Ancient Wisdom about Photography

SOME PHILOSOPHY, often paradoxical, for your enjoyment…

A bad camera can be the best tool for making a good photographer.

The best photographers can make the best photographs with even poor cameras. For this reason, the best photographers use the best cameras.

A poor photographer blames his camera; a good photographer blames himself. For this reason, good photographers use cameras they cannot blame.

Many good photographs are due to luck. Good photographers are luckier than poor ones.

You must not care what master photographers think of your photography, for they are prone to envy. You achieve this by carefully following the advice of master photographers.

Any person with minimal aptitude can become a good photographer if they spend thousands of hours learning. Some people have a natural talent for photography; they develop this talent by spending thousands of hours learning.

If you desire to be creative above all else, then your photographs will have a boring sameness. Do what has been done thousands of times before, but strive to do it better, then you will find yourself to be creative.

A bird song may be pretty, but the song is not art. Find inspiration in the work of the masters, but strive to be a master in your own right.

The business of photography is not the art of photography, for the art of selling a photograph is different from the art of making a photograph.

You have mastered photography when it is graceful, effortless, and joyful. Your tools ought to appear to be a natural extension of yourself.

Cameras change and technologies change, but art never changes, for art is inside and flows from above.

Being a good photographer does not mean that you are a good person. It simply means that your photographs are good.
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[Post-processing is the work done on digital images using a computer image processing program such as Photoshop; also, this will include traditional darkroom work for photographic film.]

All photographs are post-processed; one just has to understand the meaning of post-processing.

If you capture a good image in the camera, then that image needs no post-processing. In order to do good post-processing, you need to capture a good image in the camera.

To master photography, you must master post-processing. You have mastered post-processing when it appears as if you did not use post-processing.

You must master Photoshop by mastering its functions. You master Photoshop’s functions by never using most of them. Likewise, the worst Photoshop books are those that explain all of its functions, and the best are those that explain only a few.

In order to post-process a photograph of a subject, you must bring out the subjectness that the photograph failed to capture.

To sharpen a photograph in Photoshop, you should not use the Sharpen function, but rather use the Unsharp function.

To achieve utter freedom and creativity in post-processing, you must enslave yourself to the logic and mathematics underlying post-processing.

The sRGB color space is worst color space because it represents the narrowest range of colors of any standard RGB color space. For this reason, sRGB is the best color space to use in post processing.

Do not trust your eyes, for they deceive you, and so you must measure the color numbers to ensure that they are good. But you must trust your eyes, for if the image does not look good, then the color numbers must not be good.

You must spend thousands of hours post-processing images in order to post-process images quickly.

If you must ask if Photoshop is the right post processing software for you, then Photoshop is the wrong software for you.