I sense a wonderful thing, these days, in photo land. I sense that people are finally reaching the realisation that maybe good art cannot be bought by simply tacking on fancier tools. I see more discussion about aspects of image quality beyond mere megapixels and ISO. Good.
One of the things I love about film is that it is resolution independent. It is colour space independent. Heck, if we are talking about negative film even the ISO is somewhat flexible. And a proper film camera leaves you only worrying about the things that matter: your focus and your exposure.
I was trying to express what I like about analogue-sourced images when my eyes settled on this photograph. It is of a quiet hidden bay of a wild lake in southern Washington state. It is dark, quiet, peaceful. I look at the photograph and I can feel the surroundings. A digital capture of the same scene might be more technically accurate but it would fail to "put" me in the scene in the same way. To me, film images speak directly to the heart. Good ones do. And this is where a lot of people misunderstand photography.
When I started out in photography I started out like, I think, almost everybody else. The initial impression is that a photograph should express some kind of literal objective truth. It is only as one gets more involved in what choices one makes to achieve an image that one slowly learns that there is no such thing. After you learn that image making is a never-ending sequence of active choices you start developing the skill and hopefully confidence to make these choices deliberately with a certain goal in mind. Make no mistake, everyone makes these choices. If you are not aware of that then you are making the choices randomly or abdicating them to automatic processes somewhere along the line. That doesn't make your images more honest, just more random and unfocussed.
And what is the point of all of this? You are creating an image. It has the same goal as any other work of art. It should make you feel something!
No comments:
Post a Comment