How To Become A Good Photographer
By William Lulow
Note: Here’s another article written about six months ago. I’m currently in the process of writing a memoir of my life as a photographer and this subject has come up more than once. So it bears repeating here. Some of these kinds of pieces deserve to be repeated because many of us lose sight of the process of becoming great at anything.
I was watching a video about the great guitarist Eddie Van Halen and he was talking about how he wanted to get a certain sound from a guitar. He was recounting how he had studied other guitarists and become familiar with what they were doing. Then, when he understood how electric guitars worked, he decided he would try to build one for himself that would give him the exact sound he heard in his head but had not heard from any commercially available instrument. So, he began to experiment. He got a cheap guitar body and began to try to hollow it out with a chisel so that he could install some electrical pickups that would translate his music into sound. He made a lot of “trial by error” attempts and in the process, ruined a number of knobs and other electrical gear until he arrived at something that approached what he was hearing.
This kind of learning, a typical “hands-on” approach that includes making many mistakes before actually “getting it” is the stuff that creates real understanding and eventually leads to genius.
The same story is told by many who have become successful in whatever they do. They learn the intricacies of their craft, whatever it may be, by trying different things out so that they can see for themselves, exactly how things work and why. Much of this can be taught by competent teachers, but there is no substitute for experimentation so that you can see, first hand, what happens when mistakes are made and how to correct them.
In my own case, once I decided to become a studio photographer, I studied every book I could get my hands on. I pored over the work of the great photographers both past and present and examined their images closely, looking for subtle tone differences or where the lighting was placed, how the shadows fell on the subject as well as things like camera angles and approaches. I also worked with several well-known studio photographers until I understood how they worked and why they set their studios up the way they did. How they used light and what kinds of lights they used.
Then, I would try to emulate the same effects they got. I went through literally thousands of rolls of film (which meant shooting them, developing them, drying them and printing them) until I arrived at a formula for consistency that I could depend on to give me the results I was looking for EVERY TIME. I literally lived in my studio and darkroom 24/7. I actually built a darkroom right in my bedroom. And those were the days of chemicals that often didn’t smell so good.
And, I made mistakes. When I was learning about color film and color balance, I literally threw away hundreds of frames until I understood what mistakes I was making and how to correct them. As a matter of fact, when I was just starting in on my photographic education, I worked for several months shooting, developing and printing any number of photographs and trying to collect a portfolio of images that I felt good enough to share with others. Once I thought I had a couple dozen prints made, I decided to take them to a local photographer in Denver, where I was living at the time, and asked him what he thought. He was kind enough to give me some time, pulled me aside and without making any comments about my work, said “Now let me show you how to make really good prints.” This was devastating enough, but it taught me a hard lesson. If you are in a position to influence someone else’s work, it would be nice if you could teach them what good quality is without deflating their egos. This is something I have always strived to do during my teaching career. Sometimes being blunt is necessary, but it is not always the way to teach.
So, the moral of the story is that it takes experimentation to learn anything. One has to be so immersed in whatever the subject, that he or she begins to understand its every nuance. Then, when tried, results can be assessed and true learning takes place. Most great artists started by emulating great art and from that experience the true knowledge of how these artists achieved the results they wanted reveals itself.
The two images I have selected here represent a kind of culmination of things learned during my long career. One is traditional portraiture, complete with crisp lighting and great expression made in the studio. The other has all the elements of a great portrait, but shot “on location” during a performance where I couldn’t control the lighting and background, but I could take full advantage of what was there, including the right angle from which to shoot. This I can directly attribute to my study of lighting, backgrounds, exposures and patience to achieve just the right expression.
