The Secret Decoder of Photography

Have you ever felt confused about photography? I know you’ve been confused because I’ve been confused about photography, and I still am sometimes. Maybe you felt you didn’t know what book to read. There’s so many books out there on photography and classes. Where do you even start?

How about what lens to use? Do you go with a single lens? Do you take everything with you on a shoot? Should you have prime lenses or zoom lenses? There’s so many choices! What do you look for? How do you get out of this maze of confusion?  And what camera? I mean, come on, there’s a zillion cameras. Are we going to shoot with film? Are we going to shoot digital with a Mirrorless, DSLR or even an iPhone? And when you pick a camera, what settings will you use?  And what about lighting? Should I even use artificial lighting or should I just use natural lighting?

How about processing your images? There’s the main platforms, but maybe you should get into one of the other platforms? Are there basic tools that you need to know or is it all just a big mess?

Finally, how do you get your work out to the world and should you get your work out to the world?

When people have too many choices, they get confused! If any of these points have ever confused you, you are not alone. They have confused me too. And I had to work my way through it. I really did. And I’m here to tell you that there is a way to decode all this stuff. What if you had the secret answers?

The Cycle of Photography is the “Decoder Ring”

A way of looking at it is what if you had a way to decode photography. Like one of those decoder rings from the 50’s.

Well I have done it. I decoded photography for you. I put it in my book Advancing Your Photography. It’s a handbook for how to create photos that you’ll love. But the big secret inside is a secret decoder, which is called the Cycle of Photography. And all those things that I went through with you fit into one cycle, one decoder ring that you can learn. If you follow this, your head will get unscrambled and you’ll know what’s more important than anything else.

What are all the things you need to know to become an accomplished, confident photographer? Whether you decide to be a pro or not, you should feel like you’re operating as a professional photographer at that level.

1. Visualization lies at the center of this. Visualization is getting an idea before you press the shutter. What photograph do you want to create?
2. Then you look at what equipment you’re going to use for that photograph.
3. Next you learn to capture. Capturing is lighting and composition. How do you capture it to tell your story?
4. How do you process that image to match your vision of it?
5. Finally, how do you share it with the world?

Those are the five points of the “decoder ring”.

Visualization

So let’s start at the first point. We’ll have more blogs and shows diving into all these points but let’s get a general idea. Visualization means getting an idea before you even press the shutter. You don’t even have to have a camera to look for an image, you can just use your hands.

Now, one thing you should be doing is training your eye to always see images. Your eye needs to be trained just like every other muscle. If you’re going to learn tennis, you have to hit that ball over and over until your muscle memory kicks in and you just see the ball coming and you know how to hit it. And your eye is a muscle. It’s much more than a muscle because it receives light and you use that to see images with. You have to put the time in to really finding images.

Watch the live stream based on this blog here.

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Be sure to keep an eye on our blog as we will be coming out with a part 2 of this blog post where we will finish going over the other points in the Cycle of Photography.