Beating the Boundaries of Seeing

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:54:31 +0000

Stone Studies

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 20:52:11 +0000

Everything has it's beauty, but not everyone sees it.

You are more likely to see the beauty in things that interest you.

It's all about what you find important.

For me it’s only about ideas and finding ways to express them visually without loosing the beauty.

snowy boundaries

Wed, 4 Feb 2009 08:32:02 +0000

“To achieve his best work, the photographer must discover what really excites him visually. He must discover his own world.” - Bill Brandt,

“Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.” - Andre Kertesz

“I have no way of portraying the lives of others. I portray my own.” - Jan Saudek

“My pictures are never pre-visualized or planned. I feel strongly that pictures must come from contact with things at the time and place of taking. At such times, I rely on intuitive, perceptual responses to guide me, using reason only after the final print is made to accept or reject the results of my work.” - Wynn Bullock

I really agree with with all of the above. These quotes go a small way in describing my (Photographic) ethics. Only, unlike Wynn Bullock, I do plan my projects and occasionally individual images but try hard not to pre-visualize the look of the finished image, “pictures must come from contact with things at the time and place of taking.”

I rarely see the work of a photographer I admire without it adding something to my own work or the way I think about photography.

As Photographers we follow in the footsteps of all the great photographers, past and present and therefore we find ourselves walking down a well trodden Photographic path. As we mature as photographers, we try to explore our own paths, only to find that we have inevitably joined the tracks already made by others. As we journey we intersect more of these tracks and hopefully as we move on we take something of these encounters with us.

Over time we find our own direction and its this mixture of journey and destination that gives our work a sense of individualism.

P.S : “ Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.” - Walker Evans

BEATING the BOUNDS

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 17:44:59 +0000

December found me Beating the Bounds two or three times a day and I have completely lost myself in this project over the last three weeks or so. It’s funny how most of my projects only begin to gel after a year of photographing. Up until then, I may achieve individual images that express my feelings but it’s only after some time of repeatedly photographing the same things that I start to find it’s visual vocabulary. I think that a year is also how long it takes me to develop my initial idea into something I can express through photography.

DARTMOOR SHOOT

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:18:08 +0000

For all of you who have been asking about my works in progress, here are the new images I took on Dartmoor last week as part of my “Stones” project. Fortunately, I had a couple of suitably dull days to be able to get the sort of atmosphere I was looking for - a bit Sherlock Holmesey as in “Hounds of the Baskervilles”. I didn’t see any big dogs leaping across the moor, however!

The not so good news is that I bought a new tripod for the trip as my other one broke (see September blog) and yes! you guessed - the new one broke as well. One of the legs snapped off while I was trying to obtain a suitable angle for one of the images. Perhaps after years of using my “Benbo” tripod - which is built like scaffolding - I was expecting too much of it. I had to improvise with a piece of green ash wood inserted inside the leg so that I could continue taking photographs.