From weddings to ……………..I don’t know! But after editing and sending the finished photos from the last wedding off, I found myself trying to sort the myriad of images I have saved on the hard drive and the portable hard drives.
What am I going to do with all of these images…………..fact is – nothing! Why have I got them? An interesting question! I have pondered it for a very long time now, thinking that I should purge the whole lot and start again, however, I keep going back to images to reassess them, look at them and compare them with current images……………..have I improved?
Well, that depends………………the more I thought I knew the more I realize I don’t know, but hey, that’s life and the older I get the more I realize that there’s not enough time in this lifetime to learn everything you want!
I definitely have different categories of images, from the family, commissioned shoots, fine art, portraits, landscapes; you name it I’ve got them, but there is a distinct pattern to my photography and it’s leaning very much towards the fine art and exhibition “arty, farty” style of photography. What’s that you ask?
Well, that’s a whole new subject and probably deserves a more in depth debate by experts, not me; suffice to say I think that Fine Art Photography is not necessarily about technical excellence but more about expressing thoughts and feelings emotively within an image. Fortuitously whilst I was penning this blog I came across these quotes by two extraordinary artists:
Painter Robert Henri (1865–1929) admonished his students to “Paint the spirit of the bird in flight, not its feathers, ” and another quote by photographer David Alan Harvey: “Don’t shoot what it looks like, shoot what it feels like.”
WOW, yep, I get it, I love texture, shapes, the drama of light and dark, the absolute power of negative space and the jumble that positive space can portray and of course portraits……….Oh no, not the boudoir or the studio, not fond of the contrived, but the emotive candid capture, the intense look in the eyes, the furrows in the brow, the crows feet around the eyes, the wrinkles of the elderly that disappear with a smile, proof of life, of experience or, in the case of a child, innocent mischievousness.
So now I have a whole new perspective on my saved images, those old images are teaching me, they’re showing me graphically my flaws, my strengths and giving me that all important springboard on which to improve; more importantly they are giving me the confidence to continue to capture images, to find the emotion and tell the story! Are other photographers like me, are we all inextricably connected to every image like serial hoarders?
Now, what am I doing with all of those old images………..I’ll buy another external hard drive!
So back to the other question……….have I improved…………probably……..but………..I think it’s time for the next journey…………….thank goodness I like studying!!
flyingfree207 