What’s Interesting? That is a good question, especially when we go out with our camera and start creating images. What is interesting depends on so many factors. We are passionate about certain things — travel, family, landscapes, composition, color, emotion — the list is endless. So how do we decide what we should shoot?
We could consider traveling to exotic locales to see the rare or the unusual… always seeking something to capture the imagination, to see the other. Or we might find ourselves at home, fascinated by the falling leaves and the pattern they make on the snow covered ground, seeing the other right in our backyard. In the studio, we could arrange the model or the product just so, creating a path for the eye to follow, making the subject stand out, be different, be the other. I keep using that term, “the other”, but what is it? Oftentimes, we walk around in a kind of haze — everything around us is common, the same, not the other. We are stuck in a rut of looking at the expected, and the expected becomes boring. We’ve been there, done that, so what’s the point of photographing it? *Sigh* I’m getting bored just writing this. I quite often find myself in a state of ennui, a feeling of listlessness, of dissatisfaction, what Buddhists might call Dukkha. I have a sense of unsatisfactoriness, where things are not quite right, and unfortunately, this leads to being disconnected with the moment I find myself in. Somehow I expect to go out and find that magic image, that thing that I can capture that makes the day worthwhile. When I don’t find it, I think my time is wasted, and that is one horrible feeling. We all do this at some point… we can’t find a challenge or a spark or a moment of insight, and we just stop, close down, become disappointed that nothing is going on. The reality is, everything is going on, 24 hours a day, all week, all year. We just don’t notice most of it. Our expectations get in the way of our seeing. There is a cloud in front of us, a fog of doubt or fear that makes us demand something interest us. When we go out to create an image, whether that is in the studio, on the street, or in the middle of the desert, something — anything — must pop up and amaze us with its photographic possibilities. The world doesn’t work that way. It isn’t there to pop up and astound us with its beauty, its rarity, its uniqueness. It’s up to us to see the world as it is — to see the beauty in a fallen leaf, to find the rarity in the eyes of a smiling child, to realize the world itself is one freakin’ unique place. I have been playing around with my iPhone recently… you might have noticed I now have a “Smartphone” folder with a few images in it. I was sitting in my back yard, night had fallen, and I could see the clouds moving swiftly in the sky. I thought, what the hell, and popped out the camera phone and started shooting. Needless to say, images were dark and difficult to see, but there was something there. At the time, I couldn’t tell what, but I was intrigued. The next day, I looked at those images, but was still unsure of what I was looking at. What the hell WAS I looking at? Dark images of clouds. Really? Was I just pretending that I shot something interesting? Was I just fooling myself, thinking that if I shot it, there must be something meaningful there? I couldn't tell what was going on or why I was playing with my damn phone. I had to get to a point where I was letting go of what I expected to see, let go of how I was supposed to create images... and that was one hard step. I remembered that you could modify images in the iPhone — lighten them, change colors to prearranged settings, crop and change angles. Well, I said to myself, these are ‘just’ iPhone images… they have no importance, so might as well alter them to my hearts content. Notice what happened there… I decided that if an image had no importance I could experiment and rip it to shreds and nothing would be lost. How wrong I was — not that something could be lost — but that the images had no importance. ALL images have importance… we just don’t see it and so disregard this importance, ignore the images, throw them away. But what I found was those simple editing settings enhanced what I knew was there instinctively… images that made a statement, communicated, were important. It didn’t matter that I was letting software make these edits… what techniques you end up using aren't the important bit. It’s the journey itself, the journey of discovery that makes life interesting. So “the other” isn’t a specific place or an important event, it isn't a masterful studio setup, a hard learned technique or purchased software driven automation… it’s the magic of realizing that each moment in time is different from another, and this difference is meaningful. Instead of trying to seek out and capture somewhere else, some other way, something totally different from what we are used to, instead of getting bogged down or depressed or stuck in the common events of our lives, we need to realize these events are unique to our perception, and the simplest things, a rose recently planted, the aisles in a grocery store, the dog just sitting there, are all important in their own way. If we start seeing the world as unique, each moment becomes unique, and that opens up the possibility of communicating that moment in our images in our own unique way.
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