This week, over on my You Tube channel, I’m going to be sharing some of the questions that are asked by my Landscape Photography workshop clients, alongside the answers of course.
And there is one thing that ties all these questions together. Even though they were asked by different people, around different parts of the country……
‘Can I ask a stupid question?’
The video was filmed on location at Derwent Dam.
It struck me back in November that I heard this a lot, and not just on workshops either, but across social media pages and over in the comments section on You Tube. Whenever someone would ask what they had pre-determined to be a basic question, it seemed that this question preceded the actual question.
But it rarely is a stupid question.
Something that I’ve come to understand over the last couple of years is that if you don’t know, you don’t know.
And sometimes that actually makes the question itself really difficult to even ask. Why would you ask how, for example, you would set up a tripod, if you don’t know that you are setting it up incorrectly in the first place?
Some beautiful light hitting the pathway through the trees….Foreground interest doesn’t always need to be an object jutting into your frame.
I’ve had many a student who was setting up their tripod incorrectly, but only one who ever asked me how it should be set up……and that was preceded by ‘can I ask a stupid question….’ Of course, where I do see bad tripod use, we will correct it during the day. But, despite encountering this scenario many times, only once have I ever been asked about it.
And then there are the questions we want to ask but are afraid to appear foolish. But these themselves are always really relevant questions….
‘Why would I use a two second timer?’
‘What do you mean by focal length?’
‘What’s bracketing?’
‘What’s foreground interest?’
‘Why do I get blurry photos at night?’……….
The thing is, none of these questions or any of the other questions I’ve made a note of, are stupid. If you don’t know, you don’t know. But unfortunately other photographers can sometimes have a bit of a smarmy ‘you should know everything’ way about them and that makes it so that people don’t feel comfortable asking.
That was certainly my experience many years ago and I do still see this a lot today. In fact it is probably even more prevalent now, in the days of social media, than it was back in my early stages of learning.
So, over the course of a couple of months, I’m collating these questions and answering them over on You Tube (link is down below). And I think that we should all keep in mind that there aren’t really any stupid questions. If you don’t know, you don’t know. So don’t be afraid to ask. And if you are asked a question, don’t be one of those smarmy know it alls, be nice and answer the question as best you can. We all have had ‘stupid’ questions in our time.
Learning photography is hard. Landscape photography is hard. Be Nice!
Dave
The photographs in this read were taken on location at Derwent Dam in the Peak District National Park during the course of filming the video.