The secrets that you keep

Secrets? I take it you are joking.

"f/8 and be there" is no secret

It's important to get clients to check the backgrounds of reportage style photos in order to ensure you don't accidentally share any trade secrets.

(and should be part of your contract)

where to stick your tripod.

I have been given this advice a number of times.

Secrets come into play for me in the photos themselves rather than in the technicals of taking them. There’s so much stuff going on in the periphery, the context, and even sometimes in the photo itself that doesn’t always translate to the viewer as it actually occurred. I consider a lot of that to be at least part of the secret of photography. Photography leaves out an awful lot of stuff that only the photographers and those who were there will know, and even sometimes they won’t know. Some of those secrets are really special.

 

Of course, the other side of the secret coin is that as much as a photo leaves out it can also add.

Exactly.

My main problem is that I know everything about my photographs and, unfortunately, I never forget the situation, the motion, the motivation. Everytime I see my photograph I know why, how, and even approximately when I made it. Which taints my relationship with them, because it makes me fail getting a distance and watch at them in a detached way.

At the moment, finding out what I want to photograph of what I really believe makes sense is so challenging for me that I could not even think of sharing anything about this process.

None. It's not as though I have a profitable business to protect.

If people are actually interested enough in one of my photos to ask how I got certain results, I'm more than happy to tell them, and I hope others will do the same for me. In fact, a couple of years ago, I had a focus-stacked image of a flower in an exhibit, and I was asked to give a little zoom session explaining what I did. I considered the request a complement.

Because I take some field macros of bugs, which usually involves a huge number of failures for each successful image, I've often told people how few good images I get. Why keep it secret?

Secrets ?---what secrets ?.

You just point the Camera at the subject , (this part is the front) , look here , and press this button.

Simple.

:D :D :D.

My secret is that I'm not very good. I've been taking pictures all my adult life, and I'm not much better than when I started. I don't think that's much of a secret either. It's a mercy that I still enjoy doing it; maybe that's the secret.

Eventually something will click and you will "get it". And you'll say to yourself how obvious it all seems, how obvious it is why your photos weren't good before, and why they are now. When you "get it", there's no going back.