My New Camera

Well, I’ve been using my Lumix micro four thirds camera for a few months now, the experience has been for the most part positive. That said, I have had a couple of things that haven’t been perfect either. The Constant Exposure setting doesn’t work well. When you turn it on, it them lags extremely badly on the screen and when you try to set exposure in low light it acts glitchy and jumps around. You cannot shoot night work with it on for instance. The other thing that isn’t ideal is that if you want to turn on the histogram while you shoot it isn’t responsive enough to use for reference.

So far those things are the biggest complaint I have and this isn’t really a deal breaker. I would really like for the histogram to be useful to me but truthfully I never had it before so I can get by without it now I guess. I never shot with my dslr in liveview mode so I can live without these things.

Make Art For You First

The bottom line is, if you don’t connect with your work because you’re trying to satisfy some other formula, you are doing it wrong. I’ve finally gotten away from that way of thinking. I used to worry a lot about what others would think.That way of thinking is completely destructive to creativity. I no longer try to satisfy anyone but me.

Judges in a competition always want to see detail in shadows for instance. They lose their minds if they can’t see it, they can’t handle mystery in an image. I have heard comments to this issue a lot over the years. I heard it just recently regarding an image I am placing in an exhibition. I like shadows, I learned when shooting live music that shadows have to be shadows sometimes, and I like it.

Decide On Your Subject And Feature It.

When presented with a large area of intense interest, I tend to try and show too much and therefore lose the subject I’m trying to feature in the first place. Peyto Lake and for that matter, many places in the Canadian Rockies are truly breathtaking! At first I was taking a pano and trying to include way too much. Grand vistas are actually very hard for that reason. When I finally had a chance to think about it, I decided that the main subject was, after all, the lake.

Gear Doesn't Matter

“People think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

The above quote, in my mind is so correct. I hear so much talk about techniques and gear and I think people are missing the point of quality photography in so many ways. The Masters used gear that was far beneath what we have today and yet produced high quality work that we still value today. They didn’t have the lightning like frame rates, the ISO capabilities, the dynamic range or auto focus to name only a few things, yet they managed some of the best work that has stood the test of time.

Any camera of any brand today will more than suffice to make high quality images and yet so many of us can’t get away from looking toward that next camera or something new being released. I used to carry a heavy bag of lenses around with me, you never know when I might need that one lens, right? The one that I used once or twice a year. Did that bag of gear help me to make better images? Yes and no. What I found is that even with all those lenses I still had my favourites that got used the majority of the time yet I still carried all that weight around “just in case”.

After a trip to the UK, my wife and I decided to lighten things up a bit. We aren’t getting any younger and all that weight while traveling is not fun. We swapped our heavy Nikon lenses for much lighter and smaller Lumix gear. Are there differences and trade-offs? Sure but nothing that would stop us from shooting what we want to. The gear is just a bag of tools, the real artistic part of photography comes from us and our abilities to use those tools.