Do you often go out shooting on your own for the pure pleasure of creating impressionable photographs for you and others to enjoy? If the answer is not only yes, but hell yes, then “read on McDuff “.
If you go out very early one morning, you see a field of sunflowers and you decide to photograph them. Do you take a photo just because they pretty to see and they make you smile? Of course that alone is a good enough reason, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
Let me backtrack and say that among some of the photographers whose work I often look at is a photographer named Minor White. who once said, “One does not photograph something simply for ‘what it is’, but ‘for what else it is.”
Over the years I have thought about that and have used the expression in various forms in my own teachings both in my online classes with the BPSOP, and in my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops I conduct all around our (very round) planet.
Suppose you have taken your kids to Sesame Park in Dallas, and you see several yellow umbrellas set up for parents to hide under from the sun. Is it the umbrellas that interest you, or is it because you also see very big yellow triangles creating depth from overlapping each other? 
How about the triangles created by the shadows in between the ridges of yellow? Or just the shadows themselves? Or even to go as far as the red, blue, and yellow colors that incidentally are the three primary (pigment) colors; not counting the red, blue, and green colors that make up primary light?
So you’re traveling and stop in a plaza in Sicily for some famous Gelato and you spot a toddler walking away from his bike. Do you try to photograph the kid or the bike? If it were me, I would take a photo of the patterns surrounding the bike that create all those fabulous diamonds and squares; and the shadows of the bike caused by the backlight.
OK, so getting back to the sunflowers, You see a sunflower, but what else is it? It’s a flower that has petals glowing from the sun directly behind it that creates a pattern of color. It has beautiful texture that just happens to be one of the elements of visual design.
And so my fellow photographers, when you’re out ‘making’ your works of art, remember that the left side of your brain, the analytical side, sees an umbrella, a bike, and a sunflower. The right side of your brain, the creative side, sees everything else.
Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com, and check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.
JoeB
