Slow Down Your Photography

Slow Down Your Photography

by William Lulow

One thing the digital revolution has done is to speed up the image capture process. With a good DSLR, one can take literally hundreds of shots with the hope that at least one will turn out to be the image that one wants. And, that’s the mentality that digital photography carries with it. Just shoot enough and one is bound to be good.

Any good photographer knows this is simply nonsense! If you take a hundred exposures at the same setting, of the same subject, with the same lighting, they will all look the same. Unless there is some thought to what one is doing, the same mistakes will just be duplicated.

Better to THINK about what you are doing BEFORE you go out and capture hundreds of images. There are still some photographers out there who favor film over digital for this very reason. Shooting film, especially sheet film, slows down the shooting process due to the many steps involved in making the picture. If you shoot large-format film, you have to make sure the exposure is correct (usually with a light meter), double check the composition and the focus, load film, check conditions again to make sure nothing has changed in the scene, pull the slide, trip the shutter, replace the slide and store the film holder. This is not exactly your basic “point-and-shoot” experience.

With all this said, it is still possible to use digital media and slow the process down to where your thought process is still paramount. Think of your camera, whatever it is, as a large-format view camera. Put it on a tripod (which gives the image extra stability). Just the act of mounting the camera on a tripod slows down the process a bit. Use the camera’s built in electronic level device. This will help you slow down the process even further. Think about filtering your scene. Learn what filters can do to enhance the effects of your scene’s lighting from one of my many blog articles on the subject. Think about shooting in original B&W instead of converting your color images in Photoshop. These are things that will slow down the process of photographing a scene and force you to think more about what you want to capture.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. I do a lot of work in a music venue that requires shooting in extremely low light. So, I set my camera’s controls accordingly. At the end of each show, the club’s owner always asks to have his picture taken with the musicians. In order to provide a decent shot of everyone after the performance, I change all my settings and use my on-camera flash rig. Because I have thought about this many times and have executed it many times, I have the technique down pat. So, I really only need one or two exposures to get the shot at the end. The owner calls me the “one shot wonder,” and he loves the prints I give him on my next visit. I can do this in “one shot” because I’ve practiced it literally dozens of times. I have thought about how to do it effectively and come up with the proper way to do it.

Here’s the shot of the band in action:

Two very different lighting situations, but each thought out way before the shoot.

Lately, I have done several portraits for which I had an image already in my mind. I am always trying to bring my photography to approximate, as closely as possible, what I see in my mind’s eye. Isn’t that what most photographers are striving for? So, this was a shot of a couple for their 50th wedding anniversary. I was going clear across country for this shot and I couldn’t take a lot of studio equipment with me. I packed two portable strobes. One I knew I was going to use as an accent light. The other, my portable on-camera rig. I knew what the location looked like although I hadn’t been there in years. I wanted the couple in front of their recognizable, red front door. I didn’t bring any light stands, so I asked someone to hold the accent light just where I wanted it. Here is the shot:

You can see the effect of the highlight camera left. The shot came out exactly as I had imagined it.

So, the whole point of this is that if you slow down your picture taking and think about what kind of image you want to make, you will be much happier with your results.