On the other hand....If you care to read all this from an Ikon;
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“Photography hasn’t changed since its invention.” How many times have you thought your photography would improve if you had that bigger better camera or that faster lens?
If the art of photography hasn’t changed since the day it was discovered then to improve our craft we need to move away from climbing the equipment ladder and focus on improving and developing our photography eye.
1. Focus on Capturing the Decisive Moment
The great photographs don’t capture a view they capture the emotion of a single second. Take a look at the photographs you have taken over the last year how many of the images do you engage with emotionally?
Our passion shouldn’t be for photography but the desire to capture that decisive moment. Defining what we mean by the decisive moment is virtually impossible but I do think we know when we miss it.
How many times have you missed that shot you know would have been the perfect capture. You get the second before and the second after but you know there was one photo that you missed?
2. Engage in Photographic Reportage
I love the phrase ‘photographic reportage’, a single photographic capture should tell a story. The photograph shouldn’t be contrived or meticulously set up but be a natural moment that contains enough information for the audience to read the preceding moments and decide themselves what happens next.
3. Engage with your Subject
The concept of subject is all around us, we can’t escape it. The challenge is learning to select those ‘essential’ subjects that we need to communicate our story. Contrived photographs cannot capture the true reflection of a person’s world, something I will most certainly have at the forefront of my mind the next time I lift my camera to capture a portrait.
4. Be Pre-occupied with Composition
Composition is the recognition of a rhythm; it is the true art of photography. Moving the camera a few millimeters towards a subject can completely transform the resultant capture. Cartier-Bresson was a true master of composition.
Composition should be our focus and preoccupation. In many ways it is where the photograph is made and a badly composed image can seldom be rescued by reconstruction or cropping in postproduction. It is said Henri Cartier-Bresson shot solely with a 50mm lens. Perhaps the best way to master composition is to know a lens so well that is almost becomes an extension of the photographer’s eye?
5. Be less concerned with Technique
Henri Cartier-Bresson admitted that new chemical developments and processes brought with it new techniques but it was up to the photographer to decide what they did with them. In fact the book almost ignores technique altogether.
“I am constantly amused by the notion that some people have about photographic technique”……… “but there is a whole group of fetishes which have developed into the subject of technique”..
Having read how important Cartier-Bresson valued the concept of the “subject” the idea of the technique becoming the subject should be a wake up call to us all.
Over the last few months I have become obsessed with trying to master long exposure photography. My engagement with photography had become the desire to discover new locations where I could capture my long exposure images rather than actually engage with the location as a subject.
In Conclusion : The Hope
My photographic priorities for the incoming year have been considerably simplified having read Cartier-Bresson’s ‘Mind’s Eye’.
1. Subject
2. Reportage
3. Composition
Better still focusing on Subject, Reportage and Composition doesn’t require a new camera body, more megapixels or a new lens. What they require is a change of attitude and a desire to capture that decisive moment," end of quote.
Now there goes my purchase, - I think