Creative Camerawork

“I almost never meet anyone who discusses photography. Instead, people discuss camera profiles, Photoshop plugins and HDR regression algorithms, but no hobbyists seem to realize that the only thing that matters is what you see and do before you click the shutter.
The more you’re thinking about gear, the less you can think about the picture.

The less equipment I take, the better pictures I make.

The fewer lenses I bring, the better pictures I bring back.

The less crap I haul with me, the more good pictures I haul back at the end of the trip.”

2009/12/31
Categories: Words of Wisdom . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

“The nature of something like painting is that you’re continually being informed by what you do. The nature of photography is that you’re not. You’re being informed picture to picture what you do. If you’re printing one negative you’re being informed print to print about what you do. But it’s completely different than the painter who puts a piece of the picture down and the piece indicates what the next move should be.”

2009/12/15
Categories: Words of Wisdom . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

“I don’t know why I chose forks –

I just took my camera to the kitchen sink… Actually, I have a notion that everything can be pictured, that content is not that relevant.

“I think it’s lovely that a knife can be pink.

Its shape can be molded by light, the silver surface reflects and picks up bits of color –

it’s all very liquid. And the kind of information that is possible in a small space, like that created by the borders of these pictures, can be so crystal clear and appropriate – the issue is really about pushing some thing, some form, into a space that it seems to belong in. In the real world,

these forks and kitchen implements can have many associations and functions;

in the photographs, it doesn’t matter.

Formalism is everything.”

2009/09/15
Categories: Words of Wisdom . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

“A picture is what it is and I’ve never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn’t make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they’re right there, whatever they are.”

Everything is relative, n’est pas?

2009/08/26
Categories: Words of Wisdom . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

G. Spencer-Brown, author of “Laws of Form,” says he is “a mathematician, consulting engineer, psychologist, educational consultant and practitioner, consulting psychotherapist, author, and poet.” Recreations include shooting, tennis, cricket, soccer, chess, piloting anything that will fly, exploring, photography, maps and map-making, listening to Mozart, cooking in commercial breaks, composing and performing songs and ballads, constructing ingenious machines that actually work, and inventing astonishing games that can actually be played.

But here’s why Mr. Brown matters, for our purposes: in “Laws of Form,” a book of mathematics and philosophy which has never gone out of print, Brown includes this afterword:

“Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. –Unfortunately we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one’s ignorance.

“To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of his great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in a measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in respect of their revelation.

“In the face of strong, and indeed violent, social pressures against it, few people have been prepared to take this simple and satisfying course towards sanity. And in a society where a prominent psychiatrist can advertise that, given the chance, he would have treated Newton to electric shock therapy, who can blame any person for being afraid to do so?

“To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are being continually thrust upon them.

“In these circumstances, the discoveries that any person is able to undertake represent the places where, in the face of induced psychosis, he has, by his own faltering and unaided efforts, returned to sanity. Painfully, and even dangerously, maybe. But nonetheless returned, however furtively.”

2009/08/24
Categories: Words of Wisdom . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment