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Hello, and welcome to my blog!  My name is Jeff Barnhart, and I am an Award-Winning Pacific Northwest Landscape Photographer, High School Senior Photographer, and Wedding Photographer.  Follow me as I journey across Oregon, Washington and Idaho to create art often inspired by my readers!  This is where you can read all about the adventures of Jeff Barnhart Photography, and this is where you can Experience Art!

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3 Charts Every Photographer Should Know

Friday, January 30, 2015 6:05 PM

This first graph, I came across about the time I started to dig myself out of the HDR Hole, and I couldn't stop laughing.  To be clear, this isn't a graph that represents every photographer’s journey, but there is a lot of truth in it, and definitely rang true for me, so I hope you have a good laugh.  I have modified this from its original version to give my own take on it.  The most noticeable change I made was extending the HDR Hole down below 0%.  This is because when you first try HDR, you take a normally bad photo and make it look completely unrealistic, thus making it far worse than it was before.  I know from personal experience, and for those of you still learning, you will definitely look back on those photos and ask yourself what you were thinking.  To be fair, though, there are several HDR programs that will do HDR quite well with plenty of presets.  The problem I have with them is that you’re really not learning much about how to turn your vision into art… You’re simply selecting the preset that you think looks best, and that’s why many photographers follow the main blue curve, and think they suck.  They simply haven’t learned basic processing techniques.

Stages Of Photography

This second chart I found is funny because of how often I hear people have sticker shock about how much it costs to hire a professional photographer.  This study was done by the International Society of Professional Wedding Photographers back in 2009, but I’m sure the data is still relevant… maybe a larger social media slice now.  J  It’s notable that this graph represents wedding photographers alone.  I can say with confidence that the graph for landscape photographers would be much different, as they spend a lot of time “traveling to exotic locations”, and by that I mean diving for hours, then hiking for several more to have the opportunity to witness something truly breathtaking.  I did a quick calculation of how much travel time I spent vs. shooting time, and travel time was almost double… I guess landscape photographers can cut out album design and meeting with clients from the graph below, but there are other things like workshops and gallery time to add as well.  I would love to see this chart with a large sample size of landscape photographers!

How Photographers Spend Their Time

This very official graph below I came upon recently and I just had to share it!  This graph represents a lot about the controversy that is still alive in the photography community.  The question is how much post processing (editing) is too much?  Some would say any editing is too much, others would say that post production is an art of its own, and thus has its own creative license.  A lot of people are in the middle somewhere where the photo looks more like the eye would have seen it, but I’m noticing a trend toward a more artistic approach to post processing.  That whole conversation it for another post, so for now, just enjoy these charts for the humor in them.

Frequency Of Miracles

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