Settings Are Easy to Teach, but Taste Is Another Story

You can learn the settings that keep a photograph sharp in a single afternoon, yet nobody has a reliable formula for the quality that makes someone stop and look at it. That gap between technique and taste is the hardest part of photography to teach.

Standing on a hillside in Provence around 6 a.m., with fog rolling in across the landscape, Mike Chudley admits he isn't much of a landscape photographer. He was in the south of France to film and photograph a business event, staying at a golf retreat hotel, and walked up the hill that morning without knowing what was waiting at the top. What he found was light cutting through the fog in front of him and what looked like vineyards down below. He later says he doesn't think he's ever taken landscape pictures like those.

The second half moves from the hillside to a book launch in London, where Chudley sat for an unscripted interview about putting a street photography book together. He talks about the responsibility that comes with teaching. People spent money on the book, and he wants it to help them, even though everyone learns differently and his own 15 years of learning won't map neatly onto anyone else's. Explaining how to avoid a blurry frame is easy, he says. Once you know it, you know it. Explaining what makes a photograph good is another matter, because following steps X, Y, and Z doesn't guarantee a good image, and a technically awful photograph can still be an amazing one.

Some of the most reproduced war photographs of the 20th century, Robert Capa's frames from the Omaha Beach landing on D-Day in 1944, are blurred and grainy. They remain among the best-known images of that morning. For your own work, it helps to split what you learn into two piles. The first pile holds things you can check: focus, exposure, shutter speed, and whether the horizon is level. You can master that pile with practice and a little discipline. The second pile holds what you can only train by looking: timing, gesture, what to leave out, and how one picture sits next to another. You build that pile slowly by studying printed work you admire, laying your own prints out on a table, and revisiting your selects months later when you've forgotten how it felt to take them.

Chudley also draws a line between making videos and writing a book. On YouTube, he can say one thing one week and something else the next, and it reads as casual experience. A book forces him to articulate ideas in a fixed form, and that was the hardest part of the whole project. His answer was to lean on examples and to move back and forth between ideas, so readers come away, he hopes, with a rounded view of street photography instead of a single rulebook. He calls defining street photography an almost impossible task.

His photographs from that foggy Provence sunrise are in the video above.