No doubt you all use a mixture of many tools, but no doubt some are your favourites.
By tools I mean things like aperture, camera height and angle, background selection, focal length, exposure...
I've not replied in here 'till now, as i've been rather busy with work up, but I find myself with a little free time and thought I'd try and answer.
For me, most of my photography is either on film, or "digital shot as film" - i'm an old dog, and of recent shoot far to rarely to be breaking my habits acquired over 30+ years of film work, both personal and professional.
Historically, I used to shoot mainly 5x4" and occasionally 10x8" - usually either B&W for personal work, or E6 for commissioned commercial stuff... As such, shooting multiple exposures wasn't really particularly viable - if the client was amenable, and the image was potentially "troublesome" in terms of contrast, there'd be a spare frame or two of "bracketed" exposures - purely because E6 isn't massively tolerant of incorrect exposures, and even with drum scanning, there'd be times you couldn't "dig out the details". For those of you used to "fixing it in post" with modern RAW exposure lattitude, consider i'm talking taking 3 frames at +/- 1/3 of a stop increments here - damn it was intolerant of incompetence.
I explain all the above for a reason. Put simply, the above way of shooting dictates a few things...
- you're going to be on a tripod or studio stand for the camera
- you're going to be working on a upside down and back to front image on the ground glass
- you're going to be under a blanket if you're out and about - possibly even if you're in a studio.
- you're going to be looking at the details on the ground glass with a jewellers loupe.
- every time you pressed the shutter you were spending £10-£30 - so very wasted frame ate into the profit margins - 3 duff exposures and you're working for free that day. So, you didn't hit the button until you were completely sure of things. Test, test and test again.
- and this one's probably the most important. You had to know that what was on the ground glass was what you wanted to get as a final result - especially with E6 because the transparency was the product. At least with B&W you'd got a bit of a chance of fixing stuff in the darkroom.
So - frankly, for me - none of the "in camera" or "in studio" stuff is actually part of my creative process. The WHOLE creative process is
in my head before I even reach for the camera. For a still life, I'll have sketched out a rough composition, i'll have considered the props and the lighting, and most importantly, i'll have decided
what I want the image to say when it's exhibited/shown. Now, for commissioned work, it's a matter of translating the clients Art Directors image into a photo - but hopefully they're arty, they'll have the pre-viz sketches and roughs to work with - and of course, if it's an Advert, the "hero prop" is going to already be set, so it's a matter of translating someone elses vision onto E6 for them - to me, that's certainly craft related rather than artistic, though no less valuable for that. But the important take away is that all this happens before even selecting which camera I'll be shooting it on, never mind what film it'll be on - and indeed often "which studio space will I have to try and hire to build the set"...
But - in the process of that translation, obviously i'll consider aperture (though there's an element of
f64 and forget it with larger format cameras unlike the sub-miniature 35mm stuff that people call "full-frame" today
- Ditto Camera Height and Angle for viewpoint control, Front and rear Movements for perspective control (and DoF manipulation via amending the plane of focus) - Focal Length being less of an issue when you only had maybe 2-3 lenses on hand anyway - Exposure - well, that's a given, but frankly, in a studio, you've all the light you need, and all the tools to put it where you want so, again it's a craft thing. What I'm getting at here is simple. For me, nothing whatsoever to do with the craft of manipulating the camera in terms of location, setting, orientation or configuration is part of my creative process - it's all simply spun off by-products of the actual creative process of "creating the picture in my mind beforehand" - it's that "pre-visualisation" step that's the important thing, and
for me, it's the only real part where the creative comes in for me. At the risk of being labelled a pretentious t***t, the mechanical process of achieving that look via whatever photographic kit is just part of my technique not my art...
Maybe that's because thinking creatively doesn't generally come natural to me, and I need to take that pause, and think about things, then re-think, then scrap the whole thing and start again (often 3-4 times over) before I get something that lights a spark for me. I don't know.
I know that any picture have made, that I find "satisfying" from a creative point of view, always began in the above process. I've also taken lots of less structured, less over-thought stuff - things that many people like, and often i'm quite proud of them too, but the satisfaction there comes more from a "well - you got lucky there Mark" or even a "you did well to realise the potential of that one"... maybe I'm not a lost cause completely... or maybe I just find a distinction between pictures i've
made and pictures i've
taken...
