Finding Inspiration
Many people think that in order to produce art, you need to be born with the talent needed to produce such meaningful art. This assumption, made by most people, is very false. All you need in order to produce meaningful art that makes people stop and think is to make the image mean something to you. This is the by far the most difficult step, as for many it takes years to truly understand yourself and to be able to make your work personal and distinctive. Having your work mean something important to you is the only way to get others to appreciate it as much as you do, which is why it takes a lot of consideration and tweaking before you publish an image. The work you produce has to have a story behind it in order for it to be good, and as a photographer my job is to record the feelings and emotions that come from the story behind the image.
This is why I enjoy portrait photography so much, because seeing people being themselves in their natural habit is one of the best ways to portray who they are and how the photographer feels about them. My photography teacher, Mr. Royce Thompson, once told me that "The way the photographer captures their subject often shows how the photographer feels about said subject." I abide by these words when working on an image, both when I'm am there, taking the picture, and when I am post-processing. While I have yet to reach my potential and realize my unique style, I am getting closer to it by the minute, and soon enough I will be able to shoot things very personal to me with full comfort.
Finding what makes you passionate isn't as hard as many may think. It isn't hard to track down in our past what attracts us to certain things, and it most likely comes from one specific memory. In the book Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland, the author (one of them, doesn't say which one) describes how they can "remember to within one heartbeat the moment I first saw an Edward Weston print." He describes how seeing the image changed his view on photography and changed his style entirely, turning it into something that he did not know he had within him. Finding inspiration in your photos is much easier than many people think, yet so many people have a lot of trouble finding it. Finding what you enjoy doing and what speaks to you is something that takes a lot of time and patience in order to properly understand who you are as a person and how your photos define you.
This is why I enjoy portrait photography so much, because seeing people being themselves in their natural habit is one of the best ways to portray who they are and how the photographer feels about them. My photography teacher, Mr. Royce Thompson, once told me that "The way the photographer captures their subject often shows how the photographer feels about said subject." I abide by these words when working on an image, both when I'm am there, taking the picture, and when I am post-processing. While I have yet to reach my potential and realize my unique style, I am getting closer to it by the minute, and soon enough I will be able to shoot things very personal to me with full comfort.
Finding what makes you passionate isn't as hard as many may think. It isn't hard to track down in our past what attracts us to certain things, and it most likely comes from one specific memory. In the book Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland, the author (one of them, doesn't say which one) describes how they can "remember to within one heartbeat the moment I first saw an Edward Weston print." He describes how seeing the image changed his view on photography and changed his style entirely, turning it into something that he did not know he had within him. Finding inspiration in your photos is much easier than many people think, yet so many people have a lot of trouble finding it. Finding what you enjoy doing and what speaks to you is something that takes a lot of time and patience in order to properly understand who you are as a person and how your photos define you.
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