Art Student

I just got a new lens for my camera and I'm very excited. I've pretty much always just had point and shoot cameras. They work fine, you push the button and you get a picture. It can be better or worse depending on the camera, but you could never tell who shot the picture. The camera did all of the work, made all of the decisions, and there wasn't much you could do to change how the pictures were taken. Two months ago I bought a Panasonic Lumix GF-3, which is a fancy schmancy micro 4/3 camera where you can change a bunch of settings on the camera and you can even change the lenses. I played with the settings a fair amount and read some articles and advanced my knowledge of photography a bit, but I'd hit a wall and I wasn't really happy with what I could do. The camera was too damn smart. It wouldn't let me push the shooting parameters into inappropriate territory and see what happened. What to do?

I bought a very cheap lens, so cheap that the box says 'toy lens'. The lens is all manual and I actually have to tell my camera that it's shooting without a lens to even make it work. I control the aperture (how big the hole is that lets in the light) and the focus all by myself. I still let the camera decide how long the exposure needs to be because it does a really good job, thought I could do that too if I wanted too.

 So now I'm taking pictures like an art student. If you bought a camera that took pictures like this you'd call it a piece of junk and return it. I'm messing with depth of field and composition and all of the stuff that you'd hear pretentious art students talk about as they smoke their hand rolled cigarettes and complain about how society doesn't appreciate their vision. I do think that talented photographers are talented, but I also think that most of what separates their pictures from the snapshots I've shot all of my life is good equipment and a knowledge of how to use it. I think this is true of most things by the way, whether person is a photographer or a mechanic or a steel fabricator. The knowledge of most professions is open to most people if they want to chase it down. I really like to chase it down, at least to a point. So feel free to complain about the silly photos I'm posting for a while until either win a Pulitzer for photography or get it out of my system. I'll probably tell you that your criticism is wrong, you just don't understand my art.