LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process

Abstracts require something from the viewer that so many other types of photography don't. That is their strength and their Achilles heel. Without viewer participation, and abstract photograph is just a meaningless mess.

Reading Dickens requires an effort, especially if you are a teenager and have a limited vocabulary. It's part of the responsibility of the audience to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps in order to be rewarded with the novelist's artwork. Photography would be a different and better art form if there were some prerequisites to looking at images.

Musicians don't make music exclusively for other musicians; they make music for the public to hear. Same with ballet dancers, novelists, etc. My observation is that most photographers produce work for other photographers. It's an insular world and one that is ultimately not healthy for photography. Somehow (and I don't know how) we photographers need to break out of our peer group and connect with the masses who are not photographers, just like all the other artists do.

I remember advice from my English teacher in high school who suggested that it's important to commit to reading the first 50 pages of a novel before giving up on it. Compare that to today's social media consumption of photography where swipe, swipe, swipe seems be the most we can hope for with today's audience.

Let's say, just for fun, that you wanted to go photographing in Yellowstone National Park. That's a pretty lengthy drive to get there no matter where you start from. Isn't it possible, even likely, that you will drive past miles and miles of potentially wonderful photographic subjects? Why not photograph them?

One of the biggest challenges for the budding photographer is the expense required just to begin. How much does a poet, a pen-and-ink artist, a painter, or even a musician have to spend to get started? Compare that to the upfront expenditures required to be a photographer. And then there is rest of your art life expenditures. Being an artist is not for the economically faint of wallet.

We like to pretend that a photograph is not a fiction, but it undoubtedly is. Part of the fiction of photography is pretending that it isn't.

If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that photography is just not that difficult. Compared to the practice and discipline required to be, say, a ballet dancer, an accomplished violinist, a fine art painter, or almost any of the other fine art disciplines, photography is incredibly easy and mastery comes fairly quickly. So what is it about photography that makes it worthy of being a fine art medium?

Landscape photography has inherited from landscape painting a few premises that might be limiting and even unhealthy.

I recently discovered that I'm not as odd as I thought. I have a small number of images that I don't (and haven't ever) shared with anyone that I think are simply marvelous. They mean a great deal to me, but I know they wouldn't mean a thing to anyone else. I keep these image private. And much to my surprise, I find I'm not alone in this.

Virgil Fox, that great classical organist, announced to the audience in his album, Bach Live At Fillmore East, that "Bach and Shakespeare have felt everything." As I've grown older, I've come to realize he was probably right. There is nothing new under the sun.

We each see differently and we each have different strengths in seeing. A powerful tool is to know your strengths and to also know your weaknesses. That way, you know the kinds of situations you can trust and those you need to be a little more careful with when photographing.

Now that we have the power of the Sky Replacement Tool in Photoshop, I guess we need to develop an asset base of sky images that we can use. The first place to look is in your Lightroom catalog. Next, look up; there is a new sky every hour right above our heads!

In my way of thinking, a photograph is a physical thing whereas an image is media agnostic. Furthermore, I think this is why an example of "fine-art" can be either a photograph or an image.

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