Tommy's Blog

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.