<- Click hereYou know, with all that I can control as a photographic artist - it's maybe the most critical thing which I cannot.
Your mood.
Your mood can forgive a ghastly image, or turn a masterpiece to dung. So I've got to take a range of moods for granted and figure out some way to pierce through as many different sets of feelings as possible. It's a burden that every creative artist carries about. Just as a novelist or playwright has to find ways to get the audience to suspend disbelief - we've got to find techniques to get our viewers to suspend their very lives for the instants they view our work.
I wonder if the best technique is distraction? Just as baseball pitchers have their change-ups, we've got to have curves, sliders, fast... even spit balls ready to lob in front of our unsuspecting visitors, or else a sameness of craft excellence will allow all of life's distractions to overcome whatever we hope the viewer will feel. Sometimes we not only need a unique voice... but a loud one as well.
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As I look at the images of friends from all over the world, I am struck with the fact that the leaves on the trees around here are still close to full color. And while we've had one or two freezing nights, the city has protected its foliage from the worst. Tonight a snowstorm... or a slush storm's... expected to flow in. So in the grey of a pre-storm evening I went out back just after sunset and grabbed some of the last colors of fall. Fall on December 1st. There's the pure color in the opening triptych and here's a tad less abstraction. Incidentally the zooms and blurs were preprocessing enhancements all done in camera.
Enjoy... perhaps I'll return to Italy tomorrow night.
2 comments:
Ted,
That's amazing. Indeed, our seasons are different. Here in Carinthia the trees have been bare of leaves for more than two weeks now :)
And the moods? That's very hard. I guess, it's a fine occupation for art theoreticians to mull about the ways artists pierce the moods of their viewers, but as a practicing artist I think that thriving for it does not bring me necessarily nearer that goal, if a goal it is at all. Art always has an unconscious, non-intellectual, magic component. If not, then it is craft, science or kitsch.
It is sometimes hard enough to get into a creative mood, thus I think it is wasted effort when being in there, to split my concentration. Whatever happens while I work, it is what it is and I have to live with it later on, when I try to make it an Image of the Day. When I, who has all the work, have to live with it, I think it's only fair that the viewer has to do so as well. If that arrogance loses me a viewer, I'll live with it. I can only stretch myself so far.
But, what do I know, my friend Ted uses to ask :)
Andreas
Ted I love the entire concept of these images and the movement within as you know I would be drawn to that. I love the fact that sometimes what makes a photo amazing is that you did find it in your own back yard. I also agree that the mood really does dictate what we shoot and how we shoot it perhaps. I know that for me the ballet stuff has brought me back to classical music after several years of hard country. LOL...and that it does inspire a different kind of beauty to be seen. If that makes sense at all. I totally love this work. Zoooom away
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