16
I teach a four week online class with the BPSOP, and I also conduct my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops around the planet. What’s the single thread that connects all my fellow photographers to one another? It’s the fact that the vast majority began their love for this creative institution after the advent of the digital camera. Virtually every month , I try to educate these students of mine that you don’t need Lightroom or Photoshop to make good photos. I’m not saying there not great tools, just that you don’t need them to make a good photo.
I recently had a student ask me if I bracketed my photos and combined them in HDR to get the “correct exposure”. This is a clear sign that validates my thinking…she had been told that there was a correct exposure….What????? First of all there’s no such thing as a correct exposure. every picture I’ve ever taken had a different “correct exposure”. How can there be a universal correct exposure? Beat’s the hell out of me. I guess it’s just another one of those things that lie just above my pay grade.
My exposures are based on what I’m feeling at the point of creation. It has solely to do with the message I want to send to the viewer. Bright and sunny, or dark and dramatic…it just all depends…doesn’t it????
Second, I’ve been shooting for forty-four years and most of that was when you bracketed and choose the best exposure. There was no other way to do it; at least when I was shooting color. HDR was the initials of a girl I went out with!!!
Ok, read my lips…YOU DON’T NEED HDR TO CREATE A CORRECT EXPOSURE. IN FACT, YOU DON’T NEED HDR AT ALL!!!
In the above photo, I was shooting a project for United Airlines. One of the toughest assignments I’ve ever had. Five weeks in Hawaii shooting pretty much whatever I wanted..oh the horror!!!
We were invited to take some photos of a popular Luau at the hotel we were staying at. My assistant was standing right next to me giving me readings from my Minolta One-Degree spot meter. Yes, it actually reads just one degree of reflected light at a time. I want to know everything about the light and when it changes. It’s why I never use the meter in my Mark III after crossing over to the digital world. It’s just not as accurate as I want it.
A new reading every few seconds.
I wanted to maintain the aperture, so my assistant kept yelling out the changes in shutter speeds., until it was too dark to show the fire-eater and the environment around him, and too slow to stop the action. I was able to achieve this on one piece of film, and one exposure.
Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com, and follow me on Instagram www.instagram.com/barabanjoe. Check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot me sometime.
JoeB
Well for sure you don’t need HDR when shooting people, especially it it’s a portrait.
I’m interested in understanding why with a shot like this you’d prioritised aperture choice over shutter speed.
Valeriano,
For the simple reason that I didn’t want anything else in focus, and I wanted to be up close and personal…In those days I was shooting Kodachrome 25.
JoeB
I understand.
Thus you were still shooting at a relative slow shutter speed despite having had used a wide aperture to isolate the subject because of the 25 ISO. Why haven’t you used a faster film? As a Velvia 50?
Valeriano,
At the time of this photo, I don’t think Velvia had a firm hold in the industry. When it became tougher to process Kodachrome, I started using Fuji Film. I tried Fuji 50 (as it was called), but the color was un-realistic…too cartoony for me. Besides the fact that it was a terrible film to use on people because it rendered flesh tones too red.
Btw, at ASA 50, it was only one stop faster than Kodachrome.
My favorite film was Velvia and I started using it exclusively.
JoeB