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Quote
of the Week:
All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.-Gaston Bachelard
Seeing is Seeing
Amy Allcock posted an interesting analysis of her photographic shooting to posting ratio at flickr, and it spurred me to think about how I shoot photographs as well. It's always nice when someone makes you think about somehting worthwhile. Kinda like being back in school, but without the boredom. We talked about the Act of Seeing a lot in college, and it's an important discussion that goes on all the time with photographers, but putting it into context with digital imaging and photo-sharing tools like Flickr is something I haven't seen.
Anyhow, you should read her post, and then read my reply, which I've posted here, for my records (this is my blog, after all, which is where I can put stuff I don't want to lose. Here's the reply:
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Amy, I have a similar story, with a twist.
I entered the photographic world as a large format photographer, shooting 5x7-inch sheet film with a big wooden camera. I still carry the rig aroud in my car, padlocked against theft, in hopes of seeing something worthy of the fifteen minutes spent setting up, moving around, metering the scene, making the exposure, and breaking down the camera.
Furthermore, loading and unloading sheet film is time-consuming, as is developing it (you can process maybe five to ten sheets at one time--any more than that and you will surely scratch the sensitive emulsion against the edges of the other sheets of film. Then I print on paper that I've hand-coated emulsion onto. Coating and drying takes about 30 minutes per sheet, and maybe another ten minutes to an hour to expose the paper and negative to make a print. Then another 20 minutes in developer and clearing baths.
So, as you can tell, I am very picky about what I make images of with this camera. I might make two images a month, although I generally run through about 100 sheets a year. Out of those, a high percentage--maybe 70 of them--are what I would consider printable. I am editing before I make the image. So I find myself "taking pictures" with my eyeballs a lot more often than I take them with a camera and a lens.
So: a 70% "taken" versus "posted" (or in my case, printed) ratio. Pretty high. But then, remember, I probably don't hestitate to drive right past some shots that I'd shoot with a digital camera.
On the other side of the coin, I have a little digital camera that I shoot about 20 images a week with. Lots of stuff around the house, photos of the kids, the dog, fences on our walks, home-made meals, etc. The interesting thing is that this camera acts, for me, much like the Leica did for photojournalists in the 40s and 50s. It's small, and I carry it in my pocket, and pull it out and make images whenever I see anything even vaguely interesting. Consequently, the ratio of junk to gems is quite high. But it does make for a very interesting set of images that I'd never, ever, catch with a large-format camera. Look at Garry Winogrand's contact sheets some day and you'll see it.
Josef Sudek used a small camera to catch the minutae of his life in his small home and little garden, and ended up with a collection of images which take my breath away. They are very profound in capturing the ordinariness of his life, and his place, and they describe a beauty that can only be captured here and there, as one passes by--and much more easily with a smaller camera.
I post about 30% of those pictures captured with my little pocket camera (and would post an even smaller percentage if I didn't have a Pro account with the nearly unlimited bandwidth). And I think that in some of these images, I've started to see things that I'd never considered regarding photographically, because I've spent over 14 years looking at things from the perspective of a large format photographer. I see a lot of seemingly mundane things become beautiful when I simply look at them. And while this is no less true for what I photograph with my large format camera, these are different things, in a different world, and it is that differentness that I find so refreshing for my personal vision right now.
Thanks for bringing up this point; it's important.
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