Contradictions in Photography Advice
The third law of photodynamics: For every piece of loudly-spoken advice, there is a piece of equal and opposite counter-advice.
It’s natural for humans to consider the first way they learned something to be the “right” way, but the more time you spend paying attention to “How the pros do it,” the more you realize how different everyone’s approaches are. For every pundit or blogger making the case for some photographic approach or philosophy or technique, there’s another one making the opposite case. Part of the enjoyment of photography is figuring out how many ways there are to do things, hearing all of the contradictory advice, and making sense of it all for you and your approach.
I got thinking about all of the contradictory advice I’ve taken in over the past few years, and decided to collect the points and counterpoints into one place. Hopefully my own opinion on these points is not obvious — I’m at least a little bit conflicted on pretty much all of them.
To Crop Or Not To Crop?
Point: Never crop. Cropping is cheating. Get it right in camera. Zoom with your feet. If you have to crop later, that only means you blew the composition.
Counterpoint: It’s almost impossible to “get it right” in camera every time — the real world gets in the way. That pelican on a piling out in the harbor and you’re only sporting the one prime? Zooming with your feet isn’t an option, so it’s all about the perfect crop in post. Modern sensors with gobs of resolution can give you the range to crop tightly with no appreciable loss of quality.
ISO What You Did There
Point: Noise is the enemy — it can ruin any image, and one of the most important goals is to keep ISO as low as possible. If that means carrying a tripod so you can do a longer exposure rather than crank the ISO, then so be it. Try never to go above ISO 640, but 100 is best.
Counterpoint: Sure, noise isn’t great, but it’s generally not as noticeable to the viewing public as you might think. Even without the help of noise-reduction in post, you can probably get away with much higher ISO values than you thought. Plus, each year’s crop of sensors produce less noise at the same ISO values. If you’re still sticking to 640, have you tried 1200, or even 3200 with your most recent mirrorless? You might be surprised at how low the visible noise actually is. But there’s an even more important game changer: The De-Noise tool in Lightroom and Classic work miracles. Give yourself permission to shoot at ISO 6400, then to de-noise in post if you must. Cheating? Only you can answer that one, but it is pretty incredible. Giving yourself permission to work with higher ISOs means more freedom to skip the tripod. The image below was shot at ISO 12800 , then denoised in Lightroom.
Tripod vs Hand-held
Point: Tripods are essential. Use a tripod whenever possible, even in full daylight. Tripods help you slow down, meditate on the composition, and think more carefully about your shot. Tripods help you get the framing just right. And they’re useful for more than just night shots and long exposures — if you want to do focus stacking or other multi-shot work, they’re essential.
Counterpoint: Tripods get in the way and slow you down — a hassle (and extra weight) you can do without. You’ll get more keepers without a tripod than with one (because you’ll be more free in the field). ISO noise handling is improving with every generation of camera and editing app, which means you can get away with a shorter hand-held exposure with higher ISO, and de-noise it later. Skipping the tripod makes you more free in the field, and it shows in your images.
All-Manual vs Partial-Manual
Point: The whole point of using a proper camera rather than a smartphone is to have full control, and that means having full control of exposure settings, rather than letting the camera/computer figure it out for you. PASM dials are for people who don’t want to make their own creative decisions. If you’re not doing full-manual, may as well stick to your (admittedly amazing) smartphone.
Counterpoint: You’re moving fluidly in the field, and don’t have time to make all of those careful exposure decisions on-the-fly. Besides, why spend all this bread on a supercomputer of a camera if you’re not going to let it compute? But there’s a middle path to consider: Aperture and shutter speed are artistic decisions, based on optical realities that will never change. But ISO is just a side effect of current technology, and it keeps getting better. Plus, ISO choices can be corrected for in post, and don’t affect the creative work in the same way. So yes, let’s keep aperture and shutter speed fully manual, but there’s no reason not to use auto-ISO to achieve correct exposure (remember you can still set a maximum for auto-ISO). So… go “partial manual” — manual SS and aperture, auto-focus and auto-ISO.
Minimum vs Maximum Editing
Point: Edit as little as possible. Stay true to the history of your craft, and respect the photograph as a teller of truth. Be sure your images are honest and true to the experience anyone would have had if they had been there. Above all, never add or remove things in post. Just because photography is an art form doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want — it’s an art form that is constrained by a historical commitment to truth-telling (yes there are historical exceptions we can point to, but by and large, people believe photographs to this day because of their historical role as truth tellers). Your maxim should be: “Do not deceive.”
Counterpoint: Photography is an art form and that means you get to do whatever you want. Edit freely — remove power lines and distracting figures. Make skin more beautiful than it was in real life. Improve clouds and sunsets. Replace skies if you have to. Stretch mountains, make people skinny, pump up the contrast and vibrance, modify the geometry. The world of possibilities provided by modern editing tools is your oyster — go for it.
Keep Everything vs. Radical Culling
Point: Keep everything you shoot. Storage is cheap. You never know when you might want to return to an older unpublished image and edit it with respect to your current vision. There’s no need to cull — keep it all. Let the back-catalog pile up, who cares?
Counterpoint: No matter how much you delete, you’ll still have too much. Radical culling is key. Keep deleting until it hurts. Optimizing the set of images from a recent shoot to perfection is how you know you’re done editing. What’s the point of keeping duds or near-duplicates? Everything is moving to the cloud, and cloud storage has quotas (which we pay for). Optimize the set you just shot, reduce your storage, be happy.
RAW vs JPG
Point: All of the magic happens in post. We’re moving too fast in the field to be making final decisions about the final look of our images in real time. Always shoot in RAW, and you can make decisions about final appearance later, in post, with maximum flexibility to raise shadows and reduce highlights, adjust the white balance, tweak the tones. If you want to shoot in B&W in the field to help with composition, fine — you can always choose a color Profile (LUT) once you’re home and taking your sweet time with final decisions. “SOOC” is not a brag — it’s an admission.
Counterpoint: Who’s got time for that? Editing requires time we haven’t got. Between in-camera “profiles” and mirrorless “recipes,” we can lock in any look we want in the field, shoot in JPG mode, and drastically reduce the editing time required later. Not all of us are full-time photographers, and not all of us can afford the expense of time that shooting and editing RAW demands.
Zoom vs Prime
Point: Why carry several lenses when you could carry one? You never know what’s around the next corner and you need to be ready for anything. In the time it takes to change a lens, you could miss the shot. Zoom lenses give you options. Compared to several primes, a good zoom lens lets you save weight and bulk, and lets you decide on the fly whether to handle what’s in front of you wide, with lots of context, or tight, or somewhere in between.
Counterpoint: Because it involves extra glass, no zoom will ever be as sharp as a prime lens. And zoom lenses make you lazy. “Zoom with your feet!” should be your motto — get involved in the scene — if you want to control wide vs tight, just walk to where you want to be. And if you can’t get into the perfect position, you can always crop later (with the understanding that you’ll be reducing resolution in the process). Constraints like a fixed focal length are good for creativity — constraints force you to think on your feet, to make do with you have, to adjust and adapt on the fly. Embrace constraints. Plus, primes are lighter, which means more comfort on longer shoots.
Smartphone vs Camera
Point: In case you haven’t noticed, the quality of images coming out of smart phones over the past few years is mind-blowing. In many cases, they’re indistinguishable from what you can get from a proper camera. And even if they are distinguishable, they just look different from — not worse than — images coming from a real camera. And they just keep getting better every year. “The perfect camera is the one you have on you,” and your phone is always on you. Plus, the phone has that perfect trilogy of factors: Camera, apps (for editing and manipulation) and internet access. Which means you can shoot, edit, and post to anywhere right there in the field, right now, completely eliminating the “post” process later. All from the same device. That’s undeniably powerful.
Counterpoint: Yes, smartphone pictures look better every year, but there’s still a lot they can’t do, and so much of what they do do is synthetic and it shows. Every time you snap a phone pic, it’s really taking 10–20 images and compositing them together. The result can look great, but also somewhat fake. And sometimes it goes way over the top — sunset photos in particular often look just terrible on a phone compared to a camera, with the hues artificially pumped up, giving it that “clown puke” look. Then there’s lens choice — picking the just-right lens for a given image is a huge part of the art of photography. Yes, modern phones now come with three built-in lenses, but it’s really not the same as thinking carefully about which of the lenses in your bag will bring the character you’re after for a given image. Smart phones are thin by nature, which means there can never be enough distance between the lens and the sensor to give real depth-of-field. To make up for this insurmountable problem, they fake depth-of-field with “portrait” mode. Which is also getting incrementally better, but still often looks kind of fake. And there’s no (or almost no) control over how much depth you want in the out-of-focus area. Smartphones don’t let you control the bokeh like you would with a real camera. But perhaps the most important difference is one most people don’t think about — bringing a camera up to your eye gets you involved in a scene in a way that looking at a screen can’t do. Using a proper eye piece is a zen thing — it helps you block out the world, slow down, and focus your mind on a composition. It’s just not the same experience with a phone.
Plan everything vs spontaneous and ready
Point: One of the most important differences between taking everyday snapshots and making “real” photographs is intentionality — working mindfully, knowing what shot you intend to achieve. That could mean everything from scoping out locations in advance so you know where the right vantage point is (and then returning there when the weather and the light are just right) to using an app like PhotoPills to know exactly where the moon is going to rise so you can plan your vacation around it. Laying in wait on that one brick wall, waiting for a person in a hat to walk into that one beam of light, then snapping at the decisive moment. Leaving nothing to chance, controlling all the variables — that’s how you execute on a vision.
Counterpoint: Where’s the fun in that? Photography is about catching life as it happens. Never leave the house without a camera. F8 and be there, baby! You never know what life is going to throw at you. Plan for the hike you want to do when you want to do it, then just be ready for opportunities as they come up. Besides, when was the last time everything actually worked the way you planned? Something’s always different, and outings seldom live up to your own expectations, because they were just that — expectations, not reality. Instead, make photography a part of your everyday life, then just go have experiences.
Social-first vs Presentation-first
Point: All eyes are glued to devices, and people spend a ton of their time scrolling through Instagram, Glass, Flickr, Threads, Facebook, Foto, and other platforms. Bazillions of photographers are doing their thing on social sites, and if you’re not there with them, you may as well not be doing it. And it’s not enough to just post — you have to “work” it — interact, don’t be afraid of self-promotion, play the tags game… whatever it takes to rise above the noise and get noticed. Like it or not, social media IS the currency now. It’s either that or learn to live with just a handful of eyeballs ever seeing the work you’ve put so much effort into.
Counterpoint: When people view your work on a screen, you can’t even control the colors — you have no idea what monitor the viewer has or whether they’ve calibrated their displays. Do we really mean to put in all of that work only to have people look at our work on little phones, scrolling past in the blink of an eye? Do we want our work positioned randomly in a chaotic stream (often with ads), or do we want to control the experience? If you show your work in a gallery, or curate your own site, or publish a book, you get to control almost everything — the lighting, the surroundings, the framing, the order, and the size . You have some guarantee that the audience will see your work the way you want it to be seen. Sure, it’s lot more work and money (and possibly luck) to be able to do it old-school, but the rewards are tangible. It’s hard, it’s expensive, and you may have to pound the pavement to get a showing, but “real” photographers are above social media, and shouldn’t have to be bothered with all of its games. It’s all about control.
Print / Don’t print
Point: If you can’t hold a physical print in your hands, are you really experiencing your own work at its fullest potential? The difference between seeing your work on screen vs hanging it on a wall is like night and day — hanging an image you really care about is the culmination of the experience — that’s what it’s all about! The really committed ones invest in a good printer and experiment with papers and inks to achieve a certain look, and all of that is absolutely part of the process. The slightly less-committed ones send their prints out to a service like WhiteWall or Flickr or Social Print Studio so they can bypass the initial investments of money and desk space, and not have to deal with dried out ink cartridges, but they still end up with amazing prints. And by sending out, you can get prints not just on paper, but on acrylic, wood, metal or fabric. Sky’s the limit.
“In my darkroom when I see that print coming in the developer, it’s as if I win the lottery.” -Don McCullin
Counterpoint: Printing is expensive and slow. Images on social media get thousands of views, but only a handful of people will ever see your prints. Besides, who’s got the wall space? Most of us filled our walls years ago, and to hang new ones means taking old ones down… and where do they go? Into the garage to gather dust? They’re almost impossible to resell. Who needs to accumulate more stuff? We’re all producing WAY more images than we could possibly display — why bother with all of the hassle and investment? Just post them on your website or on social and call it a day.
Gear Matters / Doesn’t Matter
Point: Yes it does.
Counterpoint: No it doesn’t.
Both are true, but I’ll just say this: When we think of almost any of the most famous photographers from ‘the canon’ — Henri Cartier Bresson, Vivian Maier, Joel Meyerowitz, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, William Eggleston, Elliot Erwitt… (hard to stop), we have to remind ourselves that all/most of them used gear that was far inferior to the magical glass and incredible sensors and mind-blowing tech being sold today. Pretty much every one of us is using a camera that is far better (from a tech perspective) than was used by history’s most renowned photographers. Are you using your state-of-the-art gear to make images at the level of those artists? If that’s not an argument for “gear doesn’t matter,” I don’t know what would be, but there are many ways to judge photographic excellence — sharpness/resolution is just one, but vision is the most important factor, and that will never change.
Sharpness is a bourgeois concept. -HCB
Perfectionism
Point: The desire, often, is to get everything right. Perfect exposure, perfect lens choice, perfect color balance, distractions eliminated, rule of thirds dutifully deployed, nothing blown out, not a hair (or leaf) out of place, blemishes removed. Perfection is a reasonable goal — if we’re not trying to perfect our work, what are we even doing?
Counterpoint: There’s a side-effect to perfectionism — if nothing is out of place, things can start to feel too perfect, which can create a sort of Uncanny Valley (with or without human subjects). Modern cameras and editing tech can result in images that feel almost unreal. People sometimes push their editing into a space of unrealistic perfection, resulting in comments like “the world doesn’t look like that.” And some of those photographers are starting to back off — intentionally buying either cheap or vintage lenses that appear softer and less perfect; Eschewing the healing brush to allow some distractions to remain; Using advanced editing techniques less freely. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the uncanny perfection of AI images, or to the cranked up dynamic range of the most recent smartphones that often churn out almost plastic-y looking images, or a desire to present photographs that feel just a bit more organic.
There are no right or wrong answers here, but it is a tension that can play into the choices we make.
At the End of the Day
Almost no one comes down fully on one side or another of any of these points. We may be taught to do “it” one way initially, and that can feel like “the right way,” until we eventually realize there’s more than one way to do it. The beauty of this craft is that there ain’t no rules, just guidelines that come into play differently in different situations. It’s not like you have to pick sides. Different approaches make more or less sense in different genres of photography, or given different intentions. But you’ll still find people out there (on YouTube, on social media, in classrooms) telling you “how to do it.” Listen to them — they’re probably onto something, and learning is always good. Then forget half of what you learned.
