LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process

I know that Shakespeare was talking about the soul of wit, but I've come to conclude it is the soul of photography, too. At least it can be. How often do you look at a book or a project and wish there was more? As compare to, how many times to you find yourself looking at a project or a book and feeling like it is getting too long or repetitive?

LW1426 - More Captures, or More Artwork

I'm of the school of thought that when you've clicked the shutter and made another capture, you haven't made artwork, yet. So what will you do with this precious day, evening, hour? Do you need more captures? Or, would your time be better spent making a print or some other finished piece of art?

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Every Picture Is a Compromise, a series at www.brooksjensenarts.com.

and...

"How to" tutorials and camera reviews are everywhere on YouTube, but if you're interested in photography and the creative life, you need to know about the incredible resources you can access as a member of LensWork Online.

My friend Joe Lipka (who is a lifelong practicing Catholic) will often set up his tripod to capture a beautiful landscape with the words, "Way to go, God!" I've come to recognize this as a type of photography. No one would ever think this about a novel, a piece of music, a poem, or sculpture.

Buried in your Lightroom catalog are tons of images that deserve deeper attention. I have no doubt about this. I have faith that each time you click the shutter you do so because there was something that connected with you. That is, you've never clicked the shutter on a purposeful loser. Those potential images in your catalog have simply slipped out of mind.

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There have been a few times - - but only a few - - when a photographer we've published has been a bit disappointed in how their images looked in LensWork. In every case, it turns out that there was a monitor calibration issue on their end that was easily resolved. For critical work, the first step is always to calibrate your monitor, with hardware calibration if possible.

HT2063 - The Additive Process

The process of photographic composition is, by the nature of its mechanics, a subtractive process. What superfluous and distracting element can we remove from the framing? It can be useful, however, to reverse this and think of our composition as an additive process, like painters do.

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Every Picture Is a Compromise, a series at www.brooksjensenarts.com that looks at failures as a way to learn.

and...

"How to" tutorials and camera reviews are everywhere on YouTube, but if you're interested in photography and the creative life, you need to know about the incredible resources you can access as a member of LensWork Online.

Laotzu, that old rascal of a sage from 600 BC in China, advised that "the five colors blind the eye and the five notes deafen ear." He was proposing that there are more subtleties in color and sound than our methods of notation can record. I think there's an interesting parallel to this idea for us photographers.

A multi-image project is a project because something binds all the images together to make a theme. What is it that defines the images as a unified thing? Is it the subject? The mood? The location? The processing? How you answer this question about unity makes or discourages a viewer's relationship to the project.

Novelists and short story writers understand perfectly well the importance of that first line or paragraph of text. In fact, the subsequent pages are often a confirmation or refutation of that first line, at the very least an explanation of it. We have the same sort of thing in photography projects in the form of a title and the introductory text.

LW1425 - What We Do

Novelists don't make books, they write stories. Musicians don't produce LPs or CDs, they perform songs. Similarly, do photographers make prints or do we craft still images? Where is the dividing line between the physicality of photography and the strictly visual content that is independent of the media?.

All previous episodes of our weekly podcast are available to members of LensWork Online. 30-day Trial Memberships are only $10. Instant access, terabytes of content, inspiration and ideas that expand daily with new content.

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Every Picture Is a Compromise, a series at www.brooksjensenarts.com.

and...

"How to" tutorials and camera reviews are everywhere on YouTube, but if you're interested in photography and the creative life, you need to know about the incredible resources you can access as a member of LensWork Online.