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My friend Andy, the best actor I've ever known - seriously we all knew in high school he was going to be famous; he just has that star quality and is obscenely talented - was interested in learning a bit more about photography. In giving him my 2 cents, I realized that this was something I wanted to share with the masses, and what better way than to make it blog-o-fied.

its a long walk back to eden.., originally uploaded by _rebekka.

This is an image taken by my most favorite photographer, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir (I totally copied and pasted that from a Google search!). She is from Iceland, she is in her 20's, and she is self taught. At her roots she is an artist, and her compositions are flooring. A long time ago, I saw this image, and in my photographical youth, I couldn't imagine for the life of me how she did this. She looks surreal, apart from the image. The exposure is just so… balanced. But in a weird way. The light around her is so dynamic, so full of depth, but it seems like the light on her looks a bit… shallow, I guess.

I wondered how she was able to shoot into the sky and still come out so brightly (that's her in the picture; she does AMAZING self portraits!). There was a long discussion about what it was in the comments section, that subtle but particular effect. Scrolling down through the comments, she explains exactly how she did it. Her camera was on a tripod. She photographed the scene without her in it. Then she set up a flash just to her right, and took the image with her walking down the path. In photoshop, she superimposed the images and simply erased the flash that was on a stand beside her. So there is a lighting effect with no apparent source, and the image comes out looking so surreal as a result.

To a person like me, who stared at this photo for hours, who longed to be a great photographer without having any such education in the subject, this was a revelation. I began to search feverishly for certain effects that I saw in images on Flickr that moved me. I found out that the creamy blurriness found in some images were related to depth of field; I learned that it was called bokeh, and that my lens choices effected the result. I shot my first wedding not knowing what an aperture was for. I learned what it was for on Flickr. I swam through its pages for months on end, trying to learn how to describe certain effects I saw, so I could find out what they were called and how I could achieve them. Here's another kind of image I saw:

photo uploaded by vgm8383

Thinking that it was a painting of some sort, I absolutely had to know how this was done. This one took me a while, but after much toil I learned, from flickr, that this is a technique called HDR (High Dynamic Range). I saw the tag, HDR, on the sidebar, and by learning what the effect was called, I could research how it was accomplished, and I made this image of the mountains near my California home, more than a year ago using the same technique:

A lot of times, my clients and fellow photographers ask me where I went to school. I say I'm a Neighborhood Playhouse School of Drama dropout. If they want to know where I learned everything I know about photography, I say Flickr. Flickr has been such a huge part of my learning, that I sometimes am surprised that more professional photographers don't use it. It's built like a social networking tool, encouraging people to comment on each other’s images, creating an environment where everyone is striving to get more comments, more hits on their page, and if nothing else it's a wonderful way to get your work seen by those who otherwise would never have stumbled upon you. You learn, and grow, and people watch.

To this day, Flickr is such a huge inspiration for the images knocking around in my head. Some of the best photographers on it aren't even professional photographers, and if they are, most of them didn't start out that way (like myself). And some of them are very young. Like Joey Lawrence, and Lara Jade, who were both 16 when I discovered their brilliant work.

I've been doing this full time professionally for almost a year now, but shooting and learning for less than a year and a half. The huge volumes of information I've collected in my aim to be the best photographer around (still working on it, I figure if I set the goal high, there's no where to go but better) are mostly from Flickr, and looking around at other images that contain something in them that moved me, and that I long to create. The information is out there, and for me, it was mostly on Flickr. It's how I learned which lenses would suit me best, what's a tilt shift?, what the general function of each lens can be used for, how to get super sharp images in post, how to prepare them for my blog, how to get that creamy skin look without retouching much… Anyway. Go check it out now - it will make you a better photographer (if, like me, that's your goal!)

Here is a slideshow of my favorite photos on Flickr. If you go to full screen mode, you can see the info about each, mostly who it was taken by, and if there is any other info available (none of these are mine, they are all my inspiration):