My start in photography was very very backwards. I had no experience or real training other than having toyed with point-and-shoot cameras rather unsuccessfully. To this day I am not a "good" photographer.
The initial impetus was seeing aerial dancers rehearsing through some decorative lighting at an art museum gala. We were using high-definition glass gobos of winter branches for an autumnal effect and the shadows wrapping around the aerialists were entrancing. I had recently had corrective surgery on both eyes and it struck me that I could recreate this look to get a better picture than my phone was going to give me. Three days later I was at my local camera shop buying an entry-level Nikon and a wonderful 105mm lens (which turned out to be too long for the space I would use it in). My day job in production (mainly sound, lighting and projection, all playback oriented) did give me some understanding of noise floors, gain structures and the like. I kitted out a spare room in my warehouse with a ring of truss and theatrical lighting and became obsessed with losing and finding models in the patterning. The focus was, literally, less on the people than the technique and I certainly confused the hell out of the sensor on my poor little camera. I quickly discovered some features I wanted and moved up to a mid-range Nikon and then a full-frame. And then I moved outdoors.
The difference between nutso patterning and portraits in natural light could not have been a wider gap. It very much laid bare that I had learned the exposure triangle backwards, among other oversights. One that is jumping out tonight as I look through the archive is that I had some fundamental misunderstandings of the Nikon focus system. I'm still not impressed by Nikon's NX Studio software but I re-downloaded it in order to access the "show focus" feature. This particular day my D750 was set to AF-Area multi-point and it wasn't until nearly a year later that I realized I needed to swap over to single-point, which immediately did away with the stubborn habit of auto focus choosing the wrong damned thing to focus on! There were other instances of consistent misses but this particular shoot, with one of my favorite people who had made a point of coming to my state to work with me….well, it was a bitter evening when I got home and was able to look at these images full size. They looked FINE on the back-of-camera view (I also hadn't yet learned to zoom in and check, a shortcut that I very much appreciate).
These are, I suppose, how one truly learns a work flow. I've never quite been able to ditch handheld in favor of a tripod — I want to be more active in choosing angles, to drop down to my belly to see what it looks like from there. And I'm not usually overly concerned with sharpness itself — I use a lot of vintage manual lenses or lenses designed to be troublesome and I like the result. But there are times when something needs to be sharp.
As painful as it is, I spend a good amount of time on even the worst of shoots. And I don't throw them away in disgust. It's not just to rub my own nose in my mistakes but to come back and see the lesson again every so often. To think about the lesson and then wonder at it a bit and see if I'm drawing the right conclusion. And every so often, as tonight, I find a gem or two that survived my blunders.
