Seeing

Before you can shoot anything you have to be able to see it. Sounds obvious doesn’t it but seeing is a lot harder than it sounds.

It’s a gift if you can “see” things which would make for good photographic images. Very few people, including many amateur and professional photographers, can’t see all that well.

You can prove this yourself by viewing any of the popular Face Book or Instagram photographic sites and paying attention to the photography. Often it’s very good photography and often shot by very good photographers but if you look at these sites long enough lot of the images may well look very much the same.

In other words the photographer maybe a good craftsperson but they’re not necessarily a good photographic artist.

It’s hard to make clear the difference but here’s my personal experience. I’ve loved shooting photos since my childhood when I started with a Kodak Brownie. This means I’ve been shooting for almost 70 years.

During those years I shot for daily and weekly newspaper. I shot a ton of special event photography and ended up shooting and editing national magazines. I can’t even estimate how many images I’ve shot over the years but it’s got to be somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 images shot.

For my publishers I was a very dependable photographer. If you sent me out on assignment I always came back with publishable images. But as a photojournalist the “news” or the “action” always came to me. I just showed up with a camera and took some images and my publications printed them. It was pretty simple photography and I’ll admit it was rarely artistic.

Why wasn’t it artistic? For the most part because it didn’t need to be artistic but it did need to be taken and published. There was very little of this “seeing” thing that was necessary and for a lot of shooting pros this is just a fact of their professional lives.

But what if, as we talked about in our last post, you want to become a photographic artist and shoot images that are more meaningful and well artistic?

What I find now that I am no longer shooting professionally is for me to coach my artist to come out and play I need to take my time. Where as a pro I could be shooting as many as half a dozen different events in a day now I find I need to slow down….way down to shoot just one.

When we go out on our Toronto street walks I may not shoot anything for the first hour or more. I keep my camera ready but I need time to start seeing the images that exist all around me.

Athletes call it being in the zone. The same applies to photography. You need to quiet your inner critic and let your artist come out and play. Do this and I think you’ll be amazed at the results.