Sunday, March 4, 2007

Being Ordinary


I'm an ordinary photographer. I like walking around and taking photos of what I see, however I see it at the time. I rarely do much more in Photoshop except make the image as close to what I saw as possible, and only occasionally try to make small improvements. I know it's a waste of Photoshop, like driving a Ferrari to go grocery shopping, but it's what it can do if and when I want that I have Photoshop, and it's the most commonly used and written about.

Anyway, this photo was taken at the History Museum in Tacoma on a Sunday afternoon. This woman walked out the door in the background, looked around for a moment then sat down to do what she was doing. I just had to walk around to compose the scene for what I wanted and capture the image. I'm somewhat different from most photographers in that I don't use zoom lenses. All mine are fixed focal length lenses. This forces me to see in a fixed view, kinda' old-school to many, but it simplifiies my vision in photography.

And it's the vision of the photographer you see in the images, our view of the world - the composition, our idea of the scene - the color, crop or manipulation, and the content - the subject. We frame, compose, capture and present an image about what we see, the rest is yours to see and judge. We are as diverse as the general population, and it's all qualitative, nothing more. We range from the ordinary like myself to the Dave LaChapelle's in the photography world. It's who we are and our vision.

I'll stay with the ordinary and just walk around or hike the trails and photograph what I see, and hope you find something small in the images. You get a peek into our spirit and soul, expressed in our images, such as Luiz Rodrigo Cerqueira Sousa image. What do you see?

1 comment:

  1. Another reason to photograph, as each picture probably says at least a little bit about the photographer.

    “Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an
    illusion of reality with which we create our own private
    world.” ~Arnold Newman

    The longer I photograph, the more apparent it becomes.

    Photographers seem to be of two minds when it comes to the ordinary. We often draw on the ordinary as the mainstay of our craft, yet do it in a way we hope is out of the ordinary.

    ReplyDelete