A person who really likes photography must love life, so that he can find those beautiful moments from the heart, which is the prerequisite for "shooting" good "films".

It's hard for us to imagine that a person who doesn't love life will make a good film.

I like to let us enter the industry, but the trade-off can make us professional.

When I was writing about painting, I made a rough and superficial classification, and I made a lot of mistakes.

Originally, I didn't want to write a classification in the photography section, for the same reason as painting, after all, I haven't learned about it systematically, and I will almost certainly not be able to find the correct answer by looking up information on the Internet with only a little understanding.

If you don't write, you can't do it, so you can only divide it into categories from the single aspect of the subject matter.

A simple Baidu (the AI that can make the Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao of the Tang Dynasty write "If life is only as first seen" Qing poems I really dare not use at present), there are landscape photography, architectural photography, humanities photography, portrait photography, life photography, tourism commemorative photography, flower photography, stage photography, news documentary photography, wildlife photography, sports photography, macro photography, wedding photography, commercial photography, military photography, aerial photography, underwater photography, body photography...... There are also photomicrographies, infrared photography, pinhole photography, and so on.

I first directly admit that this classification is unscientific. At that time, someone on Zhihu who gave the answer directly asked, "If I take a dog on a trip and pose for a photo halfway." Is this documentary? Figure? Animal? Scenery? Which of them? ”

The punctuation marks are more outrageously wrong than mine, and the 50-step 100-step bar spirit is everywhere.

Fortunately, my misguided categorization is just to illustrate one thing, and that is that no master photographer is an all-rounder.

He's just excelling in the subject matter he's good at.

Very few of the subjects that appear in the above categories are prominent.

Of course, because the master is familiar with the most basic things such as equipment, composition, and color, he will be much better than ordinary people in any subject, but personally, he still has a preference and outstanding theme.

No one is proficient in everything.

Since no one is proficient in everything, I don't have to work thanklessly on the subject matter I like.

I love people and flowers and birds.

As mentioned above, the original intention of buying a camera was to collect materials for painting fine brush strokes, and at that time I had not yet started to draw figure paintings, so the original intention of wanting to buy a camera was naturally to paint fine brush paintings of flowers and birds.

On May 2, 2018, I wrote the article "Reverence for Life ~ Peach Gain", which introduced my preferences and trade-offs as a photographer.

Whether it's painting or photography, flowers and plants have always been my favorite subjects.

In Daqing in April, the peach willow is not green, and the butterfly dance swallow has not returned! As someone who loves photography, this is undoubtedly a good season. Every year, the first to bring spring information to the people of Youcheng is not the green willow, Feiyan, and Chunjiang...... Instead, it suddenly appeared full of peach blossoms, pink, delicate, and bright.

Probably influenced by painting, since I first learned photography, I have always disliked the so-called big scenes that I jokingly call a long hand can be photographed, I like to choose the subject matter from what I see in daily life, in this regard, I prefer Lu Yao's point of view: "A truly powerful novel does not rely on plot to win." A thrilling plot doesn't necessarily make a thrilling novel. A writer's greatest talent should be to be able to interpret the huge content that makes people's hearts tremble in the daily fragments of life. And this intellect should be based not only on an extremely familiar understanding of life, but also on a deep insight and thorough understanding of those lives. Literature and art are interconnected, and in the same way that for photography, the truly striking images are often familiar scenes.

Therefore, I have always paid attention to focusing my camera at those scenes that we are accustomed to in life, and strive to find the most suitable detail for the scene through a new perspective.

Personally, I have always believed that only by persevering in this way will there be gains.

The shape of the peach blossom is similar to the plum blossom, but the plum blossom has no leaves, and for the plum blossom with the wind of "pretty does not compete for spring, only reports the spring, and waits until the mountain flowers are blooming, she laughs in the bush", the beauty of its appearance, I think Gong Zizhen of the Qing Dynasty in his "Sick Plum Pavilion" article has said that no one can stand out: "Plum is beautiful in song, and there is no posture in the straight; Take the beauty as the beauty, and there is no scenery in the right way; Sparse is beautiful, and dense is stateless. "Therefore, according to the peach blossoms, we must also reflect the song of its sparseness.

To achieve this, I wandered among the flowers with a heavy camera on my back, carefully searching for details.

In the process of searching, through the lens, I found many times that some pictures are very beautiful, but sometimes it is precisely that in the beautiful pictures, there are some "sideways and oblique" out-of-bounds branches and leaves from time to time that destroy the beauty of the picture.

For these branches and leaves, many people do simple and rude methods, they will directly break these blocking branches to leave a perfect picture for shooting; Or cut some very beautiful flower branches and glue them to a crooked old stem to achieve perfection in the realm; Or let people shake the trunk of the tree, take pictures of the rain of flowers in the sky, and so on.

I'm never going to do that.

I basically try my best to get these branches and leaves out of the frame, some of which can be temporarily pinned by hand to other branches and leaves, some of which can be temporarily tied to other branches with small ropes, some of which can be shot from different angles (although it will affect some aesthetics), and some of which can be blocked with a pre-prepared light shield (or a colored shoebox or a painted baffle) so that it does not affect the composition.

And for those who really can't remove the picture, they either give up, or they can only regretfully leave it in the picture. As an aside, I don't like to use computer P diagrams, although it doesn't take a minute to get rid of extra images or add some needed nodes at the level of my computer. But from the first day I picked up my camera, I always had one idea: photography is photography, and it is a skill to truly record historical moments!

So since I photographed, I basically conceived the aperture shutter composition scene first, and then pressed the shutter, so that I could basically do not even the most ordinary cropping.

Personally, I think this kind of persistence has benefited a lot and helped me a lot to improve my skills.

For a long time, I have been telling some people who are "devout to the Buddha" about my understanding of diet, their concept is not to kill but to eat vegetarian, I always tell them seriously, plants are also alive, what you think of as vegetarianism is no different from killing in my opinion, what we have to do is:

Learn to revere life, whether human, animal, or plant;

Learn to listen to a little flower tell me its name on a spring morning;

learn to be a good person;

Learn to stick to our moral bottom line, which is like an article in the latest issue of The Reader, as expressed: "We shouldn't be bad at any point, should we?" "In the movie "Doomsday Danger", the child asked his father like this. At all hours. Dad replied.

I think that's all that matters.

After excerpting this article, which was written in 2018, I had the idea of replacing the photos used in the original article, but then I calmed down and thought that it was that level back then, and I still didn't change it.

In the first chapter, "Games", I wrote that life is a process of trade-offs.

It's the same in photography, when we have a beautiful view in our hearts, it doesn't automatically become a photograph.

We must consider whether to take a part or a whole, from this perspective or from that perspective, where the subject is at the golden section, and sometimes consider the role of light, etc., and then press the shutter.

All people take pictures after this process of analysis, either voluntarily or involuntarily, before pressing the shutter.

There are no exceptions, but after a lot of photos, this analysis process will become a subconscious form.

In fact, when I chose to use this group of peach blossoms to represent this peach forest, I had already discarded other flowers and branches.

That's the trade-off.

The choice of the eye is based on the beautiful scenery of the heart.

Be sure to have a beautiful view in mind.

I have taken many photos of a small tree that looks ordinary to outsiders, a few branches and leaves that are easily overlooked, and sometimes even an ordinary wall with no characteristics......

Ordinary people see these as ordinary scenes, but what I see is what they look like after taking pictures.

This is the scene in the heart, no one is born like this, they are all cultivated little by little.

Once we had the beautiful scenery, we found the best shooting spot through careful observation and trade-offs, and the composition in the shot was perfect, with the subject prominent, the background weakened, and the light soft......

At this point, we are only one step away from the final film.

Press the shutter.

This method is okay when shooting some relatively still images for long periods of time, but there are many wonderful moments in the process that are fleeting.

This requires us to be able to grasp it with our hands.

Be quick with your hands and eyes.

Quickly capture the moments that you feel are wonderful.

After shooting still images for a while, I started to practice shooting scenes in motion.

As I said above, I am against materialism.

So I basically used the camera lens that came with the camera.

Use it for shooting people;

Use it to shoot flowers and plants and red leaves;

Pat bees with it;

Shoot spiders also use it;

It is also used to shoot dragonflies;

Bird Shooting...... I used it too, but I couldn't shoot it well.

It's really impossible to see the bird's flight from many distances.

Approaching?

Approached them and flew.

It seems that they don't know that I'm a good person yet.

I have always been unable to eat grapes and say that grapes are sour mentality and people who don't know much about photography said, if you want to see whether the photographic equipment is top-notch, you can ask the photographer what he is photographing, under normal circumstances, if he says it is "bird-fighting" (I don't understand why it is called a photographer who shoots birds), then this is a rich photographer, don't care how he shoots, his equipment is absolutely top-notch, basically starting at 6 figures.

In order to practice photographing objects in motion, I once photographed pigeons in a place in Guochengji, where several pigeons kept flying up and down on a big rock, and I kept adjusting the parameters on the ground, looking and shining again, and adjusting again, but it was still blurry.

I continued to practice non-stop, but unfortunately it always didn't work well.

Until one time, Daqing organized a marathon.

Streets were sealed.

Under the scorching sun, I sat in the middle of the road with a camera and a piece of mooncake in my arms (I didn't have any experience, I didn't bring a stool or cushion or anything, I really sat on the road).

Take pictures of the runners running over one by one.

During this period, I even photographed Chester Lim, my daughter's physics teacher who participated in the competition, of course, I didn't know that he was my daughter's physics teacher when I took the photo. The daughter who just entered the school also heard that her teacher ran the marathon the next day, and told him about me going to take pictures, but this brother she called (I don't know if it's this split, foreign names are too difficult to translate) asked her to go back and find it. My daughter and I looked through all the photos one by one at night, and finally found them in the midst of my daughter's startled shout......

This picture was left for him. He also wrote a short article about the process of this competition, and this photo was used.

As you can see from this photo, he doesn't run fast because I took a clear picture of him. None of the runners in front of him could shine clearly.

It's a truly dynamic photo.

From the first runner to the last two runners (I was sitting about a few kilometers from the finish line), followed by an ambulance, a camera van, and a police car......

It's spectacular.

Slowly got up, took hundreds of photos of the storage card and a tanned face and went home to continue watching the film.

Why are you in such a hurry to watch the film?

Isn't this nonsense, in order to post a circle of friends.

Every time I think that a commemorative film must be posted on Moments, even if it is only visible to me. The second level is that it's not worth posting, but if you think it makes sense, then put it in a separate folder and give the film a file name with a time and place and a theme.

Then put it up.

As more and more photos are put in, this time can be classified.

Slowly this folder will become more and more useful.

Because the photos in it can't be used at any time.

For example, the photo on the left in the picture below.

This photo was taken when I went to Harbin 6 years ago while waiting for the train at Harbin Railway Station, the reason at that time was this, I had to take the train for more than an hour, and I had to wait at the station for an hour and a half, so in order not to waste these three hours, I decided to buy a book to read.

I found this book in the bookstore at the train station because I saw "P.O. Box 84 Charles Street" (photo on the right in the picture above) on the cabinet of students at my daughter's school, and I didn't understand what it meant. In order to make it more interesting for us to talk about it, I bought this book, it's really black, 35 yuan, no discount at all. After buying the book, I took a picture with my camera.

Then one day, if ten years from now, I will see this picture again. What message does it send me? What does it remind me of?

From the reference on the back of the book, I can remember that I went to Harbin back then, and while waiting for the bus, I bought a book from this bookstore;

From the title of the book, I can recall that back then, there was a locker in my daughter's class that read "84 Charlie Street" on the locker;

I can also recall that I used this photo in a photography lesson for their class;

I can also recall that back then, 21 children sat here and listened attentively to my lectures;

As I continued, I could recall what each of them looked like at that time.......

I think that's what photography is all about.

It's so that one day in the future, I can recall the scenes that I still felt were ordinary when I was shooting today.

Finally, I would like to talk about what I think makes a good film.

Those "ordinary" scenes that make you want to take the next picture must have something that moves you, and you have to leave that feeling and then go for it.

For example, if you see a beautiful flower, there must be a deep-seated reason, whether it is a sea of flowers that shocks you, or the flower is brightly colored, or you have raised it at home when you were a child and makes you feel kind, etc., there must be a reason.

Then try to make a picture of this feeling.

It's sure to make a good film.

And a good photo can really hear the sound of heaven in it.