Looking for Photographic Poetry
January 14th, 2009
Published in
Photography
2 Comments
Tags: creativity, flickr, inspiration, Photography
I have discovered a shift in my photographic work. For a few years, I’ve been thinking in terms of what would be cool in my microstock portfolio, and it has been an eye opening experience to let go of that idea. You may remember that I purposely decided to stop focusing on microstock, in the hope that I might grow as an artist, but I did not expect it to happen so fast.
Here are some of the observations, I have made so far:
I’m shooting more than I have in a long time, but almost no portraits, which has been my genre of choice for years. It still is, but I am also enjoying trying to compose interesting shots without people in them.
I have started using higher ISO frequently. This is a no-no with stock, due to the noise it generates, but I’m actually starting to love that kind of noise. It’s different from the artifacts you get from, say, a jpg-file that has been compressed too hard. And it allows me to shoot without extra light.
Post-processing has become more of a creative process. I play with colors, toning and all sorts of things. Things that probably would get my photo rejected for overfiltering, had I submitted it as microstock.
The whole thing has given me tons of inspiration and ideas for new photo projects. Too many, almost. I’ll never get around to doing half of them. But who doesn’t love having a surplus of ideas?
Breaking out of a specific thought/work pattern has broadened my perspective. Not very surprising, really, but it’s good to be reminded of these things from time to time. On a personal note, this has helped me come to grips with not really being a microstock photographer. I’ve outgrown that label, I feel. Not that there is anything wrong with microstock, but to me it’s kind of like the poet who writes ad copy for a living. No matter how good the ad might be, his personal work will most likely be more profound. At least to him.
You can catch my experiments, snapshots and play on my Flickr stream.
As a sidenote: If you’re reading this post in a RSS reader, you will not see the photo used to illustrate this (and other) posts. It’s something to do with the WordPress theme I am using and custom fields.
January 14th, 2009at 3:01 pm(#)
You got your mojo back.
January 14th, 2009at 6:43 pm(#)
You’re right man, you’re right. You got it right! I subscribe all your words.
Joan