The Photographer's Eye

While I was in Vienna, I had plenty of time for photography. I don't get much time when I'm in Ankara to go out and take photos, but taking photos is part of the package when you travel somewhere.

Nowadays, every teenager who gets their hands on a DSLR camera with a zoom lens thinks they are a "photographer", but taking photos isn' t just about capturing pretty moments; its about knowing how to capture them.

When DSLR cameras where nowhere to be found and all we had was SLR's, things were much different. You couldn't take 50 photos of something because you had 5 GB of storage, you had limited film and you couldn't see what your photo turned out like until you got the photos printed.

[caption id="attachment_181" align="alignright" width="198"] This a photo from the Stephansdom Church at Vienna, of the pipes of the church organ, taken with the cross-screen filter.[/caption]

You also needed to use different filters, like cross-screen, polarizing and diffusion filters, to get the special effects you can now produce with a swift move of your mouse. However, maybe to revert back to the old techniques is sometimes the best. When we found out that some of my dad's old filters he once got for his SLR worked on our new DSLR, we tried them one by one. Some of them didn't work out as well as the others; the diffusion filter didn't work because the camera couldn't deal with the center of the photo being clear and the rest blurred. However, one of them soon became my favorite: the cross-screen filter. What the cross-screen filter does is that it takes sources of light which are in the shape of a point, and turns each point into stars. Later, I discovered that the camera retouch menu has the "cross-screen" option as well, you can even choose how many sides the stars should have (!), but it just doesn't work as well as the filter itself.

If you want to take good photos, you constantly need to be searching: searching for different angles, frames, what you could use to give depth of field, how to frame your photo, for the perfect lighting or the perfect way to use the light you have; it is not all about lifting your camera and pressing the shutter release whenever you see something. Once you've done this long enough, you start to look at everything that comes your way much more differently and you find yourself thinking how you may photograph that particular moment or view; even if you don't have a camera with you; you delevlop the photographer's eye: your eye becomes the lens, your iris the aperture, your eyelids the shutter, your brain the LCD display, and the only limit is your imagination.