Believing is seeing

Here’s the thing. For the most part, it’s not really the capturing that’s the hard part. It’s the seeing. And, yet, here we have an entire industry focused on the capture. Better autofocus. More sensor zones. Lower apertures, higher ISOs – simple digital nirvana. Trends ignite for the simple fact that copying is deceptively simple. Once someone has proven something works and our brains lock onto it, we can reverse engineer the rest. Yes, no doubt, some shots are harder to capture then others. But it is not rare that people can spot the light, see the form, read the emotions, and know the composition.

Here’s what it really is about pretty pictures. It’s not that they don’t look nice. It’s that they are everywhere. Which is not to say that pretty is inherently valueless, so much as it is that pretty is utterly predictable. And that’s even worse. Because surprise is where the magic happens. It’s the essence of delight, curiosity, joy, and discovery. Lifeless is not a failure of living. It is an excess of predictability. In fact, it may well be that the single most important distinction between pretty and beautiful is not a hidden depth or an unending timelessness, so much as a simple lack of novelty. When we see newly, we see with insight, whether the result be pretty, ugly, or otherwise.

But newness is perilous. To see an image you’ve seen a thousand times before is to say you know the reaction it will incite by way of a thousand experiences of your own. It is to say that you can be secure in its acceptance. But to make one simple change – something as small as a head looking backward instead of forward, turning on or off a flash, having a thoughtful gaze instead of a smile, or capturing a hand in the air instead of a pocket is to take a step into the unknown. And it is to do so with only a the fraction of a second available to think and react. And that’s what’s hard. Not shooting what’s right there in front of you, but simply recognizing that you should. Do that, though, and the rest is sure to follow.