Photography is the art of capturing memories. Photography is the bridge to endless Journeys, both physical and emotional. When you take a photograph, you are preserving a moment in time that can never be recaptured. You are telling a story with your images and allowing others to experience life through your eyes.
Photography is an art form that has been around for centuries. It captures moments in time and immortalizes them through the power of images. Photography can be used to tell stories, capture emotions, and create connections with others. When you look at a photograph, you are transported to another place and time. You can see the world through the eyes of the photographer and experience things that you never would have otherwise. Photography is more than just taking pictures; it is a bridge to endless journeys.
Photography that we know today got its start in the early 1800's with coated pewter plates being exposed to light in a portable camera used by a Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. This type of photo media did evolve over the next 50 years, but the process of taking the picture and developing took large amounts of time and material. In the 1880's is when the self-contained camera really got started with George Eastman and Kodak. Eastman’s basic fixed non focusing lens had a flexible roll of film inside. This camera was pretty much like the disposable camera we know of today and required the user to send it in to get developed. Shoot forward another 80 years and you would get the Polaroid camera with its instant color images in less than a minute. In the 1990's is when everything changed with the first Digital camera from Kodak. This revolutionary moment is what led to over 1.8 billion digital pictures being taken every day on cell phones.
Photography isn’t only an art form, it’s a way of life for many people. There are many types of photography like Portrait, Fashion, Sports, Architectural, and so on that people use to make a living. It doesn’t stop there, with other styles like Macro, Wildlife, Landscape, Astrophotography, and Street photography. These styles tend to be more popular with hobbyist. Now I’m not saying these styles are limited to just hobbyist, but as technology in automatic cameras grows by leaps a bounds there’s more and more people taking pictures making it more difficult to make a living from this form or forms of photography. Before I get to far off topic, we will continue this portion in a future post.
With the development of the camera, it opened a whole new way to capture moments in time or tell a story. For millenniums before the camera we had writing. Now just think with the click of a shutter we can have one image tell a whole story. Not only is a single picture worth a thousand words it is also understood in thousands of languages. With the Internet and Social media these photos can also travel the world in seconds.
The Traits of a great Photographer are not only telling a story with your photo, but also creating emotions with your photo. A great photo can make you feel happy, excited, sad, or even angry. A single picture in a newspaper can bring you tears or make you want to travel across the world to a location you saw in a travel magazine. Some of the greatest photos in history are simple yet provide a message and create emotion. Some good examples of this would be a 1951 photo of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out, a 1932 photo of workers sitting on a beam hundreds of feet in the air eating lunch, a 1989 photo of a young Chinese man standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square, or a 1945 World War II photo of five military members raising the US flag on Iwo Jima.
“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” Ansel Adams
The most important thing any photographer should learn is that you're the “photographer”. It's your art, your soul, your expression, your photo. Only take advice and knowledge from people, don't take their criticisms and negativity. Like anything you want to perfect, it will take practice and failure to finally get what you want. Good thing digital film is cheap…..
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