What is that you enjoy with photography?

I subscribe to Youtube channel "Fstoppers". At times they spoke from the point of view of your audience. We know that most people, don't understand photography, they enjoy photographs that they can relate to me. Such as people, at events, pets, parks, food, beach etc.

To me I enjoy landscape and cityscape photography and I am not that particular with any brand. To me photography is a isolate hobby and the few that are into photography. The thing with the audience. They mentioned, you can do all the darkroom or digital post processing but people are not going to notice those little things. There is film, digital and different format size; so to what extend do those things matter? I imagine in general, few are printing larger than A3 size. At the end of the day the audience is only interested in the image, the end result, not how and what it was taken by. Is it a photographer's thing that some prefer doing things a certain way?

Thoughts? Cheers.

Personally, if I see an image that moves me in some way I really don't care what kind of camera it was made with. Speaking as a photographer behind the camera, I enjoy photography because it gives me a good excuse to wander about in the great outdoors which is where I like to be. I don't necessarily need the "camera excuse" because I'm an avid hiker, but it's nice to bring back to family and friends things I've seen and/or experienced. Hardware-wise I like shooting with LF cameras; I like the much slower, contemplative nature of working this way. That said, it's all good! Whatever you enjoy doing with your photography, just get out there and do it.

I thought about this awhile before answering. I think there are four things that drive me to make images with a little box and pieces of glass. In order, they are....

1) The pleasure of composing and taking the photograph. Yes, I'm an admitted gearhead, especially with classic film cameras, but there is pleasure in stalking a street scene, focusing and composing on the fly, and then firing the shutter (what a sound!) on a Leica at the decisive moment. It is sometimes like going fly fishing without catching a fish, but the experience of setting up a shot, viewing it on the finder screen, and hearing the Thwack! of my Hasselblad or Psssst of my Rollei is inherently pleasurable.

2) Working on the image. I am in love with Lightroom and processing software, almost as much as I used to be with chemistry and silver printing. Working on the image is fun, and turning it into something like I envisioned when shooting is satisfying and pleasurable. "What if I tweaked the saturation slider?" is just as much fun as asking, "What if I tried this on a Grade 6 Contrast paper?" The creative process is at work in either darkroom or Lightroom, and the process of realizing your vision is soul satisfying on a deep level, at least to me.

3) The image. Achieving that result, and presenting it, digitally or on paper, is a beautiful thing. Stand back and admire it. You deserve to. It's a thing of beauty. Something to be proud of. As long as you love your images, that is.

4) Sharing the image. After all that satisfying work, the fact that an audience appreciates it, whether your spouse, your family, your friends, or the audience at a gallery show, is satisfying. If they see the vision that you originally saw when you looked into the viewfinder, that's even more satisfying.

That's it, for me at least. The whole process is pleasurable, and "failure" at any level is not really much of a failure if you've gotten pleasure from the earlier stages and learned something along the way. That's why I make images with those overpriced little boxes.

Andy

None in my family gives crap if it film, Hasselblad or else. Pictures are judged how good is colour and sharpness. BW is next to dross.
But one of our daughters like how film looks like.
It is 2 from 7.
Another daughter did it great with dslr for paid photography where results has to be within 24 hours. It was very pleasing, but they didn’t paid well.

Photography is part of my life. I get paid for what I like to do, as long as it is possible. And after, between work I have photography as passion. Find some gifted photogs, read post on forums. Take, develop, print, scan, post, including mail. I work in visual media industry, I have zero interest in games of drones. I use my free time to take real life pictures.

Ko.Fe. said:

None in my family gives crap if it film, Hasselblad or else. Pictures are judged how good is colour and sharpness. BW is next to dross.

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Exactly my experience. You spend thousand of dollars to take a photo they just look at it for 5 seconds on their phones or tablets. You have a print? Please don't mess up my wall thanks! Have some smaller prints? Please, we don't have room to store them. Our homes are already chaotic and overloaded as it is.

BW? What century are you in? That's why we now have colour television.

hey rayonline_nz
i never get tired of the magic of looking at the film after its in the fix and seeing magic negatives,
an image just appearing on a white sheet of paper, and tinkering with stuff to see what it looks like as a photograph.
also have fun with my phone, i make daily diary photos with it when i am on the subway and driving in traffic jams..
sometimes i turn phone photos into prints using a 19th century process, kind of fun

Alan9940 said:

Personally, if I see an image that moves me in some way I really don't care what kind of camera it was made with. Speaking as a photographer behind the camera, I enjoy photography because it gives me a good excuse to wander about in the great outdoors which is where I like to be. I don't necessarily need the "camera excuse" because I'm an avid hiker, but it's nice to bring back to family and friends things I've seen and/or experienced. Hardware-wise I like shooting with LF cameras; I like the much slower, contemplative nature of working this way. That said, it's all good! Whatever you enjoy doing with your photography, just get out there and do it.

Click to expand...

This is pretty much my answer, too. I shoot with just about anything, but I prefer film just because I do. I get enjoyment from shooting and printing and I get cranky when I don't get to shoot and/or print (like recently). What others see or like (or not) in what I make isn't a part of why I do it.

What is that you enjoy with photography? Creation. I also like to make sound recordings, a little woodwork, and in the past scale models. At work, I do research, clinical studies, and write research papers. Creation. I think that goes for everyone here also...

rayonline_nz said:

Exactly my experience. You spend thousand of dollars to take a photo they just look at it for 5 seconds on their phones or tablets. You have a print? Please don't mess up my wall thanks! Have some smaller prints? Please, we don't have room to store them. Our homes are already chaotic and overloaded as it is.

BW? What century are you in? That's why we now have colour television.

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Television? It is twentieth century. But I still work on television.

At another thread some are cursing on the Internet, while using of it. I use the Internet to find people alike. My darkroom prints are in USA, Russia, Australia and in Canada. Just because people were able to see them and request. Over the Internet.

Having learned to "SEE" as opposed to "LOOKING". To quote Dorothea Lange " The camera is an instrument that teaches people to see without a camera."

http://www.jeffreyglasser.com/

http://www.sculptureandphotography.com/

jeffreyg said:

...To quote Dorothea Lange " The camera is an instrument that teaches people to see without a camera."...

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That's great. Never heard it before. It's also true that a photographers way of seeing can be contagious, even to others with no interest in photography.

It might be because I'm approaching 60 years of age, but I've been reflecting back on my work and what it all means. I recently bumped into someone who was on a trail building crew I supervised over 30 years ago and he said, "I still can't nap in the car on the highway; there's too much to look at" and a co-worker said, "When I was walking the dog on the weekend the sun was rising behind Mt Elizabeth and coming between layers of clouds, and I thought of you".

Therefore, a photographers greatest gift to the world might not be the photographs we labour over, but how those photographs help other people see their world in a more meaningful way.

I started on photography's path because the photographs I brought back from hiking contained nothing of what inspired me to take them. The following 45 years has been an intermittent, meandering path to find the most effective way to convey that inspiration. Huge tangent ahead and no end in sight!