Thinking Like A Photographer
Or at least, trying to
All my career, I’ve never paid much attention to the title “photographer,” perhaps much to my own detriment. I can’t name a single one of the greats, I can’t identify any legendary images or photographic styles. I couldn’t tell you a thing about composition or editing. Yet, I carried on, somehow fumbling my way through life. To this extent, I do hold a weird sense of pride about it - my lack of knowledge, that is. I’ve never officially learned what “a stop” is, or what “ISO” actually does.
I learned like how I learn most things - through brute force. I would sit there, turning every dial, pushing every button, and moving every slider one by one on all my cameras and editing programs, and just seeing what happens. The main reason for this is simple; I just really don’t care about photography at all, if I’m being honest. Despite it being something I’m somewhat interested in, I still never got over my hatred for academia and can’t get myself to sit down to watch a video or read a manual without significant struggle.
But therein lies the issue - my goals are to promote the beauty of this planet, to inspire others in caring about conservation and all that good stuff, and the best way I know how to do that is through sharing my images. To maintain my overarching goals while paying my bills and further funding my work, I’m going to need to get over myself a little.
Because to me, when I started to really think about what purpose a photograph serves, and where I (the photographer) stand in the equation, I came to this conclusion:
it’s not about me at all, it’s about what I’m taking a picture of.
It’s about the stories, the emotions, the feelings, the beauty of the subject in front of me that I’m attempting to convey - not my level of proficiency as a photographer. But obviously, in order to have people connect with my images, I still, on some level, need to be good at taking them. And to do that, a base level of knowledge of some kind is required, so it would just be silly of me to ignore the advantages.
It would be like continuing to use a screwdriver when you’re surrounded by power drills and you’re got a thousand more screws to go - it just makes no sense in any stretch of the imagination.
When I used to simply just fling shit at the wall, I’d conflate “staying true to my artistic sense” with “producing good work.” In reality, none of the above were remotely mutually exclusive to begin with and I was just creating false walls to make excuses for my own lack of progress. So - if the photograph serves to tell the story of a subject, the job of a photographer is to bring that vision to life. Meaning I’d need to start actually caring about photography.
At some point, I determined how that vision is brought to life is inconsequential - provided I wasn’t infringing on any laws or ethical quandaries, what did it matter how the photo was made? So all pride was abandoned and I started popping open some manuals and really learning what was going on behind all the buttons and dials. I did do a semester at the University of YouTube for a bit, but just found myself more in my element when reading through the physical manuals.
I think it’s a leftover trait from the yesterdays of video games. Like when I got stuck at the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. I didn’t have some video I could turn to, I’d lost the box that contained the manual, no stores nearby sold the gaming magazines that may have contained the manuals. We had internet, yes, but I wasn’t allowed to use it and even when I did sneak onto it, I had no idea where to go to find this information. I just had to try a different button press, different direction, different and see what happened. Probably why I didn’t mind the brute force methods much at all. I’d sat through much worse playing random old bootleg video games on those ancient consoles.
I’m not really sure what triggered the change, I think. I feel like it was out of an honest attempt to evaluate my work. I’d gotten to a point of frustration where I had to accept that alright, “I’m not getting any sales, any engagement, or traction with my work. Clearly I’m doing something wrong - what is it?” It’s the cold hard truths that none of us want to accept, when you’ve hit that first peak in the Dunning-Kruger graph and realise just how far you’ve got left to go.
How did you use to approach photography? Has this approach changed? What triggered that change?
Thanks for reading, hope you all have a great weekend!