S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

West Wing, National Gallery-DC

2008.05.01

Closing Time

Trying to depart into another area of what photography is.

Painters and other artists often pick up any crappy camera and make excellent images fast because they know seeing, visualization, composition and lighting, and immediately apply basic adjustments to change brightness and to optimize colors.

Artists know they have to drive the camera and make strong changes to basic controls to get their look. Beginning photographers, like me for my first 15 years shooting, are usually afraid to do anything other than exactly what we thought were the rules. There are no rules other than to make your image as you want it. I often shoot at a deliberately "wrong" White Balance or violent exposure compensations.

Non-artists who want to be photographers often take much longer, if ever, to create decent images because they have been misled into worrying too much about trivial issues like noise and lens sharpness instead of the real issues of light, color, composition and gesture. Want to learn photography? Study painting.

This is from a photographer Ken Rockwell

Trying to get an idea of why people take photos, feel free to give me hell. jgA

http://www.newsweek.com/id/73349

12 Comments

i concur james.
as a personal project i have been playing with out of focus images, plastic toy cameras and double exposure.
i do not post them here for many reasons .....

in studying this i feel like i am learning about composition , light , shadow in a totally different way .

i take photos to .. express something that lives deep inside.
and to show what i see.

dkelly · 2008-04-30: 09:00

wonderful images and the text presents one of the major issues in terms of photography today... when you see so many artists using photography!

I am all for freedom of expression and feel sorry for sheepish characters! :))

americo · 2008-04-30: 09:35

Thanx J.A.! (I like the dreamrooms)

szerecsen · 2008-04-30: 10:30

ps.: look (photoblog.com/utazo)

szerecsen · 2008-04-30: 10:31

I really love this shot! my new fav.

Pikapol · 2008-04-30: 10:54

I admire the feel and look to this photo, and the part about non-artists worrying too much fits me perfectly. Except that, as a non-artist (the creative genes all went to my sister), I need to learn a few basics simply in order to please myself. I don't have a clue why I'm suddenly taking photos, except that I began to want to learn to see differently in the past two years. But why learn to paint? How about learning to draw with the left hand (or vice versa, depending)? How do you feel about all of the post-processing software that exists beyond the actual camera and photography skill? Is that part of photography or another creative endeavor that just hasn't a name yet? I'm just curious, too.

LastFrontier · 2008-04-30: 19:09

And thanks for the link to an interesting article. Do you think "the medium seems to have lost its soul"?

LastFrontier · 2008-04-30: 19:14

Is that a plain shot or a photoshop work? Just curious =)
I can confirm what you write: I restarted taking photographs very recently, after some time dedicated to painting and some painting lessons and i feel i have "new eyes" now...

amagala · 2008-04-30: 19:49