Every Picture Is a Compromise
Lessons from the Also-rans
Most photography websites show the photographer's very best work. Wonderful. But that's not the full story of a creative life. If we want to learn, we'd better pay attention to the images that aren't "greatest hits" and see what lessons they have to offer. Every picture is a compromise — the sum of its parts, optical, technical, visual, emotional, and even cosmic – well, maybe not cosmic, but sometimes spiritual. Success on all fronts is rare. It's ok to learn from those that are not our best.
This is a series about my also-rans, some of which I've been able to improve at bit (i.e., "best effort"), none of which I would consider my best. With each there are lessons worth sharing, so I will.
Previous image | Next image |
Original digital capture
It's What You Make Week
The theme this week revolves around the idea that it's not what you take, but what you make that counts. All the images this week are ones that required radical processing to pull something interesting out of a blah RAW capture.
What I saw that I liked:
This image was one that I used as you see it above in a small project titled, Gestures of a Primitive Mind. It's just a pattern drawn in the sand by beach grass blown by the wind. Looks like writing to me.
What I made:
As you may have read from my comments in the past, I have no hesitation to re-use an image in more than one project. The above version was converted into a fan-shaped image for an exhibition in China in which I combined my landscape photographs with Chinese poetry. Of all the images in that exhibition, this was the one I received the most comments about. The Chinese love calligraphy as an art form and the "writing" made by this plant looks closer to Chinese calligraphy than it does to western cursive writing. |
|
