LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process Brooks Jensen

I have a printer with me on the road, but it's a bit of an undertaking to make prints here in the trailer. I don't do it all that often. I did yesterday, however, and made a considerable number of stupid mistakes simply because I'm so out of practice with the process. Frequent repetition is an important part the creative life.

Photographing at the famous Wawona Point overview of Yosemite Valley is not what it used to be.

My Uncle Lee once advised me to go to the overlook that was one of his favorite photographic spots. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I'd spend most of the day photographing in the alleyway behind his house.

Has photography become too easy? Or has the technology of photography become so easy that the challenge has shifted. Making a visually interesting, emotionally powerful, meaningful piece of artwork is as difficult as it has ever been. That's becoming more and more obvious as the challenges of the craft parts of photography evaporate with the ever more sophisticated technology.

Aging photographers are engaged in a race to used their cumulative wisdom and training before their body prevents them from accomplishing their goals. That lesson was one of the greatest ones I learned from Oliver Gagliani.

I like to think that composition is not a static way of geometrically arranging the objects in a picture, but rather arranging what's inside the frame so that the image makes a visual gesture. This brings a life to the photograph that static geometry cannot.