The GetDPI Photography Forum

Great to see you here. Join our insightful photographic forum today and start tapping into a huge wealth of photographic knowledge. Completing our simple registration process will allow you to gain access to exclusive content, add your own topics and posts, share your work and connect with other members through your own private inbox! And don’t forget to say hi!

The purposes of life

Jorgen Udvang

Subscriber Member
I'm past 60 now, so I tend not to take things as seriously as I used to. Still, I'm more focused on the purposes of life, my purposes of my life, than ever. Since I travel a lot, too much according too my daughter, not enough according to my customers, I get the opportunity to change perspectives frequently, to see if those purposes hold water. This week, I've been to Vietnam, Saigon first, then Thanh Hoa, the latter being the hometown of my interpreter/translator, the first being the city where she's chosen to live. So we were close to her life and my customers, and had ample opportunity to discuss purposes and perspectives, seeing them from her verbal angles and my visual ones.

The day I was going to return to Bangkok, a cloudy, wet day, we had a few hours for sightseeing and among the topics we discussed were visual story telling. At a local, popular Buddhist temple in Thanh Hoa, I found myself confronted with an image that told at least three stories and involved three purposes of my life. The stories should be easy to see, here are the purposes:

1. Share your knowledge. I tend to travel with young, inexperienced assistants, either by choice or by coinsidence. The disadvantage of inexperience is obvious. The advantages are plenty: They are open to new ideas, they don't mind working hard, they mostly don't mind stepping outside their comfort circle and they're eager to show what they can. But most important of all, they're interested. Interested to learn about their own trades and not least how those trades relate to others. Like visual communication. I learn too, since young people know things I don't know, about what they do, how they see life and what they think the future will bring.

2. Tell stories. The world is so full of information and visual impressions that if it was flat, most of it would have fallen off the sides. Unfortunately, the more we see, the shallower it gets. We read headlines and we travel to meet other tourists and the dressed-up locals that are pushed to the first row. There are photographers who travel the world, becoming famous for taking visually pleasing images out of context. Stand still for a minute or an hour, take one photo, the photo that has a story to tell.

3. Choose the simplest gear, forget most of what you consider to pack at home, or have it stolen. You'll miss a bunch of photos, but you'll have to learn more, learn to see stories rather than clichées. The photo below was taken with the GM5 and 25mm f/1.7 @ f/5.6. It doesn't get smaller and it hardly gets simpler.

There are more purposes, but they don't apply here.

So to the photo. To me, there are three stories. To others, there may be more stories or less.



20 years ago. I travelled around the globe with an OM-1 and a 50mm f/1.8 plus 10 rolls of Velvia. I returned home with two zooms that never left the bag and half of the film rolls un-opened. I wonder if I have the courage to get back there.
 
V

Vivek

Guest
Maybe it's because you live a different life from me, or maybe it's because my ramblings make no sense.
Trying know your purpose(s, if you are way too optimistic) and trying to shape your life according to that is problematic.

To be and no more.

Cherish what you have.
 
Top