Just a thought for the day. I was recently looking over a photographer’s work. It was full of off-composed images and tilt-shift effects. But I couldn’t get a handle on the work. Timing was generally good, technique was good, but it felt like the timing and technique were being controlled by two different halves of the brain that didn’t bother to sit down for coffee and see what each was up to. The technique had nothing to do with the subject matter. In fact, the technique was so distinct, I couldn’t pay attention to anything but the technique. I couldn’t feel a mood, I couldn’t watch the emotion. All I could see were oddly composed pictures of random things that didn’t seem to have any relationship to the wedding. It was like those vague endings in the movies, where you walk out, and you don’t understand what you just saw. You just feel confused.
This all lead to this thought. This may not be true for the bottom line, but insofar as pictures count for themselves, I think it’s a lot more interesting when photographers find the unusual in the common then when they show the common as unusual.
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