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Forms Of Authorship From Behind The Camera
One of my most favorite things to do is go out in the world and see what I can see with my photographer’s eye. Sometimes I see light and shadow and want to capture action as it enters the light, which is what I did in the above photo.
Sometimes I want to capture signs of cultural heritage, which I was also exploring in the above photo as I walked through a market with my mom’s cousin in Palermo, Italy.
But sometimes I go out and I just don’t see anything interesting that I want to photograph. And when this happens I’m just not excited about my photographs.
This is when I think of photography as authoring the image both behind the camera and in front of the camera. Keeping this in mind, when I go out into the world and photograph found scenes, there are a finite number of forms of authorship that I can deal with. When I think this way, I can evaluate my choices more easily and decide if a scene is something I want to make a photo of or not.
In this post I’ll give an overview of the 5 forms of authorship that you have from behind the camera. This way you won’t linger in a scene to only later realize that you don’t like the resulting image.
Exposure
The first form of authorship has to do with light. Look for a scene where you have different choices of exposing for light. In the black and white photo above, I had a myriad of choices of what light I wanted to expose for and set as my key. I chose to expose for the light the man was walking into. However if I had chosen to expose for the shadows, the photo would have been much lighter.
In the above photo of the woman’s solitary moment by the sea, I did not have many choices of light to adjust for. I was in Agrigento, Italy and I was trying to fit in too many sites in one day. The only time that I was able to get to the Turkish Steps was when the sun was just directly above. There were also not many light differentials in the scene because it was a wide-open beach scene.
I decided to make this photo of this woman as she pensively walked along the edge of the…
