is No Longer A Technical Medium and That’s A Good Thing!
I saw this interesting article and thought I would share it. It is by Dr. Grant Scott. Link at the bottom.
I recently saw a photographer state that education was not required to be creative. Teaching the technical skills were important he claimed, but nothing else was! I couldn’t believe such a level of ignorance or arrogance. He stated that Tom Waits, Shane McGowan and John Lyon had never studied music and it had never stopped them! Interestingly, Waits attended Chula Vista’s Southwestern Community College to study photography. Obviously the photographer was not aware of this particular hole in his argument!
The point is of course that what this photographer seems to misunderstand is that the study of anything and everything can feed into photography.
Appropriate and relevant photographic education understands this. Knowledge of how to use a camera is essential as is a basic knowledge of additional lighting and post-production but the depth of your knowledge of any of these elements does not define the success of your images. In time you will garner further information but this will be on a need-to-know basis not as a tsunami of technical facts.
Photography is reliant on a technical device and it has a tendency to draw in the technically inclined and engaged, but creativity is not reliant on technical proficiency. In fact it should disrupt technical proficiency, challenge the machines and push previously conceived rules.
Recently on the social media platform Threads there has been a tendency for photographers to post images of their cameras and argue over the pros and cons of retouching analogue images. Defining themselves as film photographers as a badge of honour and to identify themselves as ‘true’ photographers. I think! In response others have been proclaiming that cameras don’t matter and that process is all. Of course neither stance is an absolute.
Personally I don’t mind which position you adopt as long as you don’t present technical proficiency or interest as barriers to exploring photographic creativity. They are not and that is a good thing. Photography is not easier today than it once was, it is just less technical. The difficulty comes from defining a personal language, developing consistency of practice, telling the stories that mean something to you and if you wish to earn money from your photography understanding how to do that. I think that is enough for anyone to deal with!
https://unitednationsofphotography.com/2023/10/29/photography-is-no-longer-a-technical-medium-and-thats-a-good-thing/
A Day at the Park
One of my favorite things to do is to go to the park with my kids. The sheer joy my daughter gets running around and playing is infectious, and of course, me being me I have to bring my camera and capture some fun images of the day. So I hope you fine folks enjoy viewing these images as much as I enjoyed running after my daughter and making them.
Working on Childern's School videos
So while working on some videos for my son’s school, I have run into a few issues. He goes to a private school and I video their awards ceremonies and holiday performances. Anyways, I was editing together the video of a performance and had it all done and saved. I went to transfer it to the USB flash drive I was going to use to deliver it to the principal and it would not transfer. Computer said it was to large. Now, I know it is not. How do I know this? Simple, the file is 13 GB and the drive is 64 GB; and as such it should fit fine.
So, my next step is to simply re-encode and save the video again this time straight to the USB drive. A pain to be sure but not that big of a deal. I start this process and it says one hour to complete. Twenty-five minutes in I get an encoding error and have to start over. Again a pain but what am I going to do I need this video. I start over; and once again 25 minutes in the same error.
I am now trying this on a different program going directly to the drive, hopefully it will work and I can get this video to the principal on Monday.