Quick note: For a while now, I have been trying to figure out how to manage two blogs that I maintain. One of them is the blog you are reading right now, the other is my “work” blog where I post technical content related to my “real” job as in, the job that I actually make money that pays for this blog and all the photography gear. What I’m attempting to do here is share my views on how these two topics have a lot in common.
Kind of funny, but I just saw a reissue for a an album called “It’s OK to listen to the gray voice” by Norwegian jazz Saxophonist Jan Garbarek. It came out in 1985 and has always been one of my favorites, but I never really thought about the title much as many jazz albums just make up titles to conjure up an image more than anything else. There are no lyrics so the rest is up to you to interpret. What I realized though is that I DO listen to the gray voice. I like living in the space between black and white, I don’t follow the crowds, I do my own thing and I excel because of it, I like to break everything down into tiny pieces then abstract the fuck out of it. I don’t worry about people that tell me that I’m doing it wrong (I do listen though), nor do I insist that I’m doing it right. I’m never in search of the absolute best solution, I just want to make it work and revisit when I need to. I’m not a big fan of absolutes, in my mind there is always a better way, even if it does not exist today.
I’ve been a software engineer for 35 years. After this much time, I just have a feel for it.
I’ve been a photographer for 40 years, After this much time, I just have a feel for it.
Software engineering is a complicated beast. It means a lot of different things to different people including people who still subscribe to that old cliche that I will be able to fix your printer (actually, I probably can, but be prepared for a constant stream of profanity during the process). For me, software engineering is about solving problems. In fact, I’ll just throw this out there and say that engineering in general is about solving problems. When I work with my engineering team, I’m always trying to steer the discussion back to that idea, “What’s the problem you are trying to solve?” and once they understand the problem, “What is the best technology to use, or best approach to take to tackle that problem”. This seems easy enough, but it’s amazing how often the conversation starts out with a reference to some new technology and that “we should build something with this”, the exactly backwards approach, well, not exactly backwards because I don’t think in absolutes, lets just say frowned upon. In engineering, there is not an exact solution, but the solution should be exact.
I feel the same way about photography, the main difference is that there is not an exact solution and the solution itself is also not exact. I think a lot of people get hung up on this, buying tons of gear, taking classes or watching tons of videos trying to take the perfect picture. The question though is “what is the problem you are trying to solve?” If you are a wedding photographer, you have very different needs, processes and equipment, than a sports photographer, which is different again from fashion, birding, travel, street, etc. Similar, to an engineer though, you take the full set of “solutions” and take note of the equipment that is available and chose the best solution that will meet your needs. This is why there are so many different cameras, lenses, and other gear. Once you figure out and acquire the gear you actually want, you get to learn how to use all of this stuff.
It’s incredible to think about the amount of engineering work that goes into building a camera and the fact that most of those engineers probably do not use the final product. The photographer, on the other hand, has little idea of how it all works at a detailed level, like what does the math look like to make a shutter that can open and close in 1/4000th of a second, they just press the button. Of course, this is over generalizing the situation, many photographers have a very good understand of the tech and many engineers take great photographs. The photographer does not need to understand the math, the engineer does not need to worry about artistic composition.
Combining these ideas though is the challenge I enjoy. I Basically take the way I think and apply it to different disciplines and see what happens. Be creative! Solve a math problem in different way, run the camera in manual mode and see what comes out, use a cloud service in a way that it was never intended to run, bask in the elegance of the solution and wonder why no one else ever thought to do it that way.
What’s the message? Stop and think! Stop blindly following the hype in technology and photography. I’m not saying ignore the hype but make sure you understand it, think of ways to leverage it, think of ways to use it that no one else is talking about or combining it with five other things to make it even better! Know what your tools are, whether it’s a camera or a cloud service, understand the limitations, the costs. Security and compliance issues are like dealing with low light or direct sun, you need to fully understand how to evaluate the situation, create a process, make adjustments and run with it.
Thanks for reading!!
Final note here: The images above were all shot on a Leica M11 and are straight out of the camera with no editing. I have the camera set to shoot raw mode as color DNGs and monochrome JPEGs. I think the look pretty good, maybe a bit dark, certainly look better on a bigger screen. I just got the 35mm Summilux a few weeks ago and the images shot with the 35mm were all from my first day of walking around with the new lens.