Camera's Eye

I got an email recently, reminding me about my old days when I took a lot of photos. I recently found a converter that make slides into digital photos and it made me want to go over some of the old slides that I took back in college and the ones that my father took when we were little. You tended to do slide photography in spurts. It was artsy. It also was a pain in the ass to set up the projector. I still remember what the hot little bulb in my father's projector smelled like.

My photographs have felt like more of a chore than a joy for a couple of months now. I like it when I'm really into it, and I use a blog called Animal Tales as a way to go back and make myself appreciate and connect with my own photography. Kind of like the old photo albums I used to make during college days and right after. My wife is trying to use this Publisher software she got for Christmas to make a book of our son's first year.

I remember what it was like to get into photography at first. I bought a camera when I first started making money, the summer I went to Army camp. I bought it in a little camera shop in Lawton Oklahoma, while I was down there for CTLT (Cadet Troop Leadership Training). Some of the first photos I took with it were the Wichita Mountains, which looked a lot like the big granite boulders in Elephant Rocks in the Missouri Ozarks.

We went out to Colorado after that, and I remember that I was willing to spend money on film and processing, so I took a lot of pictures. Part of that was wanting to get through a roll as fast as possible so I could see the pictures. I shot both black & white and color on that trip. I think I might have had an old Pentax K1000 camera that was my Dad's, or maybe I just switched back and forth with the one camera. I think people thought a lot more about what they were shooting when you took pictures with film. You spent a lot of time on composition, and you had complete control of the speed, etc. On the other hand, you take more risks with digital.

I had my first camera, a very nice Pentax ME Super stolen while I was in Panama and I didn't replace it. Partly, there was no access to good camera shops, and partly I was so pissed off at being in the military, and I was so disgusted with Panama and Panamanians, that I lost much of my love for taking pictures.

I'd have to say that I never really got back to that point. Having a bag full of camera equipment stolen has a freeing effect. You no longer have to lug around all the equipment. It's easier to pull a camera out of your pocket and shoot and then put it back.

I think the key to good photography is in the attitude of the photographer. If you have no stress and all the time in the world, it's easy to be a good photographer. If you are rushed, there doesn't seem to be time for it. You also have to be a noticer. You have to be aware of your surroundings in detail. You have to be able to crop with your mind, because no photograph captures what it felt like to be there. The eye of the camera limits your perspective. This might mean that the photograph is a fragment of what it was like to be there, but it can also mean that the camera pares off all the extraneous material and allows you to focus on something smaller and bring out all the details of some little microcosm that's right there next to you that you normally would not notice because it seemed insignificant.

This is an effect that I would get when I was riding my motorcycle. I could see every pebble on the road at 90 mph. The human brain can absorb a great deal of information, but mostly we are so distracted that we learn to ignore much of what we see.

The other thing that the camera does is that it freezes time. You don't experience life the way the camera shows it to you. In your life, the next thing happens to you, but there's no next thing in a picture, it's fixed in time. You can play with this in three ways. You can take more pictures after it to show a sequential series of events, you can play with the time - bulb photography - to put motion in the picture, or you can take pictures whose subject implies what's going to happen next. Sometimes freezing time is powerful. You can catch something being thrown or squirted, people right before they fall over, something that is moving fast is stopped, it's pretty cool. I like the way the National Geographic photographers will be in a forest looking at a small stream's waterfall and they will stretch the time out to a second and soften the flow of the water, that's always a cool effect.

I used to get National Geographic, Outside, and Photography and look to them for examples of the kinds of things you could do with photography.

I was recently sent a link for Flickr Hive Mind, which is a little like those magazines. I'm looking at the January 3, 2010 version, and I see several examples that would inspire me with their effects.

There's a cool landscape where ultra wide angle give the photo the effect you want, the photo looks tiny, but the subject within it is expansive. Those are the ones that really need to be blown up to be appreciated. I remember when I bought a good wide angle lens, it was 28mm or 23mm and it really expanded my ability to take landscapes and get up close to objects.

One of the pics has a bright backlight that causes a halo effect and silhouettes the rest of the photo. There's a soft focus photo, which evokes a mood for the photo in itself, and I remember learning about filters and hearing that you could get a clear one and smear it with vaseline all around the outside and leave a clear spot in the middle. I think I only did that a couple of times, but it's a really cool effect.

There's a picture of a girl who's almost pushing her hair back with a big handgun. She has a sad troubled look on her face, so it's easy to imagine what happens next. It looks like the moment before a suicide.

There's one where you get right down on the ground and it totally changes the perspective. I like that effect. Sometimes it's good to lower or raise your camera to get a different perspective. The adult human eye is almost always about 5' off the ground. If you raise that 3', your scope of vision expands surprisingly, if you lower it, you get the view of a pet or child. I like the fog and snow fog effects. It's also interesting sometimes to do things like chop someone's head off. You get the Rainman effect. The kinds of photos that a normal person would never take, but they force you to slow down and focus and look more carefully at the subject.

I like the effect of putting a mirror in the photo, there was one where I shot the rear view of a mirror looking out a window of a truck while I was going over a bridge over the Missouri River. You could see the waves on the surface of the river in the mirror, and it took me years to figure out that this was a reflection off the window.

One thing I've never been good at is staging photos. I like the redhead's hair stopped in motion, the man on the dock, woman lying in the snow covered road. I think you have to have a good relationship with the subject, and either have a subject with an ego that makes them want to be photographed, or someone that understands and appreciates what you are trying to achieve, with no ego or self consciousness about their looks.

While photography is powerful and interesting, it seems like there are too many distractions in today's life to fully appreciate the art. Then again, too many distractions and being rushed too much is also what stops you from taking good photographs in the first place. It's good to slow down and appreciate life.