I've gotten so fearful of pressing the shutter - partly because I'm holding a 'real' camera and partly because anything and everything I might do seems to have been done, bigger, better, more intensely by somebody else. So today I've stopped reading and thinking about pictures and actually taken some. I can't get into my chosen project till tomorrow (my first 'booked' session is in the morning ahead of our weekly MA session at DMU) so I started photographing my two younger children - actually young men of 18 and 20 respectively. I took a lot of pictures, played with the camera settings, realised I need my flash gun (hopefully coming tomorrow!) and generally just shot a lot. This one is one of the few that I genuinely like - it seems to sum up the vulnerability, vacancy and intensity of the younger one and I kinda like the fuzzy remnant of the other one moving out of shot. I'm much taken with Alex Soth's work as he seems able to get something of the immediacy of a portrait like this using a large format camera. I still feel the only way I'll get something worthwhile in portraiture is to keep pushing the number of shots upwards and then heavily editing down.
1 comment:
Don't be shy of pressing that shutter. The main advantage of digital over film is that the freedom it gives you. Freedom from worry of not getting the photograph you are after. And freedom from worrying about the cost of all the film you are shooting. So if you capture 1000 images and only use 1. The rest can be deleted at not cost. (I know there are capital costs but once these are paid the costs are marginal). The final freedom you get is the freedom to capture the unexpected. This freedom is perhaps the most rewarding and at times creative.
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