Challenges Bring Changes

Now how is that for a cliche. I must say, however, if it had not been for my sleep dysfunctions, I would not have gotten so deeply into film and begun to teach film classes. Many evenings I had to lay down and rest, and I could watch a lot of the great movies as I rested.

The same with digital photography. I've never been a person who could sit still for more than fifteen minutes. But with sleep dysfunctions, well, I'm down resting. My head may be too foggy for high mathematics, but I can play with images and color from my photos on the computer.

My daughter gave me a rating of C- on my last batch of photos I was proud of. They were, of course, about 3 out of 150 I had taken. "I'm tired of seeing all the bright colors," she said.  I had been thinking the same thing.

I believe half the reason I work the images up in bright colors is that they look good in thumbnails for potential customers to purchase on the internet.  I'm going for darker images now, and then I'll be doing more pastels.

I am still drawn (not always) to the idea that a picture is a flat surface, and we should treat it as a flat surface and not play games and try to imply depth.  But that's just an aesthetic idea, useful to me for a period of time. I'm already starting to move beyond it.

abstract to representational and back

   Abstracts sometimes look like the designs on shopping bags of fancy department stores.  Shopping bags stole from abstract art.

Trying to Use Special Effects to make it Good, like the movies

No special effects can make up for a movie with a bad script, probably, so neither can I create a good photograph through special effects without a worthy subject, but it's a stage one has to pass through. I can try.

Rainy and Cloudy? No photographs?

You certainly can't get the long shadows and lit up areas as you can when the sun is around, but cloud cover acts as a diffuser of light that can make possible a different kinds of pictures.

The Extremist of Color

Where else, in our society, can one be an extemist without causing harm to others, and then actually bring the gift of beauty to people. Maybe art. Only art.

Reality the Raw Material

    I am reminded how musicians or dancers might hear a certain rhythm--rain off a roof, a horse carriage passing, a machine in a factory--and then will pick up on that rhythm and from that beginning develop music or a dance.
    So a photographer might pick up on something from the phenomenal world, but then just run with it.

    These are the ramblings of a person who has read no literature on the history of aestehtics for photography.

The Detective of Beauty

  By putting a frame around something, you are setting that thing off and calling special attention to it. Poems are framed by white space.

  By lifting something out of the noise of its daily context, you may be able to say to someone else, hey, this is kinda cool, kinda  beautiful.

    There's a lot of beauty out there that hasn't been noticed, that hasn't even been found yet. The photographer is the detective of beauty.

    The more we learn to see, to recognize the beauty that is out there, the stronger we get, the better we can deal with the ugliness.  Maybe by an act of mental magic we can transform that ugliness into the beautiful.  We learn that what we thought was ugly was never ugly at all. That beauty had a certain edge to it, a sharpness. Perhaps that beauty touched something inside us we were afraid of, so we called it ugly.

    I could be more specific and less general, but I don't wish to chase you away.

    It's not cleanliness that is next to Godliness.  It is beauty that is next to Godliness.

    So indulge your own sense of beauty. Show it to us. Perhaps we too will learn to see the beauty there.