concepts

How "noise" is often misunderstood by Aman Sridhar

Noise is one part of photography that I've been exploring a lot lately. 

It's the effect that you get when you increase the exposure on your picture so much that it starts to look grainy. 

Aesthetically speaking, pictures with a lot of noise can start to look quite amateurish - as though you didn't know what you were doing, and are thus overcompensating in your post processing to balance out the lack of light. 

They can also be easily perceived as out of focus, and quite bland and grey.

I, however, think that there's quite a bit of artistic quality to a 'noisy' picture. 

Here's why: 

Photography back in the day used to be with film. And with film, it's quite rare that you get the crispest and sharpest picture. 

The film effect gave it a quality that is somewhat lost today. 

The grainy, dull like look that you can get from a film or noisy picture does take skill to capture. It requires a lot of subtlety in the way you express yourself, and requires you to go for a minimalist approach, which in itself is quite a hard skill to master. 

I find the grain very appealing, and in fact have been focusing more on getting this quality to my pictures. 

Obviously, it depends on who I'm working with and whether or not my vision matches up with theirs. 

But the grainy feature, while it can be a romantic notion, doesn't necessarily mean that the picture is actually 'bad.'

I find photography a very, very subjective art, and I'm going to strive towards bringing noise back into focus. (No pun intended).

Follow Oliver Mumm to get a better idea of what I mean. 

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