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What is Photography?

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Well I had some thoughts after leaving the workshop and looking back on what i hoped to convey or maybe what I think photography truly is in terms of what is the most important elements. I thought it maybe interesting to number them in the order I think is important. Love to hear what others sit and think about on there journey in photography. To me and my style of thinking my top 5 most important that reflect in my works are.

1 Subject
2 Light
3 Design
4 Composition
5 Color or lack of to express it.

Number 5 took some thought
 

jlm

Workshop Member
there ought to be a category for "technical intent" to cover things like amount of DOF, sharpness or lack of, exposure intent, etc.. many photos shine from being straight, like the arizona series, many benefit from a less traditional method: Jim Collum's IR shots, for example
 
D

ddk

Guest
While I concur with the importance of all your points, I don't think that you can really come up with such a narrow definition Guy. Lets take your no. 1, Subject, I've seen fantastic photographs of the most mundane places and items; places and things that I have no interest in but the image sings. Then there's always content, what is or isn't included in the image can trump all the above. I'm sure that you, yourself have seen or shot images that defy and break all the rules and yet they work extremely well, but so many of those with perfect formulas fail because they're boring and predictable. No need to put limits on oneself, keep the list and your eye fluid and open...
 
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johnastovall

Deceased, but remembered fondly here...
Photography is an abstraction of the world. Screw technical intent, accident and design both sides of the same coin and equally spendable.
 

Georg Baumann

Subscriber Member
Great thread!

My take is this,

1=yep
2=yep
3+4=yeppers

5=yup on the colors or lack of it, and to me most important.... express what and to what audience?

I have this last one easy with my music. But with photography it is a much bigger challenge in deed, at the moment I intend to think that this shows in context of a variety of work from any given photographer.

The biggest success to me is when some one looks at my work and expresses a feeling that is similiar to what I felt when I decided to take this picture. Then I know, the attempt to communicate worked.

The exiting thing about it is that I learned this can happen with pictures where I would never thought this to be possible in the first place. My own lesson I took home from this is that I know everybody sees things through his own eyes, and while this sounds like stating the obvious, it made a difference to me, because I learned that some of my work is liked a lot, which I personally would consider for the shredder, and work that I spend a lot of effor on and thought to be really some of my best, is dismissed. :D

Here are four totally different examples of such. None of them I thought to be really good, neither in technical or other ways, in fact i dismissed them all, however, they were perceived by a variety of people from all age groups and different social backgrounds as desirable pictures.

This feedback from people, makes it all so interesting to me, regardless what they say about it, whether they like my work or not like it, their reactions are most welcome either way.
 

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
I think Guy's list covers most of it. I would add one vague category of something that might be loosely described as an "emotional response" factor. A quality that's less easy to describe than say sharpness or dynamic range or composition. When that factor is present in an image, there's a visceral response and the sense of a magic moment captured. To me, the really great images (and great photographers) seem to manage it effortlessly.

And while circumstances nudge the priority of each of the elements on Guy's list into a different position on the priority scale, the one that I find the most interesting most of the time is light. The quality and uniqueness of the light and an apparent success at both seeing it and then capturing it can often provoke that magical emotional response. They say that smell is the strongest trigger of memory. I think that a perception of light can act in a similar fashion, awakening personal and recognizable moments in everyone's memory.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Honestly I almost wanted to put light as number 1. It is what provokes us to actually see something unique or triggers the senses to actually shoot it. My theory and always has been without light we have nothing. BTW i personally put the technical stuff as after the decision to shoot something, more of the how and not the why.
 

ptomsu

Workshop Member
Tried hard to come up with different ideas, but finally I think Guy's list is pretty much it. Also the order is perfectly correct :thumbs:

 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
I like it, and think it is relevant, though I might use slightly different set:

1) Light
2) Composition (To me this infers there is at least one subject you had to place somewhere strategically in the image, so IMO no need to separate "Subject" out to its own item.)
3) Form
4) Texture
5) Tone, meaning the color, contrast and saturation as a unified-whole.

???
 
M

meilicke

Guest
Thinking of the lists, and TRSmith's desire to have a sixth emotional element, makes me wonder which drives the other? Is it the combination of technical aspects such as light and composition that drives the emotion, or is it the ability of the photographer to capture emotionally engaging images, that happen to have certain technical characteristics?

It reminds me of food. Is it the constituents of the food that make it taste good and healthy? Or the way food is put together as a whole?

-Scott
 

johnastovall

Deceased, but remembered fondly here...
With out emotion, photography is just reproduction.

I also like Winogrande's defination, “Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.”
 

johnastovall

Deceased, but remembered fondly here...
Honestly I almost wanted to put light as number 1. It is what provokes us to actually see something unique or triggers the senses to actually shoot it. My theory and always has been without light we have nothing. BTW i personally put the technical stuff as after the decision to shoot something, more of the how and not the why.
Nice Guy, Light gives raise to the emotion we seek to impart. It is all about light both its presence and its absence.

The rest as my old set theory teacher used to say, "And the rest is just arthimatic."
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Yes, I should edit the above to include something like, "Photography is wrapping all of these elements inside a frame and presented in two dimensions, such that the captured content represents a brief moment in time that can be shared..."
 

jlm

Workshop Member
most of what has been said applies to straight photography by pretty much straight photographers, but that ain't all there is...
so how do you include IR photography, like Jim Collum's elegant work? or long night exposures showing star trails or other not obvious to the eye effects, like multiple exposures of moving objects, though intended by the photographer? How about Man-Ray? some of these effects are not really part of the moment in time but are probably part of the pre-visualized image
 
M

meilicke

Guest
Georg, I just love #3. They are all wonderful, but the way you distilled her look to just the essentials has nailed it for me. Light.
 

johnastovall

Deceased, but remembered fondly here...
Maybe we should just paraphase Herman Hupfeld's great lyric and say, "Some times a photograph is just a photograph." Come to think of Gertrude Stein might have said something like that also.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Actually, who really cares -- I mean it's all about the gear anyway, isn't it?


:D,
 
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