Part of the fun of photography is the enjoyment you get from having a fine piece of equipment in your hands, knowing how to use it, and anticipating the creative results you will get with it. Sometimes, the challenge of using it to its full advantage is compromised by your eagerness to use it before you have learned what all the controls are for.

Photography will be 200 years old in 2026, 24 years from now. In historical terms that’s an infinitesimal length of time.

In archival quality of photographic images it’s a very long time.

In fine art photography light can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Your eye has 2,000 times greater latitude than film and your brain has taught your vision system to compensate for the ever-changing light source. Red, green, and blue look the same to your eyes whether what you are looking at is in the shade or bright sunlight, and whether it’s early morning, noon, or late afternoon. You still see the colors as red, green and blue until the light is so dim that you see them only as black and white. (The rods and cones function in your eyeball)

Sometimes, you may think you’ve plateaued in photography.

In reality, you just need to analyze the depth of your knowledge about what you need to do to improve the pictures that interest you. People in other walks of life have various names for it: “Writers Block,” in a “Slump,” “Doldrums,” and “Blue Funk.”

What does a photographer call it when the results of a day’s effort have only produced an envelope full of snapshots? Can you blame it on bad luck? I don’t think so. More than likely, it’s from being unprepared to photograph the subject of the shoot and its location. You realize that it’s beyond the time to learn how when the parade is passing you by.

Poring over low contrast pictures the day after we got home from Sequoia reminded me once again of the folly of taking landscape pictures in the middle of the day. I’ll eat, drink, take a nap – or do photo studies of moss, but I’m not going to take landscape pictures in the middle of the day any more.

I’m going to make the picture the priority. First, I’ll go take sunrise pictures, then come back and have breakfast, or I’ll take sunset pictures, then come back and have dinner.

Were it not for the amount of information available about photography, many photographers would be satisfied with just the primordial instruction “shoot with the sun at your back.”

Just think, Kodak had to decide almost a century ago what the most important bit of data was that they should include with their film. That information turned out to be what one needed to do to get an acceptable picture under varied lighting conditions. They knew that once a good exposure was obtained, other elements of a good picture would follow.

Notes from Lyle:

There are some things to learn about techniques that engage a viewer’s imagination in order to perceive a photograph as a three dimensional object.

The concept of portraiture goes back a long ways. It's even been said recently it's in our genes. Instinctively, when someone picks up a camera it's to photograph another person. The thing that has kept most people from making portraits is lack of training and equipment to produce the photographs worthy of being called portraits.