The Photographer’s Ten Commandments

Reductio ad absurdum?

  1. Learn new things always. Practice, practice, practice, strive for simplicity and thou shalt know the holy trinity of aperture, shutter speed and ISO.
  2. Rule of thirds, why should it matter. Break those rules of composition. Your feet — and be it your knees or your stomach! — are your zoom. Do not commit to using auto modes and go manual for as far as you can.
  3. New arrival, Steve Jobs, to update Moses' old-fashioned tablets | Bruce MacKinnon
    New arrival, Steve Jobs, to update Moses’ old-fashioned tablets | Bruce MacKinnon
  4. It does not matter if you shoot JPEG or RAW, just mind traditional pictorialism. Dare, experiment!
  5. So you pay three times more for gear for multiple better images? Any gear can only photograph what you see: look up, down, left, right and behind you.
  6. Point-and-shoot? Instagram is photography. Doesn’t even matter when no sun is shining and nothing moves, just don’t photograph people from the back and call it “street photography.”
  7. It does not matter if you post-process or not, it does not matter if you sharpen or not, just frame, shoot, shoot plenty and ask questions later.
  8. Noise and blur can be a blessing and too much accuracy a curse. There is beauty in less perfection and overkill in Photoshop fixes.
  9. Want to destroy natural light — as little as there might be — with a flash? This is the age of insanely sensitive ISO.
  10. Your eye and sharp vision though, they matter. Be curious, never desire your neighbor’s camera, never ever utter the words “Say cheese” and do not make photographs of people posed.
  11. Carry your camera everywhere, think what story you want to tell and love what you’re looking at. And in the end, only the image matters.
  12. Have fun.*

* Oops, lost in history: the 11th commandment.