555 Lessons is a project inspired by a little gem I recently acquired. It is a 1962 Czech book aimed at photography enthusiasts called "555 Photography Faults". I admire the book negativistic approach to the subject which is in contrast to majority of self-improving books teaching the reader what to do to achieve beatiful photographs. The authors - Erich Einhorn (established Czech photographer and writer) and Premysl Cervenka - focus rather on faults and (sometimes) lessons learned from them. And indeed, they manage to collect quite a spectrum of errors, mistakes, and faults, ranging from very technical issues (like "Your Rodinal developer is exhausted!") to the most existential topics troubling a photographer (such as "Why nobody likes my pictures?"). 

Lesson 224 - Cormorant fishiing on the Li river (“At seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. Consequently when I am eighty I'll have made more progress. At ninety I'll have penetrated the mystery of things. At a hundred I shall have reached something marvellous, but when I am a hundred and ten everything I do, the smallest dot, will be alive.” - Hokusai)

Lesson 225 - Una vista desde la casa (A shutter speed of 1/250s or faster is needed to freeze motion.) [See also Lesson 154 (1/60s), Lesson 73 (!/125s) and Lesson 72 (1/4s)]

Lesson 226 - Military patrol, Beirut, 04-01-2014, 13:09 EET (“It’s more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera.” — Sebastiao Salgado)

Lesson 227 - Mr. Miyazaki (He is retired now. Waking up at 4am every other day and taking the first train to Aoshima. Waiting for the sun rising in a particular place between the wooden beams of Aoshima tori. After many years he has thousands of photographs. They are so different, he says.) [See also Lesson 14 (Sunrise)].

Lesson 228 - Fading away (“Photography just gets us out of the house.” - William Eggleston) [See also Lesson 159 (motorbike at the doorstep)]

Lesson 229 - A tree outside the green house (High developer temperature can cause excessive contrast.)

Lesson 230 - July in Beijing (Overcast sky lacks contrast and definition.) [See also Lesson 46 (Fog) and Lesson 149 (Kites at night)]

Lesson 231 - Postcard from the past ("Photos, as they are now--namely sheets of paper or a similar material carrying information on their surfaces--are objects of post-industrial culture, one in which work is done by automatic apparatus. In the not far distant future, photos will become images appearing on electromagnetic screens; thus they will illustrate a future culture of pure, immaterial information, one in which society will be busy elaborating what is now called 'software'. The difference between the two cultures is that objects will no longer occupy the center of attention in the future one. This will involve not only a transvaluation of all values but a mutation in human existence. - Vilém Flusser, 1986)

Lesson 232 - Empty gallery (Disharmony between the main subject of the photo and the environment.)

Lesson 233 - Blue Moon ("I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath." - David Lynch)

Lesson 234 - Old Town Alexandria, VA ("I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself." - Diane Arbus)

Lesson 235 - Lukas in his motorhome (The red eye effect is caused by the reflection of flash light from the retina of the subject eyes. It usually occurs when the flash is positioned close to the lens, such as the built-in camera flash lights. )

Lesson 236 - The answer is blowin' in the wind ("When we look at an image, we can experience motion because the human mind miraculously creates it even though it might not “objectively” be there." - John Suler - Photographic Psychology: Image and Psyche)

Lesson 237 - Tulips (If we photograph something, there must be at least the slightest reason why we want to show this, something that makes it worthy of our interest. We must discover at least what is not commonly known, what is new, unusual or unseen before. If we do not find the answer to this question about the cause of our picture, if there is no reason to be interested in the picture, it also makes no sense to photograph the motif, unless it is an unusual object with its beauty, composition, lines, form of processing, etc.)

Lesson 238 - The Last Days of Disco ("Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio. Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio..." - Joy Division, Transmission)

Lesson 239 - A Generic Cult Film Scene (Depth of field is greatly reduced in dense fog, a smaller aperture befits the situation.)

Lesson 240 - Night Market in Hong Kong (Raw meat looks better on photographs with a bit of red hue lighting, or using a red-sensitive film, such as Kodachrome instead of Ektachrome.)

Lesson 241 - In the Heat of the Night ("My name's Drtikol. ... I am a photographer. I photographed with light. I write to the souls of people by the light of knowledge.") [ see also Lesson 161 (light) ]

Lesson 242 - Tasty Kebab (The Z curve is a sharp angle derivative of the S curve, a compositional principle known as Praxiteles curve in 4the century Greek sculptures) [ See also Lesson 105 (No curves, just straight lines) ]

Lesson 243 - Nobody puts Baby in the corner ("When people talk to me about picture hunters, I very quietly laugh. I'm not a hunter of pictures, I'm a fisher of pictures." - Robert Doisneau)

Lesson 244 -  After Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" {Product photography should represent a commercial product in accurate but attractive way.}

Lesson 245 - A sports photography (“Openings and closings, beginnings and endings. Everything in between passes as quickly as the blink of an eye. An eternity precedes the opening and another, if not the same, follows the closing. Somehow everything that lies in between seems for a moment more vivid." - Philip Glass)

Lesson 246 - Forsythia (Date impring is realized by a micro LCD projector backed by a tiny incandescent light bulb that fires every time the shutter is pressed. The look of it is very 90s.) [See also Lesson 120 (Flash and ambient light)]

Lesson 247 - Valle de los Ingenios ("Portrait photography never had any charms for me, so I sought my subjects from the house-tops, and finally from the hill-tops and about the surrounding country." - William Henry Jackson)

Lesson 248 - The meaning-making shadow ("I am not a surrealist. I am only a realist." - André Kertézs)

Lesson 249 - Jesús te ama (Higer ISO flim and underexposure lead to pronounced grain especially in the darker parts of the image.) [See also Lesson 141 (digital noise) and Lesson 22 (for Jesus)]

Lesson 250 - 5:30am ("I must have sensed something that was worth being photographed" - Manfred Willmann) [See also Lesson 68 (Flash)]

Lesson 251 - Mating call (Photo from a bird's eye view. When shot from above, the subject can look compressed and small.) [ See also Lesson 126 (Worm's view) ]

Lesson 252 - New York New York Las Vegas ("Turn off your flash, stay away from the cashier cage, work quickly, move around, act dumb and keep things light if you’re confronted by a casino employee.")

Lesson 253 - Mumbai (The rule of space suggests there should be more space in the direction the subject is moving or facing.) [See also Lesson 72 (night photography) and Lesson 73 (moving object)]

Lesson 254 - Human behaviour (Silhouettes and lens flare are two main properties of photographs shot against the sun.) [ See also Lesson 60 (silhouette) and Lesson 137 (lens flare)]

Lesson 255 - Still life (A work of art containing inanimate objects, either of natural origin (flowers, food) or man-made (vases, cloth). Traditionally, the selection and composition of objects carries a symbolic meaning.) [See also Lessons 156 and 237 (Flowers)]

Lesson 256 - Self-portrait (Silver ratio is a ratio of 1 : 1.41 {approximation of square root of 2). In contrast to golden ratio known from European art, silver ratio is more popular in Japanese art and archtiecture.) [ See also Lesson 190 (golden ratio) and Lesson 6 (selfie) ]

Lesson 257 - Shinjuku ("Most everything I do doesn't quite make it." - Garry Winogrand)

Lesson 258 - Aloha (Distant subjects in landscape photography can become hazy. The usage of red filter or orthochromatic material suppresses even high haze.)

Lesson 259 - Slanted (Disturbing reflections on objects, misplaced light sources. If we use artificial light sources in the interior, we must always pay close attention to whether the light source is not reflected somewhere, e.g. in polished furniture, in a mirror, glass, etc.)

Lesson 260 - Golden baloons (Wedding photography is often denounced as commercial and low level. Nevertheless, it is a complex genre mixing portrait, documentary, landscape, and product photography. A wedding photographer is not allowed to make a mistake.) [ See also Lesson 223 (Red baloons) ]

Lesson 261 - Cathedral (“When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape.” - Claude Monet)

Lesson 262 - Museum of Modern Art (“The wall, safe haven for what is forbidden, gives a voice to all those who would, without it, be condemned to silence” - Brassaï)

Lesson 263 - Leaves of Grass (Blurry image caused by camera shaking on a tripod in a strong wind.) [ See also Lesson 93 (Hokusai) and Lesson 153 (Landscape) ]

Lesson 264 - A ship (Ultraviolet light with different angle of retraction than visible light is the cause of unsharp images especially by the sea and in the mountains. A dedicated UV filter is needed to eliminate this effect.) [ See Also Lesson 145 (Sea) ]

Lesson 265 - Music for the masses (“'The thing itself' is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer’s Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth." - Abigail Solomon-Godeau)

Lesson 266 - A warehouse (The choice of setting, the foreground and background that surrounds the main motif, can strongly influence its clarity and truthfulness.) [ See also Lesson 3 (Portrait) ]

Lesson 267 - Next-door neighbours (Symmetry creates a sense of balance and proportion in the image, but without some additional strong element, the result is usually too tidy and clinical.)

Lesson 268 - Pietà (Ektachrome color reversal film has a unique colour rendering suitable for natura photography which has been made popular by its extensive use by National Geographic photographers.) [ See also Lesson 240 (Kodachrome) ]

Lesson 269 - Summer day (The Baroque diagonal extends from the lower left corner to the upper right one. It creates an openning, enganging and optimistic feeling. The Sinister diagonal goes down from the upper left corner, it usually carries more dark and gloomy emotion. ) [ See also Lesson 156 and Lesson 237 (still life with flowers) ]

Lesson 270 - Open valve ("It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement." - Jackson Pollock)

Lesson 271 - Cienfuegos (“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things in words.” - Elliott Erwitt)

Lesson 272 - Reclining sunflowers ("Art is embedded in nature and they who can extract it, have it." - Albrecht Dürer)

Lesson 273 - Goldfinger (Wrong direction of view. There is a direction from which a subject looks clearer and more natural than from the other sides.)

Lesson 274 - Fushimi Inari Shrine (Hyperfocal distance is the closest distance at which a lens can be focused while keeping objects at infinity acceptably sharp.) [ See also Lesson 122 (Depth of field) ]

Lesson 275 - Towards the post office (“The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.” – Lucian Freud)

Lesson 276 - Rovná, the ideal socialist village project (Tilt is a rotation of lense plane, while shift is a lense movement parallel to the image plane. Specialized tilt-shift lenses are used to control perspective distortion.) [ See also Lesson 58 (Vertical perspective distortion) ] 

Lesson 277 - Ceiling of the church at the cemetery across the street from the crematory. (High contrast images can be created by underexposing and overdeveloping the film, preferably in a developer with high potassium bromide concentration.) [ See also Lesson 229 (high contrast) ]

Lesson 278 - 3D chess (When working with a strobe flash, the shutter speed should be set accordingly. Dark parts of the negative mean too fast shutter speed.)

Lesson 279 - Intimacy (“I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn’t. And that’s a tough place to be because you’re never satisfied.” – Robert Mapplethorpe)

You may also like

Back to Top