When I first started taking pictures, I was obsessed with the “shoot and release” method because of the great performance of my lenses, and I believed that the best photos were the JPG files taken from the camera without retouching.
When you think about it, it’s a very poor and ridiculous idea, but I think the idea that the best photos are the ones taken right out of the camera is where most people pass when they start taking pictures. Furthermore, I think it was around this time that people began to misunderstand the performance of the camera and lens as their own skill.
I don’t know about other people, but I have more and more opportunity to ask myself.
What kind of pictures do I want to take? What kind of atmosphere do I want to create? After asking myself these questions endlessly, I arrived at the question, “What do I want to convey?
I took some time to seriously think about this question, and came up with my own answer.
I will not discuss the answer here. It’s not that this is important, it’s more that the answer freed me from my stupid belief that ” Shoot and release” is the best.
But that doesn’t mean I’m a photoshopper. I have enough skills from my work to teach others how to use Photoshop, but I am not a photoshopper. I don’t like to go on and on with the retouching and end up with a photo that is not what I originally intended.
It’s easy to assume that a photo is all about how it looks, but a photo is not all about how it looks either.
A friend of mine once said, “Taking pictures is self-expression.” At first, I was unfamiliar with this phrase and thought it was a paradoxical way of saying that taking pictures was self-expression. But now, it has become a very important word for me.
Yes, it is important to know what you want to convey.