Saturday, August 16, 2014

Motorcyclist, Moving Through

Naugatuck, Connecticut

(For Markus.)

Yesterday afternoon the light was a fabulous stormy overcast that never actually turned into storm. It was a great time to spend a couple hours on a bit of an experiment I've wanted to begin. On my walkabout shooting, the kind of pictures I post on this blog, I've been thinking that I wanted to tighten up and intensify the procedure. Eschewing halfway measures, for a while on these walkabouts I'm going to shoot just one frame of each situation. Slow down, decide exactly what I want, and do just one shot. Worked really well yesterday.

4 comments:

lyle said...

missing your 11x14?

richardplondon said...

I much prefer this attitude myself - seeking to make a single photo that speaks directly and freshly about the visual reason for feeling impelled to make a photo at all, in that place and time.

It's a matter of speculation / delusion of course, whether it's some added creative spur, or simply the absence of any others, which "improves" the definitiveness of the photo that one does take (wry grin).

Yet further photos certainly can soon labour the point, and over-stretch its significance. I get visually jaded, start to doubt my eye, things get more and more formulaic and cliche. And as a by-product, the computer work afterwards turns more into a chore than a pleasure.

An exploration of multiple genuinely separate experiences around what happens to be the same physical subject - that's a quite different matter, I'd say.

I do like your use of the term "situation" to more elegantly, and less pompously, express notions of a given quantum or gestalt of photographed reality.

Carl Weese said...

Lyle, more like missing a certain element of approach that large format "forces." Quotes, because I've read plenty of accounts of LF workers who think it's perfectly normal to need vast amounts of time to fully set up for a shot. As I understand it, this is less from lack of facility manipulating the equipment than from simply expecting to find the picture on the ground glass, after many varied attempts, instead of finding it first by direct seeing, then put the camera in the right place.

Carl Weese said...

Richard,

"An exploration of multiple genuinely separate experiences around what happens to be the same physical subject..."

I like that. It might be hard to explain how that's different from shooting 6—or two dozen—rapid variations of the same picture, but the difference is clear to me.