Introduction
It’s weird that photographers spend years, or even a whole lifetime, trying to
capture moments that added together, don’t even amount to a couple of hours.—James Lalropui Keivom
If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.
—Lewis Hine
WHENyou talk about the quality of a photograph—how good a picture is—what are you
talking about? One obvious meaning is creative quality, the photographer’s choice of subject
matter, the light falling on the subject, and how the photographer frames the picture so that the
arrangement of objects in the photo—the picture’s composition—all add up to the effect the
photographer wants the picture to have when someone else looks at it.In this book, however, when we discuss quality, it means something less esoteric. We’re talking
about the technical quality of the picture. Here qualityrefers to the sharpness of an image, how
well the exposure settings capture the details that are in shadow and in bright light, and how
accurate the photo’s colors displayed on a computer monitor are to the colors in the original
subject, as well as how accurate a hard-copy print is to the colors on the monitor.Actually, this book rarely speaks of quality at all. That’s because it’s possible to take good, even
great, photos using a $9.99 disposal camera. And it’s even easier to take terrible, terrible pho-
tos using the most expensive, technically advanced photo system you can buy. One anonymous
quotation I came across in my research says, “Buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photogra-
pher. It makes you a Nikon owner.” I’ve tried to be nondenominational in this book and gener-
ally ignore camera makers’ claims that their technology is better than their rivals’ technology.
There’s no blueprint or schematic for creativity. Creativity, by definition, springs out of the
originality of one person’s mind. If you follow a scheme written in some book about creativity,
you aren’t creating. You’re copying.Some books and teachers can help you unleash the creativity you already have lurking in your
mind. This book simply isn’t one of them. And its artist and writer aren’t trying to be one of
those teachers. Instead, our goal is much simpler: to make you, as photographer, the master of
your tools, whether camera, darkroom software, or printer. And to be the complete master of
your tools, you must understand how they work, not use them by blindly following someone
else’s instructions.xii INTRODUCTION