We have often heard the term, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” That can be true, …sometimes. Sometimes I see a logo or photo and the only thing that pops into my head is a question mark but other times I am so emotionally moved by a “simple” image that there wouldn’t be enough words to describe. For some reason people want to seperate photography from graphic design because the mistakingly assume the camera is doing all the hard work. I beg to differ.  The camera is just a tool for capturing various levels of light and shadow. It’s the photographers job to set the scene, know the best camera settings and additional tools like lights and lens for capturing those degrees of light.  Even before great software tools like Photoshop (both for Windows and Mac) a professional photographer who developed his or her own film had to know about post processing techniques like cropping, dodging and burning.

One of the most fascinating and ironic aspects of photography is despite the great number of camera owners out there you still see people getting paid to photograph what the purchaser values. Of course on reason not dependent on skill is location. It makes a lot more sense for someone from Greenville, SC to purchase a professional photo from a location shoot in a place like New Zealand than to use their own equipment and incurs huge travel expenses to get their unless their is a great possibility of make a big profit.However if you are not from Greenville,SC and would like to see some very interesting photos that are taken daily and tell stories of the town I would like to suggest visiting the web site of a fellow local blogger, Denton Harryman at Greenville Daily Photo.

Finally their is one thing I was taught once that has helped me greatly.  Get where the action or most interesting view is.  All to often people tend to take a photo right where they are standing or sitting. A camera however does give you a good excuse to go to places and act “odd” for the sake of getting the photo you intended. In this photo of a goat I had to get closer to the goats level to not only capture the goat but also the rich blue sky.  I personally think painters and other artist have great potential for being great photographers as well because both photography and painting or drawing requires consideration of angles, lighting and color (or shades of gray if you are doing black and white).

Oh, feel free to visit the photo blog section of this web site too. I’m pulling in images from my flickr account to this site for quick viewing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Compelling Content, Greenville,SC, Photography, Portable Media, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.