The Photographic Eye

Around six months ago I wrote about how to get into photography, from the raw amateur’s point of view, so that the newbie could develop what I called the “photographic eye.” This week we look a little deeper into this subject.
What prompted this article was a piece I read where some reviewers compared the results achieved with a phone cam, compared to the photographs from a Digital SLR and they claimed that in many instances, the phone camera’s results were as good, if not better than the DSLR. However, I will stick my neck out here, and say that is not quite the case.
My wife has an up to the minute Samsung S4 and we will often take photos of the same subject, at the same time, so we do have a continual comparison.
Now, if you want to photograph a bottle of cosmetics on a nothing background, the phonecam will deliver a perfectly adequate image, depending upon the lighting. And so will the D SLR. Dead heat so far.
Most of the best known images in the history of the world came from the photographer’s eye. The vehicle for that “eye” can be anything that the technology of the time dishes up, but I repeat, it is not the technology that produces great photographs - it is the photographer him or her self.
One of the most famous portrait photographers was Sir Cecil Beaton. Beaton’s first camera was a Kodak 3A folding camera. Over the course of his career, he employed both large format cameras, and smaller Rolleiflex cameras; however, many of his best portraits were taken with a Box Brownie. A Box Brownie! Hardly the epitome of cutting edge cameras.
During the Second World War, Beaton was initially posted to the Ministry of Information and given the task of recording images from the home front. During this assignment he captured one of the most enduring images of British suffering during the war, that of three-year old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne recovering in hospital, clutching her beloved teddy bear. When the image was published, America had not yet officially joined the war - but splashed across the press in the USA, images such as Beaton’s helped push the American public to put pressure on their government to help Britain in WWII. Make no mistake, the power of a photograph is not produced by the equipment. It is the way the subject matter is presented. And that is under the photographer’s control. The “photographic eye”.
Famous glamour photographer Francis Giacobetti used a Contax 35 mm for his photography, including when he shot the Pirelli calendar. Large format calendar pictures taken with a small format camera. Once again, the “eye” far outweighs the equipment.
The first thing you need to have to take superb photographs is that same “photographic eye”. I am not saying that good equipment is superfluous, but what I am saying is that the final arbiter is the human eye. How you got the photograph is incidental and even unimportant. The final picture is the only really important factor in photography.
So is the photographic eye something you are born with, or something you develop? Such semantics are beyond the confines of this article, but I believe that it is something which may come more naturally to some folk than others, but it is still a concept anyone can master.
It is worthwhile taking a few ideas on board. First, try looking at the whole picture you are about to take. Do not get so totally engrossed in the subject, that you fail to see an intrusive background. “Antlers” growing out of someone’s head does not make a great photograph, unless the subject is called Rudolph. With the D SLR you can blur the background with a wide aperture - but you do not have that advantage with camera-phones. Control over the final image is one to D SLRs. The same goes for taking action shots. D SLR wins hands down.
So, if you only have a camera-phone, don’t despair, you can still take marvelous images, but just remember to get rid of dreadful backgrounds, and remember the limited capabilities of the ubiquitous camera-phone.