For years, you’ve followed photography tutorials and Youtube videos. You know the exposure triangle, you know the difference between spot and evaluative metering for all your cameras. You probably a preset pack. Or two. You master the technique.
Yet, when you’re on location looking at a scene in front of you, you hesitate. You know there is a photograph in there. You’re pretty sure you can feel something could be done here. But you’re not sure what you want the photo to say.
This is the paradox of the open gate.
When the internet exploded and information started to flow, we asked education to be free. And we got exactly that: millions of YouTube videos on every subject under the sun, social media, free presets packs, recipe cheat sheets for every conceivable situation. Knowledge became a flood.
But what started to flow wasn’t designed to make you a better photographer. It was designed to keep you watching, clicking, and scrolling. Ming Thein put it this way: “Giving someone a recipe without teaching taste is like handing a blind person a paintbrush”.
The history of photography teaching has two main camps, neither anything like what we have now. At one end you have Ansel Adams who freely taught his zone system and build a whole academic programme around it. He taught a framework, not a cheat sheet. At the other extreme, you have Cartier-Bresson who refused to teach anyone. Both agreed on something: the part of photography that really matters is very hard to transmit, and pretending otherwise is nonsense.
When I started photography, learning was hard and slow: you had to find people with the same interest; hope some of them would be willing to spend time discussing things with you; you had to buy books; you had to actually go places to find the information you wanted (library or be cheeky and read in a bookshop). That forced you to slow down, think, contemplate, understand. This is no longer the world people expect.
In the current ecosystem, the problem is that the majority of its actors pretend everything can be easily transmitted. Everything is a checklist, a simple setting, or a three steps workflow. And that works really well for the algorithm: shallow content will outperforms deep content every time. A video called “5 Camera Settings You MUST Change NOW” will outperform one that spends time slowly explaining the concepts of ma (間) or in’ei (陰翳) with their subtle meanings by an order of magnitude.
You can see the distinction in the way the economics work. Many famous online educators that used to give everything away for free change their model. See on substack how many people start free, and then switch to paid tiers or total paywall. Others say that free production drained their ability to shoot their own work. Giving away deep knowledge for free is simply not economically viable. And remember: we’re in a side hustle economy where everything has to make money, so that goes against the grain.
But that change to a hybrid model means that the relationship between producers and consumers changes from mentorship to marketplace. And more importantly, it means that the gate is no longer fully open. The days of free flowing knowledge are gone. As things that actually teach you the important stuff cost money to produce, and they should, they now cost money to access. In the hustle economy, the free tier is increasingly filled with things that cost nothing because they are worth nothing.
But presets create a paradox: when everyone can achieve the same results at the click of a button, everyone’s visual identity becomes what the market sells. Not what they discovered over time. You don’t get a pull upwards of everyone’s capabilities through the dissemination of presets and cheat sheets, you get a levelling by the average. Once in a while, someone will make magic out of that homogeneous soup because they had something to say, but they’re exceptions.
Which leads me to my next point: presets and cheat sheets aren’t really the problem. They only become the problem when you see them as the goal.
So where does this leave someone who wants to learn?
I think the first step is to recognise that abundance was an illusion: the illusion of access to infinite knowledge. The actual knowledge you can access is limited and skewed towards specific kinds of knowledge. You can spend ten minutes to learn how to reproduce Monaris’s look, but it won’t mean that your photos will mean anything. She developed that style over a long period of time because it worked for her and it allowed her to express certain ideas and feelings. If for you it’s a few slides and checkboxes in photoshop you found in a tutorial, you’re creating an empty ersatz.
The second step is to stop treating learning as consumption. When the next tutorial is just a click away, you tend to go through tutorial after tutorial and accumulate surface knowledge, convincing yourself that you’re acquiring deep understanding. It’s not how human knowledge works or we’d all be physics Nobel Prize winners by now. Photography doesn’t develop through accumulation any more than chemistry or literature develop through accumulation. It develops through time and limitation. There is a reason why a lot of photographers advise to you go back to the same places over and over again: that’s how you understand things.
The third step is the hard one: search for education that teaches understanding before technique. It exists and often costs money and effort.
#Photography #Opinion #IMayBeWrong #Teaching