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Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest things I learned from the Photography with Annie Liebowitz MasterClass is that Annie very seldomly presses the shutter or even looks through the viewfinder - she has an assistant that does camera operation, hooked up to a monitor. Then she has a digital editor that does all the post-processing and editing.

She'd more accurately be referred to as a creative director. In the class, she even says, "I don't even know what camera or lenses I use." You don't have to be a gearhead, and there's very little to photography that should consider the gear important, but unless exaggerated for effect, this says something.

"Learn photography from someone who couldn't tell you the camera her assistant operates for her".

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"Learn photography from someone who couldn't tell you the camera her assistant operates for her".

If you had a couple of hours with Paul McCartney teaching you how to play a guitar you wouldn't want to waste time getting him to teach you how to tune it. If you had a few hours with Da Vinci you wouldn't want him to spend the first half an hour on mixing paint. The same is true for all the Masterclass courses. If I could spend some time with a world-renowned expert in anything I don't want them to waste time teaching me the basics. I can get that anywhere. I want to know the thing that elevates them above everyone else.

Most photography courses have the opposite problem. When a course is basically "Learn what an F stop is and use the rule of thirds for everything and then you'll be an amazing photographer!" it's often not teaching people what they want to know. People already know how to use their camera. When you pay money to take a photography course you want to know how to compose an incredible picture.

Masterclass is not about teaching people the basics. The expectation is that students are already knowledgable to some extent, want to become a master at their chosen skill, and want to learn from people who have perfected it.

> If I could spend some time with a world-renowned expert in anything I don't want them to waste time teaching me the basics. I can get that anywhere. I want to know the thing that elevates them above everyone else.

In my experience, the thing that usually elevates experts above everyone else is their mastery of the basics. You can’t really let your creativity have free reign until the basics are so ingrained that they always go right, and usually intermediate practitioners’ failures can be traced to technical rather than conceptual issues.

> You can’t really let your creativity have free reign until the basics are so ingrained

Generally advice around art I have seen tended to be quite opposite. You need to train creativity as a skill itself. Plus you need to experiment and train courage to "just do it even if imperfect".

If you focus on basics only, you will quit out of boredom and never challenge yourself.

The experts know basics. But you are not supposed to be doing only basics until you achieved some kind of perfection.

Your argument assumes great performers also make great teachers. I believe that is only rarely the case and thus the exception, not the norm.

Your argument assumes great performers also make great teachers.

I don't think it does. It assumes that people can pick up something useful from listening to someone who's perfected their art regardless of how good or bad they are at speaking about it, which might not be true, but I don't think it assumes anything about quality of the 'teacher'.

I would hope that Masterclass filter out the people who are genuinely bad at teaching. I would also hope that they don't just stick the person in a room with a camera and let them get on with it. They presumably have people on hand to help the celebrity make a good series of teaching videos.

I was slightly interested in Jimmy Chin's Adventure Photography class and so googled around. One of the Reddit comments described the ingest/review procedure as basically having an assistant do the cull. Obviously you can easily adapt to a single-operator environment, but it does kill the charm a little when part of the lesson is "This bit is so mundane I get someone else to do it for me."

There is a lesson there, even if it’s unintentional: successful photographers don’t obsess over the technical details. Photography is sometimes better thought of as ‘image-making with a camera’ than ‘pointing a camera and pressing shoot.’

Successful photographers attract TALENTED photographers who are willing to lend their talents and knowledge in the pursuit of the overall artistic vision.

Ultimately, SOMEONE needs to be around who DOES understand lenses, and post-processing. You're not going to luck out into a great image just by having a great eye.

World famous guitarists have guitar tech assistants to tune, fix, and customise their guitars.

World-class racing drivers don't maintain their own cars.

Michelin star chefs don't do their own veg prep.

Etc.

No, I do agree with that - to an extent:

> You don't have to be a gearhead, and there's very little to photography that should consider the gear important

But "I can't even tell you what camera it is" and then some questions arise about who is making all those decisions about things like depth of field, composition - her, camera operator, combination, etc.

If you just bought the latest Canon body whenever it came out you probably would lose track of the spec sheet pretty fast, other than having a line item in your budget to buy a $5000 body every now and then.

Disclaimer: to be quite clear, while not a full-time photographer, and certainly not a world class one, I do make five digits a year from my photography on the side, and while I may not remember how many fps a body is, or whether it's 26 megapixels or 28, but I could tell you about each of the 8 lenses I own, focal range, f-stop, and whether a given body's high ISO performance compares to another. I think at this point I probably have $40K of camera gear. Whilst it's not about the camera, as such, it is a known aspect. It'd be akin to a developer not knowing whether his computer had an SSD or hard drive, or how much memory

Until you can afford to employ someone to look after your cameras you aren't in the category where you'll start ignoring the specs.

It'd be akin to a developer not knowing whether his computer had an SSD or hard drive, or how much memory

Beyond the fact it's a 2015 Macbook Pro I couldn't tell you the specs of the laptop I'm using right now. It just doesn't matter to me what the specs are. So long as it's fast enough to do what I want when I ask it to I don't care. Plus I'm old and forgetful.

It's not about the gear, as long as you have a lot of really expensive gear.

You actually don’t need to know that either. Your employer gives you a laptop, for example. You don’t need to know what the specs are to do good work.

There’s always the gear heads in everything you do. They’re rarely the best

You’ll soon know if it only has 4gb of ram!

> akin to a developer not knowing whether his computer had an SSD or hard drive, or how much memory

which is definitely not unheard of -- particularly for some of us who use a number of different devices any day.

I assume her assistant does the obsessing for her.

Not really the point I’m making. Plenty of successful photographers have become successful by taking interesting photos, not by being a technical wizard of their camera.

An appropriate quote you've probably heard:

"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst."

― Henri Cartier-Bresson

You can get some nice stuff with just an iPhone these days, but there's probably a risk of the software making it look very samey.

Still not really my point. Leibowitz is a good example. Certainly she knows how to use a camera, but she is mostly famous because of her subject matter: celebrities. She took John Lennon’s photo five hours before he was killed.

That's a great quote but you have to remember that he said it a long time ago, long before the advent of digital photography. It's more like "Your first million photographs are your worst" now.

We all see great things. Life is full of amazing spectacles. The art of photography to me is how you capture it and that inherently depends on what you capture it with. A lot of people try capture what they see on holidays with their phones. The outcome is usually mediocre that’s not to say that was their desired outcome. They themselves are directors and are let down by their ability to use their gear properly.

You may not need to be a gear head but selecting the correct lense and settings is part of photography art itself. For example capturing the stars, this is a long trial and error process of getting your shutter speed right. I can imagine the photo looking great and directing someone else to capture it but the art is matching the photo to your vision and that comes with using the right settings and using the appropriate post processing.

This is a good example of why learning from a master is not necessarily a good thing. Liebowitz has no doubt pressed the shutter and fussed over lenses a lot in her her life, but she's at the point where she has transcended those details.

However, as students, we need to learn about those details ourselves so we can cross the chasm and make it over to her side. So for nearly everyone, it would be way better to save some money and just read Light: Science and Magic if they actually want to learn how to take a descent picture.

The lesson to learn is that stardom is about branding (marketing/advertisers) and being the boss of workers, putting your name on it to fake authenticity and singular genius in what is a team effort.

Steve Jobs feels relevant here. The first iPhone wasn't built by Steve. He didn't design components in CAD, he didn't write software, he didn't create icons in photoshop. He was the art director with the vision that made the phone a revolutionary device.

I recently heard an anecdote about how Steve didn't like the plastic screen on his prototype, only a couple of months before the phone would go on sale. So he said it would go on sale with a glass screen. There was no glass available in the market at that time which would work. Fortunately Corning had something in their research department which worked out perfectly. Steve's (unreasonable at the time) demand, ended up being the seed for gorilla glass being in pretty much every phone now. He didn't invent the glass, he didn't get in touch with Corning, he just got the right team put together to make his vision become reality.

>he didn't get in touch with Corning

He did and het got schooled on glass chemistry and composition.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40493737/how-cornings-crash-proj...

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