This is a story of connections. We went to this financial planner about 6 months ago for some advice. In the process I talked about starting my own business and the principal planner (the guy in the front) gave some off the cuff advice about how important it is to stay in contact with your real and potential clients. I took his advice and kept in contact with him and 6 months later got a call to do their updated corporate photos and website.
In the process of doing that I have now landed another contract with a husband of one of the other employees helping with his company’s website.
Stop sign #4 – I am not educated in art and photography. Answer: Praise the Lord God Almighty you aren’t! Get over it and take some photos. There are many highly educated ‘artists’ who are picking their noses watching TV and eating too much instead of using their talents. They aren’t worth doodoo compared to one person with passion and vision even without a formal education. What matters is the doing. If you do the work you will learn.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t things to learn in a formal setting, there are. I have 2 degrees in art because I wanted to learn. I learned about printmaking, drawing, art history, certain artmaking techniques, and a bit about the art world.
But I had no formal training as a photographer at all. My sole educational work in photography was about 3-4 sessions in a dark room during grad school with another student who taught me the basics in exchange for me teaching him the basics of lithography. The truth is the vast majority of my creativity and my end results as an artist are not a function of my formal education, they are a function of my desire and my passion.
There is a woman on Flickr, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, probably the most visited of all the millions on flickr. She was doing pencil portraits when she found flickr and decided to try photography. Within 2 years she had 3 million views and a contract with Toyota to photograph their cars. She is a single mother of 2 sons. She lives in….ICELAND! She is as far from the center of the photography and art world as you can imagine. But she didn’t use that as an excuse. She didn’t use her children as an excuse. She didn’t use her lack of photography education as an excuse. What she did was go out into the middle of the dark Icelandic winter and take photos of 100-200 second exposures in FREEZING cold. She is now getting an art education, but the point is she didn’t wait. She went and ACTED.
“A Genius is someone who simply has fewer stop signs in their head.”
Each day for this week and next I am telling about 10 stop signs to creativity that I have learned about over the years.
Stop sign #2 – It’s not perfect. Answer: According to who? If it is a print and is too green, blurred, flared, dark, whatever. Then collage it with something that makes that ‘negative’ stand out. An art piece is not limited to one photo all by itself. Draw on it, Cut it in stripes and layer it over the same exact shot you took that is good. Cut the worst part of the image out and tack that bad part on your wall, look at it, find something in it. Keep tacking up the pad parts until you find something interesting.
If it is a digital image in your computer, make a copy of it, then do special effects on it up the wazoo until it is something cool or at least you learned something. Go to the extreme with each setting, see how far you can take it.
The point is waiting for perfection is an excuse. It shows lack of creativity and imagination and it shows a worry about what others will think instead of seeing things through original eyes.
This is the fifth in a week long series on Photography. Check out Monday’s offering to get the scoop on it from the beginning.
One of my favorite artists, Robert Irwin, has a saying that became the title of his biography. ‘Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees’. That is why drawing instructors teach on how to see negative space because negative space doesn’t have a name, it doesn’t make you conjure up what an elbow is suppose to look like, or a breast, or a tree or a couch. It is just a shape and it is just defined by the line or the shadows or texture, that’s all.
So, when wondering what to take a photo of, don’t worry so much about the ‘thing’ you are trying to photograph, all named and defined, but look at it without naming it. Find the line or tone or texture or color that is within it and make an image of those things. Your photos will be much better, I promise.
This is the fourth of a week long series on my take on photography. Go to Monday’s posting to see the series from the beginning.
Actually, I say stand too far away or too close… or too low or too high. The demon of creativity is often the eye level shot and the ‘just right’ distant shot. Break the plane of your own eye level, of the model/photographer comfort zone and the resulting ‘well composed’ but boring shot. If you are worrying about what someone will think, the model or an onlooker or whoever, then go back to your house and sell your camera because you are only going to create something that looks like someone elses work, since you are allowing someone else to decide what you do while in the act of creating an image.
This is the third in a week-long series on my take on Photography. Go to Monday’s posting to see it from the beginning.
The rule is to get the whole face in the frame, the whole person, everything perfect. But my rule is that that rule sucks. Are their times to do that? Sure. But for Christ’s sake (and everyone else’s) don’t be a slave to the perfect shot. Try getting the persons face just partially in the frame with most of the image being a background or something else. Try working with angles and composition in an abstract way instead of worrying so much about the subject matter being perfectly upright.
Here is the important thing though. Don’t think every experiment is just so cute and precious that you just have to show it to the world. Remember, chances are every experiment you are attempting a lot of other people have tried it as well. So go look around, see what other people have done. Be self-critical but NOT self-condemning. There is a BIG difference. Being Self-critical means you evaluate and look honestly wat what you have done in context of your own work and others. Self-condemning means you deride yourself for not being perfect or more like someone else, etc. It is boring and selfish and oh so last century to wallow in that. Get over it.
This is the second in a week long series on my take on photography. Go to Monday’s posting to see the series from the beginning.
Whatever you do, LEARN what your camera can do! Do not brag about ‘Oh, I don’t know how to do that’ or ‘Yea, I don’t read manuals’. Both are excuses masking laziness or fear. Read, practice, goof off, experiment. But for God’s sake (and anyone else’s) don’t put a stop sign in your head just because you are afraid. And don’t think that taking bad photos is something to avoid. Take the photo, dag nabbit! How else will you know what is good or not? Do dancers wait until they are perfect to dance? No, they practice knowing they are going to make mistakes and fail. Do the same.
Every day this week I am going to post a page from this book. I found it back in the 80s. It is a hobby book for young children, helping them learn how to take photos. At the time I wasn’t a big believer in all the ‘rules’ of photography (I am still not)and appropriated it by putting my own ‘bad’ photographs over the photos in the book. It was my way of playing with the ideas of ‘good photography. Come back every day all week to learn my way of taking a good photo!
This book was exhibited in an exhibition entitled ‘children’s toys’ at the Young Gallery in Saratoga, California in the early 90s.
