At any rate, what I really want to say is that there is no such thing as a "self-taught" photographer.
We'll make that claim. I will make that claim, I have made that claim, but we are all liars.
You learn certain things on your own. Generally you learn the basics on your own & you experiment & pick up new tricks along the way.
The thing is, the truth is, that if you really get into photography that means you have photographer friends. And that's a pretty important thing, because they are really the ones who teach you the trade.
It's a communal thing & good photographers are always more than willing to tell other people how they pulled a shot off. This is the equipment you need, this is how you do this & this is how you do that. This is what you want to buy & congratulations, now you know how to make that certain image.
Back in the days of film, you carried a "dope sheet" around. A little notebook that you used to record how you took your pictures when you were trying to learn how to do something new, because, unlike with digital camera's you couldn't instantly see your results.
Snipers carry a "dope sheet" with them as well, & yes, it's also to record shots. I'm not sure if that language is borrowed from snipers or if it's borrowed from photographers.
It could go either way & I really do think that photographers needed dope sheets long before snipers became a regular part of the military.
Today you use dope sheets for things like graduations, but they are generally digital-audio files & are used to match the graduate up with the proper picture.
That picture of Culver City, it looks cross-processed to me. That was a technique that I read about & a Brazilian photographer named Marco talked me through. After he told me how to do it I told a few friends & we all went on a cross-processing kick.
That's how you learn photography. You hear about a new trick, someone helps you figure it out & then you play with it until you have it down.
Cross-processing is taking a positive slide film & developing it in negative chemistry to turn the slide into a negative. Generally you used E-6 slide film in C-41 chemistry & because of that you got more extreme colors & higher grains with a greater amount of contrast. In order to pull it off, you need to over expose just a little, depending on the light.
You never, EVER, use Kodachrome because that is just going to fuck-up your chemistry & besides, you can't buy it anymore anyway, they took it away & Paul Simon is pissed.
If you didn't do it right, you end up with too much green & everything sort of looks like Saving Private Ryan...or Domino, which was cross-processed & not really done right.
But back in the day, it was a little more complicated & you had to know your chemistry & your equipment & not just a computer program.
Which is why no one is really a self taught photographer. The little tricks you picked up you learned from your friends & the ones that you discovered on your own you just turned around & shared with the group.
You needed an "eye," but what was more important is that you needed to know how things worked.
Now there was a lot of science behind what eventually made photography. Like everything else you can play the connections game. This discovery lead to that, which lead to that, which lead to that, from the birth of fire right down to the CMOS.
I'm not going to get into all of that.
I'm a self taught photographer & I really don't think you are talking about photography until you arrive at the birth of a negative.
William Talbot probably died young. Back then photography killed. You entered the trade & you died of cancer. The chemistry was far from safe & people still ate in the dark room & used their hands to touch shit.
There was a LOT of silver involved in photography back in the day & there is still a LOT of silver involved in chemical processing today.
The thing is there isn't nearly as much, but every photo lab still has an SRU, a Silver Recovery Unit, that collects the old silver in a safe fashion so you're not pouring it back into the water supply when you change chemistry.
If you ever go antique shopping & you look at the really old pictures of people you don't know, pick one up & move it around in the light, that gleam you see is silver.
You can kinda sorta replicate it today. Take a digital image & over saturate it with as much cyan as possible. Then over saturate it again with a much cyan as possible. Then desaturate the image, make it Black & White & level it off.
You aren't going to get the same shine, but you will get the same contrast & over-all texture.
Sometimes doing that makes the difference between a Black & White image & an image that's Black & White & clearly taken on a digital camera.
If you don't know what you are looking for, you won't see the difference, if you do know what you're looking for it makes all the difference in the world.
Black & White, in the trade, is called "Monochrome" & it's been around for about 150 years. There is also "Cyanotype," which produced the sepia tone that everyone associates with "old fashioned."
The difference is a chemical called "fixer." That chemical made all the difference in the world, at least back in the day before photoshop.
Now that's not the most accurate way to explain it, but chances are, you really don't care.
If you don't add fixer your image will turn brown & fade over time. If you don't put it in the fixer the right way you will get "fixer spots" which are ugly brown spots. And if you don't leave it in for long enough, congratulations, you will eventually have a sepia image.
Most of the time, when you are antiquing & you find an old fashioned sepia image, it means that the photographer fucked up...big time. It was Black & White when he gave it to the client & it turned sepia pretty damn fast.
Monochrome was always more popular than cyanotype & finding an actual cyanotype image is rare. The sepia that you are used to seeing is usually just bad processing.
When you replicate sepia images, you are replicating bad photography to make your image look old fashioned.
This is replicating cyanotype:
Anyway, moving on...
Photography is easy to grasp. You have a lens & that lens has an aperture, sort of like your eye...or an asshole.
When you see the numbers on the lens, that's the range. The wider open it is, the more light you let in & the shorter your depth-of-field is. You are in focus, the person behind you is not. The more closed it is, the less light you let in, & the more depth-of-field you have. You are in focus & everything in the background is as well.
That is the lens.
The other part of the camera is called the shutter.
Butter fingers.
Chances are that you didn't realize that you could bend it back into place & ended up sending your camera out for repair. Or at least taking it back into the shop so Matt & I could do it for you.
The shutter controls how much time you expose your film to the light that is going into the lens. 1/6000 is hardly any time at all. 30 seconds is a lot of time & you can probably only hold it still at about 1/60 every time. 1/40 if you know how to hold it & 1/30 if you are decaffeinated.
That has been the basic principal since the turn of the century. Before that, guess what, you only had one shutter, one f-stop & your client had to hold still for a very long time & you had to use a shit-ton of light.
That's why no one smiled in pictures back in the day.
That's also why most of the pictures you see from that era are really pictures of dead family members, because, you know, corpses don't move.
That's a flash bulb & in the 20s & 30s when photography became truly mobile, you used a lot of them. They were good for about a single picture because you still needed a fuck-ton of light.
Which brings us to film.
You notice all the flashbulbs on the table?
That picture was taken with 35mm film. It was a new concept back than that not only allowed the photographer to burn through picture after picture, but allowed him to do it with a hell of a lot less light. So after all the old timers used up their flash bulbs, he was able to keep shooting & get that famous picture of a president drinking a martini.
Back in the last days of Kodachrome, AGFA sort of really sucked major monkey balls. You never used it.
That's also why, following WWII, color film really took off in the US.
Despite what men will tell you...or nice girlfriends, size does matter.
That picture of the Challenger blowing up was taken at the airport with a large format camera. The entire image, well, you really never see it.
Another great innovation in photography.
The entire image has the airport in it & the explosion is small & in the corner. The launch was delayed & delayed & the photographer that took it was on his way home. He snapped the picture with a large format camera.
He had an enormous negative.
Size matters.
The size of that negative gave him the ability to crop to a small portion of the image & produce that famous picture.
If he had taken it with 35mm film, he would have had nothing but grains.
If he had taken it with 35mm positive, slide film, he would have had fewer grains, better color, but the image would have still sucked.
Think of it as pixels today. You really don't need more than 4 megapixels, but the more you have the more you can fuck with your pictures which is great for the Photoshop crowd that doesn't know how to use reflectors, strobes, & lenses to get the right image without bringing it into a program & destroying a lot of the resolution in the process.
Those are also the people that use a lot of sepia & vignettes when they turn their pictures into their clients.
Or, if you are outside, you can use a wide angle under 20mm, a long lens hood that shows in your image & get the same effect.
Or, if you have a Nikon with a 1.5 CMOS, you can attach that lens to a full-frame body & get a vignette.
You don't need to put everything into photoshop.
I'm just saying, there are other ways.
OR, you can set your body up on a tripod & use a wired release & actually get the movement of the stars. About 3 minutes is all you need to really make it great, but 30 seconds will give you nice streaks as well.
It's really that easy.
But now for our final bit in the evolution of photography. It's actually an unforeseen error, a miscalculation.
In 1998 Canon released a top-of-the line professional 35mm camera called the EOS 3.
The thing is, you had to have dark eyes for it to really work & 90% of the professional photographers in the world, at the time, all had blue eyes.
It's one of those weird historical things. Most of the gunslingers in the wild west also had blue eyes & most of the snipers through Vietnam had blue eyes.
Makes you wonder.
The auto-eye focus technology had to go through more than a few adaptations & refinements for it to be a feature that professional photographers actually used.
I'll leave you with this:
Actually, no, I'll leave you with this:
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