I’m planning a photo play day this weekend, weather permitting. In and of itself, this is a good thing. Though, I’m going to take photos for free to use on a site for a client. I know that it is not generally a good idea to give my time away. But the photos will fill in part of a larger project I’ve taken on this year. That’s my rationalization and I’m sticking with it.

I probably won’t use my very best shots on the site but keep those for my own work. It’s my time after all. But even so, my second best will be much better than the CD full of truly bad shots the client gave me to work with.

I don’t know why people think that just buying a good camera will make them good photographers. Even though most current cameras have excellent auto-focus and very clever light metering, sharp, properly exposed photos don’t translate into interesting photos. And poor photos of beautiful scenery are still poor photos.

The person who took the original shots I’ll be retaking has absolutely no understanding of what makes a decent photograph. Most of the pictures have no single subject. They are just shots pointed in a general direction. If there is a focal point, it’s dead center in the picture. A basic understanding of the rule of thirds would have helped immensely. Even the simple knowledge that a photo needs a subject to hold any interest at all would have made a huge difference. A quick and judicial crop can often help the center focal point problem. But if there is no focal point at all or it’s so tiny as to be lost in the background we’ve all wasted our time.

Great photography is a blend of art and science with some natural talent and years of practice blended in. Competent outdoor photography is mostly a matter of learning and practicing a few reasonably simple rules. In this case, competent would have been just fine.

Since this particular website will be seen by many local businesses, I don’t want to lower the quality of my product buy using poor photos. And since the site has expanded well beyond the scope of the original proposal it’s already going to cost appreciably more than estimated. Hence my donated time and mild rant. But scope creep is another subject.

Possibly related:

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 9:40 am and is filed under Design Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.