journal
Digital cameras have made photography much easier, faster, and accessible to everyone. But not everyone thinks this is necessarily good. Let's talk about why photography can be too easy, why it probably shouldn't, and how to keep it engaging enough that we don't get bored in the long term.
Rain, wind, cold, and mountains. The perfect cocktail for some moody photography.
The latest issue of my newsletter is out: aows #41, on timing over location and subject.
This time, I talk about the recent blizzard we had here, and the concept I touched in the video: why many times the when is more important than the what in photography.
You can read all the newsletter's past issues and subscribe here: aows newsletter.
The winter was over; or so I thought. A rare spring blizzard hit the mountains of Galicia, in NW Spain, and being just an hour away, I couldn't miss it. Because in photography, timing always trumps location and subject. An incredible couple of days spent in the snow, a time I used to make tons of images.
Life is full of choices. Each of them takes us further down the road, never to find the same intersection again.
We all want to do a lot of things with and in our lifes. But that's not possible.
I'd love to have my own place, one I can call home; I'd also love to keep traveling, never really settling down.
I'd love to have the experience of having a kid; I'd also love to do the things I couldn't do if I had one.
Our lifes are finite, so we must choose. Some of these decisions scare us to the point of paralyzing us.
"The reason why fantasies of the future are so much more pleasant than doing them in the present, it’s because we get to hang on all of them. It is the choosing that is painful, choosing what we will do and what we don’t that most avoid doing."
-- from a podcast I listened to, whose name I forgot to write down :(
When I quit my job to become a full-time photographer, I had a fantasy: I'd travel the world, visit all continents, make images everywhere.
I wasn't so naive to think I'd travel so much, but I was expecting to go to many more places than I have ended up going to so far. In part because of the pandemic, which was a choice none of us wanted to take but were forced to.
Even though I'm still young enough to keep traveling for years to come, every time I decide to go somewhere, I'm also deciding not to go somewhere else. One decision at a time, I'm carving a path; one with many destinations, but one that will skip most of them.
I did not understand that one future comes at the exclusion of all others.
I had wanted two kids.
I had wanted to travel the world.
I had wanted to be the one to hold my mother’s hand at the end.
Everybody pretends that you only die once. But that’s not true. You can die to a thousand possible futures in the course of a single, stupid life.
-- No Cure for Being Human, Kate Bowler
Whether we want it or not, we must choose. We will miss on many, many things; we will get to do just a few, to experience a handful of them.
That's why it's so important to focus on what we do get to do, on what we do get to experience. And to share it with those people whose path didn't take them the same route.
A regular Saturday morning turned magical thanks to photography.
Why do we photograph? Read my newsletter issue "On purpose in photography"
I live for moments like these.
The act of taking photos can be seen as a way to remember things we don't want to forget, or to share those moments with others. The danger is: photography can take us away from the present moment, trading the experience we are having now for one in the future.
This is a very real concern and sometimes, the best thing we can do is to put the camera away and enjoy -- this is especially true for fleeting moments that don't last long.
But photography can be used as a tool to enrich the experience. In our search for beauty, we pay more attention, we increase its meaning, and we can feel even more present than before. Many times, photography can even be what creates those meaningful moments to begin with!
It is important, then, to know when to capture the moment, and to know when to simply take it all in. And if possible, find the real magic, somewhere in between.
We are driven by emotions — we make images when we see something that makes us feel in a certain way, and we try to recreate those feelings in the viewer through our work.
Art should touch and move the audience: the last thing we want is to leave people indifferent.
There’s a tricky balance in play here, though: on one hand, we need to feel something to make good images; on the other hand, we must be careful not to attach those feelings to the photograph.
This happens especially with images that were hard to make. Perhaps, we had to hike several miles to reach the location, wait several hours for the conditions to be just right, or we might have made the whole process more challenging on purpose, adding constraints to our workflow.
Whatever it is, those images will feel different. More rewarding to make, but harder to look at for what they are. It’s not easy to know how others are going to perceive what we capture, or how we will feel in a few months or years about the image.
This is ok. This is normal. This is part of the process, and it happens to all of us. But it’s important to be aware that this is happening.
It’s important to develop a sense of looking at our own work from a distance. We should try to see it from the perspective of someone else. We can also ask for feedback.
In the end, though, only time will give us the required perspective. Letting our photos marinate for a few weeks, months, or even years, so we can see them for what they are, once our attachment to them has faded away a little bit.
I talk from my personal experience here: the way I do it is by focusing on the mood, the atmosphere, instead of a specific subject or location. It’s all about the fog, the snow, the clouds, the stillness of the water in a long exposure, the lone figure in the vastness of the landscape, the small facing the big…
We can also evoke wonder by creating mystery: think deep shadows, and night photography. This can even make the viewer feel a bit uncomfortable, as their imagination runs wild.
Contrast can dramatically change the feeling of an image: high contrast is the equivalent of being loud, while low contrast is more gentle and subtle.
Let’s not forget about the way we present and show our work: photography is much more than showing a single image. For example, the audience comes along with me in my videos, and the photographs I show in them will feel very differently than the ones I share by themselves. The movie offers a context that will frame the work in a very different light.
Books let us use captions and descriptions. Use that extra information to reveal things about the image that are not obvious by just looking at it. Music can transform visual work as well.
No matter what, don’t forget: your work is to make the viewer feel something — and that includes your future self.
Recently, I listened to an interview where a landscape photographer was expressing their love for the struggle to make an image: the harder the process, the more rewarding it becomes for them.
This photographer was talking about hiking, but I see this happening in photography in many other ways. Another photographer mentioned using a tripod for every shot solely because of the same reason: to make the process slower and more challenging.
Indeed, we require some degree of hardship to stay engaged in the process and be able to see beauty where others miss to see it. But this is tricky, as it presents a danger: our emotional attachment to the images we make.
Because they were hard to make, because we are so proud of them, because they were a challenge we were able to overcome, we see them through a distorted lens.
They might work along with some context -- think a book with text explaining the conditions the image was made in, or a movie where we show all we had to go through.
But they might not work by themselves. A detached audience might not see in them what we see, because they lack the backstory and the emotions we felt while making it.
This discrepancy between our subjective relationship to our own work, and the response of others to it, is a gap we need to be aware of.
Images can and should convey emotions and feelings, but those must be expressed as much as possible in the image itself. This is true even if our photography has an audience of one, us, because time tends to make everything fade away. If our photographs don't speak to anyone else but us now, they might not speak to us either in the future, once all of those feelings are buried deeper within us.
Related:
Shooting through glass is something I want to experiment more with. Embracing the glare, the reflections, the loss of clarity, the overlapping of two worlds.
So far, I've been using windows I find on my daily walks. But I'm seriously starting to consider carrying some kind of glass with me on my photography trips, to use as a sort of filter.
I'll keep you updated.
During my recent trip to Riaño, in the Picos de Europa mountains, I struggled quite a bit with a hike (to the top of Pico Gilbo) I thought I wanted to do.
I found myself making up plenty of excuses: too much haze, bad air quality, it seemed very steep, I had a long drive ahead of me, I wasn't going to make any good images...
In the end, I decided to start the hike and see how far I could go. I wasn't feeling it, and I kept coming up with excuses to head back several times during the hike. But one step at a time, one milestone after another, I made it to the top.
I am so glad I did because, as usual, every single excuse I had made up was just that: an excuse. All the struggle, along with the incredible views, made this one of the best hikes I've ever done.
But, one of the excuses turned out to be true. The one I knew, from experience, was most likely to happen: I didn't make good images during the hike.
Even though some of my best images were made in nature, hard hikes rarely deliver good photographs. At least for me.
I call this the diminishing returns of hiking.
Indeed, the further I go, the harder the hike, the more I push myself physically, the less likely it is that I'll come back with a good image.
We all have limited energy and time. The more you spend them on getting somewhere, the less you have left for your photography.
The more accessible a location is, the more we get to visit it and know it, which means better chances to be there at the right time. I tend to favor shorter hikes for this reason.
But of course, there are plenty of reasons to hike to places like Pico Gilbo beyond making a good image: those experiences can be awe-inspiring and spark something within us, as some of those hikes have done to me in the past. Sometimes it's best to forget about photography and enjoy the view.
When I plan a photography trip, I usually focus on either relatively close spots, or relatively far places. I tend to ignore everything in between, and man was it a big mistake.
One of those places in between, far enough from home but not too far either, is Riaño. Technically part of the Picos de Europa, but a bit farther south. A beautiful, stunning place, so breathtaking that I can't believe I hadn't visited it sooner.
In any case, I've fixed that mistake now. I spent a few days in the area, and what a time I had. Still low season, I had the whole place for myself. Weather was perfect, not too cold, cloudy, moody. And during the first two days, I even had "calima".
Calima is an atmospheric phenomenon in which dust and sand from the Sahara, in Africa, gets blown all the way here by powerful winds. This happens often in the Canary Islands, just off the African coast, and sometimes in souther Spain. But I had never seen it happening this far north, which was confirmed by the locals as well.
The result? An incredibly eerie and beautiful landscape, looking almost like fog, but not quite. Closer to the smoke of a wildfire, if I were to find something similar. And just like in a wildfire, breathing this stuff is not healthy at all. I had to wear a mask for the first two days of the trip, and I had to put off any hiking to the second half of my travels. Everything worked out perfectly, I took full advantage of the calima, and I got to hike to the top of Pico Gilbo, one of the most breathtaking views I've ever seen.
A beautiful foggy morning spent with a camera in hand.
The only way to improve as photographers, and to build a collection of good images, is to do it... one click at a time.
Building a collection of images we love from scratch can feel overwhelming. Being constantly exposed to the work of thousands of photographers every day doesn't help.
The feeling of falling behind can materialize really quick. And before we know it, we give up.
This is a trap, and we must avoid falling into it.
Photography is a lifelong journey, it does take a lot of time and effort to build a portfolio of good images. It's not going to happen overnight. It won't be easy. But it's something we need to do everyday.
Quite literally, it happens one click at a time.
Remember: you are just one click away.
It might seem counterintuitive at first, but constraints can make us better focus on what's left.
I had the pleasure to talk to Mali Davies from Let's Create - The photography show. You can listen to the episode here.
Ribadeo, Galicia, February 2022.
From the video Photography at the coast: mistake and successes.
