Kill the critic

I wanted to see the beach under different light, so I went for a bike ride. The tide was out. I wandered the rocks, camera in hand. All I could think when I looked through it was, crappy photo, crappy photo, here’s another one, crappy photo. It all looked the same. It all looked like something I’d done a thousand times before. It all looked like 10th generation diluted Edward Weston beach shots. What happened? I was so enraptured yesterday. Where was that state?

I closed my eyes. I held my palms earthward, and imagined I could feel the presence of the ground beneath me through them. I started taking photos again. I stopped trying to make a Great Image. I was ready to see what it was I was interested in. Crappy photos were as good a way as any to find that out, so I started making some.

It had been ten minutes since I got off the bike, and my heart rate was back to baseline. That was also mucking up the works—I needed an interval to calm down my metabolism before I could be in the present moment.

I started photographing rock formations, and before long the details that seems so confusing and overwhelming at first began to organize inside the frame. Gradually I found an area that drew me in and I photographed it repeatedly, with tiny alterations. Each click was getting me closer to something. The process of taking one image led to the next, and the next, and I stopped organizing it inside my head. Something deeper had taken over. These rocks and cavities were now forms that had position and relationship, and a certain organization of them felt righter than another. At some point the series was spent, and the next image compelled my attention.

The beach before me had changed. It was a jumble of rocks when I arrived. Now it was an endless sequence of organized forms, richer in detail and texture than I could possibly have seen when I arrived. This intermediary, the camera, had changed my relationship to a landscape.

Comments

[Aaron B. Hockley]

Often photography can be like brainstorming... let the ideas flow, take lots of photos, and worry about deciding which ones are "good" and "bad" later...

[Robert Tilden]

Brainstorming is a great description of the creative photographic process- maybe *any* creative process. One thing builds on another, and what starts off in chaos settles into it's own reality as the process progresses.

I'm often a victim of the 'blank page' syndrome. I walk around an image rich environment feeling grumpy until I take the first couple of images, then things start happening.