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Kindle Notes & Highlights
It is we who put the humanity, the vision, and the poetry into our photographs.
is much harder to reveal our souls, to take a risk, to create something that showcases our vision and our humanity.
The camera on its own is a wonder, but in the hands of the poet, the storyteller, the seeker of change, or the frustrated artist, it can create something alive that touches our humanity.
the best photographs rely more on the fact that the photographer saw something the rest of us overlooked in the first place.
To make
those kinds of photographs, you have to be present, with an open mind, and see th...
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while our eyes are probably pretty similar, the brains with which we perceive the world all work so profoundly differently that, were we side by side in that moment, we’d have seen it—and photographed it—differently.
I have never asked, “Is it art?” Instead, I ask, “Does it have soul?” Is it alive? Do I see something of the artist within? Does it move me? Does it make me think? Does it challenge me? Does it enrich my human experience?
in the words of Canadian photographer Ted Grant, “When you photograph people in colour, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls.”
Specific information about settings can make us lazy and point us in the wrong direction, giving undue credit to those settings, rather than leading us to a much more complicated, and hard to describe, process of seeing, recognizing light and moments, and so on.
Every photograph has the potential to be filled with soul, spirit, connection—
It is not the sharpness of the image to which people will respond. They will not, one day in the distant future, speak about your stunning histograms.
gear is good, but vision is better;
Craft matters. Photography is one part science and technology, at least in terms of how it all works.
But photography is not (at least the way I understand the medium) a technical pursuit. It is an aesthetic pursuit achieved by technical means.
The more awkward and camera-conscious we are in our work, the less likely it is we will achieve what so many call flow, that state of creativity that borders on intuition and the subconscious.
The rest are the intangible tools of the visual language.
Know your camera and whatever other tools you prefer, like strobes and filters. Pursue new
techniques if that’s where your curiosity leads you.
Know the craft so well that it becomes second nature, gets out of your way, and frees you to do the much more important work of the photographer: being present and receptive, seeing in new ways, and playing with the elements of the visual langua...
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Vision. Intent. The things we want to say, however imperfectly, with the camera in our hands.
What is more important than defining it is learning to discover it.
What we do is less like using the camera and more like collaborating with it.
knowing how we want to make photographs is as important as knowing what we want to say with them.
it’s probably best that we work with the knowledge that our vision might be more prone to coming on slowly rather than all at once.
It’s not what we look at, but the way in which we look. It’s not what we see, but what we perceive, and what we think about what we perceive.
we must have something to say, or else the poetry and stories we write with our cameras will be nothing more than meaningless words that fall on waiting hearts and minds.
If we don’t bring to our art at least some awareness of that change, and the ways in which our intent for the images we make is changing, then we risk repeating ourselves until one day we wake to find that our photographs not only speak to no one else, they fail to light a spark in ourselves.
You can’t put soul into your photographs if, reaching inside to access it, you find you don’t remember where you put it.
journaling.
Writing forces me to bring enough clarity to my thoughts such that I can write them down succinctly. It trains my brain to be self-aware.
consider the ways we think about things, the questions we have, the things we prefer, and why. This can lead us to better images, and by that I mean images that are both more authentic to who we are and more revealing of the themes and subjects of our photographs.
vision.
It’s not the having it that matters so much as it is the willingness to keep pace with it, to let it change and evolve as we ourselves do, and to explore the changing ways that best express that vision.
“What am I trying to say?”
“What is this image about and what would be the best (most authentic, most interesting) expression of that for me?”
“What do I want this image to feel like?”
The world doesn’t need more images; it’s full to busting with snapshots.
becoming (and remaining) more consistently mindful and intentional about what you want to say with those photographs.
If you want your images to mean more to you, to be more compelling to those who experience them, then it’s deeper, more intentional photographs for which you hunger.
I will never reach the end of this journey. I’ll never arrive at a point where others have nothing to teach me.
Photography, like music, is a language. It’s an imprecise language, but it speaks to us, often powerfully.
The photographer who both acknowledges his audience and is mindful of his use of visual language has a much greater chance to make images that are more powerful and more human.
Every decision we make has its implications.
will be read one way or another regardless of our intention.
There are seemingly endless possibilities in our craft,
that list includes the orientation of the frame, the aspect ratio, the scale of the image, the elements we include and the relationships we establish between them, the elements we exclude, the moment we
choose, the choice of colour or monochrome, what we focus on and how deep that focus is, and how fast our shutter moves and what that does to our experience of time. We choose our light or our exposure and change the mood of the image. We choose our perspective and place lines and elements where we desire.
One of the beautiful things about a visual art like photography is the absence of secrets. With few exceptions, that art—the craft of it—is all visible and can be learned.
The two best ways to learn photography are: 1) make
