Improving Your Photography Through Tinkering

I’m going to take a trip down a tangent today and talk about something not related to photography. My son has recently become obsessed with a free game we downloaded on our iPad. It’s called Tinkerbox and it was created by Autodesk as a means to help make the Autodesk brand more widely known by the general public. I know this because I work for the company, so I want to make that clear up front. Since Tinkerbox is free, I’m not really plugging anything except our brand.

Anyway, Tinkerbox is about building Rube Goldberg-like devices using a variety of tools: blowers, conveyor belts, launchers, and bumpers, to deliver a group of balls to a specific destination. The game is pretty straightforward in that respect, but there is also a free play level where you can basically build any type of machine you wish, experimenting with the placement of the various tools to get the results you want.

Boiled down to its essence, Tinkerbox is really about teaching kids (and adults, for that matter) the principles of physics in a fun, hands-on way. And it’s about inventing, failing, retooling, and trying again. My son can literally play for hours, perfecting his creations, then starting all over again. And I don’t feel bad about it knowing he’s getting a real life lesson in physics that he can use later when he enters high school and college.

I guess that is what brings me back to photography (see, you knew I couldn’t stay away). Photography is really about taking a photo, understanding what makes it work or not work, then going out to shoot again applying the knowledge you learn. What makes you a better photographer is not the quantity of photos you take but being able to look at a photo and understand what is good technique, composition or tone.

Many amateur photographers who never progess beyond “snapshot photography” are missing the opportunity to analyze a photograph and distill the qualities that make it what it is. All you need is some basic knowledge about design that even the most basic photography how-to book or website can give you in 30 minutes, and then you are armed with enough information to know what makes a good photograph. You can then analyze your own work against this information and start to understand what you do well and what you need to practice. And then, guess what? You need to go out and practice.

Many people approach art with the mindset that they can just jump in without knowing anything and create a masterpiece. I know this was my thinking when I once thought I could be a painter (which lasted all of a few weeks). “Rules are made to be broken” is their mantra. While not untrue, that statement assumes that a person already knows the rules, otherwise, how can they intentionally break them?

I don’t want to sound like a photography elitist, but the advent of relatively inexpensive digital cameras has created a tsunami of photographers who think they can be next Richard Avedon or Ansel Adams. The truth is they can, but they still need to go through the rigor of the learning process and that is not a process that can be compressed into a few weeks or months. I spend a lot of time on Flickr wading through thousands of mediocre images (including many that I have taken) to find a few that really speak to my heart. Clearly, taking great photos is not easy or there would be a lot more out there.

The first step is the click of the shutter. The next is an honest appraisal of how to improve on what you have captured. And one day, maybe you will be the next master photographer.

Hidden San Francisco - The Gallery @ Autodesk

Not To Scale
Originally uploaded by Ame Otoko

Tucked away on the second floor of the architectural classic One Market Street, former headquarters of Southern Pacific Railroad are the San Francisco offices of Autodesk, the world leader in design software. Less than a year ago, Autodesk opened a space where it could display some of the most interesting pieces of work its customers were creating using Autodesk software solutions.

The Gallery is not large, but very well done, with beautiful displays of customer work, interactive media, and a very hands-on kind of feel. You couldn’t spend more than an hour here, but it would be an hour well spent if you are interested at all in how software design is improving the efficiency and creativity of architecture and engineering.

The Gallery is opened to the public on the first Wednesday of every month from 1:00pm to 5:00pm. But for an even richer experience, try to visit the Gallery on an evening it hosts Pecha Kucha San Francisco. Pecha Kucha, a style of multimedia presentation described as “20 slides, 20 seconds” are short presentations created to pitch new ideas and concepts. As they are only 6 minutes, 40 seconds long, they are rarely boring and often introduce some new and exciting ideas.

The Autodesk Gallery is located on the Second floor of One Market Street. It is opened to the public on the first Wednesday of every month from 1:00pm to 5:00pm.