{"id":1198,"date":"2009-07-15T12:50:13","date_gmt":"2009-07-15T04:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/poagao.org\/2009\/some-things-got-to-go\/"},"modified":"2009-07-15T13:30:34","modified_gmt":"2009-07-15T05:30:34","slug":"some-things-got-to-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/poagao.org\/2009\/some-things-got-to-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Some things got to go"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that I’ve finally got all of the pictures up from Paris<\/a> and Spain<\/a>, I feel I’ve come to somewhat of a crossroads in photography. The basic problem is that I take too many pictures to put up, and I can’t continue being so haphazard about posting them. For one thing, I simply don’t have the time to devote to it.<\/p>\n

So raise your standards! You say. Well, duh. But which standards? Some of my shots are technically proficient but lack emotion, and vice-versa, all to varying degrees. Many shots I love are ignored by others, while people rave and gush over shots I don’t particularly care for.<\/p>\n

I’ve also become a bit of a pack rat with pictures and struggle to be more objective in judging my own shots. It’s frighteningly easy to judge and criticize other people’s work, but it’s just as difficult to really describe just what it is that we like or dislike about works in such a subjective, emotional medium. Just look at the online critique groups, where people seem to think that a keyboard makes them an expert. Anyone can rub their chin in a knowing fashion and say, “It just doesn’t do it for me,” or “I don’t like the tilt\/angle\/composition\/bicycle\/figure.” Which of course is utterly useless. But we always see more in our own photos; we remember how we felt when we took it; we see in our mind’s eye what we were going for. And of course we want to believe that our vision is somehow more special than that of other people, simply because it’s ours.<\/p>\n

Photography encompasses so much that finding advice on this particular subject isn’t as easy as you might think. A lot of the advice seems to be about choosing the best shot out of 67 exposures of the same thing, but I don’t use the “shotgun” method of some photographers who take dozens of the same shot in the hope that one will be good; I choose my shots, maybe taking two or three at the same scene from different angles. At the risk of sounding like a snob (which has never stopped me before), I don’t particularly relate to stock photographers, wedding photographers, concert photographers, people who take photos to sell to businesses and corporations, or even photojournalists, though the latter group comes closer than any other to my ideal. I used to think street was Da Shit, but the vast majority of “street photography” I’ve come across is boring, repetitive tripe, the result of retired dentists or bored executives hearing about Henri Cartier-bresson, blowing what to anyone else would be a small fortune on a Leica M8, and then standing on a street corner taking shots of every single person that passes by, and then posting it all on Flickr or Smugmug, hoping to get famous.<\/p>\n

As with other pursuits, once you’re famous, you can almost do no wrong. Mediocre shots by a famous photographer somehow have more “meaning” than the same shot by an unknown. Which makes me glad that I’m not famous; otherwise I’d never get any honest input and I would never improve. Perhaps that is why Gary Winogrand shot so many thousands of photos in his later years; people had convinced him that he could not take a bad shot. Cartier-bresson gave up photographer later on, pursuing painting instead, and declining most interviews and photographs of himself throughout his career. I’ve come across so many glowing reviews of photographers online and in bookstores, only to find that their work left me cold, that I’ve begun to wonder just what the hell I’m aiming at. These people got books published? Entire threads devoted to praise? Has the world completely surrendered to the mediocre, exclamation-point-ridden saccharine gloss that is the current state of Flickr’s once-great Explore?<\/p>\n

I suppose that it’s really up to me to determine just what it is that I’m going for, what it is that I like in my own photography, beyond such vague concepts as “emotion” and “composition.” Rule of thirds, balance, vanishing points…yeah, I know, I learned how to follow and break those rules, but to me, they’re like the four tones of Mandarin Chinese; more of a rough guide to pronunciation than hard and fast rules. As my friend Brian Q. Webb<\/a>, one of the best street photographers in Taiwan today, says: “Photography is jazz for the eye.” Emotion expressed via technique, spaces between notes. Perhaps if I am just a little more discriminating, a little harder on myself and my works, I’ll be able to navigate my way through all of my own duds and find just where the path lies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that I’ve finally got all of the pictures up from Paris and Spain, I feel I’ve come to somewhat of a crossroads in photography. The basic problem is that I take too many pictures to put up, and I can’t continue being so haphazard about posting them. For one thing, I simply don’t have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/poagao.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/poagao.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/poagao.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poagao.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poagao.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/poagao.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/poagao.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poagao.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poagao.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}