What's the whole point of this you may be asking by now? Well, the point is to make better images. I'm describing the critical nature of the major ingredients so you'll know what's missing the next time you're critiquing your own work.

The next major point is you can't have one without the other to produce great images. Sure, you can make mistakes that are missing some aspect of one or the other and still produce images that look "okay". That's not close enough. I'm talking about knowing why one image worked and the other didn't at the core level. These two ingredients are obvious to most people. Sure, you may say that I need to master my camera "technically" and master the artist stuff as well before making great images. But, did you know that they operate independently from each other. Even contrary to each other without something quiding the way. The technical and artistic worlds just don't go on their own to produce images. They have to work together and something has to drive the boat. That's where Quality comes in. It's the thing that produces the ideas that need the skills from the technical and artistics worlds to produce images. In other words, before technical and artistic expertise there's Quality. Before Quality, there's nothing. Everything flows from Quality and is subordinate to it. Without Quality, you're navigating a river without a paddle. You don't have control and you don't know where you're going. Quality is the driver that brings these two areas together to produce great images.

Now here's some examples. I've worked tirelessly plowing through my library of images to find a couple that are less than perfect. Maybe they have some redeming aspects but as a whole, they're missing something major. The first image is my attempt at showing how I tried to be artistic but messed up the technical parts. What was produced was an image that was "oh so close". As they say, "close but no cigar".

This image of the Big Horned Sheep Ram running was almost what I wanted. Artistically, it has all the major parts I was trying to attempt. It has the blurry background and almost invisible legs to show the speed of this guy as he ran by in the morning. The problem is the framing. He's stuck in the lower left corner. His legs are almost cut off. Normally, I'd include composition--this includes framing--in the artistic world. Problems associated with framing are normally related to some artistic fault. In this case, it was nothing but technical expertise that pasted him in the lower left corner. I didn't have the skills to move him towards the center of the image. What had happened was I used the center focus sensor for this image and specifically focused on his eyes. Unfortunately, this was done to a fault and it essentially "bullseyed" the image. The result of minimal technical and lots of artistic expertise is an image that's almost there but not quite. His placement in the lower left distracts the viewer which, unfortunately, kills the whole idea of the moving--within a static medium--subject.

Now for the other end of the spectrum of faults when producing quality images. Here we have an example taken in a location that's almost impossible to produce poor images--Bosque Del Apache NWR, NM. We have Sandhill Cranes gathering on an embankment in front of foliage at the peak of their fall colors. The whole scene is taken at sunset so the lighting is difused. All the technical ingredients are there to produce an awesome image. The subjects are interesting. The lighting is right. The exposure looks great. But, it falls short. There isn't anything interesting or captivating for the viewer to hang on to. It isn't compelling in any form. There aren't any interesting lines. The subject is too small to impact the image. There's almost too much data to make the image work. It really doesn't work. The most redeeming feature is it looks like all the elements were there to produce an awesome image. Most of you if given the same circumstances are probably salivating how you would've captured "the" image with these ingredients. All that was needed in my case was a little artistic vision to focus the whole affair. Something other than just shooting an image with really cool ingredients was needed here. Here we have an image with all the technical aspects looking great but none of the artistic ingredients coming together. Once again it doesn't work.