What is more important in photography: technical knowledge or creativity?

Whether you work by chemical or digital means, photography involves you in two complementary skills:

1. There are set routines where consistency is all important, for example film processing or paper processing, especially in colour, and the disciplines of inputting and saving digital image files.
2. There are those stages at which creative decisions must be made, and where a great deal of choice and variation is possible. These include organization of your subject, lighting and camera handling, as well as editing and printing the work. As a photographer you will need to handle and make these decisions yourself, or at least closely direct them.

With technical knowledge plus practical experience, which comes out of shooting lots of photographs under different conditions, you gradually build up skills that become second nature. It’s like learning to drive. First you have to consciously learn the mechanical handling of a car. Then this side of things becomes so familiar you concentrate more and more on what you want to achieve with the machinery.

Having more confidence about getting results, you find you can spend most time on picture-making problems such as composition, and capturing expressions and actions which differ with every shot and have no routine solutions. However, still keep yourself up-to-date on new processes and equipment as they come along. You need to discover what new visual opportunities they offer. Technical routines and creative choices give a good foundation for what is perhaps the biggest challenge in photography – how to produce pictures which have interesting content and meaning.

Fundamental of photography: picture structuring, lights, intensity, distance, focusing, exposure, printing