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.