 Oh, how's it, how's it? Now I've been sitting here going, how can I start this video in an interesting, kind of cool way? It's gonna grab your attention. And it's all about what to find in the world where there's too much to photograph. Where do we find these images? And I've fallen foul of exactly what we're gonna be talking about, which is I've been overwhelmed. I haven't got any focus. Now focus in photography isn't just about sharp images. It's also about being able to look at these infinite possibilities in front of us and then pick out the thing to photograph. There's a piece of advice that just came through sort of arbitrary talk the other day with a very talented knowledgeable photographer, which I wish that I'd heard when I was getting started. He said, painting is the art of addition, whereas great photography is the art of subtraction. So many photographers struggle, and I used to struggle with this as well, about trying to find things to photograph. Now let's think about what that guy was saying. You know, the painter starts with a blank canvas. He can pick and choose what he wants from his imagination to put on there. Whereas, you know, the photographer, so this was me when I was getting started. What am I, how, I've got all this stuff in front of me. What am I supposed to do with it? It looks rubbish. It's because I don't know how to exclude things from the image. Now, obviously we can't physically exclude things unless we take them out of the frame or we hide them behind something. But there are a lot of tools that over time, you know, I've managed to get a handle on that kind of help this process. So we get to the point where we can distill down all the things that we see in front of us into a really cool, like awesome image that sticks in people's minds. That's, for me, was an awesome thing is to look at the images that I go, wow, that's great, it's because it's a simple concept. Don't misunderstand me here. Can we not talking about simple images where there's only one element or there's just a single subject or something, are great because they're just a single image? I'm talking about a distillation of ideas, which we can do, it's very simple. So we're going to start with something that I kind of actually found sort of almost absentminded. So back when I was a late teen, only 20 years just getting into photography and I would spend a lot of time driving around in my little 1967 B tour, going off to Pretoria and going to learn about photography and all that kind of stuff and often get stuck in traffic jams. And it was during these moments where I've got nothing to do, I'm just kind of idly looking around and I would start to think about how the elements inside my car would look if I photographed them. Now that is helpful because it was starting to sharpen my awareness. Going, okay, there's something here that could work, might work, but I'm being open to that. You can start practicing this idea as well right now. Look around you, is there, is an area and you go, okay, right. So I'm looking off shot here, there's a little portalite softbox, there's some old cables and all sorts of things like that on the floor. And I could sit and look at that for 10 minutes and go, okay, well, if I change my perspective, what would this look like? If I was walking around and the lighting would change or something. So observe something. The power of observation is so helpful because the next time that you're out there, you've already been practicing this. You're training your mind to see the possibilities of photographs and you also understand the things that are gonna surface for you that you're interested in. There's been an awful lot talked about framing, composition, things like that and people talk about rules. There's a rule, rule thirds and horizons and you know, all that kind of stuff. And I found when I was getting started that because it was a rule, well, that was just, it was a rule. We just followed it without understanding kind of why. Now, you know, what happens is when you start experimenting with ideas, if you find something that you like and you just photograph it, trying out different compositional techniques, rule of thirds, golden spiral, Dutch tilt, all of these kind of ideas and you kind of work through them. And you go, try horizon, horizon, you know, low and high and stuff like that. That you are training yourself to actually respond to this, this, I'm hoping my tummy's gonna get smaller the next year, right? Your gut. That's why I was talking with Alan Copy the other day. He's a great photographer and he's talking about, composition is about your gut instinct. And I feel that when we understand like why certain compositional rules for a better word work for us, for me as a photographer. I look at a scene and I go, does that feel right? Does my gut say this is kind of cool, right? And if it does, okay, fantastic. Because over time, I've trained my gut to feel what's right and what's kind of wrong for me. So find an object, photograph it in a massive, all sorts of compositional ways, right? And then loads. If you're not sure where to go, you go online and look, say all the compositional techniques and see what happens. See which ones feel right and see which ones kind of feel just a little bit off. Baka, baka, baka, baka, baka, baka. The people talk about baka with lenses like it's the only thing that matters. And lenses have a really great way of helping us isolate things from the scene around. Now you're familiar with maybe shallow depth of field and wide depth of field. So shallow depth of field when everything, apart from a little tiny element, is out of focus. And you often see this with portraiture on the streets. People, you know, pretty go and they put it in front of some neon lights or something like that should have super wide opens. That means it was very shallow depth of field. And then look at that. We've taken away that distracting background and turned it into something that supports the subject, the idea of this image, which is the pretty girl. So that's kind of, you know, that's one thing. But if you're not sure on how to use these ideas of apertures and of framing your subject, then just do, there's a simple exercise. Just find a flat surface, put your camera down on it. So you don't need a tripod, set your camera on aperture priority and used to lie out some Lego figures, chess figures, whatever. So long as they sort of stack, see how my hands getting close to the camera, so long as they stack away from the camera at sort of regular intervals. And you focus on the first one and you photograph it wide open. So set your lenses as wide open as go like F 1.8 or, you know, what have you. And then stop the lens down. So go 1.8, 2.8, 4, 5.6 and so on and so forth. So very simple exercise, but it gives you also an understanding about what happens and why these things happen. I can't stress enough that, you know, when we understand like the why, why does the image look like this when we photograph it at this certain aperture or the shutter speed or what have you, that it gives you another tool to help you isolate subjects from different, it's just amazing things around. This is what these photographers are doing, who are creating these stunning images, that they understand not just the techniques that we've talked about now, but also some of the ones that are coming up and how to apply them to distill that stuff down into like a really cool image. Light is one of your friends here, one of your greatest friends in helping you to isolate objects. You can either, you know, put things in inky blackness or, you know, highlight them with beams of god rays. You know, there's lights that come down and they're just wild and like amazing. But you know, why is this important? Like I said, you can, you start to use light to kind of really guide the viewer's eye around the scene rather than just going, oh, well, golden light looks really kind of cool and stuff like that. When you understand how shadow and light itself work together, how they change the way that things look what you can do with light and shadow, then again, in building up this tool in your toolbox to help you, you know, make the viewer see what you want them to see. You can work on observing light and shadow. Again, without having a camera, you can do it, there's so many of these things you can do all the time. I can't, you know, it's great to just sit there. Whenever you've got to spare moments, they're just, they're just idly think, what would that look like? Oh, well, the light, you know, right now I can see this light's giving off some shadows there that aren't normally there. So is that kind of interesting? Is that something I could use? The more that you look at these things, the more again that you're training your eye, then when you actually do come to take a photograph, you've actually got a better handle. You're not overly reliant on the technical aspect of photography. You're managing to go, okay, I want this I want that, I've got a better handle and now have the tools to put what I've got up here into an image. And we're going to talk about equipment now because I just mentioned it. But of course either, I often say, you know, equipment isn't important and the gear doesn't make a photograph and it doesn't. But you do need to understand how to use the equipment properly, what it does. If you've got a new camera at Christmas, okay, spend today, not running around doing all the fancy kind of like the HDR things or whatever, you know, new focus peaking sort of system that the guy has. Think about getting two grips with how the camera works. If this is your first time, say for example with a camera that has modes in it, aperture mode, shutter mode, all those kind of things. Take time to explore them, to look at how does the thing work with aperture property? What is it doing? Why is it doing this? The same with all these things. Once you get a handle on how to actually kind of, you know, not know your camera backwards, right? The basics of it, the exposure. Once you get a handle on those, it makes the process of actually picking out the images a lot easier because you are not focused in on trying to make the camera in your hand. That thing in your hand, do what it is that you want it to do. So, you know, flick through the manual, that's pretty cool, but then, just play with the different modes on it, shoot. But don't run around shooting different things. You need to shoot the same thing, right? In your house, go to the kitchen, go to your bedroom, somewhere, that you can just photograph the same thing with different modes to then make a comparison. Say, okay, well, I see what's going on there, right? These are little exercises you can just do for like, take 10 minutes, right? And you won't believe how important that is into helping you pull out great photographs. I feel that one of the big issues that we kind of see as photographers, when we are confronted with a scene, is that we make the assumption that if it's a landscape, it needs to be photographed in a certain way, if it's a person needs to be photographed in that particular way. As a photographer, you know, we want to pick out the ideas, but if we have more ways of expressing ourselves at our disposal, then it makes life so much easier, gives us a thing. So, one of the things that we used to do at photography school was take an idea, you know, happiness or blue, you know, some random kind of idea and try and photograph that. Now, I've done this exercise a couple of times with people in cohorts and one-to-ones and what have you, where we say, look, you know, photograph an emotion. And often people will photograph somebody laughing or somebody sad. Not often, though, will people go a little beyond about how to kind of think about an emotion in their photographs. And if you spend a little bit of time at home, pick an idea, pick some sort of subject. It doesn't have to be an emotion or a color or something like that, but just something that you can go, okay, I want to photograph light. I want to photograph letters. I want to photograph horizontal things. I want to photograph textural things. When you start looking around your house and working to that brief, then again, you are training yourself to isolate certain subjects, because now you've got some tools in your arsenal to help you do that. Texture, I think if you're combining light that comes across the side, this light, if this light here were right in front of me over there, it would make my face very flat. But right now, I've got some form to it, right? Because there's some shadow in this film coming in from the side there. So you see how these kind of things all sort of start to build on themselves. It's great to have cameras that are all singing and all dancing, but so long as we know why we are asking them to do certain things or why we are doing certain things as a photographer, then it makes the process so much simpler. One of the reasons why I had such a problem starting this video and being overwhelmed by the options is I didn't give myself any constraints. I didn't say, Alex, you have to do it in five seconds or you know, what have you. And there's a similar issue in photography that, you know, we have many, many, many options. We have, you know, if you like a lot of photographers, we have all these zoom lenses, all these ISOs and stuff, we're not, we seem to exist in a world of photography that is almost boundless, that we have no constraints put upon us because we can do whatever. Now of course with AI, even more. So do yourself a favor, do something that is a boundary on you. The whole first year of studying photography, we had to photograph in black and white because, you know, we had to learn how the film works and how to process it. And all those sorts of things, then you start to see the world of black and white, you understand more about shape and form and texture. So color doesn't enter into it because now we're just in black and white. So set yourself some constraints. If you are, you know, somebody who enjoys color, to photograph one day this week exclusively in black and white. If you are a, somebody loves black and white photography, don't really shoot in color, do the result, reverse. Photograph maybe your car in 10 different ways. Photograph the same thing at 10 different times a day, right? Just something that's a constraint. If you're feeling really brave and you wanna just, you know, kind of push yourself out there, see what happens when you take 10 photographs in a row where you don't look at the screen at the back of your camera. Just rely on what you've got inside. If you have a mirrorless camera, then it's not what you can do. But try that. Often people have said, you know, before you had, when you photograph a film, how did you know things were right? Well, you didn't, right? You had to rely on your gut instinct that it was right. Remember we talked about gut instinct with composition? Same sort of thing. Once you get a handle on this, once you understand why these things are working, how you've put it all together, then it becomes a lot easier to sit there and go, you know what, I can't actually see, but I know what it's gonna look like on my head because I have more of an understanding about why I'm doing the things that I'm doing. That's a wonderful feeling. And it makes everything just kind of wee. It's so much fun. It's awesome. And then of course, you've got all these photographs. Just look at them. Photograph them just without this constraint. And then we're gonna do something very interesting. So you've got this creative restriction. You're gonna have a project. Now you might find when you're photographing this project, do your sister and go, nah, this image isn't good enough. No, that's not good enough. I'm not gonna do it. There was a photographer called Jerry Oldsman who you may not know the name of, but he's the guy who did the outer limits, house with the roots. Now those are all done in a wet dark room with like up to like 30 in large. It's all like crazy stuff. Now he was doing some lecturing photography one semester. He split the group into two. He said, you guys over here, to get a passing grade, all you need to do is just photograph. Like just submit me a whole bunch of images at the end of the semester and we're all good. Now you guys over here in the second group, I want you to submit one image, but there's a caveat to this. It needs to be the best image that you could possibly have taken this term. So comes the end of the semester, this group over here, they're submitting tons and tons of images and he's seeing they have grown as photographers. They have, you know, they've embraced their mistakes and also, you know, learned from them and moved on and explored their boundaries. The guys over here, they kept second-guessing themselves. There we go. I can only photograph one thing. I can only submit things. So they were trying too hard to focus down on one aspect. And so consequently, their growth was a lot slower. Now in your own photography, embrace this idea. Take everything we've talked about today, all of these ideas and just run with them. Just take photographs, right? The more that you take photographs, the more that you look around at things, the more that you understand how aperture and things of that nature work, the more that you feel comfortable with your camera, the more that you understand about gut feeling with composition, then the easier it is to start taking things away to hide them. In March and May, I am running two cohorts which are going to jump deeper into these concepts about how to simplify the world, how to train our eyes photographically to see the possibilities for really strong and amazing photographs, to learn the language of photography. If you'd like to find out more about this cohort, then please click on the link below. Thank you ever so much for watching. It's been awesome to see you. I hope you had an awesome Christmas and a fantastic new year if I didn't talk to you before then. And if you'd like to check out the video that I talked about with Alan Kopie where he talked about this idea about simplicity in photography, check it out over here. Thank you ever so much. I'll see you again soon.