The 7 Greatest Photographic Fundamentals of All Time and How They Can Revolutionize Your Photography
by Mark Hatasaka
Without a doubt, the number one secret to my success as a professional nature photographer is knowing how to expertly execute photographic fundamentals.
To keep things simple, I sort these fundamentals into seven basic categories.
- Subject
- Lighting
- Composition
- Color
- Focus
- Exposure
- Timing
For further simplicity, I use the acronym SLCCFET to refer to these categories. The SLCCFET mnemonic is seared into my memory. I use it as a checklist before every photograph, and as a mantra to keep my field time focused and productive.
How SLCCFET Can Revolutionize Your Photography
As a professional photographer, my primary objective—the holy grail I'm constantly seeking—is to score perfect SLCCFET 10s in each and every photograph I take.
I'll tell you up front, though, it's nearly impossible to achieve this goal in even a single photograph, let alone the tens of thousands of photographs I take every year.
Nevertheless, there is tremendous value in constantly striving to create perfect SLCCFET photographs. At first, In small degrees, this effort will slowly but surely raise the overall quality of your photography. Over a period of a few short years (or even months if you're highly dedicated), consistent SLCCFET practice will inevitably raise the overall quality of your photography to the master level.
Thus, in describing the way SLCCFET fundamentals can change your photography, evolutionize is perhaps a better word than revolutionize. The end result, however, is the same no matter what word you use—radically improved photographs.
Once you reach the master level, creating exceptionally strong photographs becomes almost easy and routine. Rare is the day when I don't return with at least a handful of top SLCCFET images. These are the eminently publishable and salable photographs that form my stock in trade.
Use Any Camera
One of the best aspects of photographic fundamentals is they work with any camera be it a 25 lb., 8x10 manual film behemoth or a 5 oz., automated-everything, digital point-and-shoot flyweight. In fact, photographic fundamentals are called that because they're fundamental to the proper operation of all cameras.
This means that, with the proper application of photographic fundamentals, you can create truly great, truly world-class photographs using virtually any camera. You don't have to wait until you can afford a "real" camera to start doing "real" photography.
You probably already own a camera that's more than adequate to begin applying photographic fundamentals, and hence, to begin creating your photographic masterpieces.
Not a Lot of Equipment Required
An important corollary to the "any camera" principle is not a lot of equipment is needed to expertly execute photographic fundamentals. Indeed, it's easily possible (and common) to employ too much equipment.
Too much futzing and fiddling with too many fancy cameras, lenses, and accessories directly detracts from your time spent applying photographic fundamentals. The detrimental consequences of this are obvious.
The Power of Digital Simplification
To prevent the scourge of excessive futzing and fiddling, the key is to simplify your photography to the maximum extent possible. For this purpose, nothing succeeds better than digital cameras. These amazing modern marvels enable you to perform magic simplification feats like:
- Safely dispense with the hassle, expense, inefficiency, and imprecision of optical filters, and in the process, greatly improve your photo finishing capabilities.
- Cover a gigantic 12-500mm (18-750mm equiv) focal length range with just three relatively lightweight, close focusing lenses.
- Utilize some unique optical-mechanical-electronic features of digital point-and-shoot cameras to outperform professional camera/lens combinations costing $10,000 to $50,000.
- Condense the photographic power of 30 pounds of traditional film gear into a complete, 2-3 pound digital camera system.
- Completely prepare for major photo expeditions literally last minute as you're rushing out the door.
- Take thousands of photographs and never stop once to "change film."
This list can go on and on and on. The important point to remember is all the time, energy, and money savings produced by digital cameras can be directly channeled into the better execution of photographic fundamentals. When you do this, be prepared for a veritable explosion in the quality and quantity of your photography.
The Power of Lower Costs
Beyond simplification, digital cameras enable you to better execute photographic fundamentals in yet another highly significant way. Digital cameras enable you to lower the costs of your photography by tens of thousands of dollors. Savings of this magnitude encourage you to take many more photographs, more often, thereby increasing your opportunities for practicing expert photographic fundamentals. The ultimate result is stunning, spectacular, world rocking, emotionally devastating photographs.
Dodge All the Hype and Bull
Not to be overlooked is the fact that photographic fundamentals enable you to significantly increase the effectiveness of the camera equipment you purchase, and save many thousands of dollars at the same time.
For example, a very knowledgeable, reputable, and credible salesperson recently told me high-end photography buyers are starting to insist their photographers use only the latest super-high pixel resolution, $30,000 digital backs attached to $20,000 worth of medium format camera equipment.
I must admit this shook me up enough to seriously consider buying such a system. After doing some research, however, I realized I'd be sacrificing certain focal length lenses vital to my compositional style. In the end analysis, the newer, statistically superiror system would be a huge setback to my photographic fundamentals, and hence to my business.
To this day, I still use sub-$400 point-and-shoot digital cameras in my business. These cameras offer certain unique optical-mechanical-electronic features not found on cameras costing $50,000 or more. Consequently, I'm able to capture many unique subjects and compositions impossible to photograph with bigger, clunkier, less agile camera systems.
Systemization is the Key
Up to this point, I've touched on the clear superiority of a fundamentals based approach over an equipment based approach, and I've raised the point how the simplicity and lower costs of digital cameras are a huge boon to the practice of photographic fundamentals.
The key to making all of this work in unison to quickly master photography is to develop and practice systems. I have checklist-based systems for subject, lighting, composition, color, focus, exposure, and timing. Then, I use still more systems to meld all the individual subsystems into seamlessly strong SLCCFET images.
Time and space prevent me from getting into these systems in this article. Fortunately, you can read all about them in my books, Digital Nature Photography and Mark Hatasaka's Digital Landscape Photography.
If you're currently shopping for digital camera equipment, I encourage you to stop right now and purchase these books today. The information they contain on a fundamentals-based approach to buying and using digital cameras can easily save you thousands of dollars, and revolutionize your photography at the same time.