Have you ever looked at the images other photographers are making and just thought, “How the heck are they doing that? My images don’t look like that. Is it the camera? Is it something magic in post-production? I don’t get it!” You can nail the technical stuff and get it all “right” and still not make your images look the way you want them to. And if they don’t look that way, they won’t feel that way. ImageWork is an 18-lesson video series about the aesthetics of photography. In other words, what decisions can we make to make images look the way they do? There are a lot of answers to that question. Some of them involve depth of field, and some come from our choice of shutter speed or the way we use our optics or where we put the camera (this is a big one!). Others have to do with our choices in the digital darkroom. But most of the time it’s the combination of all those things and more. And it’s never a result of following the manual. One of the problems with learning photography is that we too often start with the technical stuff. We need that. But it’s not a very creative approach. Your photographs can come out of the camera technically perfect—and perfectly bland. So can mine.
