Capturing Feelings
“I find photography a way of capturing what I’m feeling and sharing it with others.” – Om Malik
photography
In Like a Lion
“It’s good to see you taking photos again,” my wife told me this weekend.
Indeed. Maybe it took a freak March 1 storm that had both soaking wet rain and giant snowflakes. Maybe it took the light coming back in the morning and the evening. Maybe it took some hope on the horizon.
March is in like a lion. Me? More in like a lamb for a while. Let’s try that.
Try Not to Try
Desire, as the Buddha taught, is the source of suffering.
This is true in photography as well. New gear comes out, and photographers start sweating from Gear Acquisition Syndrome. It makes photographers feel like their gear is unworthy, and that photographs would be so much better with that new lens/camera/whatever.
Here’s a trick I learned to get over that feeling: just wait.
Wait a week. Don’t think about it. Maybe wait a bit longer.
Then: assess your feelings. Do you still desire that object?
For me, the waiting works every time. I look back at my week-ago self and wonder, what was all the fuss about? Is my life worse off? Did I suffer for not jumping on a purchase?
This strategy applies whenever I’m thinking about making a major purchase. If I wait, and I still feel strongly, then I know it’s important. If I wait and the feeling passes, I know I can either save up a bit more, wait a little longer for a discount, or just not go through with the purchase.
As Tom Petty sang, sometimes the waiting is the hardest part. Once you’re past that, you’ll make better decisions.
An Easy Decision
My heart hurts. Another school shooting, another reason for our kids (and parents!) not to feel safe, and another bunch of nothing gets fixed.
Aiden has to do school drills to practice being safe if something terrible happened. In my day, drills were for tornadoes – natural occurrences that you can’t control. Our parents had bombing drills, and we all decided that hiding from nuclear weapons wasn’t a thing we wanted to do. Hence: arms control.
Today, drills are for something we can control, but fail to do anything about. It’s silly.
Glad to see the Florida students shame our politicians, and (hopefully) many Americans who feel our kids aren’t worth protecting.
I’m pro hunting, pro owning a shotgun or a handgun – but also pro safety and controlling these killing machines from the crazies. We can have both.
Most of all, I’m in favor of kids over guns. It should be an easy decision, America.
Make And Take
Leave it to me to schedule our Family Art Studio session for the snow storm weekend.
But so it went. We drove to Ann Arbor, braving the highway traffic and slick conditions, to spend the day making art at my work.
This was the boy’s first trip to an art museum, and he had a lot of questions. Were the statues real? Why can’t you touch the art? That bust of George Washington – where’s the rest of his body? Why was that girl so hairy?
We took inspiration from Japanese graphic design and made our own poster out of cut-out shapes of colored paper. It was us and six other families – half of what was scheduled to show up.
“The difference between your art on the fridge and these drawings is that there’s a frame around them, and they’re hanging in a museum,” I said.
I hope he took the day to heart.
Snow Day
There’s nothing like a snow storm to get the family out of the cabin fever funk.
It’s also a great excuse to get the ol’ point and shoot camera out, dust off the lens, and take some photos of the outside activities. Despite the broken battery door, my Canon PowerShot SD750 still works great, and shoots fine.
This thing and me go way back. We’ve been on many adventures, from road trips through New England to hiking in Zion, and all of life before I purchased my first DSLR.
This weekend, when the snow started to accumulate, I broke out the SD750 while me and the boy went sledding, and then to capture all the fun in the yard when we got home. After all, if it gets wet, no big loss.
A side benefit: the photo files loaded lickety split into Lightroom.
Say Cheese
It’s a hard habit to break, having your kids say “cheese” whenever they see the camera come out.
Our own kids started saying “cheese” almost out of nowhere, and at a very young age.
Meanwhile, I strive for those in-between moments when taking photos of the family. I want their real faces, and real smiles, so I’ve learned to be sneaky and quick. Those in-between photos are the ones I treasure, collect, and share.
Sure, the grandparents want a nice framed photo of the kids looking at the camera and smiling. Family snapshots have looked like that since our parents were kids. Again: a hard habit to break.
Me, I want some real life in my photos.
It’s made me think about making family photos for friends and family. My paid gigs are few and far between these days, but when I do get asked about taking family portraits, I want to make a suggestion: How about we hang out for a morning, and just let me capture what happens in between the Cheeses? There’s some intimacy involved, yes, but like a good photojournalism assignment, the good pictures are made by simply being there and capturing what happens.
Gaze and Shrug
“I once needed to shout from the rooftops but have now said my piece. Can we be done at some point? Can we gaze upon this world and shrug, content with the work we’ve done? God I hope not. The mere thought of it depresses me.” – Patrick LaRoque
Byproducts of Exploration
“For me, the pictures I make are the byproduct of my explorations, not an end in themselves.” – Stephen Shore
Before the Break
Sure, it’s nice – getting a week between Christmas and New Year’s off as a freebie vacation week. That week is one of the many benefits of working in higher ed.
Except when you’re sick.
It hit us the weekend before Christmas: a scratch throat, a groggy unease, and sinus pain that felt like continual just-before-you-sneeze agony. Then, from Christmas day to just this week, a persistent sickness. It didn’t ruin the holidays, but it certainly wasn’t fun.
Maybe it’s a good thing I had that week off. But there are better ways to spend a vacation than homebound misery.
So I took the usual Christmas morning photos of the kids opening presents. Other than that, and despite some big photo plans I had, I just didn’t get much done. Instead, I’ll share some pre-Christmas fun in the playroom with the kids.
Before the snow fell. Before the presents showed up under the tree. Before the misery.
Year After Year
![O Holy Day [Explored]](https://i0.wp.com/live.staticflickr.com/4726/39448858051_7103d54dcc_c.jpg?resize=800%2C533&ssl=1)
Every year, I give a simple gift to my side of the family: a calendar of full-page photos from the previous year, showing all the kids in the family doing their thing. Easter, summer, Halloween, birthdays – it’s all in there.
And every year, the calendars are a hit.
I’ve been giving photo calendars since before I had kids of my own – probably five years or longer – and there’s no gift that makes a splash like they do. My family tears them open, thumbs through the photos, and remembers the year that was. You’d think they’d get old (“Another calendar? C’mon, Dave.”), but they don’t.
What keeps them fresh? We keep adding family members. That means new birthdays get added to the calendar portion, and new photos of new people appear up top. I added a kiddo to this year (Riley, in April). Family variety, in photo form.
“Sometimes I’ll take out the photos and frame them,” someone told me this year. What a nice thought: an 11×16″ photo worthy of a hanging on the wall for longer than a month.
I often feel like I’m taking the easy gift route for Christmas, giving away family photos year after year. But you know, they’re never not appreciated. I think it’s the variety thing, but I also think it’s because no one prints photos anymore, so any picture of a grandkid that one can hold is a true gift.
We can share our photo talents so easily starting with the ones we love.
Home for the Holidays
Everything is different this year: new house, new family dynamic, and heck – even a new place for our Christmas tree.
This time we went to the well-known family name, the one you pass on the highway with the big sign. And wouldn’t you know it, the nice weather met us there and made for a fun family outing (and great photos). It’s one of those holiday traditions we look forward to every year.
Like Christmas Vacation, right? Everyone loves that movie. You can’t help but think of the Griswolds every time you head out to the countryside to grab a Christmas tree.
Plenty of things change, but we try to keep these kinds of things steady.
The Fear Takes Over
When my daughter Madelyn was born, everything changed.
And not just for the better. As a parent, you can’t help but worry about your kid. Will they be safe? Will they be healthy? Will they always be around? I noticed my brain going down some very dark alleys after I had kids, often despite my best efforts. “Don’t worry,” I told myself. “Not much you can do about the unknown.”
Except my thoughts went to those dark places anyway. They still do.
Photography is a great way to show your love and appreciation of your family members. But to some, it can be a way to manage the anxiety of raising a child. I feel this often. If I’m photographing my kids, that means I’m with them. If I’m with them, that means I can prevent the bad stuff from happening.
That’s silly, of course. Bad stuff can still happen, even if I’m there. Photography is merely the excuse to keep the dark thoughts away, if only for a little while.
In Caspar Claasan’s project, he mentioned that things got better over time. If that’s true, than the photos I make now will remind me of the fears I had from an earlier period.
That will have to be good enough.
Through Your Eyes
I used to follow quite a few New York City-based photographers on Instagram.
It’s New York! Look at all the city scenes!
Except then it all started to look like…New York. Same Brooklyn Bridge, same skyline, same ol’ urban scenes.
What’s more fun for me is to follow photographers from somewhere else. There’s a million little towns and cities and hidden gems in this country (and continent, and elsewhere). Show me rural Iowa, or downtown Detroit, or Manitoba, or the people of southeast Michigan. It’s not that New York isn’t cool, or infinitely inspirational, but I’m a road trip guy. I want to feel like I’m seeing all of America, not just the most populous/popular part.
Show me America through your eyes, with your photographic voice, and I’ll be right there with you.
![Neither Love Nor Hate It [Explored]](https://i0.wp.com/live.staticflickr.com/4586/37720660694_d683812d24_c.jpg?resize=800%2C533&ssl=1)
Overblown Expectations
“From what I witness almost daily, completely unrealistic and overblown expectations are the biggest problems for most photographers.” – Jörg M. Colberg
Far better, I would say, to have no expectations, and make whatever you want, when you want. Even if it fails, you learn something.
Want to publish a book yourself? Do it. Don’t ask for permission.
Work For Play
![Betwixt Birth and Death [Explored]](https://i0.wp.com/live.staticflickr.com/4559/38211865941_f62cefc0c0_c.jpg?resize=800%2C533&ssl=1)
A recent essay in Harper’s has me thinking about the importance of play in children’s lives, versus the demands that modern school systems are placing on them. Public education is so concerned with test scores and achievement, argues Malcolm Harris, that there’s little time to let kids be kids.
Now, take that into art and photography. What’s the balance between cramming your brain with technical information and learning by accident?
Photography education is fine. It feels like you need to learn all you can, especially at the start, to be a “good” photographer. But I would warn that too much of that leads you into birds and blooms – tricks instead of a voice and a viewpoint.
I think the balance should be like 10/90, formal technique education versus experimentation. Learn a little, but play a lot. Pick up a book, grab your camera, and try to recreate what you like. Be a photography kid.
The school system my kids are coming in to kind of terrifies me. With lower funding for music and art class, and more rote memorization and “teaching to the test,” there’s little room for kids to enjoy their time in the classroom. Summertime at school? Yuck. Adults don’t like that much pressure – why would children?
So it goes when you pick up a camera. Don’t be so burdened with learning all the technical stuff that you don’t stumble on a new (or “you”) way of doing things.
All my best techniques were picked up by accident – me just playing around, shooting for fun.
On Photography Education
I’ve taken maybe a handful of online photography courses, mostly in speedlight training because it was so new to me. Over time, I learned most online photography courses are like online Photoshop courses: one trick ponies to only use when you really need it. And for most of those, as CJ says, there’s free videos on YouTube to learn techniques.
Seriously, just do a search on anything you need to know – from camera repair to off-camera lighting.
No, my “education” comes from the How To See end of the photography spectrum. Specifically, it’s learning how the great photographers of history have seen the world and translated it through their pictures. When I learned how Callahan and Metzker saw the world, my photography voice and vision (not techniques!) improved.
The best photography lessons come from photo books and projects, not one-off online classes. Find a photographer you like, go grab their book from a library, and spend some time with it. If you really like the book, buy it, and you’ll be able to keep it forever. You can share it with friends. You can revisit it over time and rediscover the lessons.
Libraries provide books to anyone, just about anywhere, for free. Through interlibrary loans, if they don’t have a book, they can get it for you. That’s a librarian’s job! They can’t wait to help you find a book. I’m lucky enough to work at a university where I can go online, pick a book, and it shows up at my office a few days later (one of the many reasons I love working in higher ed).
Now, if a photographer doesn’t have a book, visit the Projects section of their website and spend some time with it. Look at those images full size. Read the text. Find out the why. Hell, send them an email and start a conversation. Don’t be shy.
If you’re a professional photographer who needs to solve a difficult problem, maybe something like CreativeLive will work for you. Maybe it’s worth the money.
But for us hobbyists, a book is a better investment in time and treasure.
Borderland Arrives
Nice to get a fresh photo book from England. Well, maybe not fresh – I’ve had it for a while. But I’m finally digging in.
Steve Gray’s Borderland is a small marvel. I’ve covered it before, thanks to Gray’s Q&A, but seeing it in person makes all the difference.
The first edition is sold out, but he’s taking requests for the second printing.
Season To Taste
“Tools are easy to learn. Training your eye takes time.” – Jeff Sheldon
It’s fun to laugh at a graphic designer when they use Comic Sans. “What are they thinking?” the cry goes. “Don’t they know.”
Often, they don’t. Often, the “graphic designer” is a secretary at a church making a community dinner flyer. She doesn’t know any better.
So it goes with any art form. The inappropriate HDR, the selective color, the breaking of any “rules” of photography – it’s often a new photographer who is mimicking what he or she sees elsewhere, ignorant of the kitsch they’re putting on display. They haven’t developed good taste.
(Tangent: Go look at Flickr’s Explore page and you’ll see lots of birds, landscapes, flowers, and light painting. I wonder – because that’s what’s being put forward as popular work on Flickr, is that why so many people make photos of wildlife and macro blossoms?)
After absorbing tons of good photography (and shooting a ton), you can acquire self awareness and taste. It’s like this with any craft. The more good work that you devour, and the more you practice, the more you can season your own projects with a unique viewpoint.
My goal is always to look back at my old work and cringe. That’s how I know I’m developing my taste.