Picture This…

When I was about 16 years old, my father let me use (and eventually gave me) an old Minolta X500 SLR camera and a few lenses.  It was completely manual…manual focus, manual aperture, shutter speed.  I loved using that thing.  I would trek it over to the Albion nature center or schlep it along on some drives through the back roads around Michigan.  While my classmates were taking disposable cameras with them on school trips to Toronto or Band Festivals, I was lugging around this heavy SLR, a 28mm, a 50mm, and a 135mm lens.  I was buying (and occasionally stealing…since I was a klepto back in those days) all KINDS of film, both color and black and white.  I spent tons of money on getting my film developed.  I just loved taking pictures.

Part of the problem, however, is that I just wasn’t very good at it.  I read books, and practiced, but I never seemed to be able to get the hang of lighting and composition.  As with many things that I have tried to do in my lifetime, I understand the technical aspect of what it is I was trying to do, but I never managed to grasp the artistry.

My love of photography has never really abated.  I got my first modern SLR camera as a sophomore in college (Canon Rebel 2000).  As a senior, I got my first digital camera (Minolta DIMAGE 7HI).  My first Digital SLR came less than a year later when I got my Canon Digital Rebel.  A year and a half ago, I got the Canon Rebel XTi.  Then, just before Christmas, I traded up to what I hope will be the last digital camera I buy for a good long while: The Canon 7D.  The 7D is a fantastic camera that does 18 Megapixel images, and 1080p Hi-Def video.

I also, over the last several years, have managed to cobble together a few fairly decent lenses…which supposedly are the main different in the quality of the photos.  My favorite lenses are my 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 wide angle lens, my 50mm f/1.8 lens, and my 24-70mm f/2.8 lens.  (Sorry for the geek speak for those who don’t know or care what those numbers mean.)  (And, as another parenthetical, when I type the word lens, my fingers want to type it in as "lense."  Not sure why.)

All in all, I’ve managed to cobble together a pretty good little set of gear for an amateur.  I did some actor’s headshots and a few portrait sessions when I was in college and afterwards, some of which I’m pretty proud of. 

But I’ve never seemed to be able to move my photography past the point of "workmanlike" to "artistic," and I’ve been struggling to figure out why that is.  I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and I believe I’ve developed some insight:

1.  I think that, overall, my frustration stems from the fact that I seem to be unable to capture the scene in front of me as I’m seeing it through my own eyes.  I see things around me all the time that look absolutely beautiful to me.  However, the instant I start trying to see it through the lens of my camera, I lose that vision.  I don’t know whether it’s the fact that I’ve not yet mastered the technical aspects of my photography, and so I can’t translate what I see in my mind onto what I’m looking at on film, or whether I simply haven’t learned that translation layer yet.  The camera can’t see things the same way that I can, and I’ve not been able to see things in the way that the camera does.

2. I think that, overall, I just struggle when it comes to visual creativity.  (In reality, I feel like I struggle with creativity in general.)  I’m really good a copying people or stealing ideas, but sometimes I have a hard time coming up with material on my own.  For instance, I was looking through the Flickr stream of my friend Jamelah, and came across this photo and this photo.  Jamelah does this "365 days" project where she takes a self portrait every day, and posts it online.  And a lot of them are really, really good.  They’re just so creative.  And so well executed.  I saw her photos and instead of using that as a springboard, all I could thing of were ways that I could copy or tweak her idea.  I just struggle coming up with original ideas.

3. I rarely go off the beaten trail…both literally and figuratively.  My drive for photography, like so much of what I do in my day-to-day life seems to come from proving that I can make a pictures that is just as beautiful or just as ______________ as someone else’s.  I want to take portraits like Rachel Thurston.  I want to take nature photography like Scott Bourne.  I want to take landscapes like Chris Gin.  I haven’t figured out what kind of photographer I want to be or what kind of photographs I want to take.  So, as a result, I skim across the surface of several types of photography, never really getting good at any of them.  I also don’t leave my comfortable world that often.  So, it’s hard for me to find those sweeping panoramas or glorious vistas or unusual animals because if it’s not within a 10-minute drive of my house, I haven’t been there.  So, I drive along the well-worn highways, take pictures of the same waterfalls, the same rusty old tractors, the same ferry boat ride panoramas that everyone else has photographed.  As a result, much of my photography feels like snapshots instead of photos.

4. The digital toolbox.  I may know my way around F-stops and shutter speeds, but when it comes to what to do with the final product, everything I’ve ever learned has been experimental.  Some things I’ve gotten pretty good at (like retouching headshots) while other things (color correction, for instance) are troublesome for me.  Plus, I’ve tended to use Photoshop to hack my way through fixing mistakes that never should have been made in the first place.

5. Some of it just my old self-doubt.  I’ve always been one of those people who feels like, if his creativity isn’t the best and greatest, there’s no value in it.  Why continue to create mediocre "art" when there are those out there who can do it so much better than you can.  As I’ve started taking more photos again, I haven’t just enjoyed the process.  The whole point of the process for me is to get a quality final product.  And I think it’s that focus on the final product that prevents me from really learning and experimenting and creating in a way that I haven’t done before. 

Today, I woke up early, threw the dog in the car, and drove down highway 202, east out of Redmond.  I’ve never been that way, so I just drove to see where I’d end up.  I ended up in a little tiny town called Fall City (population: 5000) not to far from the Snoqualmie water fall.  I walked around, took a ton of photographs, and spent about two hours just meandering around the area.  When I got home, I popped my memory card into the computer, and I was just disappointed with the results.  I want to take that one picture, that one shot that just screams "AMAZING!"  The one that you would want to use for your computer desktop, or even print up and hang on the wall.  But out of the thousands of pictures that I’ve taken over the last couple of years, I can’t think of a single picture that I would want to hang on my wall.  In fact, with all the photos that I’ve taken, the only thing of mine hanging up right now is 5 4×6 photos of tulips in a frame…and none of those are particularly good pictures on their own.  They just happen to match my shower curtain.

It’s become painfully obvious to me that I’m not going to be one of those people who picks up a camera and starts making beautiful, amazing, life-altering photographs right away.  I mean, come on, I’ve been taking photos on and off for over 15 years now.  If I haven’t turned into the next Ansel Adams by now, I’m not going to.  So, I think the real challenge for me to learn how to enjoy the process of photography, not fixating on the end result.  The fact of the matter is that, I’ll probably continue to take pictures for the rest of my life because it’s one of the only ways that I’ve found to be even remotely creative in a visual space.  And I have enjoyed it in the past, even when my photos were never that good. 

I also need to really work on finding my way off the well-worn paths.  I need to get out of my car and walk through the mud a little more.  I need to experience things from a vantage point of someone other than a tourist.  I need to be a little braver in asking people if I can photograph them or their pets or their flowers. 

And I just need to keep taking pictures.  Because, while my photos aren’t great, taking pictures is sure a whole lot cheaper than buying more equipment to take pictures that still aren’t great.