aidenkitamura/about_photography

Introduction

This project, is my personal thoughts and conclusions regarding photography. I plan to divide this post into several sections:

• My First Philosophy of Photography
• What to Do Before I Take a Shot
• Technical Perspectives
• The Afterworks of Correction
• Making it Expressive and Stylize

Each section includes different contents I want to talk about. To begin with, I talk about My First Philosophy of Photography, which is how I perceive photography as a whole, what it means to me, and why I still stick to it up to now. It has a lot of personal emotions inside, which might be considered as non-sense by the readers from time to time, but fuck it, I just wanna express my truest emotions.

The second, what to do before I take a shot, includes my pre-shooting routines, what am I thinking when I see a scene, what are the preparations I typically do, and etc. This section is rather empirical, and the actual experience might vary a lot from individual to individual, and intend to make this secion a reference for readers only.

Then follows the Technical Perspectives. I am a rather technial photographer actually - although I usually try to focus more on the content itself, I consider the usage of proper tools and techniques rather important - that without these things, it is highly possible you won't be able to create the image that you have in mind. Just like painting - you must learn the techniques before you could fluently express your ideas, and so does photography.

Correction is an important part in post-processing a photo, and is something usually ignored these days - either intentionally or unintentionally, especially by freelancer content creators. I do not know why people just skip this step, in the sense that they believe whatever they capture? That is not the case. Your monitors need calibration, so does the image. Having a plain reference image is the starting point of all stylizing and etc. If someone wish to teach you about color grading, while they do not bring up the correction, do not follow them. They are either unexperienced, or only want to hide the important thing and teach you only the seemingly fancy stuff so that you could never be a competitor to them.

The last part, is what I struggle the most with - because the topic is so broad, while so important. It is like the pearl on the crown, but so hard to reach. It is the representation of your deepest mind, your love, your confidence, and those little details about yourself that you haven't noticed. Why is the sky interpreted as pink in this photo? There must be a reason behind your choice, even you might not realize it.