JPG Magazine: Stories: How To: How to shoot anything

How To

How to shoot anything

By Greg Summers

27 September 2007

Before you start reading this rambling - just remember when I say you, I am really saying I - as in do I ever but I started writing this in you so it is going to stay that way. I came back to say this so you'd know this is a rant to me. I forget almost everything I am about to say from time to time

I'd like to tell you I know secrets but I don't. They are hidden away and out in the open for everyone to see. So - first - how many of you always (not sometimes) use a lens hood. If you don't, you could be losing 25% of the clarity of your image. How many of you use a tripod when ever possible or is it just too much trouble. How many of you use a cable release and how many of you keep going to the same places a hundred times or maybe a thousand until you know where every tree is an every angle the sun comes up and use every lens you have until you can imagine without looking through it what you will see.

Photography is not so much what you know, it's how you use it and if you use it. It's a lot of hard work and getting up and going out when everyone else is asleep. The light changes an hour after it's up. It changes before it's up and in 5 minutes and fifteen minutes and are you there.

For 6 or 7 years I got every morning before the sun came up and went out. I'd get in my car with growing bag of equipment and look at the sky and decide right then and there where I'd go. Boulder Colorado makes that hard because it offers so much and indecision is a killer because if I don't my butt going, I won't end up anywhere.

I wasn't right all the time either. But as i went, i began to learn where I wanted to be when the moon set was at sunrise and almost full. I remembered when the leaves changed and when the air was still the reflections I'd get and i shot so damned much I just had to learn how to use the camera.

So, about the equipment and the hood and all that - it is vitally important to the shot and so is the camera and all its settings but like a piano player we have to know it so well, what we do becomes instinct (I finally changed from you to we). So, when I began to shoot seriously, I bought a Nikon F100 and set it manual except when I was trying get Canada Geese taking off and learned to see light as the camera did. I didn't always like what the camera saw, but what could I do because the camera certainly wasn't going to make any changes in for me and the film was going to limited in it's capacity unlike the human eye, so in spite of all my moaning and groaning, I had to learn.

One day, I sat in my back room and threw away 9,000 slides - and in film terms that's a lot of slides - a lot of really lousy photos that I spent a lot of money on. But when you're in love with what you're doing and you've got the money (or credit card) and think you are after something non one else can have, it's so much easier.

And that's what i was - in love. I bought and read every camera magazine and every last one had something in it that i could use. A little tidbit that made it possible for me to see differently than I had the day before. I read an article about lens hoods and after that I had one on every lens all the time - not just pat of the time - all of the time and I won't buy a camera or a lens that i can't put one on. I bought a tripod because some pro said it was the one thing that would improve my photography the most.

Now, I had this idea of shooting that involved holding a camera to my eye and clicking away like the photographers in movies - click, click, click but once i got a tripod, I slowed down. I had to and then I felt naked and unstable without it. Guess what?! They were right. I think it is is because I slowed down and because i didn't have to hold anything and then there was the cable release so I didn't touch the camera and I began to see tilted horizons because now, I looked through a window.

The Nikon F100 is a wonderful camera and it began to feel like a musical instrument in my hand. Like a musician, i played color instead of notes and I hardly had to look to see where my fingers went to change a setting. That's when I began to notice light. The camera became transparent and all i saw was light and I began to figure out that the light had to be soft and even. I threw away all my flowers that had blown out noon light in them and began to hide the flowers from the sun until the sun was soft and kind to the flowers and the detail in the petals came out.

I began to learn the rhythms of the world around me and I anticipated where the moon would be and when it would be full. I began to remember and one night I had this thought about finding a very beautiful thing each day and bringing it home.

One afternoon, I shot at irises and went through almost 500 exposures. I spilled water on the table and when I was done, I had learned more about irises than I ever expected to know. I had never seen the designs and lines and dimensions of the iris and I fell in love with them just as I had fallen in love with roses and the moon and reflections.

So, if I can say anything, it isn't about the equipment although you know it is. What I can say and recommend is to fall in love everyday. I see most of you do, I see it in your images as if I was looking through your eyes and I see a new vision.

With love, I am persistent and excited and determined. I am willing to get up and put layers and layers on when it is cold enough to make me shiver and I am determined enough to be alone and lonely while I wait for the colors of a sunrise or a warm light on a rose. I am willing to carry my tripod up steep slopes and make sure I don't forget the hoods or filters or cables. Yet, there have been times i was so focused on bring everything, I forgot the one thing that made it all go - film. So, after watching a blue heron stand silently only 20 feet from me with 12 dead batteries and all the film i needed, I determined to go through a check list before I went out.

I think it did me some good to just watch although that would have been one great shot - you'll have to trust me on that.

Report a Problem

VOTE: Should this story be published in JPG?