Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/10/31
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Friday, 30 October 1998, Alastair Firkin wrote: > Yes, but you can teach most people [who > have an interest] the technical factors, expose them to images, and then > explain how those images are pulled out of a scene. Then practice practice > practice, and you will find your own personal vision. Alastair, I don't think this is totally true. I think some people can see all the photos in the world and have someone explain to them all the technical niceties of the photos and they still would not get it. Kind of like painting. I can't draw a straight line. I took a lot of art classes in college and failed them all miserably, but I am somewhat accomplished with a camera. I can't explain how I do things, I just do what "feels" right. Exposure, moment, light, mood, all of it. To me it is automatic, to others who I talk with they work and work and still never fully grasp it. Photography is kind of odd in the fact that people see it and see a form of reality, however the photos themselves are divorced from reality. They are 2 dimensional, a slice of one moment in time, and are one small part of a vast scene. Many people never see the small slice a photographer selects, many people never see the light that motivates the photographer. 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. Too often people want to stick on the widest lens and shoot some kind of wide angle shot when the real shot needs to be made with a 90, or a 180 as close as the lens will focus. It sounds like I am being dreadfully basic I know, but most people I talk to who are not photographers just can't understand this no matter how I explain it. I even go to the trouble to show them in their own photos what they did wrong, they still don't get it. I think, photography is like so many things in life some are really good at it naturally, some get good at it through hard work but are never "artists" in the media, and some work all day and never get it at all. Same can be said about fixing cars, shooting guns, or anything else. Some people have a knack, others don't. Best regards, Harrison McClary http://people.delphi.com/hmphoto preview my book: http://www.volmania.com mailto:hmcclary@earthlink.net Everyone has a photographic memory, some just don't have film.