Moments gained. Moments lost.
A look. A gaze. A pause. A burst of energy.
Life comes in stops and starts, flits.
A breath, an exhale, a sigh. A smile. A frown.
And the world turns around.
Don’t blink. Here. Gone.
Moments gained. Moments past.
I guess my wife is paying attention. The title above is something she said to me recently. I guess she noticed.
I have been playing with tones recently. I started last year as I decided to take a step backward regarding gear and emulate some of the old-school photographers working with what would today be considered outrageous restrictions – Kodachrome at ISO 50, in a darkened room, or at the edges of the day, without a tripod, or a monopod.
Think about it, these photogs shot with stuff you and I spend lots of money to get away from, and they made iconic photographs.
Damn, they were (or are) good.
So I grabbed my D80 and one lens last fall and committed to it. As others upped their sensor size and crazy-high-iso-capability-I-can-shoot-in-the-dark cameras I went the other way (story of my life, my parents tell me.) I grabbed a camera with an ISO rating that shouldn’t be legally rated above 400 and went at it. Man that was hard.
It was hard because out of the camera my files were not going to compare in quality to what others were shooting. Because I was going to miss and flub a lot of shots – and I did.
But I learned something. Those limits pushed me to look, to search, to seek, to struggle around the edges of things, and to learn to trust my eye and my brain rather than the light meter in camera. I don’t think I shot anything “properly exposed” according to the camera. It was a lot of “half a stop over” or “1.3 stops under” or even “3 stops under” My images began to look like what I wanted them to look, not what the scene actually looked like in front of me.
And that is when I started creating images. Took me some years to get here.
And now maybe a new camera….
A two-fer here today as I play with the way I present these sketches and work through what I am photographing and presenting. A good friend asked a couple of weeks ago about these sketches and why I consider them so. In truth, I consider them sketches because I am trying things. I am trying things out in the field capturing the images, and I am trying things in terms of presenting the images. And I am learning, curiously learning; making stuff. To my mind, this is the process of art, no?
So today, an image – in color – harvested (pardon the pun) from a long series of images made on President’s Day as we spent the day with two neighbor families fishing at Isleta Lakes on the Isleta Tribal Pueblo here in NM. Following the color image is a series I shot with my iPhone and Hipstamatic’s app telling the little story of the day in broad strokes. Let me know what you think. I am playing with storytelling, both in single images and in series of images, and I am limited in my photographing explorations by the necessities of my family. So I do what I can, sometimes wishing I had more time to photograph, but grateful that, as I was reminded, I get to do my hobby all the time….! True that. It is the limits that forges the creativity after all.
The series below you may have seen already if you follow me on Twitter or Instagram as I posted the individual images over the course of the day. Here it is again with two additional images to round out the series. I attempted to capture the cooking process (stuffing the fish with garlic, lemon and herbs, and grilling them in foil) without much success. To my mind that is missing from this series. Lesson learned.
It is Valentine’s week so an appropriately themed image to recognize this day of love, lust, Hallmark, Cupid, arrows, chocolates, roses, dinner dates, etc.
Cupid was on the hunt in Albuquerque yesterday
A young child shields his eyes from the bright sun while riding his tricycle in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2012.
I’ve been reading a book lately, “The Mind’s Eye” by Oliver Sacks, where the author, psychiatrist, and neuroscientist explores the effects of damage to the brain on vision. Initially I had thought the book would be about challenges for people who had lost their vision, either completely (blindness) or partially (legal blindness). As a counselor I was interested in learning more about how people adapt to such drastic life changes. However, as I read I discovered Sacks was exploring something altogether different, and I was intrigued with its implications for photography.
Early in the book Sacks meets, befriends, and studies a woman who has suffered a non-debilitating stroke in the visual area of the brain at the back of the head. Not only was the stroke not debilitating in the way we are accustomed to recognizing stroke victims, it actually went unnoticed to the victim-at least initially.
What was damaged in this woman was an area of the brain that processes visual stimuli-the area of the brain that makes sense of what we see. In effect, she began to have difficulty recognizing common objects for what they were. She could “see” them just fine; that is, there was nothing wrong with her eyes. It was just that her brain was not able to make sense of the visual input; the software got confused, as it were. This was most notable with sheet music (she was an accomplished pianist) as well as the written word. She was suddenly unable to read! (Oddly, the ability to write was unaffected-that skill is controlled by an altogether different area of the brain). Eventually this inability to recognize symbols and objects spread to simple, common, things like a banana or a bottle of mineral water.
Imagine seeing the shape and form of a banana but not being to recognize it as such.
So this got me thinking; after all, this photography passion of mine (and yours, yes?) lies in a visual medium. What would our photography be like without the ability to recognize common objects as such? Some of my friends already play in this area of visual space; they are quite good at photographing space, shape, form, shadow, contrast. They can be drawn to it.
I find I have a hard time with this. Sure, I can photograph some lines and shadow, but they usually surround, are infused, and represent actual, recognizable things. Abstracts are much more difficult for me. I tend to be drawn to people, place, story, to humanity, to my human interaction with the world around. It’s really quite narcissistic when you think about it-as I see it, my world around me develops its meaning (at least for me) from my interaction with it. What would happen if I lost my ability to recognize shape and form as “things” or “people” and began instead to just see them as shape and form? And what meaning would I make from simple shape and form? How would that affect my photography. How would it affect yours?
Many times I share with my family an image of something I like and the question that arises almost immediately is “what is it?” We want to make meaning of things and knowing what something is helps us to discover what that meaning is. It’s not a bad thing, but it can be limiting for an artist and photographer.
Lately, as I’ve been mulling these thoughts in my head, I’ve taken to playing with an old Pentax K1000 film camera. It is a fully manual camera and lots of fun. Having to shoot manual has suddenly freed me to play with focus. You see, autofocus and our generally conceived idea that pictures of things need to be sharp almost forces us to shoot things in sharp focus-bokeh not withstanding, but still there is an area of the image (the selective focus area) that is sharp. The K1000 has helped me to see that playing with focus can help remove the idea of the “thing/person” I am photographing and pay more attention to shape and form. It is a lot of fun and leading to a whole other way of seeing images in the world, and hopefully allowing me to stretch as a photographer.
The image above was intentionally shot out of focus. I don’t know if it works for others, but it works for me. Of course, I’m biased because I know what is in the image. The image at the top was an accident and caught me by surprise when I imported it into Lightroom. At first I was going to delete it but as I looked at it I started to see the possibilities and in the end I love it for being so representational of the melee of Snow Geese I was photographing that day. It is one of the images that gives the feel of the place for me.
What about you? Do you ascribe to the sense that images are best when sharp, focused, clear in visual representation and intent. Or do you like to play with representational shapes, lines, form, blur, out of focus?