Creating a photograph - H

I love feeling passionate, feeling that driving fire. I feel that way once in a while about photography, but most of the time I have to find something else to motivate me, to push me forward. The fire fizzles out quickly, and I'm left only with the head knowledge that I really want to photograph but without emotion, fire, or desire. What then? I tend to let it go until that fire wells up again, but this cycle doesn't allow for much progress which is clear in my lack of development and maturity as a photographer.

What I learned today. First, good photographers have the ability to visualize the photograph even before they shoot it. Second, a lot of the creative work occurs in the darkroom. On the SFMOMA site, they show a contact print of an image Ansel Adams captured. A contact print is the first and undoctored print that a photographer will produce in order to plan changes s/he may make. Then they showed 2 different and final versions of the same print after he had worked with them. The difference is quite dramatic. The contact print and so the original image was actually uninteresting and flat, but in the darkroom Ansel Adams created a very dramatic, visually spectacular image with a lot of depth and expression. Very interesting!

So, what I'm beginning to understand about the art of photography is that it is indeed creative and not simply about capturing an image and freezing a moment in time. Very cool! This means that understanding how to use all of the tools and their effects, both in the darkroom and out, is very important. Hm...good lesson!