LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process Brooks Jensen

In my school days, I always detested test questions that began, "Compare and Contrast." With photography, however, I find that is one of the most powerful ways to make a diptych. In fact, diptychs are an ideal way to compare and contrast.

Can you think of an experience in your life where you did something for the very first time and did it flawlessly? Yet we go photographing in new locations and assume that our first time will produce brilliant images. Why do we think that's true for art making when we know it isn't true for anything else in our life?

I'd like to address today's comments to those of you who have been doing photography for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. An interesting exercise is to go back and look at your first completed project with the intention of redoing that project today. How would you approach the subject differently based on the fact that you are now an older more mature photographer?

Occasionally a breakthrough in technology opens the door to create a vision that had previously been impossible or at least very difficult. The new AI noise reduction available in Lightroom is a good example. The other day was a full moon and I found that sufficient illumination to make some interesting landscape images illuminated only via moonlight.

There is a definite set of today's photographers who are eschewing the digital workflow in exchange for a more analog process and aesthetic. Nowhere is this more prevalent that in discussions of sharpness. How much sharpness it too much sharpness?

Ours is one of the first generations in all of history to have the ability to so easily record our life. But what should we record? What's worthy of preserving? Which is more important, Who-Where-When, or Stories-Thoughts, and what they Did?