Tag: Emporia

Do You Take A Photo or Make A Photo?

A rooster asserts himself.

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
- Ansel Adams

 

Just a quick note from Dan.
Ansel Adams was, no doubt, a great photographer.
What a lot of people don't know is he was also a wizard in the darkroom.
He sometimes took his work and manipulated it.

Using masks and varying exposures on images he accentuated features
seeking to evoke emotion in the viewer. He sometimes even combined
two or more negatives to create an entirely new photo.

So, he truly did make photographs in a very real way.

Momento Mori

Sunset through the Squirrel feeder.

All photographs are memento mori.
To take a photograph is to participate in another
person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.
Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it,
all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt
- Susan Sontag

Snap Decisions and Snap Shots

Taking a walk after an ice storm.

A photojournalist makes snap decisions; based on the ability
to quickly assess situations and record one’s perceived truth.
- Jack Dykinga

This applies not just to photojournalists, but to all photographers in general.
There's a reason they're called snapshots.

Trust and Rapport

Just Grab and Go. A Kansas Blue Jay catching a snack.

All the planning, intuition, technical prowess, and knowledge,
as well as the trust and rapport you have (or haven’t) established,
will show up in the picture, frozen forever.
- Gregory Heisler

This is something that many photographers, including myself, sometimes forget. It can really hurt a potentially great photo shoot.

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