dr_lizardo

I guess my last blog was pretty boring.

I don't know if I can ever save myself from the life of an average worker. Or maybe a below average worker in my case.

Part of me would like to believe that I could make it as a professional photographer but i fear that the reality of what the profession is, is as anathema to me as what I'm doing now. Meaning that being creative and making money have very little overlap. Being a professional photographer can mean photographing jars of jelly or high school kids for yearbooks or the same contrived poses of brides and grooms over and over again. I read an article yesterday that sought to discourage people from going pro, and indeed to stop dreaming about it, not least because photographers fail because they refuse to pigeonhole themselves. The article referred to photographers who don't pigeonhole themselves as "bottom feeders" who will have part time jobs in addition to the photgraphy to support themselves.

In a certain sense you might say that I don't want anything, or there is no point in wanting anything, when what you could conceivably want doesn't actually exist. What do you want? I can't identify anything out there to want.

Or on the other hand, there are things seemingly worth wanting, but we need money, and therefore we need jobs, and therefore things aren't going to be all right, ultimately.

The article that I read did offer some hope for people with certain kinds of minds and agendas, for example you might want to photograph tennis matches for sports illustrated or other major publications, and that's good, since you have your pigeonhole marked out already.

Maybe I have a viable pigeonhole. I like to shoot landscapes in the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, like movie stills. I like sensuality, texture. So a possible pigeonhole is that I want to shoot widescreen landscapes that will send chills up peoples spines, that will be so striking that people can't walk past them.

I also like urban landscapes and macro photography. It actually worries me that I might get into a show somewhere, and I would somehow be in trouble If i showed up with a broader range of subject matter and style than I had seemed to indicate in the sample Images I had sent in initially.

It's sunday. I'm going to go down to guitar center and look at guitars and amps, even though I have too many guitars and amps already. Or maybe I'll change my mind and go walking somewhere else.

Sometimes I'll be talking about some camera I want and people tell me it's not the camera, it's the photographer that takes the picture. Actually a picture involves several interacting fields of information. There is the subject matter being photographed, the capture medium, the photographer, his background that led him to where he'd gotten to when he took the photgraph, the output medium, such as a computer screen or a paper print, the audience, and the cultural and personal forces that gave shape to how the audience will see an image. Maybe i obsess about cameras so much because they are the most concrete part of the equation and the easiest part to understand.

I wonder if you'd be right in saying that Ansel Adams pigeonholed himself as a landscape photographer. I tend to think that what he did, while it is not immediately obvious that he did so, is comparable to what the impressionists did for paint. When the photograph came onto the scene and could record from life far more accurately than a painter could, the impressionists and others broke from the school of the old masters and abandoned the pursuit of illusionistic pseudo reallity in painting, and posed the question, what can PAINT do, this medium that is fundamentally different from the photograph. Ansel adams posed a similar question about the medium of film, he wanted to know exactly what it was capable of doing and how it responded to a scene and how to control its response. So while you could say that he pigeonholed himself, what i see is that he waded way deeper into his medium than anyone had ever gone before.

The beatles never let themselves be told that there was anything they couldn't do, and whatever they did, they still sounded like the beatles.

Photographic technology is getting to the point that you can do just about anything imaginable with it. It creates a problem in that there are so many images already out there and so many other talented people with more experience or better equipment or what have you, that you have a major problem in how you are to stand out when the world is already full of images of incredible quality.

All the resources that are out there, things to photograph, equipment to photograph them with, are like a three dimensional field of information that surrounds you. It's like being inside a large cake. You sort of reach out and grab a handful of it. From one standpoint the question of what you are capable of doing has always remained the same. Can you produce an image that makes somebody feel something? It is possible that if you are capable of doing that you're doing something that transcends the equation of developing technology and you make yourself relevant, based on the equation of being able to communicate feelings.