Your Photographic Epiphanies?

[white.elephant]

Seeing a Weston exhibit and being stunned at how small the prints were.

 

[Vaughn]

1) While taking a university photo class (teacher was Thomas Joshua Cooper), I slowly came to the realization that I was photographing light, not objects -- not "I should be", but just that I was.

2) After being introduced by my photo teacher/head of the photo program (not Cooper) as "the Ansel Adams of Humboldt County", I decided that I much better like being the Vaughn of where ever I happen to be. (for the record, he did personally know AA, Cunningham and that whole West Coast crowd). I also decided that I should actually look at the work of AA...which I think was instinctively avoiding at the time as a matter of self-preservation.

Vaughn

 

[Matthew Gorringe]

Realising that the only difference between people who succeed (by whatever measure) and those who don't is that those who succeed don't give up when faced with failure.

 

[SamWeiss]

Latest epiphany: Trying to make a pretty picture is a meaningless exercise in vanity. If I happen to make a pretty picture and someone else likes it, then that is good for them.

Slightly earlier epiphany: cameras are best left to collectors and fetishists... for an artist (or at least for me) a camera all too often is a clumsy tool that gets in the way.

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

[/list]
Hear, hear!

And doubtless, $3,000 or so (common going price for wedding snappers around here) lost in fees... :rolleyes:

 

[David Brown]

And doubtless, $3,000 or so (common going price for wedding snappers around here) lost in fees... :rolleyes:

I (and possibly the person who first said it) are referring to "friends" who want you to do it for free because you're a "shutterbug". No thanks.

But, for the record, I was going to post that stopping doing weddings commercially (I did them for years) was a very liberating experience. I do not degrade any commercial photographer - I admire them greatly. But, doing commercial work for clients sucked all of the joy out of photography for me. It was not an epiphany to quit. I knew it would help.

YMMV.

 

[ricksplace]

I don't know if this counts as an epiphany, but I decided to try RA4 colour printing about a year ago. I can't believe how easy it is. The only learning curve was colour balance, and becoming accustomed to a DARK darkroom when printing!

 

[Laurent]

1) Was to realize that, no matter how much I like AA's work, I should not try to duplicate his... Took me some years to discover this.

2) Was to discover that a good photograph is not necessarily a sharp one, and that the 'rendition' of a given less may be more important than it's age and technology.

 

[John Bragg]

1) Discovering that GOOD Honest grain and micro contrast is far more important than a smooth plasticky grainless image when you view your work from a normal viewing distance and resist the urge to become one of lifes "Grain Sniffers"..

2) Getting the hang of using Rodinal and exploiting it's considerable strengths and unique character in achieving the above..

 

[smieglitz]

During the pursuit of my Bachelor's degree at U of Michigan -Flint in a field unrelated to photography, I was fortunate to have a Professor of Bavarian Languages, Douglas Miller, as the instructor of a Color Photography course I took as an elective and basically for fun. Dr. Miller had translated Goethe's Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) into English and he taught the course referencing Goethe and his artistic progeny (Itten, Mante, etc.,) as much as possible. That was quite an experience for which I will be eternally grateful.

But, the epiphany came from a fellow student in that course. All of the guys in the course gloated over this fancy camera and that gonzo lens that they had acquired...GAS big-time. One older female student, an art major, went through the course using a 110 Pocket Instamatic and just blew us out of the water because she was a true artist and had vision. The rest of us were just equipment geeks and artist wannabes. I try to remember the lesson of what she accomplished with the simplest of tools and a great passion for art.

 

[DWThomas]

Not sure it's a full-fledged epiphany, but I had gotten away from B&W and home darkroom activity for 25 years or so. I shot color and sent it off to whomever for processing. When I came back to B&W a couple of years ago, it was long enough to force me to read up and think about what I was doing. I'm certain that shucked away some bad lazy habits, as my worst prints today are typically as good as the best I ever made back when. Maybe some of it's age or maturity, and admittedly I have a better enlarger than my old homemade contraption, but I think it's mostly working a bit slower, paying attention to detail, keeping notes and actually thinking about what I'm trying to do as I do it.

DaveT

 

[BobNewYork]

When I finally realized that exposure isn't a shutter speed and aperture - it's a quantity of light. Like filling a bucket from a tap where E.I. is bucket size. It made sense of the Zone System and it's derivatives for me - which I'd followed blindly for too many years without truly understanding. Sounds nuts but it really pulled it together for me.

Bob H

 

[Paul Goutiere]

About 1959, or so, a neighbor suggested I take his old folding camera (maybe a Ikonta) instead of my Brownie Hawkeye for a weekend trip. Initially, I thought the idea was a little ridiculous, but he somehow convinced me.
There were too many controls on the folder, like speeds, distance and f stops....and then it had to be opened. The film he gave me came in a box that had instructions on exposure which he translated for me.
The pictures were absolutely wonderful (relatively speaking).

Choose the right camera; That was my first photographic epiphany.

 

[SilverGlow]

The epiphany I had a few years ago, is that the picture, the print is what truly matters.

Everything else is secondary at best.

What all we do, what equipment we buy, what skills we acquire, it's all for the final directive: The Print.

What medium we use, be it film, digital, what equipment we exposed the picture with, is just the means to an end.

Too often, film bigots and digital bigots lose sight of the prime directive. They worship the medium instead of the print. Often bigots (on principal) will ignore the work of others, if that work was not done with the "right" medium, regardless of just how fantastic those compositions are. They demonize the work made with the "wrong" medium.

Back in the early part of the 20th century, and I paraphrase what Alfred Stieglitz said "The print is everything; nothing else matters".

Another epiphany that occurred to me years ago: Skills and technique do matter. Vision and concept without the means to reveal the print is worthless. Conversely, all the technique and skill in the world with out vision and concept is just as worthless. In other words "Faith, without works, is dead".

Yet another: Most cliches in photography are wrong. Pooh, poohing techique and skill is dead wrong, yet considered so "advent garde" and "cool" in the art community because it "clouds" artistic vision..what a load of craaap.

It's about the picture, stupid.

Don't first choose the right camera. Choose the composition first.

 

[mjs]

I mis-spent my childhood in awe of people who could use those camera things -- sort of like rocket science only with fractions, I think. F-stops, exposure times and they all change together... the heck with it!

Then my oldest daughter said she wanted to try photography, so we went to the town camera store and I bought her a used Minolta XG-1. It came with instructions. I had to read them in order to explain them to her.

Oh. *blush* That's easy enough...

Mike

 

[removed-user-1]

"Photograph the light."

Perfect - I love this quote!

My first photographic epiphany was actually in chemistry class way back in high school - we did an experiment where we precipitated a white powder (silver nitrate) out of solution and filtered it into a coffee filter, then opened it up and watched it turn dark. The question on the lab report was "Can you think of any application for this effect?" and I made the leap, and actually yelled out loud to the whole class "THIS IS FILM! Or, well, it's not film but this is what film is made of!" This was 1987; it's funny, I've never met another photographer who had that experience.

The second epiphany was about seeing the image before even picking up the camera... on US 74 near Hamlet, NC, there is an old ruined mill (Great Falls Mill), which as a child I always wanted to photograph, but my parents never stopped the car to let me get a picture (they always said "It's just an old building, why do you want to take a picture?"). In 1996, at the age of 25, I drove by it myself on the way back from the beach, and I got a print that resembled exactly what my 12-year-old mind had seen. After that I always tried to think about what my mind was seeing, instead of just the object itself, and by this point I had some darkroom skill to go along with seeing ability. It was a nice moment, and I knew when I pressed the shutter that I had it. I've sold that print a couple times.