Shoot for the "Feels"
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A Photograph without Emotion is Nothing
You’ve probably heard that the path to competence is 10,000 hours of doing. I think that this is misleading. 10,000 hours of work done poorly does not make competence. We need to make sure that what we are doing over time is the best work we can do at the time.
One of the missings that I am seeing, even in today’s glut of available training material, is a path to success model. We are all very impatient, and to a large extent have diminishing attention spans.
Can you be a good photographer or videographer without any formal training? Some can, but we are not all equal, and different people learn differently and have different artistic inclinations.
I recently read an article where the writer laments that anyone can make a well exposed, in focus image and that functionality is actually impeding skills development.
I have to agree
Technical accuracy and automation are wonderful things but they do not make one an artists. Those things bring no emotional context. So while the number of images being made is only growing each day. the number of compelling photographs as a percentage of the total “captures” is in free fall.
Of course, if you are happy with what you are making, then good for you. However if you look at the work you made two to three years ago and don’t shudder, or see it as poor, you’ve lost a great opportunity.
I’ve lost a lot of interest in photographic groups and forums because they have become so absorbed with camera features and speed of this or that or number of frames per second. If a camera can capture 195 images per second, and you aren’t doing your job, you end up with 195 well exposed in focus images that are lifeless and completely meaningless. This isn’t growth, this is abject failure.
Change the Game
The rules have become concerns about technical stuff, but when I look at both modern and older “great” photographs, why do I struggle so hard to find meaning in the newer work? It’s sharp, has incredible dynamic range, and may be well composed. But there’s no emotion, no story, no legs and no staying power.
If you find the same thing or simply look at the seemingly endless flow of edges and don’t feel compelled to stop, or come away with no image sticking in your brain, you can change things. You change by changing your process.
Start Over
You see something that you think will make an interesting image. Stop. Yes you might miss a shot, but maybe not. Why do you want to squeeze the shutter. A lifeless image is never saved by a camera, a lens or the latest plugin. Dead is dead. If you cannot answer specifically why you are squeezing the shutter, there is no photograph there. If your answer is about something technical, you don’t have an answer. If there are no “feels” there’s nothing there. Yes you will need to bring your expertise and your proper practice to bear but those things won’t make magic out of nothing. Just more frustration and possibly more expense as you put money into gear as if gear creates a photograph. An image is a thing, a series of zeros and ones. A photograph is something very different entirely. A photograph doesn’t grab you because of exposure or depth of field, there has to be emotional commotion. It is absolutely true that we do not all respond to art the same way. How I react to Van Gogh’s Starry Night is not the same as the reaction of every other person. When I look at the images of Vivian Maier, who made thousands of images, that were seen by no one until after her death, I can spend hours there. There is so much emotional commotion in so many of her photographs.
I haven’t been making many photographs for a while, not because I have grown bored with the art, but because when I see something, I realize that I have already done it, and no matter what additional skill I may have built, if there is no “feels” in what I see, there’s no point in squeezing the shutter. I am making a lot fewer images, but the ones I do make are much more fulfilling.
The Roll of Film Technique
A technique to help get here is what I call the roll of film. When I started, I had very little money for photography. I had a camera with two lenses and shot one of them almost exclusively because it was a 35mm and I was trying to learn to see with that lens as my greatest influencer Alfred Eisenstadt had. Film was a cost and processing and printing were expensive. I ended up doing my own black and white not because I was interested in chemistry but because it cost less. I bought film in bulk and rolled my own rolls if you will. Regardless of monetary savings, I treated each shutter squeeze as having a hard dollar cost in material and time. I worked to never waste a shot. I failed in this often, but when I succeeded, I had better shots. On my best days, I would get emotion and what Bresson called the decisive moment. Such wonderful wins.
Now if I go out with the camera, I go with one lens (and a flash - I remain a lighting dork). I tell myself that I have 36 exposures available. That’s it. When I get home, I may have made 36 exposures, but often have not used up my “roll” I think back a few years ago when I might come home with hundreds and after waiting a day or so to import them and then wonder what the hell I had been thinking. I don’t immediately believe that scarcity creates success, I can still come home and decide that there are no keepers. That’s ok. To me better nothing, than a set of images that bore me to tears.
Closure
I am aware as you are of the incorrect phrase that “practice makes perfect” I always remember my greatest teacher in a very different discipline saying that “proper practice makes competence”. In that discipline and in this one, and frankly any other one, this is the accurate response. Edward Van Halen became who he was by proper practice for hours every single day. Eisenstadt and Bresson and Adams did not use motor winders. Their capture count on a shoot might have been a very small number. However, if you could ask them, they could articulate their rationale for every shutter squeeze, what they saw when squeezing along with what they saw in their mind’s eye as the final outcome.
Today we have better tools to capture images and tools never dreamed about in editing. Wonderful stuff and none of it will make an amazing photograph. If you want to be more accomplished, shoot for the feels, or get buried in thousands of whatevers.
