Extremely dull to post an influencer/YouTuber here, I guess, but I found this latest one by Popsys quite thought provoking. He talks about often brightening skies to near white or darkening shadows to black to remove distracting elements and draw the eye to the main subject. Although this is very obvious, I personally find it hard to get out of the technically minded habit of trying to capture and then retain as much detail as possible during the edit.
Yeah, I liked James’ video when I saw it yesterday. He (in a sense) took the high road in explaining why he does what he does instead of just dismissing his “critics”.
Although I’m a “landscape not manscape” kind of guy I actually like his style for the most part. At best it has to my eyes a pleasant and airy “Mediterranean” vibe, even with other content / subject matter. He’s one of the more unique and recognizable landscape photographers I’ve seen on YT. His self-deprecating manner is easy to watch as well.
FWIW I don’t tend to see him (nor other “working” YT photographers) as “influencers”, really. I think those who produce legit work and simply have a YT channel are just that – Photographers who have a channel. To me (and I could be wrong) an “influencer” is someone who has no other purpose than social media fame. Kardashians, many (most?) TikTokers, for example. But I also don’t really consider YouTube as “social media” in the common sense.
But yeah - He made some good points.
Fair point on the influencer distinction. Just being cautious in the sense that there’s no hard advertising/editorial division on YouTube content as there should have been in the past for broadcast or journalistic output. Hence the blink and you’ll miss it disclaimers on almost all YouTube videos. I also like his pics, particularly as he’s often not going to super wow landscape places where the landscape would be doing half the work for him. Even when he does go to Iceland or wherever, his shots aren’t really the obvious ones.
Influencers are people who build a following and that long predates social media, although the term may have become salient with the advent of social media popularity. I agree the term is a pejorative, at least that how I use it.
As for photographic exposure, I have long been of the opinion that exposure based on the frame rather than the supposed data exposes the subjects in the most ideal light and signal to noise ratio. Modern cameras have good noise profiles and dynamic range too.
Agree that influencers existed prior to social media. I guess in journalism, even product journalism, there were/are rules, even legislated in many cases, on not accepting gifts because of the risk of the journalist being influenced themselves. Working lunch or dinner was always paid by the journalist. I used to even refuse to eat the food that was often put on for hacks at pressers or conferences on the principle that “I can buy my own food, thanks.” (OK, there was that one time I was too hungover to function and devoured half a platter of sandwiches).
I guess Ansell Adams was the influencer who most influenced my photography style.
its an interesting one isn’t it, at first glance you’d be forgiven for thinking that photography is a documentary format and why shouldn’t you try to render all the information you capture in a RAW file, but it doesn’t take long to realise that taking that approach usually leaves you with little semblance of reality in the image that comes out the other end.
once you’ve departed from reality (which regardless of how good your colour calibration tools are is impossible not to) the question probably shouldn’t be how big a departure is permissible, it should be what direction do I think would be most interesting to wander off in.
imagine if you were to write for a hobby, you could make contributions to user manuals on github, or you could try your hand at poetry. It’s funny because you could write almost anything and call it poetry, but I think a lot of people would still find that more intimidating than a bit of technical writing (which is not to trivialise technical writing by any means! I’ve been there lol).
photography is interesting because you get to to dabble in a bit of both.
edit: I did actually see this video right before I had a go at this PlayRAW which does show a little bit I think lol.
I think this is why I’m a fog addict (others may say I’m just in a fog). I should move somewhere that fog occurs more often. The earlier composition video that he referenced early in this video is one that I have bookmarked to re-watch now and then. I have to admit that I prefer when he crushes the blacks than when he blows out skies, etc., I find the latter a little hard on the eyes.
I hear that, and I think that (at least for me) conformity is a part of the problem.
Its a nice reminder that on one hand you can try to or in fact you do capture images strait away as you intent to present them. So then your edit will work towards reproducing or reinforcing the capture of that shot. You might be enticed to capture images of a building, a person, or landscape or whatever because in that moment you find or see some sort of artistic or appealing aspect in the shot pretty much as you see it with the existing light. Maybe it is ideal or interesting in that moment of capture so basically all variations of that theme. But in the video esp I think say the example of the stairs. They are very very ordinary until massaged, framed/composted as he did. Open the shadows as many people might do strait away in a raw edit and that impact is lost. The same with the man walking. I suspect many people would ignore the man and look at the bridge on skyline or some other element in the photo. Instead intensional changes were introduced to place the focus on the man histogram be damned…
It can be easy to get so caught up processing color and tone of the entire photo that framing and composition and targeted editing to enhance a vision of the photo or a subject in the photo are not given nearly enough attention…
Depending on the intent of the work or edit… it might be better to spend more time looking at the photo and what you can do with it and less time being handcuffed by crafting a nice histogram 
I certainly am not at all gifted with the vision to be creative… I have to rely on being in the right place at the right time… I am quite impressed by others that take a look and decide well okay let’s go with this or that…