LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process Brooks Jensen

Photography may not be the best medium for philosophy, but that doesn't mean that photography isn't guided, shaped, informed, influenced by a philosophical background. Said another way, art is the marriage between images and ideas. It's easy to see that photography without an image is not art. It's much more difficult to realize that photography without an idea is not art.

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is for most unknown photographers to get published? In one of those dirty little secrets of the publishing industry, most magazines choose to publish the photographs of famous photographers because they want to ride the coattails of the famous individual. Needless to say, here at LensWork we've chosen a different path and try to bring to light the best work we can based on its merit.

Having been a participant in workshops for 50 years (both as a student and as an instructor), I come to recognize that there are two types of instruction that are most prevalent. There are instructors who teach how to make images like they make. Then there are instructors who help you make the images that you want to make.

The technical questions of how to make a photograph dominate almost every YouTube channel, book on photography, workshop content, and much of our creative time. It has always seemed to me that the far more important question is not how, but rather why. Why do you want to make this photograph? Why do you want to share this photograph? Why do you choose to process this way rather than all the other possibilities? The art-life is asking why; our craft-life is asking how.

For technical reasons I don't understand, aggressive processing in blue skies tends to create a blotchy appearance that is very unpleasant. This is true whether the image is color or black and white. I assumed the solution would be found in bit-depth, the Clarity tool, or possibly the new Lens Blur tool. Nope. So far, the solution escapes me.

Looking back, I wasted so much of my photographic youth by studiously avoiding going to the obvious and iconic landscape locations. If someone famous had photographed there, I reasoned that they'd "already done it" so there was no reason for me to go there to photograph the same things.