Waiting for breakfast early one morning in San Remo, Italy.
Before reading this post, for all of you that have taken my part I and II classes, the school is bringing back my Gestalt class for a month, starting the first week in May. Here’s the link: https://bpsop.com/courses-1/
When I critique one of my student’s photos in my online class with the BPSOP, and also in my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops I conduct around the planet, I’ll talk about what they saw versus what they would have like to have seen.
Most photographers that I see (close-up) in action walk up to something, some person, or someplace, and bring up their camera to their eye and “take’ a picture. In other words, they take a picture of what they see. What I want my online students that take my classes is to ‘make’ a picture not of what they see, but what they would like to see.
In the fifty years I’ve been shooting I have rarely seen what I want. I guess I’m just too impatient to wait around for something I want to shoot. What I’m getting at is that I shoot what I’d like to see.
In other words, If I see a group of chairs lined up against a wall and one or two of them are making the overall composition un-balanced, I have no problem going up to them and arranging them the way I’d like to photograph them.
Now, there are those out there that call themselves”purists”, and would never think about moving something. On the other hand, those same purists have no problem going back to their computers and adding a lot of post-processing, aka HDR for one.
I can’t think of anything as “un-pure” as taking three exposures and combining them into one photo..but that’s just me. In all these years I’ve never had to do that and my photos come out pretty damn good. Btw, I know people that do this.
If I see some ordinary items one would see while being served breakfast, I’ll fool around with them until I see something worthy of shooting as in the photo above. To me, that’s being an artist, and make no mistake my fellow photographers we are all artists that have chosen a camera as our medium of choice.
And so I leave you with this, a camera on a tripod is just the same as a blank canvas on an easel.
Visit my new website at www.joebaraban.com, and check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come paint with me sometime.
JoeB
