Today the temperature rose above 0 °C, and the snow started to melt into water... Drip, drip, drip. But it was also a day full of snowmen and other such things the children made. (Ok, also the adults, I at least.) Here are a few photos of such found (and made) things. It is very difficult to get snow show up properly in photographs, but I'm slowly getting some practise in it, using iPhoto, Photoshop and Lightzone, sometimes all three programs.
Update: I finished reading through the photography book by Martti Lintunen ("Baabelin kuvat", images of Babel). It was a short one, and perhaps would have merited a more thoughtful reading, but somehow I felt the material a bit too familiar, except for a couple of deep and excellent points about photography, how it is used in society.
Now I'm reading the book "On being a photographer", which is a discussion between two photographers, David Hurn and Bill Jay. Perhaps there is a bit too much of mutual commendation, but mostly the book contains deep thoughts about what it means to be a photographer, not just to look like one.
The importance of subject matter is discussed in a unique manner: how restricting your attention can make you grow as a photographer, even though you might think the opposite. If you don't emphasize the subject, you end up in navel-gazing. Going this direction you find photographers who develop a "style", differentiating themselves this way, without a subject their care deeply about. But in this kind of photographs you find only emptiness. Great, deep thoughts, but perhaps too lofty for an amateur. But then you can look up what amateur actually means - "lover of".
Update 2: I ran into a posting on style on Andreas' blog, it provides good links and another viewpoint to the topic of subject-oriented or style-oriented photography. (This was posting number 419, I have a quite long way to go in reading them all...)
I must say that I'm not too keen on developing a style, but I'm not also really committed to "subject-oriented" photography. I'm shooting what appears in front of me. Is that a bad thing? Perhaps, at least it is not so deep as when you start to develop your photography around a specific subject, learning it, knowing all the time more about it.
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4 comments:
Just a suggestion: Concerning photographing snow, when white is dominant in the picture like the ones above, try to overexpose about 1 stop in order to get it white in the final image, eitherwise it will be dull gray...
@voluptious: I was using +2/3 EV compensation, but it was a dull, dull day. I explored a few different versions, some with very bright snow, but that was not how it was like.
Hehe, pretty interesting to re-read what I've written more than a year ago :)
Well, basically I still see it that way. The style you have lives, the style that the market means is for the dead. That's also well reflected in the prices. Art gets expensive when the artist is dead. There are some exemptions from the rule, but by and large it is true.
For me style is something that you as an artist can completely ignore. It happens, but it has no significance for your work. It is the exterior look of the creative process. The process counts, not how it looks to by-standers.
It was also interesting to read what I wrote almost a month ago... As I commented a bit later, I was finally much disappointed with the book "On Being a Photographer".
However, the book "The Life of a Photograph" by Sam Abell was revelatory, telling (and mostly showing) of how to "make" photographs instead of "taking" them. And I'm not sure if you could say Abell has a style - but he does have a way of combining rough reality with beauty, human beings with landscape, snapshot aesthetics with well-developed documentary thinking. In this light, the discussion in the book "On Being a Photographer" seems almost trivial.
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