Ian MacDonald, on giving a creative friend some advice in a time of doubt:
Success is really an iceberg. On the surface you see the rewards and accolades, but underneath it is nothing but blood, sweat, failure, hard work, frustration, set backs, disappointment, and resistance.
Admiration is better than jealousy.
(via Patrick LaRoque)
To be a photographer, one must photograph. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of making pictures. Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there is no guarantee that one will become an artist. Only the journey matters.
Harry Callahan
(via theglasschild)
Amen.
My advice to new photographers is always this: You’re going to suck for a while. And that’s okay. Keep shooting. One day, you won’t suck as much.
There are other things in life beside autumn, women, religion, and fire…the things I normally write about. Now we chose death, drugs, depression, and Halloween.
It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.
Thomas Jefferson
Right. Now get out a make something.
Take some time to renew yourself — seek quiet and be aimless — for a little bit every day.
Images are never final; they’re always a work in progress, subject to the possibility of a different interpretation. They’re constantly in a state of flux, alive with the potential of change.
A New Year’s message, as I do every year, from Dr. Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Have a safe and happy new year, all.
To this day I still get excited when I feed a card into the computer and begin to play with the images; it’s like painting or sculpting, getting my hands dirty. It’s a step of the process I thoroughly enjoy, however time consuming it may be.
Film, Kage stuff… It’s Friday. — laROQUE
Indeed. I like playing around with a few images, just to get the look and style down, and then going to town on the rest.
What else I’ve found helpful: not touching the photos for a while – like a month or longer. It makes editing/culling easier, because there’s no longer an emotional attachment.