From the course: The Practicing Photographer

Rewind: What does it mean to be an expert?

From the course: The Practicing Photographer

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Rewind: What does it mean to be an expert?

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- Hi, I'm Ben Long. This week on "The Practicing Photographer," we're taking a look back at our coverage of an essential skill that's worth looking at again. I will occasionally see someone referring to a book that I've written, or a course that I have here in the LinkedIn library. And from time to time, I will see myself referred to as an expert. For anyone who's ever referred to me as an expert, thank you, that's very flattering. I'd like to clue you in a little inside information about being an expert. I started writing about photography for computer magazines in the mid-1990s. I wrote my first book about digital photography in the year 2000. So I started my career as an expert before the era of YouTube and social media. But then, as now, to get assignments from magazines, to get contracts from book publishers, to get students to come to workshops, I still had to have credibility. In modern terms, I had to have a brand as an expert. To establish your credibility, you have to generate content. A photography expert needs to generate photography, but you also need to generate instructional content. These days, you have to generate a lot more than when I was starting, simply because of the different media world we live in now. And so, as then, you look for advice to give. You look for solutions to problems. You try to state all of those things with authority. One of the bedrock rules of marketing is to define a problem so that you can then sell a solution to it. Experts do some of that, both because it gives them fodder for content and because it makes them sound authoritative and that increases their credibility. I recognize this recently when I was working with a student. I was demonstrating some flash stuff, and I had my camera on one of my smaller tripods. I had grabbed it because it already had a head attached to it. This is the tripod. I like it because it's small and lightweight. I'm lazy, so I need small and lightweight, or I won't bother to carry a tripod. If you're trying to shoot a headshot of someone who's standing, then this tripod is a little short. So I raised the center column. My student immediately responded very politely and said, "Oh, I thought you weren't ever supposed to do that." She meant you should never use the center column on a tripod. I knew what she was talking about, because I've heard experts give that piece of authoritative advice. The argument goes that when you raise the center column of the tripod, then you're working with a monopod, not a tripod, and that's less stable. If we'd been standing on top of a mountain in a 30 mile per hour wind, I might've agreed with that. I would've raised the center column anyway, if it were the only way to get the shot, but I would know then to be very careful about shutter speed and camera stability. But I would never say, "Don't ever use the center column of a tripod," unless, I've said that in a course here in the library. I don't know, I might have. I do know that what I've experienced teaching a workshop, I know that you want your students to feel like they're getting their money's worth. You want your students thinking, "Wow, that guy knew a lot of stuff! I mean, all those details about tripod center columns, I hope I can remember it all!" Because then there'll be a satisfied customer, and your cachet as an expert will improve. As an instructor, you want to throw out those teachable moments as often as you can, and so maybe you sometimes state things a little more strongly than you should. I know I've done that plenty of times in the past. I'm hoping I don't do it so much anymore. With something like the tripod question, you also have to consider personal goals. Are you a sharpness maniac who's going to lose sleep if you don't have razor sharp, perfect detail? In that case, go ahead. Spend your time worrying about the stability of your tripod. But if you know that you're never going to print your image over eight-by-10 or even 13-by-19, then that level of sharpness, finesse, doesn't matter. So are experts always wrong? No! But as a consumer, it's worth considering that no matter how much expertise an expert may have, their advice often has a subjective component to it, or a particular perspective. Not always. Some advice is objectively good or bad, but some isn't. And it's good to try to learn to recognize when a piece of seemingly objective advice is actually an opinion. Now I'm talking about photography, not medicine or engineering or the law, or something else that requires a huge amount of training and study before you can weigh in with your own reasonable, valid opinion. Just doing research online doesn't mean you're reasonable and valid. Photo experts are probably not trying to deceive you, but in addition to the advice they're offering, they're probably also trying to buttress their own brand as an expert, and that goal might color their advice or their delivery. So, listen, but keep up a reasonable skepticism until you have verified for yourself that the expert was right.

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