My Creative Approach

How I Think About Photography

Where to Point Your Camera

We are all tempted (and encouraged) to think of photography in terms of “genre”.  But I believe photography is essentially opportunistic.  I think most (if not all) photographers start with a subject that calls to them…some serendipitous event or thing that grabs their attention.  It could be a beautiful bird, a play of light and shadow on a building, a fascinating stranger, or even a tragic event.   And once we shoot, we start a feedback loop of sorts.  If we like what we see, we do that more, and we get better at doing it so we like it even more.  So it goes that a photographer might pick a lane, or a “genre” of specialty.  And the community encourages this.  Conventional wisdom says that we should all be specialists in a certain genre, especially if we want to get paid for photography.  The idea is to go deep, not broad.  

I don’t follow this conventional wisdom.  Each genre teaches you critical skills which apply to other genres.  While it’s true that I have a particular passion for street photography, I’m not sure I would be much good at it if I didn’t shoot other stuff.  My experience in landscape and wildlife photography is what gave me the tools to really get meaningful images on city streets.  So I would never encourage anyone, especially at the beginner stage, to pick one genre.  

And speaking of ideas I do not agree with:  many people insist that a good photo must tell a story.  I don’t buy that.  A story requires a temporal element; a picture freezes time.  Images can be part of a larger narrative, but not every image contains a story.  To me, a photograph is not a container; it’s a window.  And what passes in the window either commands your attention, or not.  The job of the photographer is to ignite a spark of recognition by presenting a familiar thing, and simultaneously confound it with something entirely unexpected. This juxtaposition conveys a tension which can provoke a feeling in the viewer: humor, anger, wonder, shock, etc.  That emotional resonance is what photographer are trying to convey in their images.  A good image portrays the conventional in an unimagined way. A great image alters perception in a sense that echoes beyond its viewing.

How I look at editing photos

For me, everything is fair game when you are creating a photographic image for your own use.  I don’t make a fundamental distinction between making a photograph and making a painting.  Creators create, and what they create belongs to them.  So I don’t see any obligation to stay within implied boundaries of “realism”.  I have no compunction about editing, whether it is simply cropping and contrast adjustments or something more elaborate like doing composite work.  To me all that is perfectly fine.  But ethical considerations do creep in where photography becomes transactional.  If your image becomes a product, whether its a print for sale or a photojournalistic assignment, then you become accountable for your process.  In that situation, there is an ethical imperative to be transparent about how you get to that final image.  Failure to do that is unethical in my opinion.

All that said, my personal creative ethic, and most often my goal, is to faithfully represent what I saw when I took the photo.  However, what I see and what the camera records are almost never aligned.  That is counterintuitive to some people, who would argue that what the camera records is the most faithful representation of any scene.  But that is patently untrue and is a failure to understand how cameras and human visual systems work.  Without getting into the technical details, a camera sensor is not nearly as good as the human brain at interpreting a scene.  Everyone who takes photos has had the experience of seeing something beautiful, taking a picture, and being disappointed by the image.  This is not because you were wrong about how beautiful is was.  Its because your camera is not as good as your eyes and your brain at seeing the beauty.

So when I process photos, I am mostly trying to put back what the camera left out.  Sometimes I get there.  Sometimes I fall short and sometimes I go too far.  But the ethic is constant while the output remains a work in progress.