I came into lynda.com training just to pass the time, with some small hope of a better understanding of digital processes. I wasn't expecting much of anything, and most certainly wasn't expecting to be inspired by what I found online. I was sure the most effective courses, if there were any, would be about the technical aspects of digital equipment or the digital manipulation of images.
But what I found was a mind full of preconceived ideas – ideas of what digital was and of how inferior it had to be to what I once loved. Photography for me was chemistry and film, taking up long hours in a darkroom processing light sensitive paper to get the images I sought. I could not conceive of a photographic image made outside of these parameters... of these constraints. I had to let go of my negative conceptions of the digital world, but I had spent so much time thinking photography was dead, that it had changed so much, that it just wasn't "real" photography anymore. This must have been how the first daguerreotypists felt as their techniques were being replaced by glass plate negatives... damn I'm old. But once I let go and just went with the flow, I found myself becoming interested, then intrigued, and then inspired by what I saw and what I was learning. The funny thing is, what was inspiring me most weren't the technical aspects at all. Now don't get me wrong... these lessons were invaluable. I saw what was possible digitally and I learned all about the new technology available to the modern photographer. My new camera, the Fujifilm X-T1 had f/stops on the lens and a shutter speed dial just like my old film cameras did. Adobe Lightroom manipulated a digital image much like filters and darkrooms allowed me to do long ago. But these lessons were the things you had to know to manipulate images in a digital world. They weren't photography per se. They were the tools used with photography, the stuff you needed to make images. What really inspired me was something far more fundamental and far more essential. It was the courses on the photographic experience, those photographic concepts I already knew about, but which had gone by the wayside after so many years without, that truly made me reevaluate, made me think, made me excited to see photography as I once did when I first started. The simple acknowledgement of what photography is, its composition, its view of the world, its most basic qualities, made me realize what I had lost and what I could gain again. Getting back to basics, to the core of what something is – this is what inspires us most. All the technical advances, all the tools and flashy equipment... these are just window dressing, a way to get us interested. But in the end, without the understanding of why we do what we do, it's just that... window dressing, with no real substance.
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