Working with awful reference photos

If you're waiting for a good reference photo before you start painting, you could be waiting for years.

Back when I was younger (and I’m going to age myself here by saying it was a time when there weren’t any digital cameras and we used rolls of 24 film), finding a decent reference photo felt like an almost insurmountable task.

Composition, aperture and ISO settings, depth of field, all felt like technical terms beyond my understanding, and practicing to solve them would have required the level of concentration and dedication that would have marked me out as some kind of camera boffin. Not that that was bad, it just wasn’t what I wanted to do. After all, I wanted to paint, I didn’t want to learn about cameras. I certainly didn’t want to have to move myself into alternative positions to take the photo, nor set up a scene myself.

This reticence (either based on laziness or overwhelm), continued on into my adulthood when having a digital camera only slightly ameliorated the reference photo choices I had at my disposal. Yes, I could take lots of photos now and choose the best from them, yes, …