hoang_tran

I'm very new in the field and had taken quite a large number of worthless pictures as well, so I don't intend to tell you anything new but just my own experience. Personally, I find that:

 

1. Camera's images and our brain images are quite different in the level of details, the colour, and especially the feeling. When we faced the reality, we gathered information about the surrounding using all our senses, that include temperature, the blowing of the wind, the transition of the feeling between what we have recorded (say a minute ago) and the current one and yet the camera only recorded light/dark/colour (which forms the images). Because of this we could never translate the entire feeling we have to other people by just the limited image that was taken by the mechanical facilities.

 

2. When we see other people's images, the brain is then reconstruct the environment using the past experience that we have, or it has recorded, to give definitions and meanings to the picture. The amount of definitions recorded in our brain are vastly different between person to person, for various reasons ei. background culture, the amount of travels, opportunities etc.. which bring about differences in opinion to the same picture.

 

Personally I don't think there is such thing as a best photo, although there are photos that were liked by a large group of people, and certainly copying others won't make you a good photographer either. By copying, you will learn the "wining formular" of one group and will be liked (if you're a good copier) by that group of people, but it doesn't necessarily make you a winer in another group. Find something that make you feel butterfly in your stomach, stick to it, mess about with it, turn it upside down, inside out and don't care about what people say, but care about what you've learned and improved and oneday you might be there. I certainly do so myself. These are just some of my humble thoughts.

As a viewer, I'm not looking at the technical side of the photos but rather what the photos are doing to me, ie. what happened to me after I've viewed the photos.

 

1. I see that you're human enough to take interest in them, the corner of the city which people often ignored or never though that they could be there, the least desired.

 

2. I see that there are sufferers no matter where you go in the world (people could naively think there are no street sleepers, beggers in Canada).

 

3. The photos remind me, and especially if I'm working in the National Health and Social Security department, that there are still those cases to be solved. It's an embarrassment to the nation and it sure is a self-evidence that someone is not doing the job which people voted/trusted him/her to do.

 

When do we stop producing cheap nice/pretty little pictures when the reality is not what they represent?

I'd prefer seeing some living spirit in the character than staring at a statue, painted with skin colour and wearing wigs. I don't really care how it was taken, but that just me and my little unfavourable belief.<div></div>

I've read somewhere saying that the word "art" is taken from the word "artificial", another word meaning "man-made", or "creativity". If this means "yielding" something from nothing then we are facing with a very large scale of measurement, from negative feelings such as "horror, grotesque, dirty, trash" .. to positive feelings such as "tranquility, beautiful, exaltation" etc.. However, many of these feelings are based on shorterm memory (environmental knowledge) and many are based on longterm memory (inheritance), ie. objects and images making sense in one culture might not communicate anything to another(ie. throwing bad eggs on somebody might consider an act of demoralizing in some countries but doesn't make any sense in others, similarly images of naked bodies might consider artistic in the West and disgraceful in the East). Where do we stand ?

 

To me, at the very basic level, photography is an effective means of recording life and communicating it to others. Whether people get any feeling out of images or not is difficult to say. If there are feelings generated then the image can be called a piece of artwork, if not, it isn't.

 

On the scale of feelings, however, there are positive and negative sides. People tend to lookout for positive feelings such as "tranquility, beautiful, exaltation" etc.. so you can see now that the whole half of the scale is often obmitted. Children often like sweet and soft boiled eggs while adult can take a much larger range of taste.

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<img src="http://www.photo.net/photodb/image-display?photo_id=1478352&size=lg">

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Look at me, I'm tough! ... am I ??? </center></p>

<img src="http://www.photo.net/photodb/image-display?photo_id=1418899&size=md">

<p><b>What?</b></p>