I want to talk about the relationship between photography and digital painting, because photography has transformed how I see and work without transforming my medium.

The reference use I've described elsewhere: using photographs as observational study subjects rather than tracing them. This is the most obvious relationship.

The less obvious relationship: studying the physics of light as captured by photography. A photograph is a document of exactly how a specific light condition affected a specific scene at a specific moment. Analyzing many photographs teaches you to predict lighting without needing a reference.

The compositional lesson: good photographers and good painters face identical compositional problems. Studying photography composition taught me things about the relationship between depth of field (equivalent to focus/detail hierarchy), the use of negative space, and the management of the viewer's eye that I hadn't encountered as clearly in painting instruction.

One practice I've maintained for two years: saving a folder of photographs I find compositionally striking and reviewing them monthly, specifically analyzing what makes each one work compositionally.