This is Dr. Dhiraj Kacker’s second guest blog post here. Read his first post on album manufacturing too. He is the CEO and co-founder of Canvera, an online digital photography company based in Bangalore, India. Dhiraj can be found online on Twitter, his company blog or his personal blog.

This post has been on my mind for a long time as I think a lot about the changing role of pro-photographers in the digital age. But in some ways I got beaten to the punch by a much more spunkier take on the issue by Allen Murabayash, CEO of Photoshelter, on his blog post “Rant: I Love Photography”. Please go read it. My post here will be much more sedate and boring! With that warning, let’s dive into it.

I have much more insight into the market where pros get hired for personal or corporate events (such as weddings, portraits, bar/bat mitzvahs, etc) so I will focus on that and not on commercial, editorial and stock photography which has its own set of dynamics in the digital world.

What do we all hear and say everyday: DSLRs are getting cheap, everyone has a camera, it’s getting tougher to earn a living being a pro! A lot of it is true. Digital Photography combined with the internet and cheaper and cheaper capture devices have made it simpler for all and sundry to take and share images like never before. Unshackled from the physical limitations of film and the cost of taking each picture everyone today can pretend to have some proficiency in photography. There are weekend wedding photographers who are taking business away from full time pros just based on price. There are pro-sumers who are building online galleries, showcasing their work and in fact selling their work.

But here’s the funny thing:

- For the first time in the history of pro-photography we have celebrity wedding photographers! Celebrity status was limited to fashion and editorial photographers, never to wedding photographers. How did this happen?

- Family portraits on the wall look like model shoots today, not just people saying cheese into a camera and accepting whatever came out. Perfect lighting, perfect smile are must!

- Corporate mug shots make management look like celebrities and anything lower quality doesn’t speak well of the company

- I am hearing more and more that right after a wedding date is fixed the first or second service provider that gets booked is the photographer; this used to be an afterthought

- Senior shoots are blurring the line between model portfolios and what was considered just pictures of the teenage years

- Parents want their kids’ sports pictures to look like shots from pro sports

- Never before have engagements & boudoir shoots been taking place in such large numbers. The smart photographers have also created the “trash the dress shoot” as well!

I don’t believe any of this was common a decade ago.

So what’s really going on? Let me talk a little from my personal experience. I had a run of the mill point and shoot film camera in the 90s and in 2000 bought my first 3MP digital camera – an Olympus 3000 for a $1000 (yes, a thousand bucks for a 3MP P&S camera). I remember the excitement of getting pictures back in the film world and just being able to relive those memories was amazing. At the time the pictures looked great but today, they look mediocre (and I am being generous). Too much sharpening, probably done by the minilab and too much contrast because of the film I bought. And of course I had no eye for composition or lighting. Initially I really liked my P&S digital camera – it was quite simply the excitement of digital. But my appreciation of photography kept going up and at some point that quality was just not good enough.

After my first kid was born, I finally invested in an SLR and for a few years managed with the default lens. And then I got fancier with the lens. It is safe to say that today with two young kids I shoot a lot of pictures, but here’s the kicker: unlike in the film world where I did not know any better, I can immediately tell how many decent shots I got. It takes me possibly 100 shots to get one really good one! I don’t have an eye for light or composition, and I rely on sheer volume to get lucky. So much so that on a recent birthday party I did the unthinkable: I called up a pro friend of mine to hire him to take pictures. By playing around a lot I have come to realize just how difficult it is to consistently take good shots. It is kind of like playing sports and developing a greater appreciation for the professional who plays the same sport. Isn’t it true that the omnipresence of little leagues and minors grows the business for the majors?

Here is what is happening: never before have average consumers been exposed to this much high quality imagery – web, mobile, magazines, hoardings, blogs – you name it. The quality of images on Pinterest or Tumblr is just mind blowing. Sub-consciously consumers have developed a greater appreciation for good images. Everything I’ve listed above is happening because of this trend. I believe that today consumers (like me) are experimenting a lot more with photography trying to reproduce the quality they observe. And like me they are coming to appreciate how difficult the art and craft of photography is. So when it comes to important life events (operative words being “important life events”), my prediction is that over the next decade pros will be hired in record numbers. Consumers will be spending in record amounts.

None of this means that things have not changed and pros can simply fall back to what they did in the 90s (which was essentially to build a physical portfolio and get referral business). Like a pro-sportsperson, they have to be savvy business people. I am writing on a photographer’s blog so I know that this audience is aware that from building a brand, to marketing to sales and operations, a pro has to do a lot more; a pro’s life has become lot more complicated. But boy, I don’t think there has ever been a greater appreciation for the art and craft of photography as it is today and I think we are at the start of a golden age of professional photography fueled by the omnipresence of images in our lives.

So, what do YOU think? Pen your thoughts below!

This guest post is by Dr. Dhiraj Kacker, CEO and co-founder of Canvera, an online digital photography company based in Bangalore, India. Dhiraj has numerous patents and publications to his name in the field of Digital Imaging. Dhiraj can be found online on twitter, his company blog or his personal blog.

With the advent of digital photography and the simultaneous rise of the Internet the entire photography landscape has been revamped in the last decade. This audience knows these changes quite well so I won’t dwell on all of them but rather I’ll focus my post on the technology and craft that goes behind a product that was spawned by this revolution: Photo Books.

I don’t know how many people actually sit back and think about it but it is quite remarkable that today we can actually get a single copy of a book printed at a reasonable price and turned around fairly fast. In the traditional book publishing world the economics just would not make sense unless there were at least say a 1000 copies of a book to be printed. There are many services that provide the ability to print one-off books:

a) Consumer grade photo books by companies such as Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodakgallery

b) Self publishing service providers such as Blurb, Amazon etc. that focus on generic publishing not just photo content

c) High-end photobook and album manufacturers such as Graphistudio, Asuka, Queensberry etc. that provide a much richer variety in covers, papers, finishing and other customizations. These are the favorites with professional photographers because they best showcase the work of a pro.

Canvera falls in the last category and we have slowly but surely added more and more options as we engaged with more photographers and understood their needs. There is however a constant tension between how many options we can offer versus producing a high quality output and keeping fast turnaround times. What makes this difficult is that there are many different pieces that have to come together in an exact sequence without requiring any one person or set of people to keep track.

Take for example a flush mount book with a custom cover and a personalized box with pictures. The inside of the book is printed on a silver halide machine and bound. The cover and the box wrap are printed on a wide-format printer (in Canvera’s case). The cover goes for separate finishing and then through barcodes is matched at a separate station with the book block and then bound together. The same happens with the custom box. Now there are complications in the process: the silver halide printer and wide-format printer have to be producing the same colors at all times, we can’t afford to have anyone trying to match colors on a book by book basis; individual sheets may have to get re-printed for a variety of reasons; QA may reject the finishing of one of the pieces and that may have to get re-done and matched back with the remaining finished pieces.

None of this is possible to do at scale without significant automation and technology. But adding options brings with it significant complexity as well. Even seemingly simple things such as adding more cover varieties, paper types or hot foil stamping fonts requires us to think through the full workflow: what equipment do we need, where will the raw materials be available on the production floor, how will quality analysis happen etc. We keep trying to push the envelope in adding choices (and at times have gotten burned!) but it is a balancing act.

At Canvera our driving philosophy behind everything we do is as follows:

a) 80% of what makes a good photo book or album is the photography! No matter how many digital photography touch-up tools have been created and how many effects one can do, the pressure on a pro to produce great pictures is as high as ever. In fact I’d argue that with an explosion in images fueled by the web and multitude of capture devices, consumers have subconsciously developed a greater appreciation of what makes a good picture.

b) Fast turnaround time matters a lot. Take the case of wedding photography: For the bride and groom 90% perfect pictures and album received within 10-15 days of the occasion are much more valuable than the absolute perfect set received 6 months after the event. At Canvera therefore, once we get an order we try to put it in the mail within 48 hrs.

c) Quality of printed products should be high and predictable. It is not good enough that the samples are great, but every single product produced every single time without requiring any special treatment should be produced at high quality.

With these driving principles, we focus more on turn-around-time and end-to-end workflow to ensure speed and quality while hopefully letting the photography do most of the talking. This does not mean that we don’t keep adding options, but we do try and think through the full implications first.

Here are things for you to consider when choosing a photo book or album company (beyond of course liking the samples):

1) What kind of front end tools (web or client based) do they provide to capture the order correctly? If there is complexity of choices in the order that the front end tools are not capturing and you are sending instructions over email/phone, chances are that mistakes will happen..

2) As the company grows, do they have processes in place to maintain their turn-around-times and quality at high volumes or are they better off as a low volume hand-made producer?

3) Do the variety of options on the books and albums lend themselves to more mistakes? Is the company ready to handle that much complexity?

4) What kind of color consistency is there in their production work flow?

As I said earlier, at Canvera we are taking the approach that first and foremost the photographs should do the talking. That’s key. And we as the photo book and album manufacturers should get out of the way by quickly turning around a high quality product with the right colors morning, evening or night, even if it means in the short term compromising a little on the variety we offer.

What do you think? How do you pick your photo book and album company? Do you agree/disagree with this thinking?

As a portrait and wedding photographer, it’s awfully tempting to jump on the latest shining thing that comes along that claims to cut post-processing time down by a significant margin.

After all, what would you rather do, have the time to photograph or sit there in front of your machine for hours processing images? No one I know has opted to do the latter. It just wouldn’t make sense to them. So, the search for that holy grail continues.

MY POST-PROCESSING WORKFLOW

My process after an event, be it a portrait session or a wedding, is to download my images off of my CF cards (for the curious, I use Sandisk 8gb Extreme III’s). I cull my images in PhotoMechanic, as it allows me to quickly view my raw files and then I mark the ones I want to keep. The ones I edit out are moved into a different folder and out of sight. I then edit images in either Lightroom or Photoshop, depending on how many images there are in the “process” folder. Choices, choices. In the past, I would chug through a wedding with more 1500 images to edit. Lately, I have been thinking of sending them out to Colorati and having them tweak the images for me.

PRESETS FOR AND BY PHOTOGRAPHERS

There is however one other option. Yes, that bright and shiny thing I mentioned earlier on. It’s called Visual Supply Company, or VSCO. If you use Nikon or Canon cameras and you shoot RAW files, your ears should perk up about now. Once you’ve imported your raw files into Lightroom or Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Raw, you are able to apply presets based on your camera’s profiles. So Nikon users would use Nikon presets and Canon users would use Canon presets. A select number of Nikon and Canon cameras were used to test these presets to create custom profiles. From what I have been told, the company will continue to add more profiles as they are tested and as newer cameras come into the market. I personally like this progressive aspect of the company a lot. Here is the current list of cameras that have been profiled so far.

FIRST STEPS

From my experience with the presets (which I bought), I needed to have correctly exposed and white balanced images before beginning to work with the presets. So, that should be your first step (getting the exposure right in the camera) and then batch correcting the white-balance, if you have that option after you get home.

EMULATE THE LOOK OF FILM

I don’t know about you, but I started out in photography using film. I have shot untold number of rolls of Kodak Tri-X and T-Max 3200. I miss the rich, textures that digital files have all but obliterated. Yes, in the words of Jonathan Canlas or Kirk Mastin (both awesome film-only photographers), I could pick up a film camera again instead of making a digital file look like film. They have a point. Yes, I could do that. But VSCO gives me the opportunity to emulate the look of film without the added expense of working in that wonderful medium. For me, it’s really the best of both worlds.

BLACK & WHITE EXAMPLE

>Straight Out Of Camera, or SOOC

>First Tweak – Just Clicked on the TriX-400++ Preset

>Second Tweak – Used the Vignette++ Preset

>Third Tweak – Used the Dark Skies+ Preset (notice how the t-shirt in this is darker?)

So, in three clicks, I arrived at what I consider to be an acceptable final image, ready to be shared with my clients. The images will definitely go through another round of tweaks, in Photoshop if the clients were to order this image.

COLOR EXAMPLE

>Straight Out Of Camera, or SOOC

>First Tweak – Clicked on the Kodak Portra and Contrast++ presets

>Second Tweak – With the above image being a little “hot” in the highlights, I used the “recovery” slider to bring back some highlight detail.

>The Final Image – Took this image into Photoshop and used brushes to smoothen out natural blemishes, bring some light back into the eyes and sharpen the image up.

For both sets of images, I used the Visual Supply Company Studio Version. I also processed the images in ACR. With the processing engines the same in both ACR and LR, sometimes it is more convenient to fire up ACR (for a small set of images) versus Lightroom (which I use for image sets that are 100 or more). Wanting to emulate the film look, I was more enamored by the way VSCO’s Film helped me produce black and white images. In fact, I might use this almost exclusively to create black & white prints for my clients.

IS THIS FOR EVERYONE?

In one quick answer, no. It’s not. I would recommend you look at your needs first. Figure out whether your clients (if you are a professional) would not just see but also appreciate the look you will be producing for them. If you are an amateur or hobbyist, just looking to create images with a different look, these presets will help you achieve that. Let me put to you even more simply – if you are inclined to produce images that you want people to merely look at, then you should pass on this. However, if you are the type of photographer who wants your viewers to dip into a well of emotion and feel the image, then you should definitely buy these now.

THE SWEET DEAL THAT ENDS ON NOVEMBER 29th!

Until Monday night (that’s tomorrow night), you can get the Standard, Pro and Studio versions for quite a bit off of their regular prices. I bought the Studio version as it includes both the Lightroom and ACR options for both Nikon and Canon cameras. In the event I work with a photographer who shoots with a Canon system, I can now very easily tweak her/his images as well. If your business is primarily shooting portraits, I would nudge you more towards the Pro version.

From Visual Supply Company’s Twitter feed:

“All prices will increase after Monday at midnight PST #VSCOFILM. Standard $59 will be $79, Pro $99 will be $119 & Studio $179 will be $199.”

STILL NOT CONVINCED?

You should also read John Keatley’s review of Visual Supply Company’s Presets. And Jonas Peterson’s review too. Just look at the images they have on display.

SHARE YOUR IMAGES

If you bought the Visual Supply Company presets, please share your images with me and tell me in the comments sections below which presets you liked the most. Do you use other

Disclosure of Material Connection

In the US, you are all just about ready to sit down and have a good meal with your family and friends. Here’s wishing you a very Happy Thanksgiving, from my family to yours.

What comes next is usually considered the biggest SALE day of the year, or Black Friday. I haven’t done that 2 am mall run in ages and have no desire to send you looking for stuff at such a witching hour either. Life isn’t a scavenger hunt. Instead of buying “stuff” that will collect dust in no time, how about giving your brain a boost and learning some new techniques or getting your photography fundamentals down?

Full disclosure: Rob & Lauren of Photography Concentrate are friends. I love their products, I have used them myself and have learned a tremendous amount from them. Yes, even professionals need to keep learning. All the time. So the links you will find here are all affiliate links.

If you are just beginning to use your digital camera, consider buying Extremely Essential Camera Skills. Regularly priced at $49.95, if you buy it before November 29 (midnight), you’ll save $19.98. I reviewed this gem of an ebook (comes with videos to explain a few necessary fundamental things about your camera) and everybody who has bought it through my affiliate link has thanked me later. With a whole lot of you buying cameras – be they point & shoot or DSLRs, you’ll want to get this truly foundational course to get you going.

Once you have your photography skills down pat, you’ll need help with editing them. The team at Photography Concentrate have a tutorial called Super Photo Editing Skills. It too is on sale. Instead of paying $79.95, you can buy it for $47.97, saving you $31.98. If you ever wanted to learn how to use Lightroom, this is a great video tutorial. What’s awesome is that you can pause it, rewind and watch it again and again until the concepts and the steps make sense to you.

When you are done editing your images, you have a couple of choices. You can save them on hard drives or you can share them with the world. Albums are always a good choice because they have staying power. Awesome Album Design Skills, is another tutorial that Rob and Lauren have produced for portrait and wedding photographers. They show us how they use InDesign to quickly and efficiently create custom albums for their clients. This too will be selling for $47.97 through the end of November 29th, so you’ll want to jump on this deal if you are ready to go pro. It’s regularly priced at $79.95.

In addition to the sale, Photography Concentrate has a new free eBook – The Camera Buying Guide (do they just think of everything?) and giving away a Fuji Instax camera (brings you back in time to your Polaroid days doesn’t it?).

Please remember that the sale starts NOW and ends on November 29th at midnight EST. If you do buy these products, please come back here and let me know what you thought about them. Your feedback is valued greatly.

Right around the holidays last year, just about everyone I know bought or received a camera. No, these weren’t the point & shoot variety (hey we have our iPhones for that right?). These were DSLR‘s or digital SLR’s. The excitement over opening the camera was palpable. I know because I received several emails soon after asking me … “So, I got a DSLR, but my images still suck. Why?”

My first response was always, “did you read the manual?” The silence at the other end was quite telling. Most of us, I know fail to read our manuals. When I bought my first Nikon DSLR, which I believe was the D70, I don’t remember diving into the manual either. On the one side, there is a new toy to play with and on the other, my ego was saying to me: “Yeah, I can figure this out. No problem.” That’s until I started seeing images I’d be ashamed to show my mom.

So, if the manual is way too daunting, or even boring, what do you do? Until today, you could have scoured the interwebs and patched together a bunch of the info that may have helped elevate your game. That too is time consuming and unless you are nuts about photography or pursuing as a professional, chances are slim you would be inclined to curate that information, digest it and then deploy it on your next go around with your DSLR.
Rob & Lauren Lim, the duo behind Photography Concentrate, have just published Extremely Essential Camera Skills. I was one of the few lucky ones to receive a review copy gratis. Having seen some of their earlier tutorials – Photo Editing Skills and Album Design Skills, I knew this one was going to be special.

Think of Extremely Essential Camera Skills as the foundational course you forgot to take when you started experimenting with your camera. It’s exquisitely designed – consistent with their other tutorials and extremely engaging website (which you must bookmark). When you open up the PDF, you are presented with a set of colorful tabs for the different chapters such as: The Camera, Focusing, Exposure, Lenses, Depth of Field and Camera Settings. I found the built-in navigation to be very helpful as it makes it easy to skip pages or navigate back to the ones you want to read again.

Unlike other tutorials that teach but fail to train, what I loved about Rob & Lauren’s latest offering is that they are serious about making sure you get the concepts they have just taught before moving on to the next chapter. They do this through tips, exercises, videos (more on this in a bit) and pop quizzes. Though it is incredibly thorough, Extremely Essential Camera Skills is not a read it and forget it kind of manual. The lessons you will learn, each one at your own pace, will stick with you for a lifetime. The definitions and demonstrations are easy to understand and absorb.

As a professional, most of the concepts were familiar to me. But that’s only because I use my camera every day, so it does become intuitive. Having a guide like Extremely Essential Camera Skills will help you get to that point where you too can easily make images you are proud to show your family and friends.

If there was one area where I could see the authors develop more content, it’s the section on using an alternative to that pesky flash that everyone insists on deploying. To their credit they do say this: “The built-in flash on cameras generally sucks.” So true. May we see a sequel to this guide that will dwell on off-camera flash? I hope so, but I do believe this guide will lay the foundation for better images using flash. So, I do urge you to get this one first.

The 7 videos by Lauren are fantastic. Her even, conversational tone and excellent examples helped me better understand the concept behind exposure compensation. So, the take aways are many. With Rob & Lauren’s permission, I am considering using this guide book for photographers (I really don’t want to call it a manual) in the beginning photography class I teach high schoolers. Yes, it’s that good and it is perfectly fitted to meet the demands of amateurs and semi-professionals too.

As I have already stated, I received a review copy Extremely Essential Camera Skills and loved it. If you are struggling to use your DSLR, this guide book will help you get comfortable. For the next two weeks starting today, Rob & Lauren are offering a launch sale. You can get Extremely Essential Camera Skills for $29.97, that’s 40% off the regular price of $49.99. In addition to the 89-page PDF and videos which you can view on your computer or your iPad, you will receive the Extremely Essential Camera Skills Field Guide, which you can print and tote around while you are photographing.

Full disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive a commission on the sale of this PDF to support Tiffinbox. If you enjoy the content on this site, I ask that you use the links in this post to buy Extremely Essential Camera Skills. Thank you!

The very core of the Strobist experience is to use your flash units off-camera or studio strobe units on location. There are a lot of options in the market now that can help you do just that. From personal experience, though, I have used the PocketWizard Plus II Transceivers. More recently I switched to Paul C. Buff’s CyberSync system. Now I am considering returning back to PocketWizard.

These two videos below by Mark Wallace have convinced me to make the move back. The videos show how the new units work with the Nikon camera and flash systems. I suspect, however, the way these units operate won’t be too radically different if you are using a Canon system. So everyone is welcome!

How To Shoot With PocketWizard MiniTT1 and FlexTT5

How To Use The PocketWizard AC3 Zone Controller

For using these units on a Canon system, check out these video tutorials.

By sheer coincidence, I won these units some time back. So, you’ll see an “open-box” video very soon. Stay tuned! Thanks to Mark Wallace and Phil Bradon of Mac Groups for sending me the Nikon version of these PocketWizard units. I can’t wait to go out and play with them.

Below, tell me if you have considered buying these units or you have already invested in a RadioPopper or some other wireless system. Do you work with flash off-camera or studio units for your shoots? Do you have questions on how to set those up? Would you find it useful if there were more tutorials posted here on Tiffinbox? Let me know!

This is Ingrid Spangler’s second guest blog post for Tiffinbox. She is responsible for all the social media, as well as copywriting, promotions and marketing for AdoramaPix. She has been an avid photographer from the time she was a child, and studied film at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she learned about film theory and visual aesthetics. Her first post was about finding the perfect photography printing lab.

Hardcover photo books are fast becoming the best choice to present and distribute your portfolio. It’s a more permanent way to display your images, and while that is a definite plus, it also requires much more care when organizing and designing than just slipping your prints into the plastic sleeves. There’s also something about having your images in a book that leads the viewer to believe that the images should hold together and tell a story more than a traditional portfolio.

Here’s a general portfolio tip from my buddy Joe Holmes of joe’s nyc focus on one style or genre of photography that you do best, such as landscapes or street photography or portraits. You can always do separate portfolios/books for each genre.

Another tip: Don’t let the design of your book overwhelm your images. Keep it simple. This rule goes for any photo book you make, but is especially true for portfolios.

From speaking to photographers and photo editors, it seems that the general rule when organizing your images into your portfolio is “put your best images in the front and the back; make a strong first impression, then give them something to remember you by.” While you can still use this tenet to start to set up your book, what do you do with all the prints in the middle?

Here are some suggestions for how you can sequence the images to have them hold together as something cohesive.

Organize Your Images By Color

Allow the dominant color in one image to dictate what the next image will be. This is very subtle and works very well for images that are largely disparate. Take for instance these images with lots of red tones, the next images could be something with orange or deeper red as the dominant color and so on.

Keep moving through the color spectrum until you are close to the end of the book, where you’ll place your second set of strong images to leave a lasting impression on the viewer.

Organize Your Images Graphically

Look for the strong, dominant lines in your images and pair them accordingly. This image with strong diagonal and horizontal lines is matched by an image with similar lines. For diagonal lines that go off the page, try as much as possible to have them point to the center of the book. This pairing also works because of the similar colors.

Or these circular shapes:

*Images courtesy of Brandon Remler: Fall Trees, Boys on Beach, Bridge, Guggenheim and Tunnel. Red Table courtesy of Ingrid Spangler.

Group like with like: black and whites together, images that depict the same subject, etc.

Above all, choose a high quality lab to make your photo book portfolio! AdoramaPix photo books are printed on real photo paper, so they are the closest thing to a traditional portfolio. Unique lay-flat bindings ensure that none of your images are lost to a gutter in the center, plus you don’t have to worry about matching up halves of an image that you want to span both pages. PixPublisher, the online book creation and editing program, is easy to use and powerful, you can design your portfolio exactly the way you want, sizing and positioning your images precisely on the pages, down to the pixel!

Remember, it’s your work, don’t gamble with the presentation. You may only get one chance to impress someone, make it count!

This is a guest post by Paul Gero, a wedding photojournalist based in Orange County. Paul is also known for being a terrific writer, speaker and teacher. He, his wife Nicki and now two kids are wonderful people to know.

Having been in photography for a little while, I find that the work falls down into basically two approaches: Control and Chaos.

Doing Control type work is about setting up, posing, lighting and forging a bond that elicits the desired response.

Much of the commercial world and a lot of the wedding and portrait world is in that category of Control.

A few reasons why it might be so popular:

a) The desire to create an image that looks familiar (and with the web more images are shown and seen than ever before).

c) A newer photographer with new found skills and less certain about capturing things “on the fly”.

The Chaos approach has been around for decades practiced by many of the greats including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Koudelka, Larry Towell and others.

Many of the great photographers from the famed photo agency Magnum work in this manner. These are some of my favorites primarily because of the way the see the world, the moments they capture and the way they structure their photographs.

It’s a style that takes practice to master. It’s about looking, watching, spending time in the field with a camera, and anticipating — it’s not always reproducible, but it will always be interesting. Serendipity is a huge part of the equation of Chaos photography — that can be scary but also hugely rewarding.

It takes thinking about how you’ll approach a situation from where you position yourself in relation to your subject, where they are in relation to the background and what focal length you’ll use to make this type of photograph.

I recommend to my students is they watch people especially as they gather at a mall, for example. Notice how they stand, how they greet people (and cultures are different).

Then when watching those interactions think about where you would need to be to make a great photograph of that situation. What lens would you use? How far would you be from the subjects?

Selecting a spot to stand in relation to your subject in the Chaos realm is important. This location along with your focal length determines how much context will be revealed in the photograph. And typically you’ll want to see that subject’s face in order to capture emotion (the eyes reveal the soul, as they say). That often means being in front of or to the side of your subject.

When I worked in Washington DC and covered events with the President, it was interesting to watch how the Associated Press determined their coverage and would station a photographer front and center of the President. That was a safe angle, and often times the best angle.

They would position another photographer off to the side for most events — that 45 degree or called the “cut away” angle.

This angle adds depth to the photo as the subject to the right or left of the President would often be slightly out of focus (with a telephoto lens). It would be a good angle if the President was looking in the camera direction, and perhaps less successful if he were to look to the opposite side.

Selecting the angle behind your subject is a lower percentage choice, but can be useful as this position gives the viewer a sense of “walking into the sunset”, or leaving. That aspect makes it useful and can help creating a natural looking end to a story.

While observational skills and camera position are critical to successful Chaos photography so is being in control of your technical skills.

Knowing light, knowing exposure, knowing when to trust or not trust your meter all play into that role.

Many photographers use the auto modes on a modern camera to “set it and forget it” and while that can work and does in many cases, there are times when it can get you in trouble especially if you’re not paying attention to the choices made by the camera or get sloppy in where you meter and hold the exposure value.

When I choose my working settings, I start from selecting aperture first, in order to create the look and depth of field on the scene (especially using wide or normal lenses).

My shutter speed choice then coincides with a good exposure for that scene based on the ISO (typically using the lowest ISO for optimum quality while still being able to get the desired shutter speed). I also consider the amount of movement in a scene in order to select the appropriate shutter speed to stop the action.

Lens selection is critical for Chaos photography.

Much of what I call the inspirational photography in this genre is often made with simple focal lengths, either slightly wide or normal (i.e. 28mm, 35mm, 50mm lenses on 35mm cameras). Rarely do you see a lot of this work done with extreme wide angles and extreme telephotos.

These lens choices also force an intimacy with your subjects in terms of your position to them. It’s much tougher to hide when you’re using a wide or a normal focal length lens, as is possible when using long zooms or telephotos.

When you’ve become really disciplined using one, two or three focal lengths, you begin to see the world taking place on the stage for those lenses. You get comfortable framing with the the imaginary lines of those focal lengths.

Zooms are popular and can be useful tools, though I find that primes often help photographers hone their vision especially when learning. It forces you to move to frame, rather than zoom to frame.

I know for me when using zooms I have to be very disciplined to not just zoom out when I should be moving my feet to frame. In fact, I try to use the zoom like a prime and determine the focal length I want to use, set it on the zoom and then move to frame but not zoom unless I absolutely must (especially with a zoom such as the 24-70mm; less so with a long lens such as the 70-200mm).

Metering light which then translates to a great exposure is critical especially in fast-moving situations.

I find that using an old school incident meter is great in this area. It allows me to dial in the exposure so that helps exposure consistency from frame to frame. Even if you only use an external meter for a while as you learn the patterns of lighting, I think it can be extremely useful.

This gives you one less thing to think about because you’ll know that exposure is handled.

Look at the scene and anticipate what would happen if you change position or your subject’s change position. Think ahead and pre-visualize where the subjects might go can help you successfully handle any change in exposure.

I can’t stress it enough: Exposure is a critical component to successful photography — and especially digital photography.

To paraphrase my instructor, famed National Geographic photographer William Albert Allard: You have to get your exposure dialed in because you’d hate to lose a portfolio photograph due to a lousy exposure.

He was right when he told me (and we were shooting transparency film) as he is today if you’re shooting digital.

What I enjoy most about Chaos photography is that it’s more about capturing life as it happens, as opposed to having it set up by me. It takes more time for this to work, because you have to be able to witness things — having a five minute window with a subject often precludes that and reduces you to do Control work.

I find that life is so much more fascinating and people do much more interesting things than I could ever set up.

I loved to be surprised when looking through the lens and use that as a guide to know if I’m in the presence of an interesting photograph — if it moves me, excites me, or causes an emotional response in me while I’m photographing, it will usually translate in the actual photograph.

Perhaps folks who prefer Control photography are not certain that good or great photos will even materialize therefore they want to ensure that they do.

All I can say from years of experience is to trust that they will — if you have time. Wherever people gather there is a potential for great photographs. And you will often be surprised by the photographs these subjects give you.

The human element makes that happen. The energy from an event makes it happen. You just have to have faith that you’ll see those moments when they happen and using your skills acquired from practice and observation, you’ll be in the right place at the right time.

Knowing how to create nice Control images is a part of the modern photographer’s tool box, no doubt, but I think it should be a piece of the box, not the whole thing.

Practice your observational skills and your technical skills and be prepared to be surprised with the beautiful and incredible chaos that is life and then capture that feeling with your camera.

What kind of photography do you practice? Do you agree or disagree with Paul? Your comments below will create a dialogue that I will welcome here on Tiffinbox. So please take a moment to tell us what is on your mind. We’re listening to you!

I remember the days in a Maine darkroom where I recklessly spooled my Tri-X onto steel reels and taped the cans down for good measure. Of course, I practiced threading dry exposed film but with the lights out in a stuffy closet-like room, it made it almost impossible to get it right the first time. I grabbed the film by its edges, bent it slightly and hooked the sprockets onto the prongs on the reel. Sometimes it caught. Sometimes I thought it caught. I spent an inordinate amount of time rolling and re-rolling film. That was just the first of many challenges with film. The good folks in Rockport were both meticulous and strict about their film development. No sooner had I learned to spool film, I was confronted by the idea of getting my chemistry just right in temperature and volume. Too warm and I would nuke my film. Too cold and it would take me eons to finish.

Getting the chemistry just right was just the start. Film had to be agitated just so (a source of great mystery even to this day) and I followed along and got into a system of ‘swish-swish-rotate-swish’ every minute.

But all of this is old hack. It had to happen. Digital is now firmly established in our collective consciences. Is it the death knell of film? That’s for time to figure out. I still shoot film. But click here and you will see why I raced to jot a few thoughts down.