beauty and narrative

The more I shoot, the more I'm realizing these two factors need to co-exist and give each other space to shine. One to attract and the other to retain.

I wrote an earlier entry on how style and aesthetics are king. This has always been my natural inclination with photography and I think my focus was on making photos that could stand on their own, but from a purely technical or rather "academic" perspective (mastering techniques but lacking depth and thematic consistency). Colors, tones, geometry, and composition would need to be really solid but there might not have been any sort of narrative, tension or feeling of transience in the photo.

These are no longer the kinds of photos I'm interested in making now and it's been quite a journey this year breaking out of that mental trap of just making eye candy. Still guilty of it at times but the intention and awareness really helps as it’s a continuous practice, not an overnight shift. Every photographer has a voice but it takes work to dig inward and find out what that is. A photographer's style should be more than just a tone curve or focal length.

Shooting street and then also shooting topographics for my upcoming project have been liberating in that aspect. I wanna make photos that try to navigate the subject's intent, rather than just capturing the literal subject itself. At the end of the day, I think factors like location, color, and geometry are just tools, not actual soul of a photo. That should come from within. Whether a photographer starts out having their color game down from the get-go or fully banking on their storytelling abilities, eventually maturity is about having both aspects complement each other. It feels really nice knowing that I still have a long way to go while still breaking past a mental plateau.

color versus b&w

I adore color and will always adore color but I've come to realize it can sometimes become a crutch. Color is descriptive, filling in details where there is structure. However it sometimes feels like it can reduce structure and distract from meaning within a frame if the intention for interpretation was there.

I've been curious of why legends such as HCB, Ansel Adams, Fan Ho, and Minor White have dedicated themselves to shooting mostly in black & white when color photography was available to them. After thinking about it a while and making some monochrome work of my own this is what stood out to me - black & white forces a layer of abstraction upon the viewer, while color may only suggest that layer of abstraction. As mentioned earlier, color is extremely descriptive and in some cases can make a photo too literal. It's easy to capture a memory or mood but much harder to capture an idea, which often comes from structure, lines, and form. Of course one can capture ideas in color but I think what they're getting at is that black & white is the unfiltered domain of ideas.

Color, monochrome - they all have their time and place. It's just a matter of what you want to convey through photography and understanding which tools are better depending on the intent.

I'll be shooting a lot more black & white this year and going through archives for photos that may possibly be revived in black and white. I don't want editing/post processing to be the end game, hopefully I can continue to evolve my eye through future shoots and take those lessons back to color photography.

I guess what makes this all complicated is that color has its own form of contrast not in brightness but in hue, potentially adding meaning and intent behind a frame. That's why I don't think I can ever discount color or think of it as inferior to black & white. They're two separate mediums that serve their own purpose. This is a journey I'm still figuring out and there's no doubt color will always have a place in my heart. The question is really what are our own intentions when we pick up the camera?

thoughts on video + streetlogs update

As much as I personally enjoy consuming videos as a medium, after filming a number of vlogs I feel that from a creator point of view - videography as a medium just doesn't scratch the itch that photography does for me

I feel that video as a medium is a bit too raw for my liking? Maybe with photos I am trying to capture something more abstract and open ended, allowing the audience to interpret as they like, rather than myself forcing some meaning upon the work itself. With photos there's a sense of surrealism that I'm drawn to. It very well could be that I haven't experimented enough with video to get to that point but it just hasn't clicked the way photos did from the start

I'm glad that the effort of producing my streetlog videos brought down the resistance of just going out and taking photos- if anything that was the goal. I actually have my 4th streetlog vid filmed and mostly edited but it’s become clearer to me there’s not as much heart behind it so I’m going to let it rest and put my energy back into photos for now.