What make you photograph?

What makes you do it? Two part question.

 

General. What makes you photograph? What innate qualities drove you to pick up a camera and keep at it year after year?

 

Specific. What makes you decide to take a particular photo? Do you plan it in advance and seek out the conditions where it might

happen? Do you explore with an open mind to see what catches your eye? And when it happens, what convinces you that this moment is

worthy of capture and that moment isn't? What chain of thoughts and/or feelings makes you want to organize a composition, press the

shutter button, and process what comes out the other side?

Oops, pardon me! The subject was supposed to be What Makes You Photograph? Silly iPad keyboard!

<p>For the past two years I'd been photographing mostly with the idea of salable images for a local interest magazine that had begun purchasing from me on request. The money was nice, but I went stale pretty quickly. Today I just had the camera on the car seat and saw some really nice early fall colors. I photographed them out of sheer delight for the beauty of the subjects in overcast light. Tonight I converted the raw files and the joy was back. I've photographed for different reasons over the years, but the love of the subject and the light are probably the best reasons for me. The photos I'm referring to are the top row in my photo.net gallery folder.</p>

<p>I agree with the "love of the subject and the light" Howard mentions. I also sometimes idly wonder if my motivation has something to do with control...wanting to control or encapsulate within a rectangle (or square) some interesting or unusual moment in time. Is it that I want to control, organize, and file away a slice of "reality" so that I can feel like I am in control of life, which is really a very unpredictable, complicated, slippery--if beautiful--thing?</p>

<p>I think primarily it is theraputic for me to photograph.</p>

<p>My pro stuff is almost entirely planned out in advance with a designer. My personal work is almost entirely guided by very strong subject matter, and hopefully special lighting, unusual point of view, or whatever I can get. But I've come to the conclusion that if a scene or subject isn't strong enough, I pass. I also spend a lot more time looking at a scene from many angles before I even set up the camera.</p>

<p>Also, something like mood, light, and other ethereal elements don't get to me and exposed on the film the way they used to. I've come to realize that some things won't photograph well, or I simply don't want to share the beauty I'm experiencing.</p>

<p>I'm a bad painter, so I need to do things with a camera....</p>

<p>Honestly, what makes me photograph is a desire to walk around actually looking at my little part of the world. Since becoming an enthusiast of this art/craft I realise how much of my time I spend not noticing stuff, walking through places but with work or current affairs or some life issue in my head, or paying attention to whats being shown or heard on some electronic device.<br>

At a more tactical level, once I'm in that deliberate walking around and seeing space, I think its pretty open-minded. I get an idea that I want to execute, even about small and common things (which you will see plenty of in my gallery), and I try to make it happen. The main issue for me is looking properly at things, beyond their banality.</p>

<p>Just yet another way of expressing myself, for myself and for others that can appreciate it. I shoot a specific scene when it "burns" in my eyes, as Julie so rightly has called it. </p>

<p>As a ham-fisted and muddle-headed writer, a frequent loather of poetry, an insincere and thus horrible dancer, a sculptor limited to 2x4 lumber, no kind of actor, and as abysmal as I am with charcoal/paint/graphite/pastels, and certainly not one with enough malice in my heart to sing out loud or even hum or whistle, I abuse photography as the only remaining form of communication and expression available. And with a camera, I can't commit run-on sentences like the preceding example.<br /><br />Also, to my continual astonishment, sometimes people even give me money to do it. That part helps to pay for the gear, and to pay for my opportunities to read the books, see the dances, touch the sculpture, watch the plays, buy the paintings, and listen to the music of other people who know what the hell they're doing.</p>

Great responses, everyone! Your thoughts are honest, straightforward and intriguing, just like good photos! I'll add my two

cents on the subject shortly.

<p>I like games. I like to roll my own.</p>

<p>Anything that appears to me to be different from what it had previously appeared to be. That change could be caused by me, and independent of the subject, or it could be the subject that appears differently to me. As for the other 3/4's of my images, various other reasons make me photograph them.</p>

<p>I'm not a pro and have no pro ambitions. That would surely ruin my love of photography. In someways photography is a lot like fishing for me. Grab a favorite camera, take a ride looking for relics of Texas past and hopefully come home with a keeper or two. Though I have some decent digital equipment, it's a film camera of some era or another loaded with B&W film that does it for me.</p>

<p>Mystical attraction, they say, affinity of spherical natures on intersections ... but one need to work systematically in order to remove egocentric "I" element from the works. That's how the door opens.</p>

<p>Initially, I stumbled across photography very accidentally. What keeps me coming back is how I've found it's more than capturing a moment of some sorts.<br>

And yes, it's therapy of some sorts. Behind the viewfinder, I get kind of disconnected and connected at the same time. It's a travel to the inside, as much as it is letting the outside work out on me. It's my world, which is very comfortably mine and mine alone.<br>

That said, I still need to upholster that world more with more skill and more vision.</p>

<p>For each specific photo - it depends. On some events, it's just a machine-gun approach. When I am more deliberate (=going out to take photos as a primary objective), something caught the eye. Sometimes I catch that, sometimes I find later what it was and how I should have taken it instead. And in between these 2 approaches, a lot of other shades too.</p>

<p><strong>General Answers - Why do I photograph?</strong></p>

<p>Whenever I travel or experience something interesting, I think about how I would like to share the experience with others (family members, friends, etc.). Photography and videography are tools through which we can communicate our the essence of our experiences and adventures to others who were not there at the time.</p>

<p>I have a compulsion to create visually beautiful renderings, but I have no drawing skill. If I could paint or sculpt, I might not have as much use for photography. But I can't do either, so I thank the camera for coming to my rescue.</p>

<p>I have been moved emotionally by the work of great photographers, and I wanted to be able to do what they do.</p>

<p>And finally, I have a poor memory. Photographs help us to remember what we've done and where we've been in life.</p>

<p><strong>Specific Answer - What makes me photograph something in particular?</strong></p>

<p>Things just "catch my eye," so to speak, and I feel a strong desire to capture them in a photograph. It's very interactive and impromptu. There isn't a lot of planning involved except when I'm returning to a scene where I feel that I could capture a better image under different lighting conditions.</p>

<p>I want to "capture" the interesting things I see. When it comes to people, faces are infinitely fascinating to me, and again, I want to capture and preserve what I see to share with others and to "have" to be able to look at again and again. </p>

<p>I get to own and preserve a piece of the world I photograph and it becomes mine, in a digital jar. A collector instinct I suppose. I like to write too, at times but no discipline to do poetry. Have other artsy interests, with similar motivation. The active right brain they say never sleeps long. And somehow there is a pleasure in it. Must be dopamine.</p>

<p>Some famous photographer answered this question thusly (I paraphrase, I'm sure): because I want to see what things look like when I photograph them.</p>

<p>The relentless passing of time. At the age of 12 I took my first 'serious' photographs, a record of the last days of our local railway branch line, my childhood stamping ground. In that instant I came to understand the documentary role of photography. The coal-mines closed, the brickyards closed, the foundries closed, the boileryards closed - eventually there was no trace of the old town I knew. Now, 45 years later, I am even more aware of the passing of time, there being less of it available to me than there used to be, mortality being what it is. So I continue to try to document my experience on film, in the perhaps vain hope that someone in the future will be able to see what it looked like back then.</p>

<p>I have various reasons for shooting photographs, similar to what already has been posted above - to document places, times, people; for catharsis; to satisfy an insatiable urge to create. The last probably is the most important for me. As I approach my retirement (about 2 more years of indentured servitude), I find that my work has increasingly little meaning. So I have to supply my own meaning, which lies mostly in trying to create music, poetry, and photographs.</p>

<p>Most of my photographs border on the spontaneous. But this is a matter of degree only. </p>

<p>Because I'm not tranquil and the still image freezes into tranquility, more than it does not.</p>

Chris Waller, I wish that I had had the means and the skills to capture the vast steel mills that flanked the towns in my

home county. That world now seems as far away as the Battle of Gettysburg.

 

Michael Linder, I feel your pain. My profession, which I do enjoy, seems to lose a little bit of its magic every year.

<p>Dan: I am most grateful for your reply. It evoked another thought.</p>

<p>At times, the urge to create is almost overwhelming. I become quite preoccupied, and sometimes very anxious. These feelings tend to dissipate the moment I sit down at my piano and start playing, or when I start writing some poetry, or when I grab my camera and start shooting or start processing the results. I'm not sure whether this is tied to my job, my increasing age, or soething else I just haven't discovered. I just feel compelled to go with it.</p>