Steve Johnson - Low Cost High Impact Photography

Low Cost High Impact Photography

By

Steve Johnson

Published by Wolfe Johnson Inc.

Amazon Edition

Website: minimalistphotography101.com

Note

Copying of text and images is allowed for both educational and review purposes.

If use other than described in the previous sentence are required then please contact Steve Johnson via the Minimalist Photography 101 website

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INTRODUCTION

Marble on Glass Brick. Canon A3100IS macro. Edited in Adobe Lightroom

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About This Book

The main purpose of the book is to save you money. It will show that serious photography does not need to be a prohibitively expensive pastime. The vast majority of the photographs in this book were taken with a camera that currently retails for around $130.. The sections in this book are written to be as self contained as possible. In other words it doesn't have to be read from one cover to the other. Most of the chapters are completely self contained.

The division between the aesthetic and the technical is not a complete one in this book, and this is intentional. Even though they have their separate sections there is a lot of crossover. Too many photography books and tutorials place an artificial divide between these two aspects for the sake of neatness. I have chosen to sacrifice neatness and order for a more holistic approach, even if it is a little messy around the edges.

Most of what follows is written with the point and shoot compact type camera in mind. Almost all of it can, however, be applied to the more expensive dSLRs. Every dSLR owner that I know also owns at least one compact camera and regards it as a serious photographic tool.

Ice on Lake Michigan. Canon A3100 IS

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About The Photographs

Most photography books use a set of very predictable images illustrating a very predictable set of chapters. There would be the landscape chapter, the studio portrait chapter, the sunset chapter, and the street photography chapter, etc., all illustrated with boilerplate picture postcard type imagery.

I wanted to get away from that by using photography that is a little more challenging, that doesn't fit neatly into expected boxes. The photographs here are not great photographs by any stretch of the imagination but they are the right photographs for this book.

The vast majority of these were taken with a budget point and shoot. A few, like the one below, were taken with a dSLR.

Marble on glass brick. Nikon D40X. The relatively large depth of field makes the transparent marble appear solid.

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Who is This Book For ?

Those who want to move on from the simple snapshot.

Those who have started to move on but feel overwhelmed by the potential expense and learning curve.

More experienced photographers who may feel that they are in a rut.

Visual artists who are thinking of the camera as a potential creative tool rather than just a recording device.

Just about anyone who is interested in the creative process.

Items and window. Canon A3100 IS

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The Photography Industry

I want to get into talking about equipment but first I'd like to give you a little bit of advice. Become an informed consumer! Photography is a potential hole into which money can be endlessly poured or it can be a rewarding, relatively cheap pursuit. The point is that there are options. Your interests are not aligned with the industry's. You want to take great photographs and they want your money. They don't care a fig about your images, only that you keep on purchasing stuff.

One essential thing to realize when embarking on the photographic journey is that there is a whole industry invested in separating you from your hard earned cash. This industry runs much deeper than just the manufacturers and retailers of cameras and related equipment. The camera review that you read on a blog probably links to the camera being reviewed on Amazon, and if you click on that link the reviewer makes a percentage of the sale.

There is a group of people who by and large are good photographers but are also relentless self promoters. One in particular who I won't name knows his photography, of that there is no doubt, but his priority is marketing. I did a quick count of the plugs for other services he puts in one of his photography books aimed at the complete beginner, and the number came out to around 60. Of course these are not formal advertisements but rather come in the form of this is a tip picked up from my good buddy x who's website can be found at y. This same author also has very strong ties to one of the big two camera manufacturers and to the main photographic software company.

Everything that person writes is done either as a quid pro quo or with a view to calling in a favor further down the line. In other words, that author's priority is to feed your money into his particular food chain; whether it makes you a better photographer or not is, I suspect, not a huge concern of his.

Bottom line is that the photographic industry is just about the most incestuous one that I've come across . You will need to interact with it, but an awareness of the underlying financial structure and networks is a good thing to have as it will allow you to make the most of your budget and avoid wasting money. Always remember that even the experts in this industry do not lose credibility by promoting useless, expensive crap.

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Where to go for Good Information

Forums are just about the best bet. Some extremely good and knowledgeable people inhabit these regions of cyberspace and most haven't sold their souls to the gods Nikon, Canon, and Adobe and genuinely want to help newcomers.

There is one thing to bear in mind and it relates to the previous section. As human beings we have a tendency to want to belong and those in the photographic equipment food chain know this and act on it. They will get active on forums and push the idea that to improve your photography you are going to have to spend a few hundred dollars on a lens that in the real world you'll probably only use twice in a year. These same people also seed the idea that the sharpness of a lens and its ability to function in low light (more about this later) are the be all and end all of photography. Of course it is just a coincidence that these are the two factors that jack the price of a lens up through the roof, that lenses are the most expensive piece of photography equipment, and that there is no limit to the number of lenses a photographer can use.

Anyway, back to the point about belonging. Photographers tend to be a conservative bunch and don't like going out on a limb, so if the consensus says you need to spend $2,000 on a camera to be a serious photographer they will spread that idea as enthusiastically as if they had come up with the number themselves in fact give it a little time and many really will believe that they did come up with the number themselves. They will not profit by the setting of this bar but they will act as the multipliers for the meme. Of course this is a huge generalization but it is certainly a dynamic that needs to be taken into account when researching equipment.