I love a good landscape photograph, but it is not the only way to show love. While I am no photographer (I just happen to own one of the highest quality cameras), I am always looking to learn about new ways to capture the essence of that moment.
I’m guilty of this too. I recently found myself in a situation where I had to make a photographic portrait of someone I didn’t know. It was a bit tricky because I didn’t want to over do it with the bright lights, but I was looking for something a little more intimate than just a landscape. I ended up shooting the entire time I was with the person and making more than one portrait.
I took some of my best shots with my Canon EOS 550D, using the flash as a fill light, but I also used a tripod to help me get the most detail from the light. I went through a few options to find the one that would work best for me. To start I went with a little manual focus on the camera. The biggest problem with manual focus is that you need to know what you are focusing on.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “I want that look” or “It needs just a little more definition”. The problem is that they are usually wrong. Manual focus is a great tool for getting the right focus; but it also limits your creativity because it forces you to decide which elements of the image to focus on.
I had a similar problem with myself. I was a photographer for over 20 years and my specialty was landscapes and architecture. I often used manual focus because I felt its the best way to get the absolute best image. I found, however, that using manual focus to “get the right focus” is more like an art form than a science. To me it was like watching a magician while he performed.
Art photography has always been somewhat subjective. You can only make so many photographs with exact focus. In fact, the way we often deal with this is we put a piece of paper down in front of the camera so we can “look” at it to see the exact focus. It is actually a rather subjective process.
I think this is one of the reasons we need to take a bit of a step back and look at the basic principles of photography as they apply in our world. When we’re shooting pictures we’re not making a photograph. We’re making a picture. The same is true in creating artwork. We have a tendency to focus on details such as the shape of the letters or an image of a clock rather than focusing on what the overall picture is.
Photographic artists don’t have this problem. To create great compositions, they have to think about the overall picture. They have to come up with the overall composition and the meaning of it rather than being concerned about the “details”.
This is why I like digital design tools like InDesign. I’ve used InDesign to create the cover art for a book. It’s a great tool, especially because it’s so intuitive and lets you see what your design will look like before you start designing. The art director I work with has the background to draw the cover image, and he’s very good at it.
I have to admit that I’ve been using InDesign for a few years now, and its a great tool for graphic design in general (and illustration too). I like inDesign because it lets you quickly test out designs, and a quick way to see how a finished page looks before you commit to it. I personally prefer to spend hours on an illustration without having to worry about my actual design.