How does one capture an emotion?

Here's what it seems like to me. You ask someone to talk about four refutations of Deacartes's cogito. They tell you why

they became a philosopher, how they'd go about researching this, they list seventeen philosophers who have given

refutations, and then talk abou the beauty of the cogito itself. You came close when you posted the moon photo and

talked about your memory of the night. You also said you thought most viewers would not feel the contenemt you felt. So

it was an example of a photo that WOULD NOT evoke emotions in the viewer. So, that's why I asked you to choose a

photo by another person, not yourself, and talk about the things both in terms of content, form, and style, in terms of

texture and composition and perspective that evoke contentment in you, where you don't have the convenience of having

been there to be influenced by your own memory of the situation. But I sense exhaustion, so feel free not to go there. It's where I thought you wanted to go but I am likely very wrong.

<p>It's worth doing, Fred, but I can't right now. I truly am exhausted, but not by the thread.</p>

<p>There is a sense, however, in which I really do think that talking about how specifics of a photo evoke contentment (or any other emotion) really might be barking up the wrong tree, given the multiplicity of types of successful photos where the evocation of emotion is concerned. By directing the focus inward to what I feel, I am admittedly almost giving up on analyzing the way that I photograph, at least as you speak of identifying the elements of the photo, etc. As for how great photographers photograph, and whether they would try to identify specific elements of the photo as evoking emotion or anything else, I really don't know. I don't think that most persons who take emotionally evocative photos ask, "How am I going to make an emotionally evocative photo? What specific elements in the photo are needed in order to achieve that goal?" I might be wrong, but then I know little of the critical literature and even less of the discussions with photographers who have been successful in evoking strong emotions.</p>

<p>I do applaud you for trying that approach. It might yield some fruit. I am not so sure that it would help me to improve my own photography. I would be interested in hearing what other photographers have said in that regard, if you should happen to know.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>Fred, here is something that I wrote in response to Julie in a new thread on the psychology of photography. It might have some relevance for the present discussion. I am not sure.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>My photography is expressive of something that is bottled up in bureaucratized and homogenized society. That something is indeed freedom and whatever other psychological needs are being suppressed in hierarchical, coercive social structures. How that "something' comes out, and why it succeeds once in a while in producing a photo of my own that I like, I really don't know. I am increasingly uncertain that I even need to know. Some of it seems serendipitous. Some of it even seems guided by forces beyond myself. I'm not trying to sound like a mystic here. That is simply what I feel sometimes.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I think I must have slept through all the discussions of creativity that I was ostensibly a part of in grad school. In any case, none of them had much of an impact on me. Nor do I have any good theories of my own about the creative impulse, or any manifestation of it, including the evocation of emotion. I can say that all of it seems to come from within, but that does not answer your questions or mine in the present thread. I certainly don't blame you for continuing to answer the questions we have raised.</p>

<p>I guess that my views have now evolved into a position of profound skepticism regarding your own way of thinking about these issues: "My guess is that what's going to evoke emotion in a viewer is going to be something about the photo itself." Okay, what you say in that quote seems obviously to be true, but it does not necessarily follow that analyzing the photos themselves will find that "something." You are analyzing outcomes. I find it more promising to look at processes, especially psychological processes. That line of inquiry may be doomed to failure as well.</p>

<p>--Lanni</p>

<p>Again, it's not a matter of looking for a formula or any sort of one-to-one correspondence. So, no, I'm not forever analyzing the way I photograph. I do analyze others' photographs and not just how they make me feel but why they make me feel a certain way. That doesn't lead me to do the same things as them to get the same effects and it doesn't lead me to want to explore the very same emotions as they do. It just goes into the big mixing pot I use when I'm making photos. It's part inspirational and part visually linguistic. You don't study syntax, vocabulary, and grammar, metaphor and alliteration, poetic rhythms and meters so you can always be analyzing your own writing and speaking. You do it to develop a fluency with language and communication. And sometimes I do want a very specific emotional direction for a photo and it's nice to have the tools to be able to do that. Sure, folks will disagree with what the emotion may be or how the photo makes them feel. But if I feel it's in the emotional ballpark I want it to be, then I'm usually OK with what I've come up with.</p>

<p>This was the first version of this photo I made. I didn't think much about the emotion I felt or wanted to evoke but when I looked at the photo it felt a bit mysterious, a bit down, a bit lonely, maybe even a bit foreboding. </p><div></div>

<p>A few years later now I'm needing to print the photo (which I hadn't done before) and started preparing the file for the lab I use. Kind of spontaneously, I started to see it in a different light after having set it aside for these few years. Now I felt I wanted more optimism out of it, more lightheartedness, and perhaps more a sense of longing or even winsomeness/pleasantness than loneliness. So this is what I came up with. So, yes, of course I thought about what kind of emotion I wanted out of this photo and I proceeded accordingly. Am I always this deliberate? Of course not. And the fact that one analyzes these things does not mean one approaches shooting or even processing analytically. It just means there are more raw material deep down to work with, IMO. </p><div></div>

<p>Just a note: The purpose of posting these two photos is NOT to find out which anyone likes better or even if anyone likes either. It's to show the way I went about visually changing how the photo looked in order to come to the emotional feel I wanted for the photo. Like I said, you may not feel the same I do about each photo. That's fine and mostly irrelevant to this discussion though it's interesting in its own right. What this is meant to show is the connection for me between choices I make and emotions I get to. Some are deliberate, some are more intuitional. But I believe they are all choices and I believe they are all founded in the sum of my experience, both emotional and VISUAL.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I don't think that most persons who take emotionally evocative photos ask, "How am I going to make an emotionally evocative photo?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I don't know about most people, but I thought <em>you</em> did, to start this thread.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I guess that my views have now evolved into a position of profound skepticism regarding your own way of thinking about these issues: "My guess is that what's going to evoke emotion in a viewer is going to be something about the photo itself." Okay, what you say in that quote seems obviously to be true, but it does not necessarily follow that analyzing the photos themselves will find that "something." You are analyzing outcomes. I find it more promising to look at processes, especially psychological processes.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>You know, I just got into bed, closed my eyes, and found myself so puzzled about where this thread wound up and it just struck me why, and this statement of yours kind of captures it. What you're saying is that the answer to what's evocative about a photo is to be found in psychology rather than in photography. I've never encountered quite so much resistance as in this thread, and not just from you, to what is seen, or as you call it, "outcomes." I now better understand why you haven't talked about or described what's seen, the photo. I can more appreciate now why you've talked about your memories and feelings, but not about what you're looking at when you look at a photo. And as I note you've got a lot of support in that. To say I'm left baffled would be an understatement. And this is not meant as a dig. Sometimes being baffled is inspirational.</p>

<p><a href="/photodb/folder?folder_id=1079539"><em><strong>Here is a folder full of both full frame and cell phone shots</strong></em></a> in which I used Photoshop layers to convert to various B&W or other monochrome effects using color sliders on <em>variants of the SAME PHOTO(S).</em> I generally am more attuned to the purely visual in such manipulations, but there is no doubt that my mood at the time may affect which I find to be more pleasing visually.</p>

<p>Looking back to these photos, worked on late last spring and early summer, I don't remember thinking too much about moods and emotions while sliding those little color sliders around (or adjusting levels or contrast or whatever). I just went with what I liked, what was pleasing to me and my eye, for whatever reason.</p>

<p>I'm not trying to be difficult or obscure here. I am just reporting what I did. If I could remember what I felt, I would report that, too.</p>

<p>I did play a lot of moody music while doing these, but I cannot begin to remember which mood or which song or anything else went with which photo--but I can generally tell you which color sliders were shifted left or right to get a particular monochrome effect.</p>

<p>I'm just reporting the facts as well as I can. I'm sorry that I don't remember more about my mood or my emotions of the moment.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>Wow, wow, wow. We are really missing each other. I haven't asked you about your mood at the time. Nor did I talk about my mood at the time I was processing the two photos above. And, I get it. You just move slider bars around to make pleasing pictures. I think that's . . . nice. And I think you've answered your OP.</p>

<p>Lannie, you've said over and over throughout the years that you don't think your photos evoke the kinds or degree of emotions that other photographers you point to do. I have long thought maybe that's something that bothers you or that you wanted to change. I'm now thinking it's not at all and that's powerful information to me. It changes completely how I would have approached this thread. My bad. </p>

<p>In any case, you've asked and I've tried to answer. No, I don't think you're intentionally being difficult at all, thoough this has been a tortuous thread to me. Not because anyone's being difficult but because we are not speaking the same language.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>The purpose of posting these two photos is NOT to find out which anyone likes better or even if anyone likes either. It's to show the way I went about visually changing how the photo looked in order to come to the emotional feel I wanted for the photo.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I wasn't trying to find an "emotional feel," Fred. I was trying to create a visually pleasing photo. Whatever else happened or happens is just icing--and is totally unpredictable.</p>

<p>I don't see the emotion in either of your two versions of the same photo. Emotions are very subjective states which only you are privy to. Or, at least, you failed to communicate them to me. That's not your fault. It isn't my fault, either.</p>

<p>You have universalized from what I felt or how I proceeded on that sequence of photos, which is little more than a mini-travelogue of my drive home for spring semester, 2015, to all of my photography. There are others where the post-processing did indeed evoke something, but this is often an unexpected result. I do not start with the emotion that I want to evoke. I start with the reality in front of my lens. In post I can try different things to see what I get, and sometimes what I get has an emotional impact. I don't start with that as a goal, but sometimes it happens.</p>

<p>I am pleased when it happens. I wish that it happened more often.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>Here is my grandson Luke back in 2009.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p><div></div>

<p>Here is my grand-nephew Noah from the same general epoch.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p><div></div>

<p>Lannie, that's perfectly fine. I don't really care whether you see the emotion in either of my photos. That wasn't my point, to get you to see some sort of emotion or feel something. My point was to show you how I connect what I see in a photo to what it makes me feel. Not so you can see that same connection, but just so you can see how a connection can be made between what a photo looks like and what it makes someone feel. The bottom line is that it doesn't matter anymore and, like I said, I don't think we want anything similar out of photography and don't think we're really talking the same language. Given where the thread ended up, where you've clearly stated your goal to be making pleasing pictures, that's simply something very different than I was imagining this thread was about. So, again, my bad.</p>

<p>Here is my granddaughter Libby from about a decade ago.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p><div></div>

<p>I'm not just out to get pleasing pictures, Fred. I fish for pictures. I catch a lot. Sometimes one moves me. I like that when it happens. I don't have a recipe or formula for making it happen. I sort of wish I did. . . maybe.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

So, Landrum, after a long thread, what would you say is the answer to your question?

<p>I'll get back to you on that, Q.G. I am not sure at this point. Fred and I are perhaps talking past each other at this point.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

"Perhaps"? My impression is that you have been for most of the thread, Landrum. Fred was addressing your question much, much longer than you were. You appeared to wander off quite soon, often and far, hence (also) my question above.

<p>Fred, here is what I responded to Q.G. in another forum:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Q.G., there was a lot of trial and error on those photos because I had just learned how to use layers and sliders to achieve certain effects in black and white photography.<br>

Perhaps with time I will be able to predict the results. I am not there yet.<br>

The "what and why" both at the point I took and [the point I] processed them was more along the lines of, "Let's see what this does."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I hope to progress beyond that primitive level in terms of understanding what makes a photo a good and evocative photo--and how to get that result.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>Q.G.., sometimes I post a general question without having thought it through. The questions then evolve as people weigh in. I am not sorry for that. Sometimes all of our writing and thinking only serve to refine the question, as in philosophy.</p>

<p>Other times, the tangents wind up being more interesting than the original question or questions. There was more than one question that became salient as the thread unfolded.</p>

<p>I applaud Fred for staying on the scent of the original most salient question. I'm not sorry for having wandered off on some side trails.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<blockquote>

<p>That collection of images is like showing us all the raw ingredients that could make a whole meal.</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>Phil, that little folder fulfills my original goal of partially documenting the routes I took back from Union County, NC--an area I had not previously ever traveled through. So. . . I started driving back roads to see what I could find.</p>

<p>Some of the photos have more than documentary potential, and perhaps I will come back to them to see if I can realize that potential. Perhaps not. There is a lot of world out there to see and shoot. I do rather like the photo of the house with the pond, but I am not sure what else to do with it--except to learn to do it better and to avoid generating too much noise in post. I am not sure that it is worth reshooting. (It was shot at 55 mph hand-held aiming out the right window at moderately high ISO and 1/8000 sec shutter speed--hardly a formula for excellence.) My big lesson from that outing is that high shutter speeds can nearly supplant the need for tripods--nearly, but not quite, and certainly not in all situations.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Q.G.: So, Landrum, after a long thread, what would you say is the answer to your question?<br /> <br /> Lannie: Q.G., sometimes I post a general question without having thought it through. The questions then evolve as people weigh in. I am not sorry for that. Sometimes all of our writing and thinking only serve to refine the question, as in philosophy.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>In other words, no answer.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Lannie: I am not asking the philosophical question of whether one can photograph an emotion. I am asking about practical techniques for attempting to do so.<br /> <br /> Phil: That collection of images is like showing us all the raw ingredients that could make a whole meal. Like it is now, there's little meaning in it. But looking at the collection and going over the images I can see something in there, something that I could work with if I wanted to make a collection or small porfolio that's more evocative and taps into a feeling or mood.</p>

<p>Lannie: Some of the photos have more than documentary potential, and perhaps I will come back to them to see if I can realize that potential. Perhaps not. There is a lot of world out there to see and shoot. I do rather like the photo of the house with the pond, but I am not sure what else to do with it--except to learn to do it better and to avoid generating too much noise in post. I am not sure that it is worth reshooting. (It was shot at 55 mph hand-held aiming out the right window at moderately high ISO and 1/8000 sec shutter speed--hardly a formula for excellence.) My big lesson from that outing is that high shutter speeds can nearly supplant the need for tripods--nearly, but not quite, and certainly not in all situations.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>In other words, I really have little interest in my original question or your practical recommendations in response to my question at all. I mostly want to get out there and shoot more and, by the way, I can list my camera settings. Instead of coming around to talking about your ideas for getting these photos to be evocative, the question I thought I was asking, I'll talk about excellence and prior to that about pushing around slider bars to make pleasing images and now I'll talk about noise and what I learned about shutter speeds. For good measure, I'll still claim to be interested in evoking emotion and applaud Fred while I'm at it.<br /> <br /> Though you've really given no answer to Q.G.'s question, you've simultaneously given a revealing answer to it. You haven't the interest or the staying power.<br /> <br /> It's like you met an attractive woman at a bar, got a little loose after a few drinks, flirted with her while you felt her flirting back, whispered some sweet nothings in her ear to which she responded in kind, even talked a little dirty, and told her you wanted to take her home for a night of unbridled sex. Then you got home, got out the chips, and turned on the TV.</p>

<p>Of course, I'm not saying you should want to or be able to make evocative photos or passionate love. I'm just asking you not to mislead your dates.</p>