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Sooner or later most avid photographers find themselves in a rut and find it difficult to get the creative juices flowing. If you’re a working pro on assignment, duty calls and it’s relatively easy to get motivated. On the other hand, if you’re a photo enthusiast shooting for yourself, sometimes you have to play some mind games to push yourself through the doldrums.

The New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust recently discovered and restored a treasure-trove of century-old cellulose nitrate negatives left behind by the ill-fated Ross Sea party when they were rescued after spending three years struggling to survive on Ross Island after their ship broke loose from it’s moorings and blew out to sea. The small box of 22 unprocessed negatives were part of more than 10,000 objects conserved at Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s hut and brought back to New Zealand by the Trust and painstakingly restored.

Dedicated black and white photographers have always processed their images and made their own prints. Negatives were carefully developed according to exposure and contrast needs; prints were made with extensive “handwork” and archival processing procedures. Processing was and is a key element in black and white photography—digital does not change that element of the craft.

To fully understand your flash, there are some basic principles and definitions I need to explain. When I start discussing how to be creative with your flash, you will know what I’m talking about with this information under your belt. Flash is not difficult once you understand some fundamental principles. I will start from the beginning and take you step by step to the point where it will seem like no big deal to get excellent flash pictures.

After I had been taking pictures seriously for two or three years, I realized that photography taught me to see things I had never noticed before I picked up a camera. I had been fairly oblivious to contrast, the shapes of shadows, details, texture, light, color, and graphic design. The camera helped me finally pay attention to all of these things. It is truly remarkable how much you can miss. For example, BP (Before Photography) I would have walked right past the overturned cart in a rural area of Missouri and not given it a second thought. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that this had any artistry or beauty. Similarly, BP I would have missed the bold graphic design, warm color, and rich texture in the detail of a cathedral door in Strasbourg, France.

Think of a digital camera as a microprocessor with a lens. Along with doing all the things a camera does there is an immense amount of image processing that goes on inside before the image is recorded on the memory card. There are many ways to change the character of an image using the camera’s processor.