When Life's Blues Hit, Bust-a-Prime!

[abe_hollander]

What, you got a better pic to use for your obit? Didn't think so. Heck, she'll get credit for the photo, but don't I get some for the idea?

[pbarnes]

Miserere, thank you. The birds and your captions - just lovely, and the thread that follows is fascinating.

Peter

[alisa_stieg]

"Most of my pics are primarily intended to be viewed by a particular person, with the intention of simply showing her things that my camera has recorded, and that I've subsequently processed. The intention is not always to please, as such... My philosophy is merely to give her something to look at and some space for her to think... She does the thinking, and I think about her thoughts, both before and after I press the shutter.

 

Sometimes I try to make the space for some of her thoughts a visual one, within the image. Sometimes I hope it exists between and around the images too. What she thinks about the pics is far more interesting to me than the images themselves. If some reasonably good photos (to her mind, mine, or anyone else's...) come out of this process, it's just a little bonus really. Her thoughts are more interesting and important to me than the photos themselves, so I just keep snapping stuff to show her."

 

I hope you let your wife read these words...they are truly some of the most romantic words I've ever heard. You know, it's funny, I've been married to the same wonderful man for 24 years and being married for that long with 3 children and all their needs in the works, sometimes the conversation is a little dry, until he says something like this (which he does) and melts my heart all over again. If my husband had written something like this, I would like to read it, so I hope you let her do so. What a wonderful sentiment.

 

Sorry, I just had to say so, even though my comment has little to do with photography. And I truly hope that you find whatever it is you're searching for. It makes me sad to think that someone with such heart is feeling out of sorts...

 

Lisa

[hinman]

I love this thread and I always love to see the posting from Mis. Mis is full of humor, sometime emotional, sometime with blues, sometime with sheer joy of beauty and energy, sometime sarcastic like the moronic bidders in ebay, but one thing I am sure, he is always artsy in a unique way in his pictures. I can only set up and admire.

 

I am not a musician, far from a guitar player who can play a complete song, but I do admire those who can

 

http://hintheman.blogspot.com/2006/12/guitar-passion.html

 

And I see a great connection between music and photos, perhaps all visual arts. Every time I tune in to a song or melody, the thought of a picture comes to mind, sometime a sad one, but very often the joy with admiration of our surroundings, our memories, people we love and strangers we meet.

[miserere_mei]

Peter, you're most welcome; glad you liked them.

 

Alisa, please, this thread stopped being about just photography many posts ago; you're quite all right posting

non-photography comments. And I agree with them too :-)

[joe_jackson4]

Alisa, thanks for your comments on my words up there, although I'm neither married or feeling out of sorts... :) Perhaps you've confused my words with those of Mis somewhere along the line...?

[alisa_stieg]

LOL, Paul!

[joe_jackson4]

Reading this thread again, it seems I got so carried away with the whole guitar/photography analogy thing up

there that I really didn't respond properly to some of the points Mis raised in his lengthy post...

 

Firstly, I have to say I (partly...) disagree with Mike Johnston, too. I think specialization can be a good thing

if I think about activities such as drawing and painting - where it often takes much practice and skill/style

development to achieve good results - but the beauty of photography is that the camera does all the real work for

you... :) All you have to do is fiddle with a few buttons and out pops a picture... So I see no reason why any

photographer should limit themselves to certain themes/subjects, unless that's their professional line of work or

personal photographic choice, of course. So from that point of view, I think Mis should carry on with his

eclectic style without that being considered as sinking into mediocrity in any way.

 

There's perhaps a problem, though, and it's one of recognition... People like pigeon holes... I think it's just

easier to become well-known as a fashion/portrait/landscape/sports/war photographer or whatever, than as someone

who does almost everything... And there can often be an element of self-marketing here, perhaps, so it all

depends if you want to become well-known or not... Well, personally I don't care about all that stuff. I just

want to take photos of the things I see for my own personal reasons, so I'm happy to take a picture of anything

from a turd to a tornado. Sadly, the latter are somewhat uncommon here in Finland... :)

 

And perhaps there's another problem... Individual, eye-grabbing images - no matter how good they are - don't

always work well when viewed as a set, in much the same way as a mix tape of individually great tracks doesn't

always work as well as a "proper" album. It depends on the track selection though...

 

Another thing I've found from my own experience is that I when I first started taking a lot of pics a couple of

years ago, I tended to take pictures of things that caught my eye or imagination for some reason. So I ended up

with lots of pics which were visually interesting to me at the time, but which didn't hold my interest for very

long, for some reason... I think this may be partly what Mike Johnstone is referring to, when he says that

portfolios like this are all over Flickr.

[garry_young1]

Paul - love the fact that you are telling me photography doesn't need practice - "All you have to do is fiddle with a few buttons and out pops a picture"

 

Now I know why I spent the bucks on the K20D! ;-)

 

But on a more serious note, I think that your perspective really speaks out and is evident in the "snapshots" you often post. They truly do have a unique sense to them, and they are stirring. Hopefully all this snapping is not going to be practice that will ruin this vision!

 

I am atually rethinking a lot of the categorization stuff that was going on my head. Thanks.

[miserere_mei]

Thanks for the re-visit Paul. I agree with the points you make, especially regarding people liking to pigeon-hole everything. Here's a story about that for you.

 

Everyone knows Stephen King (I'm assuming), and his particular brand or horror literature. But he also has a liking for Fantasy and Sci-Fi, and has dabbled in these genres too. Many people don't realise that Mr King is what I call a pathological writer; he doesn't write because he likes it, he does it because he needs it. Isaac Asimov was also like that, and he even wrote an amusing short story about it (I forget the title). Many prolific writers have suffered from this "curse". But back to Stephen King; at some point in his career during the 80s he was writing at a prodigal rate and his publisher told him he couldn't possibly release every book because he would saturate his own market and because writers shouldn't publish more than one book a year. They finally decided to publish these extra books using the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and they were reasonably successful, but not as much as the Stephen King books.

 

If I were a professional photographer, I would have five or six different pseudonyms, one for each of the photography styles I worked in.

 

As for "the beauty of photography is that the camera does all the real work for you", I wouldn't want to scream that at the annual meeting of the PPA (Professional Photographers of America), but I do agree that photography is all about capturing light. What that light is bouncing off of shouldn't really matter to the extent that you can be competent in one genre and useless in another if you're dedicated enough to learn the techniques appropriate for each of them.

 

Lastly, I agree with you that it is important to learn how to distinguish an image that is eye-catching from one that is heart-catching (for lack of better terms). The former will appeal universally, while the latter is only important for those who know the context. Some of the photos you take of your girlfriend will have special appeal to you both because of something that was said or done when you took it, or because it was a special occasion. When we look at them they'll mean nothing. However, I think you do a good job of selecting images that *will* speak to wider audience, even if we (they) don't know the circumstances surrounding them. Again, I believe this is also independent of genre.

 

As a side note, I need to add some wedding photos to my mediocre Flickr portfolio. I feel there's something missing and that might be what it is.

 

I also need to practice saying "Flickr" and "portfolio" together without chuckling.

[joe_jackson4]

Yep, all a camera does is record light... That's it. Sure, you can control what it records, and how - at least to

some degree - and add some of your own light if you like, but ultimately it's simply a recording device. Learn to

control it and you can record many different things... :)

 

Some may argue that canvas can also be considered an image recording medium, at least when paint is applied by an

artist. This is true... But the difference is that the camera can very easily make a picture that will at least

look detailed, recognisable, "correctly"-proportioned and "right" to our eyes... With a modern auto-everything

camera, it can be as simple as pressing the shutter release button... That's it. And a child can do that... In

fact, a blind monkey could do it, and could very easily (by total accident...) take a considerably more

interesting pic than you or I have done recently.... :)

 

Technically it's utterly trivial to take a photo with a modern P&S camera... And I've taught a friend of mine how

to use my K100D in manual mode in order to get a pretty decent exposure (and how to control depth of field and

subject motion blur...) in my garden/kitchen in about fifteen minutes... It really is that simple, at a basic

level. And that's usually enough.

 

Some aspects of photography may well require some practice, technique, experience and creative vision, of course.

But let's face it, the vast majority of photos out there required very little effort on the photographer's part

to record. Being in the right place to take the pic may have taken some effort, as may getting a subject to

respond as you wish, but the actual recording aspect is generally extremely easy. Why? Because the camera does

the actual image recording for you, doesn't it...? :) Recording that image with a brush and a set of paints ain't

quite so easy... :)

 

The interesting question, of course, is how to make our light recordings visually interesting (in whatever way)

to ourselves, as photographers, or perhaps to someone else... There are clearly many, many ways to do that, many

of which are really not all that difficult... Think porn... :) So you just have to decide for yourself how you

choose to use your little light-recording device, and how (and in what context...) you present your images.

 

I happen to like your way of doing things, Mis, and I hope you do too.

[joe_jackson4]

Garry, cheers for the encouraging words there... I'm really not sure how long I'll be taking pics - I may go back to my drawings or try my hand at painting or something instead - but for the moment photography is still an interesting learning curve, for me... Not so much technically, but just in terms of deciding where best to point the camera, and when best to click... That's the difficult part of photography, I think.

[miserere_mei]

Paul, I recently had a discussion with a friend who said exactly the same things you just said...to explain to me why Photography wasn't Art. I had a great time winding him up about it, cos he took it a bit more seriously than me :-)

 

Do you think it's Art, Paul?

[joe_jackson4]

"Do you think it's Art, Paul?"

 

Depends who's looking at it... :)