Every picture you ever take will be a lie. People take pictures for lots of reasons but all of those reasons have some element of seeing something worthy of documenting. Something catches our eye and we want to recreate it. Regardless of how good the picture turns out, it will never live up to the flawless, crisp, three-dimensional image produced by our 100MP eyes.
Pictures that begin to approximate the beauty of what we see with our eyes don't catch your attention because their image was produced with flawless glass or the latest and greatest sensor. Award-winning pictures have almost everything to do with excellent composition (not framing —composition) and telling a story. Ridiculously high-end equipment can improve the quality of your work. Faster lenses let in more light and allow for faster shutter speeds. Faster auto-focus (be it through psychic predictive tracking or advanced AF tracking processors) will get you crisper photos more often. But none of that matters if what's in the picture doesn't stop a person in their tracks from fifty feet away. The rest is details and technical specifications for people to argue over and none of it will ever be true to what your eyes captured when you were really there, anyway.
In school I studied Electrical Engineering, which makes me a nerd at heart. I get sucked into specifications and features as much as the next tech savvy person. I temper that tendency by reminding myself that some of my most cherished pictures -for content as much as technical accomplishment in photography- were taken with a cell phone. In fact, I could show you twenty amazing pictures, ten of which were taken with cell phones and ten taken with professional DSLRs, and you wouldn't be able to tell them apart.
So if I think that my equipment is so unimportant, (and I don't, really) what is the most important element of photography? Storytelling. I approach shooting for clients -regardless of the project- as if I'm shooting for myself, as if I'm photographing my kids. It doesn't matter if I'm holding a cell phone or a multi-thousand dollar DSLR; as soon as I put a camera in front of my face I take myself out of the story. I may as well be on the other side of the planet, looking at the subject through a web cam. For that reason, I want my pictures to matter. I want them to inject details, emotions, the presence of the event; the story. I want my pictures to make up for the fact that I'm missing this to take a picture. So I want my composition (the arrangement of people and things in the photo) and my framing (the position of all that stuff relative to the edges of the photo) to tell the story well enough that I don't feel like I missed something. And I want my exposure, lighting, and color reproduction to fill in enough of the details that my clients (even I) don't feel so lied to by the inadequate reproduction that is a photograph of a live event or person.
The front page embodies this idea. Baltimore and one of its most cherished harbors is framed by Key Highway. By de-emphasizing the skyline, areas of the harbor where locals congregate to play volleyball, enjoy great food, and generally socialize, are brought to the front of the observer's attention.
Spatial arrangement is reinforced through the use of colors that project depth. Caustic orange of Sodium lamps lighting Key Highway blend the foreground into the background as the observer tracks the more neutral tan and green colors of the volleyball playing fields all the way back to vivid blues, grays, and blacks of the skyline, pushing it back as far as possible.
Choosing to compose this photo in such a way is how I tell the story of where and what is dear to the people who live in these places. Throughout this project I want to find the social hot spots that tourists might never think to see. Equally importantly, I want to compose my pictures in a way that won't betray the scene by relegating it to a postcard. The stories must be genuine, and most importantly, personally palatable to the inhabitants of these cities.
