In response to my post about my frustration with my photography, Mark Hobson, a.k.a The Landscapist, neatly summed up my problem:

Creating Art is an emotional, not an intellectual, act.

And he provided a way to start working on it:

Get your hands on a point-and-shoot, set it on Auto, take it everywhere you go, and just take pictures of anything that catches your eye.

I’ve heard this advice, or variations on it, several times in the past, notably from Ben Lifson. But it never quite sunk in. People would say: just shoot anything you see that interests you. Carry a camera around all the time.

But when I filtered what they said through my brain, I added an assumption: that I should try to make good photos of whatever interests me. So I would dutifully carry a camera around and, seeing something, would stop, try to frame it, think about the light, think about the composition, think, and think, and think. And then I would go home and expect to see successful photos. And, of course, I would be disappointed.

But the key is to eliminate all that thinking mess. And eliminate any expectations that these photos should be “good” or presentable. The important thing, I realize, is to act: take photos of anything that interests me. There’s tremendous value in that alone. And then I can look at what I have shot and, in each photo, ask myself why I took the photo. I believe this act of photographing without thinking and without any expectations of the results, and then reviewing what I have shot, will be the start of something wonderful.

I’ve been doing that for a couple of days now. I have to admit that it’s a whole lot harder than I thought it would be. I almost had to grit my teeth to take those first few shots. But I’m already beginning to notice things about my visual interests that I had been vaguely aware of before — things that I like to look at and would like to photograph but resisted because I didn’t think it would be an interesting photograph. I hope to teach myself to take photos of things that actually interest me as opposed to those things that my intellect says ought to interest me, or those things that interest other people. And once I recognize what I’m interested in, and have convinced myself to take those pictures, I can go to work on making good pictures of those things, whatever “good” may mean.

As I was heading into the weblog meetup last night, a father and daughter were walking out of Crossroads mall. The father was a big man, probably six-four and two-fifty or more. His daughter looked like she might be in middle school or junior high.

Father: …if I didn’t, I would just blow up.

Daughter: <something I couldn’t hear>

Father: I did look. There was no one around.

Daughter: But what if someone came around the corner? Then they would have heard you!

At the Eastside weblog meetup tonight, we talked some about cameras and photography and I told Anita and Jules that sometimes the expectations I have set for my photography are more burden than benefit: I can hardly bring myself to just take a snapshot anymore (although you might not believe if you look at my Flickr photostream — at least I don’t intend to take snapshots).

I’m not saying I want to take snapshots. But along the way I lost the joy of taking photos, or I forgot why I liked photography in the first place. I have managed to replace enjoyment with a burden of responsibility. Each time I pick up a camera, I have to think about the composition in the frame, and I want to make sure that the edges of the frame have strong forms, and I don’t have washed out highlights or shadows lost to unrecoverable blackness, and I’m looking for lines or progressions of shapes that will lead the eye through the frame but not out of it, and I’m wondering whether the picture would be stronger if I took it from over there instead, or from down on the ground, or from up on those stairs. And, oh yeah, what’s this photo actually about? What mood or emotion or idea am I trying to convey? Now what can I eliminate from the frame so that the idea is stronger? Is this idea better communicated through a wide angle, a normal field of view, or with the compression of a telephoto? Do I want the whole frame in focus from front to back or do I want to open up the aperture so that I selectively focus on only a part of the frame? Is there enough light for that aperture to keep the shutter speed up and avoid blur? Do I care if those trees in the background converge because I’m not holding the camera perfectly parallel to the ground? Is the horizon straight? In scenes like this, does my camera tend to meter them high or low? So how much exposure compensation do I want to dial in? Would a bit of fill flash help? How much ambient light do I want to let in?

And on and on. Read that paragraph again — did you notice any concern about what I was taking a picture of?

I came home after the Meetup and, while Dawn was playing Elebits, I popped up Bloglines and saw that Timmy Corkery had a new post. With a scan of this wonderful Polaroid photo from years ago. Since I hadn’t been checking Flickr in a while, I had a look at the rest of his photostream.

Timmy has fun with his photos. And I have fun looking at them. He doesn’t try to make “fine art” photographs: he takes photos to tell stories. He tells stories about the food he loves, about his bicycles, about his friends. There’s this joy of life — of his life — that sings through Timmy’s photos.

Somewhere along the way, in my quest to make better photographs, I went off into the weeds. I decided that I wanted to make art, not photos, or not just photos. So I spent a lot of time studying the techniques and theory of fine art photography and sought to produce photos that would stand on their own as artistic creations: photos that would be appreciated as art on their own, not for their content. In fact, it was almost as though the subject didn’t matter: that I would truly have succeeded when I could make a great artistic photo of anything at all, where the question “what is this a photo of?” is irrelevant.

But I forgot, or never learned, that a true artistic photo doesn’t choose the forms and the shapes instead of the content: it starts with the content and adds all that visual grammar of art to it. It intensifies the beauty or the emotion of the subject with a strong composition and interesting shapes and forms.

Maybe that’s why I can’t enjoy so many of the fine art photoblogs: like me, they think the design is the message, not a way of clarifying it. There are a few art photographers whose work I enjoy: Billie Mercer, Paul Butzi, and Doug Plummer. There’s a common thread for all three: they shoot what they love and let the art follow. Billie has her adopted town of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico; Paul has fences and rural landscapes (and before that the rocky beaches of the Pacific Northwest); and Doug has contra dancing and sticks.

So maybe I should just open my eyes, stop pretending like I know everything (or anything) and let the joy I feel everyday come through my photos. Let go of the pretensions that have produced my recent spate of drivel and just tell a few stories like Timmy.

Lots of news this week about the disappointment of Vista. Yes, the security is leaps and bounds better than XP (and that’s enough reason by itself that we should upgrade, but then we should eat more vegetables, we should exercise more, we should stay at our desks when the email goes around about free doughnuts in the break room). And the driver model is a lot more stable, but it’s also new and so Vista generally doesn’t match XP for games performance right now, if you can even get the drivers for your video card. The rest of it? Well, most people think it’s just some fancy graphics.

But hold on.

I’ve been running Vista for a few months now and have gotten used to it. So when all this press started coming out about, well, the mere competence of Vista I didn’t disagree that much.

Until last night, when I installed it on Dawn’s computer and I saw it through her eyes.

The OS does look a lot nicer than XP. SuperFetch makes it faster use: Dawn had been using IE7, Office 2007, and MSN Messenger just a couple of hours previously on XP and, without my prompting, talked about how Word and Excel seemed to launch more quickly and that everything just seemed snappier. She can actually put her one-month-old computer with two monitors to sleep and have it wake up properly. The system-wide searching, and the ability to search the Start menu, are going to transform the way she works with her computer. Seriously. We finally have reliable backup. And she loves the convenience and extra protection of Shadow Copies. She’s not yet excited about all the metadata that Explorer support on files, but she was impressed when I showed her how to apply keywords to photos and then how to find that photo with a simple search from the Start menu. I’m not going to list all the new features but I was surprised to see the operating system from fresh eyes and realize that Vista is not just an incremental improvement over XP. It’s a serious change in the usability of Windows.

Maybe we need to take Chris Pirillo up on his offer.