The best camera is the one you have.
The best subject is the one you’re shooting.
I’ve been sick lately. Really sick. For about a month and a half. It’s been miserable and absolutely devastating to my ability to engage in creative endeavors. I also have this new camera I’m desperate to get to know and play around with. So what do I do?
Well, I leave the house. I don’t go far. Just to the backyard. There are a lot of things in the backyard.
The trick to taking good photographs is to take photographs. I like to look through the viewfinder because it forces me to see what the camera is going to see and teaches me to see all the things in rectangular images with clearly-defined edges. The “things” include both the things themselves and the negative spaces they leave behind; the foreground and the background; the colors and the shadows. If the “things” don’t all work together, you don’t have a good shot.
There’s a limited amount you can do in post-processing. I have a lot of fun taking a shot that has a lot of “things” I like and a few I really don’t and turning it into something I like throughout. I prefer to do this by manipulating light, not content. AI makes manipulating content too easy, I think. My photojournalistic background screams in protest at the idea of manipulating content. I barely got that side of me calmed down enough to manipulate light; we’re not going to start deleting unsightly bits outright.
(I’m not talking about using the “heal” tool to clean up a dust mote on the lens that’s ruining an otherwise perfectly blue sky. I’ve done that with very little guilt. I’m talking about using generative AI to eliminate an entire…say…trash truck off a street.)
To reiterate: Take pictures. Not necessarily lots of pictures, but enough that you start seeing what’s good. It’s easy to take a good picture somewhere stunningly beautiful. It’s a lot harder to take one somewhere random and boring. And the challenge is what it’s all about, isn’t it?
Yndiri Creates 
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