I found the excerpts from this piece inspirational and identifiable. I found myself highlighting, underlining, and annotating a fair few lines that resonated with me. For example, on page 15, he writes, "They've [photographers] been given what they did not earn, and as is the way with unexpected gifts, the surprise carries an emotional blessing." Sometimes I feel weird opposing senses of guilt and pride when I make a photograph I sort of just stumbled into. So many photographers plan their photographs, which I find amazing. But I fail to recognize the unique pleasure and candidness that arises out of taking a camera with you where you don't know what kinds of photo's you'll make. This event instills in me an emotion much like the one Adams describes. I feel as though I have been thrust upon with an undeserving gift, but feel an immense gratitude that it was presented upon me and that I have a tool to make it become a photograph. On a shallow level, this idea can be quite stark and uninspiring, but on a much deeper level, this idea is piercing and quite overwhelming when in the midst of its experience.
I took this photo on Randall's Island and printed it last autumn. I'm quite pleased with it. One of my favorite photos I've ever taken and it was not planned (with the exception of the composition). The man just biked into my shot and thus the opportunity was perfect.
"Smart is okay, but lucky is better," Adams elaborates on page 16. When a photographer shoots to satisfy an intrinsic, immediate desire within themselves, it keeps them alive. In my experience anyway, this is why I shoot. I love capturing moments that deserve to exist longer than the moment in which they are born. Beautiful moments that can provoke inspiration, beauty, emotion, or memories are moments I seek to capture, wait for, create, or manipulate. I love luck. I think luck is the essence of free will and spontaneity. It's the opposite of mathematics--reliance, dependability, 'absolutes', finite ideas. It's creativity, it's bridging gaps between circumstances that don't occur together. It's humor. I love when Adams talks about humor, too. He quotes Mark Twain saying that "analyzing humor was like dissecting a frog--both die in the process." Humor is a life that moves forward like time. We can't really explain its complexity, and it's one of the most powerful things known to us.
My bassist, playing in his underwear.
I don't even want to claim that this photograph is funny, I was merely photographing a funny moment. Someone might smile when they look at this, because it's sort of a ridiculous pairing of dramatic lighting and composition and the visible situation.
I love the way Adams talks about money and dogs. I can't help but connect these two sections. Dogs do what they love to do because they love it. The reward is intrinsic to the activity, much like artists and photographers in particular. We do what we do because if we were left to our own devices, this is what we would do. Money, however is a strange third-party incentive. If I told a dog I was going to pay it to be a dog, and if it had a consciousness, what would it do? For some reason, with humans, it's nearly like a double-negative. The more conflicting incentive, the less passion there is behind doing these things we once loved. There's a sense of identity loss in work for work instead of work for play. A dog has no problem chasing a ball around all day until it's passed out, but a dog wouldn't be a dog anymore if it needed an incentive to do this awesome, fun thing.
I'm not really sure if my comparison is making sense anymore, I'm just writing and seeing where this goes. The last paragraph of the Dogs section reads: "Art depends on there being affection in its creator's life, and an artist must find ways, like everyone else, to nourish it. A photographer down on his or her knees picturing a dog has found pleasure enough to make many things possible."
I love photographing animals, and I love seeing the way humans interact with animals. Animals are wonderful symbols of affection in the way they show it to humans. In this picture below, my friends are all staring at dozens of koi fish that gathered around them at the short of a pond at Pepsico.
Why do I take pictures?
I make pictures to remember, to forget, to make moments last longer than they intrinsically lasted. I make photos to make things seem like things they aren't--using the camera to deceive and abstract the world around us. This interests me just as much as making photos that depict true, familiar reality--candids and secretly taken photos. What's wonderful about photos, however, is that they are never familiar. As much as we can relate to what we see, we have never seen any novel photo before, so the situation is new, the people are new, the trees are new, the scene is new, and the composition is new. I make photos to help me and people that see my photos construct and break down our realities.
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