But is it Art?

Thank you very much for looking! For the past year-ish I have used an old Canon Rebel XT that I got used off of Ebay and two relatively low-end lenses a friend gave to me. A few things were shot with some nicer, borrowed lenses but mostly I have used nothing too fancy. I do hope to upgrade sometime soon because I’d like to be able to shoot at a higher ISO and with the “proper” lenses to get the depth of field I want. If there is one thing that frustrates me with my current set up, it’s controlling the depth of field. If there is another, it’s camera shake.

The older stuff from Europe and elsewhere was mostly shot on a Fujifilm Finepix S1500, which was a nice introduction to manual shooting before moving to an SLR. It had a beautiful macro mode. Some of the super early pictures from my first US tour and some of the momentary candid stuff from Europe was shot on a little pocket Canon Powershot somethingorother. I learned a lot with just those.

My opinion is that a good composition will carry a photograph despite any flaws in image quality. Also, if you go used, you do not have to spend a huge amount of money to get started. My used SLR body cost less than the Fuji did new.

one question (i’m not a photographer, just curious), how do you know what to take pictures of? all your stuff on here looks real unearthly.— templeseven

Many thanks! In my case I started by taking a whole lot of pictures of whatever I thought could possibly be interesting to see or could form an interesting composition. After a lot of coming home to discover that very little of what I shot actually worked, I learned from my mistakes and figured some things out. If you try everything, eventually something will stick, and in the digital world all of your failures are free. Once I knew something worked, I’d go and try it again in different ways. A good composition will carry a photo that is flawed in a lot of other ways.

A lot of it comes down to a matter of style and approach because photography can be “about” many things, i.e. making the ordinary look interesting, finding subtle emotion in a specific moment, juxtapositions, texture, etc. One thing that I find works for me is to divorce whatever I am shooting from its context and try and show it in a new light. I tend to see the composition first rather than the object. I look for the light and the shadow, the texture, the emotional connections without looking at the thing, because the photograph will be of those, not the thing. Sometimes I have an idea for an image and then have to go and find or set up the objects and lighting to make it happen, which is more difficult but rewarding when it works. Whenever I shoot people or a scene, I approach it a little differently and try and find a nice composition and then wait for the unguarded moments in between.

I have a hard time finding things to shoot sometimes. I find the “here’s an object I had around the house with narrow depth-of-field” type of thing rather limited, so I try to avoid that. But I find that if I am patient, a photo will walk its way in front of the lens.