Flicker Pondering Something Very Important And Troubling, Quincy, Massachusetts. Tuesday, May 29, 2018. 3:34 p.m.
Simplify, simplify, simplify. I try to build strong structure and balance. Then layer color and light over it. Painters work like this. (See below.) I try to do all of this in the camera.
I still use only the viewfinder to shoot, reserving the LCD screen for reviewing my images. It's so remarkable inside the viewfinder, what it shows you. Like sitting all by yourself in a dark movie theater. Cinema Paradiso.
I shoot manually. I spot meter my most important detail, put it in its proper zone, and let the other zones fall where they may. All of the work is done inside the camera. I might adjust the exposure or contrast in Lightroom a tiny bit. Hardly at all. Just a stitch. It may be just the calibration of my screen, too, that I'm adjusting. This is my response to all of the heavily edited, Photoshopped images out there. I have nothing against them, they are simply a different art form, but not my art form. There is natural beauty; it doesn't have to be manufactured.
The theater taught me to take huge risks, that I was capable of taking them, and that I enjoy taking them. But that’s a different subject for a different discussion.
I’m inspired by painters. My images are intentionally painterly.
Everyone today who has a phone is able to make “pretty” pictures. I want to investigate the next step, making images about things not readily noticed or considered pretty using light, line, shape, color, and form: a tangle of underbrush, the beauty and composition of the world as it slides past us in our cars, tiny beautiful worlds that are unseen because of their size. I’m investigating paper, specifically washi paper with images printed. I’ve printed them on transparencies, too. I want to see what they look like, not printed, but projected huge.
Arrangement Of A Collective Memory In The Key Of A Minor