Photography is an interesting medium. It, of course, explores human conceptions of beauty; symmetry, contrast, colour. It provides, too, a very literal image of projection--while humans live in a 3D space, a picture is usually viewed in 2D. For this reason, the photographer has ultimate power over the image he shares; an infinite number of 2D slices may be created of a 3D space. Despite this control, there is a way in which photographer is different from other forms of art; a photographer does not necessarily feel that he is creating; often, he feels that he is capturing.
My photos come from either my iPhone 13 Pro, which takes pretty bad pictures, or my Canon 6D MK II, which is a full-frame DSLR. For my DSLR, I almost always use my 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. Rarely, I instead use a 70-300mm telephoto zoom. Some of my photos will have metadata attached if you're curious about the settings I use. In good light, I shoot from around 1/2000, 100iso, f/1.8, ranging to 1/500, 400iso, f/6. In dark conditions, I shoot at around 1/200, 2000iso, f/1.8. Of course, a wide open aperture induces some significant gaussian blurring, so that is a stylistic element that I sometimes want and sometimes don't. It does mean that I can minimize grain and motion blur. The other thing that comes up is focal plane issues. Sometimes the plane of my subject does not exactly match the plane of focus, in which case I will be forced to step down the aperture. I try not to go below f/8 if I can help it, because the image becomes less clear. You may notice a vignette in some of pictures. This is usually not intentional--my lens just tends to do that. I'm too lazy to fix it in post. On the note of post-processing, I don't do it much. Sometimes I retouch shadows and highlights, but I try to stay away from colour, with the notable exception of my B&W work.
