If I've learned anything about photography in the last two years, I've learned that it's hard. Harder than it looks. Framing a scene and pressing a shutter is the easy part. Figure how to expose scenes properly isn't too bad. Photoshop isn't even really as scary as it seems. But doing excellent, faithful self-expression? That's the hard stuff.
It's not possible to say "what" photography really is. Really, I guess it's just ones and zeroes that are recorded on a sensor when I push a silver button. But anyone who has ever heard a shutter click knows that it's something more. Those ones and zeroes are a peculiar kind of magic. Beyond the zeroes and ones, I've begun to think that photography is about the desire to constantly learn about the craft and the need to faithfully express a vision.
Those things are what I hope this blog can become—a constant exercise in learning and an attempt to express a vision that will become more solid over time.
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I've always seen photography as a "skill" rather than an "art", unless you're specifically trying to make photography look like Art through photomanipulation and other methods.
ReplyDeleteLike all skills some people are good at it while others are quite ordinary. The only way to get better is to not only keep on shooting but also look at other people's works and learn from them.
I think it's both. There's skill in the technical parts—learning your gear, learning proper exposure, things like that.
ReplyDeleteHowever, you can master all of those skill thoroughly, and still take garbage shots. It's always seemed to me that there has to be some sort of soul behind the lens.
I have an English degree, and the overriding thing I always learned about poetry was that its main goal was to evoke—to evoke some mood, some feeling. Photography, in my mind, does the same thing, only with an image. That, I feel like, is what transforms it from skill to art.