Posts Tagged ‘inspiration’
Deep thought as a way to make better pictures
I recently went back and re-edited a shot I took in autumn last year. Because I already had a finished  shot from the same series I thought hard about how I want to process this one and if the two could somehow be combined in the same context. So I went back to the first shot, examined it for a while and thought about what stood out and was inspiring about it.
Too many people motordrive their cameras because digital pictures “cost nothing” and put very little of themselves into their images. This is a valid logic when the goal is just to collect information, getting as many pixels as possible in a short amount of time. When this isn’t the case it is important for an image to convey a context, to tell a story or to induce an emotion and to get people thinking. Although other people may not feel the exact same emotion, if they feel anything, be it positive or negative and if they can somehow relate a piece of themselves to my image, I’ve done what I set out to do.
This got me thinking about why I fell in love with the subject of these images in the first place. As a kid there was nothing I enjoyed more than to run through dry fallen oak leaves in autumn. Simple times, when I didn’t have a care in the world. There was always something magical about autumn leaves and the freedom I felt every time I ran through a pile of them. To me this couple of images embodies just that. So that’s what the dreamy soft focus, the high grain grittyness and the strong contrasts between the snow, the leaves and the not too subtle black vignette are meant to accomplish.
Convey an emotion. Move someone with your image.
