The other day the UPS guy arrived at my door with a copy of David duChemin’s excellent new book “Within The Frame”. In it, he talks about “the journey of photographic vision”. It got me thinking about how we see as artists, how our vision enables us to create great photography (or poetry, music, painting etc). I’ve only read the introduction and first chapter of “Within The Frame” so far, although I’ve flicked through the book, looked at all the pictures and read the captions, and have been a fan of the author’s blog Pixelated Image for some time. I decided to write this now, before I get too deep into the book, so that the ideas I’m about to discuss don’t end up overly influenced by it. Read on after the jump for some musings about the way we can see outside the box.
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Anyone can pick up a camera, point it at something and press the shutter button. Result. A snapshot. Going a little further, one can learn about the various settings, optimum exposures, right light, rules of composition and so forth, then pick up the camera, point it at something and press the shutter. Result. A picture. You can learn how to do this from any number of teachers, books, websites, videos and blogs (including this one). The technical aspects of photography, while numerous, are easy enough to learn, and indeed, doing so will make you a better photographer.
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But what if you want to be a great photographer? What if you want to produce works of art that take people’s breath away. For that, you really need to be able to see. You need some kind of vision. The bad news is that there are no real rules you can follow that will teach you how to see. There are, however, principles that you can use that can help you see. These principles aren’t set in stone due to the subjective nature of creativity, but they can at least set you off on the road to seeing. Before I go on, I’ll just make a note that the pictures accompanying this article are not meant to be examples of the correct way of doing things. They are simply my impressions of the scene at the time I shot them and how it fit in with my mood at the time. If I re-shot them today, I may well use a different composition or different equipment to convey my mood.
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Creativity can be described as a mixture of perception, imagination, inspiration, persistence and inventiveness. Henri Cartier-Bresson called it “the decisive moment”. That point in time when everything comes together in such a way as to bring the artist’s vision to life. As technologically advanced as cameras are these days, there’s still not a camera in existence that can recognize when this moment occurs, or even know what this moment is and should look like. That can only come through the photographers eye, the way he/she approaches the shot and how it’s presented afterwards. “Moonrise”, Ansel Adams most famous photograph, is a prime example. Adams was returning to Santa Fe after a days photography when he glanced out of the car and saw the scene. He later said “I had a clear visualization of the image I wanted to make”. (Examples – The Making of 40 Photographs by Ansel Adams, pp 41-43 ) Taken with an 8 X 10 view camera on ASA 64 film, he had to guess the exposure (1 sec @ f32) based on the moon’s luminance due to a lost light meter. Once back in the darkroom, to translate the pre-visualized image to print took a number of different methods, different chemicals and different papers before he was able to settle on a method that worked. All of these small adjustments, done according to his artistic vision, lead Adams to say “it is safe to say that no two prints are precisely the same”. (Examples – The Making of 40 Photographs by Ansel Adams, pp 41-43 ). I guess he could simply have made a quick print using a basic formula and been done with it. It would have still been technically good but it probably would have lacked vision.
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So how does one develop this “eye”? Firstly, take a look at the camera and lens you have. In all probability, you have a standard zoom lens that covers focal lengths from about 24mm to 105mm full frame / film (17-70mm on a non-pro DSLR). Your lens might differ slightly, but it’ll be similar. If you’re like most people, you zoom in and zoom out as needed. I know I do.
This brings us to exercise one. One quick way to stimulate your eye is to shoot everything at one focal length on your zoom. If you have a prime lens (and every photographer really should at least have a 50mm f1.8 lens) even better. Choose a focal length. Doesn’t matter if it’s 28mm or 35mm or 50mm. Just pick one, zoom to that and stick to it. Now go out and shoot with that lens. Shoot hundreds of frames, thousands; use only that focal length for a week or a month. If you need to bring something in closer, move towards it. If you need it wider, move back. Don’t zoom. If it’s still too close or too far, then look for another angle or vantage point. Maybe you can’t move back far enough to capture all of a wide scene. Try moving closer and shooting the details. Can’t get closer to isolate a subject. Move back and include the surrounding environment in the frame. You’ll find by doing this that the creative areas of your brain get kicked into action. By forcing yourself to think differently and look for different images, you’ll begin the process of learning how to see differently.
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This has been a pretty long post so we’ll leave it there. And with that said, one of the hottest creative photographs around today, Chase Jarvis, recently posted the video of an hour long talk he recently gave called “The Consequences of Creativity”. I urge you to watch it.
I’ll have the follow-up to this sometime in the next week. It’s already written but I’ll give you a few days to absorb the information here and get you thinking about how you create before I continue. Feel free to leave comments, ideas, suggestions and the like, and don’t forget to share.
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Craig Ferguson Images | Cultural Photography. One of the key aspects of life that we humans identify with is culture. We label people, places and events according to our ideas of what they are, ranging from the broader scale defined by tradition and place down to the small scale subcultures and tribes. Craig Ferguson Images is consistantly creating new visions in the field of cultural photography. From traditional festives and customs to modern, urban subcultures, Craig Ferguson Images is in touch with the changing world. From our base in Taipei, Taiwan we are perfectly positioned at the crossroads of the ancient and the modern.
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