Tony Kuyper is well known to many of us who tend to spend a lot of time in Adobe Photoshop. He makes an editing panel that allows photographers to create exact luminosity masks, which in turn help with granular and subtle editing. Of course, his panels do more than that, but his mask-making shortcuts are a blessing for my editing style.
Today, I ended up on his blog and found a gem of an article. He was philosophizing about photography, what it means to him, and what it has taught him. Kuyper has always eschewed what is popular and instead marched to the beat of his own (visual) drum. Kuyper shares five lessons from his extensive time as a photographer and developer of tools to help photographers.
- Stop chasing the light and focus on where it might be hiding instead.
- Don’t ignore the ordinary.
- It’s easier finding light once you’ve found your style.
- Taking the picture is only the beginning. Developing the image personalizes it.
- We are all photographers, even if we don’t take pictures.
Indeed we are. “Exploration isn’t always about traveling significant distances or spending lots of time reaching a destination,” he writes. The pandemic brought me to a similar conclusion and forced me to think creatively about photography.
June 9, 2020, San Francisco