February 26, 2021

New Photography Blog

Simplicity of an image brings your vision to life. When you include a gluttony of details you run the risk of confusing the images unique purpose.

To much detail undermines your vision of beauty in this world. Overwhelming the viewers confusion of what is your focus in the image creation.

What was the photographer trying to say? It looks like a casserole of everything, even the kitchen sink.

If everything is a photograph waiting to be taken then where is the depth of a photographers personalized, inner viewpoint.

If all we have to do is snap photos of stuff as if that will entitle us to fame and fortune then you have another thing coming. Everything has the potential to be a good image if the photographer can examine the landscape and narrow his personal interest down to details and strong natural light.

A good photographer is not out in the world to snap images and move on, he is there to study the landscape seeking details that when put together in the camera frame will create a solid composition that intertwines with his personal vision by choosing a unique perspective. Without these contemplative necessities you have made a deception of a photographic insight, a cliche that you probable remember seeing in your past and now claim it as your own. It is a lot like wearing a suit that doesn’t fit you.

We have all seen the look alike imagery being copied by photographers that haven’t got a clue as to what they want to take pictures of. We all start out this way but as we mature as photographers we soon break away from the mass of redundancy and start to follow our own instincts in creating our personalized vision a viewpoint that has your intuitive signature.

We must have an inner purpose, an inner expression that will come when we look deeper into the external reality and begin to see man and nature as unique subjects beyond their physical presence, seeing them worthy of a photographer’s study.

Think of photography as creating your own personal story. As you grow into the your visual imperative you will find the subjects that enchant you, this is the external worlds way of moving you forward into a reality that fits your unique perspective, making you want to immerse yourself in the magnificence of mother nature but not allowing your inner intuition to take a back seat.

Because you feel nature as your saving grace a means to be yourself through your images as your voice expressing a personalized landscape through your inner ability to find subjects that reflect your character.

Your expectations of how easy photography is, is your first stumbling block. You need to slow down and really think about what inspires your inner being in order to find subjects that you can interact with on a personal level.

Open your eyes, see what is being presented in the scene before you. There is no use stalling and making excuses of why the scene didn’t fit your personality. Your first steps toward your photographic goals are the hardest. When I look back on my first attempts at photography I still get embarrassed! I was doing what I loved to do and I felt so important making my own personal images. It took patience as I finally felt the inner power of visualizing your image by looking and reading the words of the great photographers of the past and present.

Your first photo pics will be crude and if lucky you will see the potential in a few of the images and once that is the case you must return to the original scene if possible but this time not rushing through the beauty in nature, taking your time to just be present and insightful, looking deeply into the environment that now has you inthralled and you begin visualize a potential photograph, because you are there seeing the subject with new eyes.

By coming back to a scene over and over again enhances your perspective and opens the door to your unique sight through focused attention.

Now you can compose your image by eliminating details that would have interfered with the composition you were building and distract the viewer from seeing the beauty shown through your eyes.

It comes down to focused concentration allowing your subject to open up the details that will enhance the image that you are creating in your own personal way and not copying a cliche you saw in a magazine.

Seeing images of places you are going to travel too is a double edge sword. Yes, you want to get some ideas of places that have great potential to create your unique viewpoint but the negative side of seeing images of the place you are traveling to, is that you might find yourself copying those travel book images and lose sight of images you ignored but were actually in your realm of potential revelation. You never want to lower your unique perspective by narrowing your palate of potential subjects. If it so happens that a particular building or landscape is worth your efforts then go for it and use your intuition to find a perspective that is unique only to you.

 

February 2, 2021

Present In Our Pictures

When a photographer is present in his search for his own vision, his awareness of a possible subject is heightened for he sees amongst the details a vision of something powerful, an awareness that he is approaching a unique composition.

His inner ability to compose the scene without clutter, without overwhelming colors and details that take away from the image creation, and do not empower it.

Being aware of your surroundings, instinctively forming a vision of what you are seeking, revealing the necessary composition that will bring inner and outer exploration to a deeper beauty that your photographic eye sought.

What attracts us to photography? Could it be the instinctive hunter that is in us all. We seek to capture a scene, a person and we hunt both day and night for that special revelation that we can take home with us.

It is not all about taking a photo but seeing an image possibility first! A depiction of a vivid dream, a memory of a child’s excitement seeing for the first time a scene that opened his eyes to the beauty and truth of mother earth.

A photograph is a means of writing your own  personal, visual novel in one simple frame and all you have to do is have the patience to wait for that moment, for the light, seeing your unique composition forming and make your image.

A photographer has an intense need to see himself reflected in the images he creates. It is not ego but a desire to feel the scene and be part of it.

It is like discovering gold and then opening your mind to the possibilities of expression.

Photographers are immersed in the very idea of capturing something in their viewfinder. The necessity of taking away from a scene an image is power in the mind of the tourist photographer.  

This feeds his ego and any image no matter the content brings to the image taker a since of power over the external world. We are trapped physically in this reality but a photograph takes from the scene a conduit to self praise and awareness. A photograph conquers the infinite details overwhelming the person behind the camera, by reducing your visual sense to a fragment of the scene that caught your eye and the hunt is on for you to capture it not with your physical abilities but with your ability to reproduce a duplicate of the scene that caught your eye through the technology of the camera. This gives one a sense of power and control over his selective nature and doesn’t allow him to be intimated by over studying a scene that would tie up to much time to untangle for an image that reflected his inner being.

But because the majority of people take pictures as a means of enhancing memories they are not immersing themselves in the scene looking for that detail, that composition that reflects their inner artistic vision.

What you should be looking for is an expression of your inner self.

What is it that demands we take pictures of our lives as means to document ourselves, our family, our friends, our lifestyle, our reflections of exterior importance, we seek to become the external reflection in the cameras eye rather than becoming our inner truth through a unique purposeful vision of the reality we think is stable never changing.  It is anything but stable and is always changing and creating a means of exploring your inner world through an infinity of external expressions.