This was an email response I sent to my cousin, Ilho in Seoul.
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 18:48:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: Younghong Cho
To: Park Ilho
Subject: Re: digital cam…First of all, thanks for the compliments.
Of course, you can! (A standard and mostly true answer. :p) My belief is that most of it is in the eyes of the photographer. As you must have learned from years of painting, techniques and tools are nice-to-have’s, not necessities for artistic work (not that my photographs are anything close).
Given a decent camera (not the best nor the most expensive nor with biggest number of pixels), one can achieve a lot with some basic photography knowledges. I didn’t know anything about photography before I bought my Canon PowerShot G1 (no longer in production, given the short life cycles of the digital gadgets). So, I went to a bookstore and looked through several books and bought one that had enough technical explanation (aperture, shutter speed, zoom, lenses, etc.) and some aesthetic guidance. I think this indeed helped me a lot.
My camera has limited (compared to SLRs) controls of the shutter speed and the aperture size. It mas a manual, an aperture-priority, and a shutter-speed-priority modes. I was a bit conscious about the decision to have those controls instead of just getting an “auto” mode camera.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you cannot get great pictures with just an auto camera. Yes, the specific technique you mentioned (the depth of field control) requires the control of aperture, but this is just a technique to “enhance” a particular aspect of your expression. I think the bigger part comes from training your eyes to recognize the moment and learning to get the scenes into the frame the right way.
The framing is probably the most difficult part. That is, deciding how to place the objects and scenes within the boundaries of the sensors (or the negatives) to capture some aesthetic structures and patterns that you saw, is something that will probably take me forever to learn to do it consistently.
This is why I like the “digital” photography. I can easily edit the framing “mistakes” with PhotoShop (and adjust color balance and contrasts). I sometimes think that I got much better using PhotoShop than taking pictures.
Anyway, take a lot of pictures and look at a lot of other people’s work. If you really want to further your expressive experiments with photography, I’d recommend getting a camera with the manual exposure controls. A compact auto camera does have a benefit of easy to carry around, any time, anywhere (mine is a bit bulky).
Looking forward to seeing what you have captured.
Hong.
On Fri, 13 Sep 2002, Park Ilho wrote:
> I recently bought a digital camera: Sony’s Cybershot P7(3.2mega pixel). I thought of carrying it on me, and taking picture wherever interested me. I might work on some of the pictures that come out alright and use it when I make my homepage, or I might use it if I begin drawing a Manga of my own. It would be of much use, when I need to draw backgrounds.
>
> I have seen some of your pictures on pbase.com. Looked like ‘professional’ work to me! I was wondering if I could take picture that look like your with my digital cam. What kind of model do you use? Is it possible to take pictures that look ‘professional’ with a digital cam like mine?…it’s not manual, you know. Also, if it is possible, how do you get an effect like…the ‘things’(one of your pictures on pbase) in which the object on the rear is clearly blurred so that you get maximum effect of distance between the two objects?