Are the ‘Rules’ Making You a Worse Photographer?

I’m a life-long hardcore nerd and proud of it. From the Sharp MZ-80K computer my parents bought me in 1979, to the 72 bulb, triple-bridge RFID-enabled smart home hub I built a couple of years ago, I’ll be a dork till I die. That love of innovation and of technology meant that photography was always going to be something that ‘spoke’ to me. And in fact I’ve been a photography nerd for longer than I’ve been a computer nerd.

I don’t think I’m alone in this either. Photography attracts nerds like politics attracts sociopaths. At times it feels like we’re simply fulfilling some star-written destiny. But that love of technology can become a problem when it overshadows any kind of expression of artistic vision or emotional truth. Particularly when it also leads to a rigid adherence to a set of rules, both written and unwritten, and both creative and technical.

So the question is this.

Is your fixation on focal-planes, bokeh, hyperlocal distance and perspective distortion getting in the way of your photography? Is the quest for the sharpest lens, the perfect camera bag and the fastest auto-focus all just a distraction?

Sweating the Small Stuff

We photographers do like to get buried in the minutiae. I’m guessing every hobby or interest has its fair share of nerds. And though we’re probably even worse than petrol heads, at least we don’t pretend there’s anything cool about arguing over the merits of direct-fuel versus port-fuel injection systems.

But while automotive enthusiasts seem to forget that a car is a device designed (in theory) to get you quickly from A to B without getting wet, a camera is designed to take photographs.

When you start out in photography, it’s easy to become obsessed not just with the gear, but with the rules and procedures – because we’re lead to believe that doing so will result in better photographs. And while a good understanding of the technical aspects of photography is useful, I think that once you’ve grasped the basics of things like the exposure triangle, you should just concentrate on, you know, taking interesting photographs. I’d even say that there’s a strong argument for completely ignoring all of the essential non-technical rules of photography when you’re starting out and just experimenting with the camera.

The rule of thirds, for instance, is I guess, an attempt to steer photographers away from always placing the subject of a photograph in the dead-centre of the frame. But the way some photographers stick religiously to those thirds, you’d think their cameras were rigged to deliver a shutter-button triggered electric shock if they strayed outside the lines.

Learning what looks pleasing to your eye, irrelevant of the subject’s location on the golden ratio, will result in more creative images. Your shit / keeper ratio may be a bit skewed in favour of shit at first, but at least they won’t all be boring near-identical compositions.

I think it’s fair to say that popular photography content-creators give a distorted impression of the photographic process too. I’m not going to throw shade on any photographer in particular, but it’s clear that the chin-stroking rationale they give for how they composed a particular photograph, is often scripted after they’ve taken it, not before.

In other words they used their experience to spot a photographic opportunity and their technical knowledge to make a photograph and then they break-down those processes for the punters at home. Which is all well and good, but it gives the impression that you have to stand there, making rectangles with your fingers, before you take the shot. If you like doing it that way – thinking deep thoughts before taking the photograph – then crack on, just know that you don’t have to and know also that many of the big-name photographers on this platform despite all outwards appearances, don’t do it either.

There is no ‘right’ way to compose a photograph any more than there is a right way to write a poem, sketch a drawing or tell a story.

This adherence to accepted wisdom is brutally apparent in the other part of photography – the gear. Photography is a technical art-form, of that there is no mistake, but often the gear seems to take on more importance than the photographs. If only I had more megapixels, if only I had a red-band lens, if only I had a self-erecting, self-levelling tea-making deep-tissue massaging tripod.

All the Gear

In our nerd-like obsession with the subtleties of the hardware we sometimes lose sight of the truth – good photographs are taken by good photographers, not good cameras. The difference between an incredible meal in one restaurant and a shitty meal in another, isn’t down to the fact that one chef’s got better knives than the other.

Years ago I read an article about a Russian photographer by the name of Alexey Kljatov who produced the most incredible macro shots of snowflakes I’d ever seen. Did he produce these magnificent works of art with a $15,000 camera and high-end German glass? Nope. He made them with a banged up Canon Powershot A650 with an old Russian Helios lens jerry-rigged onto the front of it with gaffer tape. And sticking with that theme, Wilson A. Bentley, the pioneer of snowflake photography managed to produce incredible photographs all the way back in the Edwardian era with a cheap microscope and a bellows camera.

We photography nerds often stress about the various technical specifications of the equipment we buy when the truth is that none of it really matters.

In recent years there’s been a rediscovery of analog film, older digital cameras and JPEG photography because we’ve come to realise that a good photograph is not defined by its pixel resolution. Camera equipment is so good these days that the differences between products is usually minimal. It’s in the camera manufacturers best interests to perpetuate the update cycle, but not always in the photographer’s.

And if you are upgrading or moving from one brand to another, then don’t let decision paralysis get the better of you. It’s better to make a decision on a new piece of equipment rather than agonising about it for months because there is never a perfect time to buy something. Whatever you get will be superseded by some marginally better product a few weeks or a couple of months after you make your purchase. But the newer product doesn’t suddenly make yours worthless.

I bought a Mavic 2 Pro drone over six years ago. I’ve watched as the Air, Air 2, Air 2S, Air 3, Mavic 3, Mavic 3 Cine, Mavic 3 Classic, Mavic 3 Pro, Mavic Mini, Mini SE, Mini 2, Mini 2 SE, Mini 3 Pro, Mini 3, Mini 4 Pro, FPV and Avata rolled out the backdoor in Shenzhen but nothing has compelled me to upgrade. The new telephoto lenses on the Mavic 3 range look pretty sweet, but you’d still be hard pushed to tell the difference between video shot on my 2 Pro’s 10-bit sensor and video shot on the latest Mavic 3 or Mini 4 Pro, particularly once that footage has been uploaded to YouTube.

The point is that we live in a consumer-focused world in which we are targets in a cyclical product marketing engine. And the time and energy we spend wondering about that next big upgrade is time we could spend simply using the gear we’ve already got. Gear companies spend millions each year generating a kind of latent snobbishness that manifests itself at the check-out in camera stores.

Consider how we are taught to think about the lens that gets bundled with our new camera. Despite the fact that they’re often excellent, kit lenses usually languish in the camera bag never seeing action until the day the camera is sold. Poor quality kit lenses used to be an issue back in the early DSLR days, perhaps, but it’s simply not the case any more. I film all my YouTube content on an 18-55mm kit lens that came with my X-T4 – it’s a brilliant bit of glass with a versatile focal length equivalent to a 27-84mm lens on a full frame, fast f2.8 aperture, in-lens stabilisation and top-notch image quality.

The influence of the big content creators here on YouTube creates a distorted and elitist worldview. We think we must have that incredible prime for our own content or it will look terrible. It’s hard to ignore the aspirational messaging implicit in the reviews of the latest, greatest lenses, cameras, filters and accessories here on YouTube, but ultimately it’s just a distraction.

By all means upgrade your equipment, buy new cameras and lenses, but be lead by your actual requirements, not some bullshit aspirational marketing planted in your brain by content-creators with a vested interest in the product upgrade cycle. Instead of stressing about the hyperfocal distance on some German-made lens, look for an interesting angle, a new perspective, an interesting location, an emotional vibe.

Make a photograph that is distinctive and recognisable as being yours and it won’t what camera, what lens, or what tripod you use. After all, no one ever looked at a breathtaking photograph and said, “Wow, what perfectly corrected barrel distortion!”