You use gear, understand exposure, practice composition, and control light so that you can express yourself. At least to me. Which is why my answer was expression , but this could devolve into some kind of circular argument real quick. There is no right answer, and we can all learn something by how others see things. Photography is about gear. Photography is about exposure and composition. Photography is about light and post-processing. But in the very end, why do we care about any of that?
What is photography all about to you? Big shout out to Jeff for making me think about this. Listen to the ful l episode here. For me, Photography is the way to capture everything! I thought about this a lot while listening to the podcast, listening to downloaded version while on an excursion in Death Valley. Light and composition take us beyond good, becoming qualitative and personal.
It's sort of an apex-down triangle, and your triangle supports your 'expression'. I heartily agree. But my answer was 'experience'. Not defined as 'I've been a photog for 20 years" but experience of the things that lead to and follow capture.
It's probably about the same thing as 'expression' heck, both words start with 'exp'! Abstract or minimalist images might come from your emotional experience. Documentary and portraits try to 'express' there it is! This was a photo from a memorable moment: I saw a rare falcon!
You can head out with the family to the beach or on a picnic, shoot a local sports games , randomly roam your city streets photographing strangers , stalk wildlife , hike up a mountain for a stunning view, or stand under the stars at 2 AM and watch the Milky Way slowly move across the heavens.
In other words: Photography offers many opportunities to do new, interesting, and fun things with your camera — things you may not have done otherwise. Plus, all sorts of things become interesting when they can provide you with material for photographic adventures.
Hanging out with the zombies at a Zombie Run event. Research shows that learning a new skill helps the brain and improves memory. And the more difficult the skill, the more you benefit. Given that photography has so many elements — the science of light, the technology of the camera, the creative artistic side — there is a lot to learn. Getting out of the house, walking, and even hiking are common side effects of interest in photography.
Do you like landscape photography? Do you want to photograph people? Of course, not all forms of photography require strenuous exercise. Make sense? Carrying a camera on a strap around your neck plus a backpack on your back for a long time can be quite painful. Fortunately, there are many lightweight cameras available, not to mention excellent camera-carrying devices, compact tripods, and other burden-easing equipment. She says that creativity is good for us as individuals, and that the feeling you get when you finally capture an awesome sunrise photo, the feeling you get when you finally capture the image , is a wonderful thing.
But being creative is something we rarely do as adults. Enter photography, which is hugely creative and allows for endless flexibility in shooting and artistic style. That style can grow as you learn more and start to experiment with different genres.
Bottom line: Creativity is fun, and it provides a necessary counterbalance for the stressful demands of a modern lifestyle. After the last frame, we all just beamed at each other. It was so thrilling.
I believe in light. Photography is light. I have been most honored to support and publish work by many of them. I intend to continue nurturing, encouraging, supporting, cajoling, helping, counseling, appreciating, celebrating, and paying for professional photojournalism for as long as I am able. I believe in its power. I have been there, as a young photographer, and I understand that passion and drive — and now, as my career has taken me through so many levels and roles in our industry, I feel compelled to support and nurture those storytellers, to help them continue to produce important work and tell those stories, often uncomfortable ones, so that we can, sitting in the comfort of our homes, be made aware of the darker side of our world.
This art, this madness, this compulsion to convey a story we know as photojournalism will not die, storytelling will not die, it will change and evolve but it is human nature to want to learn, to be educated and to understand our world through narratives. I first became interested in photojournalism primarily out of an interest in history.
One day, while studying the Industrial Revolution, I found myself very saddened by a photograph of a child in a factory. I remember realizing in that moment that both the child and photographer were likely no longer alive and I became fascinated by how the photograph could make me so upset for the hard life of someone who lived so many decades before me.
In a way both of them became almost immortal through the photograph and there was something very compelling about that. A photograph is particularly powerful because it is accessible to most of humanity. There is no language barrier in photography. I pick stories and pursue the projects I do with the goal of documenting not only important issues of our time, but ones that will also be relevant or perhaps even more vital for our understanding of humanity in the future.
Twenty years ago, I took a formative road trip across the Southwestern states with my sister and my best friend. She was studying literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and he was a film school graduate who was just beginning to take his experiments with a still camera more seriously.
We planned to cross the San Juan Skyway, then head West to Canyonlands and Monument Valley, looping through New Mexico and back across the Colorado border, but we ended up taking the circuitous route. I would stand next to my friend, and see what he saw. We came to see the world differently; not through some new point of view, but by giving in to our heightened sense of curiosity. Two decades later, this is still the Holy Grail.
The photographers I most admire go out into the world with a sense of wonder and freedom and, yes, arrogance, challenging our apathy, making us see it afresh, for better or worse.
Today, I am as willing and eager as ever to wade through the endless repeated themes and subjects to find those rare works that provoke, challenge and thrill me through their brave and insightful perspectives, or their sheer visual sublime.
When I left Yemen in August , the place where I learned to photograph, build a story, and really love a community, I felt very lost. For over a year I tried to seek out a new base, a new story and group of people that had meaning to me, for something I felt connected to, without success. By November I was asking myself that very question — why am I still trying to do this?
I arrived in Iraq in November , looking for stories having nothing to do with Mosul, yet I felt with so many other journalists around, I needed to find meaning elsewhere. Living with this tight knit group, I began photographing our surroundings, the Iraqi medics whose job was so morbid, but who were so jovial in our downtime. By working side by side with them and photographing what we went through together, I was useful, needed, and passionate about something again: I felt the desire to photograph for the first time in over a year.
A favorite childhood memory is of my father driving us to a hobby store, purchasing a few packs of trading cards and me excitedly ripping them open to see what was inside. That same rush is what propels my belief in picture editing. In a time when our global awareness is under siege by an increasingly insular perspective, the responsibility of empowering photographers whose mission is to not just capture but to investigate, to enlighten, to excite, is one of the great privileges of our time.
Today there are more photographers producing more photographs and populating more platforms than have existed at any other point in our history.
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