Re: [Leica] Talent - And Emotion

["Bryan Willman" <bryanwi@seanet.com>]

I don't know what part of photography, painting,
etc, must be "inborn" and what part can be "achieved"

But it does seem to me that the most interesting,
and perhaps hardest, parts of photography, painting, music,
and oddly, software construction, are about emotion.
(I define emotion very broadly.)

Photography can be very technical.  But it is fundamentally
an emotional field.  Oddly, collecting, amassing working
gear, and other such parts, which would seem more technical
than anything, are hyper emotional.

(And, having lived through now 14 years of building
 operating systems, be assured that programming
 anything large is full of emotional/political/personal
 issues, well beyond technical ones)

I think the real reasons that M cameras are so useful
have to do with the "emotional resonance" of the cameras themselves,
and the "transparency" of the lenses that let's them
express emotion and idea.

Surely, *focused* (no pun) practice helps.  But
random, or disfocused practice will not.

I suspect that the pattern Harrison talks about,
where people just "don't get it", has relatively little
to do with "abstract intelligence" and a lot to do with
sensitivity, perception, resonance, and lack
of focus.  (And by the way, I don't know that I
"get it" all the time....)


- -----Original Message-----
From: Donal Philby <donalphilby@earthlink.net>
To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us <leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
Date: Saturday, October 31, 1998 9:23 PM
Subject: Re: [Leica] Talent


>Harrison McClary wrote:
>> 
>> And many people never develop the tunnel vision a photographer has to
>> have  to  select the small scene that represents the whole. This is, I
>> think,  the  hardest concept of photography. To be able to see a scene
>> that you find interesting and find in that scene something that can be
>> recorded  on  film,  that  communicates a feeling, mood, sense of the
>> place  to the viewer, this is the hard thing of photography. 
>
>Harrison,
>Absolutely.  For me it is a drive to organize the universe, to make
>sense of it as it goes by.  The small that represent the
>whole--perfect.  Like hiku.  

<snip>