The Art of Seeing

I just love it when people respond to one of my photographs with “Wow, you must have a nice camera”. That is exactly the message I am trying to convey.

OK, so maybe not. If the only reaction a photo evokes is “this guy spends a lot on equipment!” then I have failed pretty miserably in any form of artistic expression. And while I get enough positive reinforcement from my photos to keep me going, I still get asked about gear far more often than I get asked about technique or creative vision. I have been trying to figure out why.

People love to have the biggest and the best. We like cars that can go three times faster than we will ever drive them, and we like cameras that produce images that can be blown up to the size of a house. Twenty five megapixels you say? Great, I’ll take it. And I will admit it, I am a sucker for that sugar rush of having a new toy to play with, and salivate at the sight of a new canon L series lens.

But photography is a blend of science and art. With more emphasis on the importance of gear than the importance of seeing, the art of photography gets drowned in a sea of megapixels. We all want quick fixes and immediate results. We want to improve our photography NOW, and the best way to do that is to get an expensive camera and lenses longer than your right arm, right?

I’m not so sure. For over two years I used an entry level DSLR and shot jpegs. Post-processing was something you did to cheese and RAW meant uncooked meat. Why would I want a “fast” lens when most of my subjects weren’t moving? A professional-grade camera and expensive lenses would have been wasted on me. The simplicity of a basic camera and one lens forced my creativity. I really had to think about composition and light. Without post-processing I had to get everything right when I clicked the shutter. I tried to figure out what worked well and what didn’t (mainly by doing the latter) and spent a lot of time studying the kind of images I wanted to be taking. When I looked at a scene I would ask myself “how would I paint this?”. It forced me to think about what was really important in the composition – what was the strongest way of seeing, as Edward Weston put it. It challenged me to think about how I wanted to represent the scene or the subject rather than simply lifting my camera to eye level and recording it as if to say “I’ve been here”. I thought more about mood and emotion, about composition and quality of light.

As my eye developed I started to feel the limitations of the camera and lens I was using and my curiosity led me to invest in a wide angle lens. A new world of creative opportunities was opened. I captured the image above when the combination of scene, light and moment coincided and it was the first image I had taken that I felt really captured the mood of the moment. That lens was stuck on my camera for the next six months. I went a bit bonkers with it.

And then came my first portfolio review with National Geographic Natural History Photo Editor Kathy Moran: “you might want to go easy on the wide angle”. I realized my obsession with the wide angle had closed my mind to other, potentially more powerful, interpretations. This challenged me to find new and different perspectives that did not rely on the “wide angle effect”. I invested in a zoom lens and learned the power of isolating and compressing elements of the landscape for more abstract images. I learned the art of simplicity.

So, what’s my point again? I guess my point is that, while equipment is of course important, while we all succumb to the allure of the nice new camera with gazillion megapixels, the most powerful images are those that resonate emotionally – and for now, at least, that is not something the camera will do for you. It will tell you the “right” exposure for a scene, but it won’t tell you the creatively correct exposure for your interpretation of the scene. It won’t tell you what lenses are right for your creative vision. Enjoy the journey of creative discovery, hone your art through carefully crafted compositions, experimentation and happy accidents, beware of the wide angle traps and challenge yourself to see the world in different ways. And please don’t ask me what kind of camera I use.