troron wrote:sean_mcr wrote:Photography is not just about technique; It's about feeling, insight and intent. Drawing on inspiration is of course a good thing and poets and painters picked up pens and brushes because of how moved they were by what they'd seen and read. John Lennon wanted to become a musician because of Elvis, but he did not become Elvis he became John Lennon and a photographer should not become somebody else.
To the OP I’d ask this question. Do you think your teacher expected you to be still copying 40 years later?
Nothing makes photography more mechanical then when it becomes little more then a photocopier
Oh shame on you for thinking I am photocopier
Shame on me for being coy with my little story.
I am just getting back into photography after a laps of nearly forty years.
And yes I do copy technique. I see a new technique and go try to use it on something.. I "steal" the idea and create something with the new tool I have aquired... Ansel Adams dodging in the horse in the meadow.. I stole that technique and use it a lot with HDRi.
Everyone starts mimicking from birth. If you saw film history of the groups "The Quarrymen" or "Johnny and the Moondogs" you would see just exactly how mimicky Lennon was at first.
I feel John was talented enough to invent a new sound over time. However I highly doubt I will ever find the "missing chord" of photography.
Cheers
Troron
Well welcome back, it's been too long
So you hung up your camera after your class, the class where you were encouraged to replicate. I think there's a lesson there for sure
If you'd had been fortunate enough to have taken a class by Robert Adams, you would have been taught that you must know your mediums history in order not to repeat it.
What you would have been taught in Mike Johnson’s class
"The urge to make clichés stems from a desire to make pictures that look like everybody else's pictures. Why would anybody want to do this? Personally I think it's because it relieves us from having to rely only on our own judgment when evaluating what we've done. Photographers, far more than other kinds of artists, are perpetually insecure about whether what they've done is going to be accepted as good. I also think photographers like clichés because, at an early stage of our development, it's a way of demonstrating competence and accomplishment. You can tell you're in this stage because the phrases "that looks like a professional took it!" and "it looks like a postcard!" are construed as compliments, and make us swell up with pride. (Later, of course, those kinds of comments become insults.)"
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/colum ... 6-01.shtml
Maybe Lennon would have still been wearing his black motorcycle jacket and singing Elvis tracks at weddings had he hung up his guitar in the sixties. Thankfully he didn't (though he might have lived, a lifetime of Elvis covers would have been a fate worse then death for him) it's a shame you hung up your camera
Funny you should mention Adams
http://www.photoattorney.com/2005/03/mo ... -view.html
Keep shooting (this time)
Sean
What uses having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling? -
W. Eugene Smith