Rules are made to be...

...broken?

Maybe... But to be honest life gets a little tedious (and potentially truncated) if you spend all your time in nihilist mode. We all go through a teenage phase in which we rebel against authority - any authority - just because. Rule breaking can range from the subversive - graffiti, or leaving the toilet seat up when you go to visit Granny - to downright stupid - driving on the wrong side of the road, for example, or not wearing a seat-belt in Reading. Most of us grow out of it, unless we are middle-aged, male and the owner of an expensive camera, a demographic that appears to have ripped up the rulebook on tolerance and courtesy, particularly when participating on internet fora.

Blindly following the rules is however as counter-productive as a total disregard. Some rules are downright pointless, some are outmoded and some are simply stifling. Consider the "compensation culture" that came to its pointless peak under the last government. Rules were put in place in every avenue of daily life to mitigate often unquantifiable and statistically insignificant risk in order to avoid the attentions of the ambulance chasers. Unquestioning adherence to rules is for the unimaginative, the risk averse and the habitual wearers of an inordinate amount of beige.

Let me offer an alternative approach to the rule.

Rules are made to be understood and disregarded if appropriate.

This more enlightened approach comes with age and experience. When we are children it is a rule not to touch the top of the stove. We do not have the nous to do anything other than obey the rule, or we will be hurt. When we are older, we understand that the rule only has meaning within a contextual framework; is the stove hot or cold? Can I touch it for an instant without harm? These levels of subtlety - of interpretation - can only come by understanding the rule and then interpreting - over-riding - it when it is safe or advisable to do so.

Issac Asimov built a whole career as an author on writing three simple rules, and then finding ways and means to subvert and interpret them in an entertaining manner. His Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2.A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

...are a case in point. Each "Law" is actually open to interpretation and subversion dependent upon context. Ultimately they can be bent, but not broken without terminal consequences. Thus, gravity can be defied, but never ignored. Exposure can be adjusted but not wilfully disregarded. F2.0 is F2.0, 1/1000 is 1/1000 and so on.

Today's techno-marvel digital cameras carry enough processing power to target a missile strike. But they are simply automata that blindly follow pre-set rules, partly defined by the laws of physics and partly by a team of programmers in the Far East. The photographer who places his images in the "hands" of his camera instead of taking control himself does so at his peril. It's a bit like those lorry drivers who find themselves wedged in a small village street having blindly followed their dashboard sat-nav. They have ignored the (sometimes literal) warning signs and simply let the machine take them up a blind alley.

Don't play with fire...


In the 1982 Star Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan, there is a memorable scene where the Enterprise is under heavy attack by another starship manned by renegades. Kirk, by now old and wily, uses a little-known command protocol to lower the other ships' shields before he delivers a decisive counter-attack. His explanatory line to a younger officer - "You have got to learn why things work on a starship..." is the perfect example of the benefit of applied experience over blind reliance on technology.

There is no harm per se in relying upon automated features as long as a) you understand what they are doing b) you know how they will behave in a given situation and c) you know how - and when - to over-ride and take direct control. The harm is in adopting the "fire and forget" approach, in which your only contribution to the process of taking the photo is being there and pointing the camera in the right direction. You may as well have acted as chauffeur for a mate who snaps in the direction you are pointing. Dumbing down only happens to those who are dumb enough in the first place to embrace without question the talent-numbing excesses of do-it-for-you technology.

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- All images on this blog are copyright Bill Palmer and may not be reproduced in any format or medium without permission.

T for three...

Ask any photographer about the three Ts and he will look at you blankly. And yet the three Ts – Talent, Technique and Technology – are contributing factors, in varying degree, to every photograph ever taken. Mastering the relationship between the three is key to mastering both one's equipment and oneself.

Let me explore each element in human terms. At one extreme we will find the Techno-Tubbies, whose unswerving devotion to the essential rightness of every technological advance is breathtaking in its thoughtless, naive simplicity. Bloatware bingers and feature-creepers to a man (and indeed exclusively male), many if not most are early adopters, eager to consume the latest and greatest even if it is barely teetering on the bleeding edge.

Technique is far less important than Technology, and Talent hardly figures at all. Why bother to learn the basics when you can rely on your whizz-bang, state of next-week's art, CaNikOny camera to do it all for you? Why concentrate on the essentials of getting a single shot right, when you can hose down your subject and pick the shot that works best? In the mind of the Techno-Tubby, quantity has a quality all of it's own, a bit like going large on your Big Mac – more must be better – mustn't it? Time spent at a location taking photos is kept to an absolute minimum in favour of time spent in front of Lightroom, Aperture or Photoshop, deciding on which shot is “best” and then “improving” it.

Our second group of extremists is the Techniquerats. To them, Technology is merely a tool and Talent something random, capricious and intangible and hence to be distrusted and downplayed. Like the Techno-Tubbies, they crave the newest and best, but only because it provides them with a platform to achieve a higher, purer state of nerdy Nirvana. The Techniquerats obsession is less with the tools and more with the sterile perfection of the end result. The Techniquerat spends hours poring over MTF graphs and debating which is sharper – a Global kitchen knife or a 50mm Summilux ASPH.

The Über Techniquerats of course eschew all forms of manufacturer or third party testing in favour of their own painstaking research, haunting hardware stores and stationers hunting down the optimum ruler to act as their unwilling subject in their quest for front (or back) focussing. Never as vociferous, as thin-skinned or as cocky as the Techno-Tubbies, a Techniquerat, if cornered, will adopt a pained expression and retreat to his shed with cries of “You just don't understand”

A splinter group of Techniquerats, the Bokeh Barons, obsess over out of focus areas, seeking the meaning of life, the universe and everything in each swirl and blur. The biggest frustration for the Bokeh Barons is that their particular fetish is in and of itself hard to quantify in objective terms so they are looked down on by the rest of the metronomically precise Techniquerat community. This causes them to sulk and to play with FSU lenses in fruitless attempts to prove them optically equivalent to Leica's finest.

Our third and final group, the Talent Scouts, are loathed and distrusted by the Techno-Tubbies and the Techniquerats in equal measure – and for good reason. The true Talent Scout lives in his right-brain to the extent of struggling with mundane and insignifiant matters like teabags, doorknobs and light-switches. Unworldly to a degree not seen since the glory days of Woodstock, the Talent Scouts make the capture of an eyeball-achingly beautiful image seem like child's play. It doesn't matter what camera they use – a Box Brownie, a Leica MP, a mobile 'phone or a webcam, everything is just – right.

A Talent Scout is always in the right place at the right time, blessed by lighting that Michaelangelo would have given Venus de Milo's right arm for. Every shot is pin sharp and perfectly exposed, except of course those that are deliberately and artfully out of focus or darker than an economist's heart. If you ask a Talent Scout what camera or lens or exposure he used he won't be able to tell you, simply because to him it really doesn't matter. Corner a Talent Scout and he really won't care.

Then there are the rest of us. The mere mortals that strive to balance all three sides of the equation in order to achieve an aesthetically pleasing end result. If we rely too heavily on non-existent talent, our images will turn out dull, uninteresting and as tedious to their audiences as a National Trust guidebook on the dry stone walls of England and Wales. If we overcompensate for our lack of talent with vast and expensive injections of technology we will end up with equipment that does everything for us including think. We will not learn, grow or improve because the technology will act as a crutch. Laziness will result, and will culminate in the watching of X-Factor catch-up shows on overcast Tuesday afternoons.

Consider for a moment the dubious benefits of “Auto-”; autofocus, auto-exposure, auto-iso, auto-color (sic), auto-levels, etc. Every element in an image averaged out, all randomness eliminated and with it all personality, verve, style and individuality. Or the levelling power of the burst-mode; no need to wait for the decisive moment, no need to concentrate, to observe, to develop a sense of timing – just put your finger on the trigger and pump away like an over-excited Bandido on Che's birthday. Pick the best later, eh, in the comfort of your own batchelor pad, with a Bud in one hand and a reheated pizza at your elbow.

The power of Three; keep them in balance, eh?

Technique – true technique – is something to be nurtured, practiced and perfected, and balanced with Talent and Technology. Learning how exposure works, either by using a basic camera or by turning your Hokey-Cokey 2000 to “manual” - is not just a liberating experience, it is a revelation. Learning to rely upon yourself instead of a faceless programmer in Osaka is part of growing up as a photographer and fulfilling your potential.

In the UK, at least, it is possible to learn to drive on an automatic car only. Your licence is truncated, what you can drive is restricted. You can only ever have the gears changed for you by a CPU. Never will you feel that moment of adrenaline-fuelled satisfaction when you time a gearchange to the instant, dropping down at just the right moment to maximise the power of the engine as you sweep through that challenging set of curves, clipping the apex of each and powering out to the next straight. It's the same with photography – the sense of satisfaction that ensues when you finally see the photo that you made all the choices on is far greater than that when you pick from the lucky-dip SD card the shot that is infinitesimally better than the five before, and the 28 after.

Finesse is an art, not a range of beauty products. Timing is a skill, not a menu setting. A moment is singular, not plural. The true photographer picks his moment, plucks it from the stream of time, visualises it in his mind and captures it in his camera because he has decided, then and there, that it is special, worthy of preservation and of later display.

The lesson is simple – everything in moderation, especially moderation. Balance the triangle of the three Ts and satisfy your inner photographer.

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- All images on this blog are copyright Bill Palmer and may not be reproduced in any format or medium without permission.