The Perceptive Photographer

In a follow-up to last week's podcast on the value of interviewing others and yourself about photography, this week we talk about some possible subjects or ideas to consider when planning your interview. I always recommend that you start with the work. Look closely at the images and projects someone has created to get focused. Think about what you want to know about how the work came about, what they learned from the work, and their approach. As long as your asking questions that focus more on the why and awareness of the images and projects,  you really can't go wrong.

One of my favorite exercises I use to teach photography and learn about my own work is called the interview project. This process involves you doing enough research about a photographer you are inspired by or want to learn from and then create a set of 10 to 20 interview questions that you would want to use to interview them. In some cases, you might be lucky and be able to use those questions to interview the photographer. Still, sometimes they might no longer be alive. Either way, part of the process is to answer those questions as if you were the photographer. This will help you get some insights into how you might approach the work. You then use those same questions, slightly modified to fit your work, and then interview yourself.

The podcast this week walks you through the process and so possible insights you might be able to get with a simple little exercise that gives you big rewards in understanding your own process and work.

Sometimes it is the little things that can make all the difference. In a photograph, it might be a shift in POV or depth of frame. In our printing, it might be the right paper selection. No matter what you are working on a small change can be a big deal. However, as the days seemingly run together in this year of COVID, I got to thinking about how easy it is to miss the small changes since everything and every day seem to blend. 

This week's podcast takes a look at how small changes can impact your photography and work. Hopefully, they can inspire you to try out the same or think about what small changes you will carry forward even when things shift out of our 2020 way of being.

I often think of photography as an active verb. It is something that we do, see, and respond.

There is, however, a whole set of photography that is created without the photographer. Video and photos are created by surveillance systems and unattended cameras. These photographs and videos are used for evidence for the most part to show the actions recorded by these cameras without the influence of a photographer.

This week's podcast takes a look at how we define photography in the context of who and how the image was created and the responsibility of photographers to help have meaning conversations about intent and context for how images and videos are made.

Please remember to keep safe and wear your mask!

Sometimes I hear someone say something and it gets me thinking about my approach to my photography. I recently overheard someone say don't shoot the messenger. This got me to thinking about how many times we blame the viewer for not getting our understanding of our photographs. 

This week's podcast is all about how we can help to overcome our frustration with others when they just don't get our work. It is easy to blame the viewer as just not getting it, but I believe there is an opportunity for each of us to step back from our work and think about our approach. Are we as clear as we can be with our story, emotion, composition, and frame? Do we know what our work is about? Do we have clarity of purpose in our work or is it still vague in our mind? We can't really expect someone else to get it if we don't on some level get our own work, can we?

The one exception I have to not blaming the viewer is around personal experiences.

This week's podcast dives into how to think about your photography and ideas to approach your editing using some of the concepts and sections you find in most software release notes. This release note template gives us an opportunity to create a plan, outline, and goals for editing. They can also serve as a to-do list when we need to make new work going forward. I am sure most of you will never dive deep into software release notes. Still, I think you can get something useful from the practice that industry has adopted.

This week's podcast dives into how we define a photograph and photography. For me there are three key aspects of a photograph. They are time-bound, indexical, and is represented by an object of some type (print, slide, etc). For you, I imagine you might have different ideas of what might be a photo. I hope that you get some aspects to consider and spend some time coming up with your own definition of a photograph.

This week's podcast introduces my two new long-format workshops and also an exercise, called 10x10, which will help you better understand your approach to editing and creating your photography.

There are a number of aspects of photography that fall into two camps. There are artistic decisions and technical decisions. For some people, you might think of this as left-brain (technical) and righ- brain (creative) decisions. However, to be successful, you need both sides of your brain to make a good photograph. Not only both sides but also some language around how both sides work together to make a successful photograph.

When we can talk about how our camera decisions help or hinder the experience of a photograph, we can make better photographs in the future. We can, with this enhanced language, also provide better feedback to other about there work. RAther than focusing on what f/stop, we could focus on the effects of sharpness in an image as it relates to how the image is seen. So much of photography is about learning to translate what we see in the world into the image even when what is in front of us is shifted by the camera options. When we lack the language to describe what we want, we can make decisions with the camera resulting in work that often feels empty. Learning to be able to have a language to describe what we want and how to get it with the camera makes the artistic side of our work easier. This week's podcast is a deep dive into the important distinction of these two sides of our language and how to balance them for the greatest impact.

One of our listeners sent in a great question about distractions. Her question was a two-part approach to dealing with distractions.

The first was dealing with the distractions of editing the wrong images. The second area was dealing with distractions outside of editing.

We take a dive into both of these topics this week and look at some ideas for dealing with these distractions and approaches for when it might be ok to be distracted.