Saturday, November 11th, 2006
For those of you familiar the design of digital cameras, you’ll know that most professional digital cameras have an image sensor that is only 40% of the size of a 35mm film frame. One limitation of this design is that lenses that are wide angle in the film world are no longer, as the smaller digital sensor only captures the center part of the 35mm area.
Two days ago, I got some new camera equipment. I have wide angle again. Ah…. it’s like getting reacquainted with an old friend.
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Tuesday, November 7th, 2006
ob·ses·sion (É™b-sÄ•sh‘É™n, Åb-) noun: Compulsive preoccupation with a fixed idea or an unwanted feeling or emotion, often accompanied by symptoms of anxiety.
I’ve spent a good amount of the past week researching and ordering new camera gear. My mind is a blurry mush of reviews, measurements, price comparisons, bidding… I’m getting light-headed just going through the list. I’ve spent hours agonizing over product choices that may likely have no noticeable importance in my final work. I wonder if I would have been better served by just sticking with my current equipment. I would have certainly been less anxious.
One of my purchases is a new camera bag. Colin Jago recently wrote on his blog:
Lots of photographers end up as bag junkies. They joke about it. Laugh at themselves even. But they buy a lot of bags.
You can get a good feel for the severity of this obsession by visiting www.cambags.com. Cambags is a website where photographers share pictures of their bags loaded up with gear, and then describe how they’ve fit everything in. I purchased the new bag yesterday, a Domke F-6. It’s my fourth bag. I probably spent an hour at the camera store opening bags and borrowing cameras and lenses from behind the counter to see how they fit. I get home, load up the new bag, and imagine myself walking around a shoot with it – ok… I’m walking around with the bag, and I pretend there is something to shoot… now I envision getting out the camera, switching lenses. I look in the mirror to see how the bag looks. Do I look like a gear-head, a tourist, a target for a pickpocket? I now place the camera back into the bag. How did it feel opening the flap. How smoothly did the camera slip back into place within the bag’s compartment. Later in the evening, as I’m eating dinner, I have the urge to be wearing the bag around my shoulder, just to remember how it feels.
I get up this morning, and the bag is still on my mind. I’m wearing it around my studio, just to make sure that the fit feels right. The bag is just the beginning. On the way is a new camera body, lenses and filters.
I do feel that I’m nearing the end of my gear fever. My head is starting to get clearer. Someday, I may even get better enough to pull my head out of reading reviews, and actually work on some photographs.
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Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
As a self-taught artist, I have a lack of context that is ingrained in my art-school-educated peers. They are able to banter about history and movements and disciplines and sub disciplines that my mind isn’t fine-tuned enough to recognize. Almost all of the painters that I know work in abstract. At first, I wasn’t sure how to appreciate their work. Some of it is starting to click, but even then, am I gaining insight, or am I merely being absorbed into the mind of the group? How does one relate to a piece of art that doesn’t seek to represent a real world object?
Then, I got thinking about audible art, particularly instrumental music. Instrumental music is an inherently abstract form of art. The sounds of music aren’t representative of what we hear outside of music. And yet, we all know how to relate to what we hear: the textures, the rhythms, the silence, and tones. How come we have a harder time appreciating non-representational visual art?
As I’m going through this learning process, my photographic tastes are starting to lean more toward abstract compositions. Whether or not this is a conscious choice, I don’t know. There is something satisfying about focusing on the color, textures, and lines of an image, and not worrying so much about if the image communicates a real place. Here are some additional images from my recent trip to Red River Gorge.
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Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
Growing up, I was interested in collecting pieces of the places I have been, something to capture the moment as a reminder that I was actually there. Here and there would be a scoop of sand from a beach, or a piece of morter that crumbled from a building. I would stand on a stage and imagine breathing in the same molecules exhaled by the performers. Photography is beautiful in this respect. It captures an “impression” of what was actually there, not in a way that conveys actually being there, but a sampling – an interpretation.
Photography is all about capturing light. When I’m out with my camera, I am continuosly observing the quality of light around me. After I get a feel for the light, then I’ll consider a composition. This may be different in how other photographers work, in that they may have a composition in mind, and then look for interesting light for that subject. I work a little more spontaneously, perhaps more similar to the organic development of an abstract painting. Look for light, and then create an image around the light.
After purchasing my first manual camera, I checked out most of the photography books at the library. One book, by Galen Rowell contained a series of articles about how we see. How we see with our eyes is different from how an image is captured by a camera. Our eyes can percieve a much larger range of brightness than film or digital camera sensors. Our minds will focus our attention on a small part of all that is in our field of view. The mind automatically filters out distractions. Our minds automatically differentiate shadows from physical objects. In a photograph, a shadow is just as solid of a compositional element as a brick wall.
Observe the behaviour of light, isolate the composition, and capture the image.
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