Category: overnight notes

Learning Photography

Posted on Posted in creativity, da net, film, overnight notes

Making a task hard so it turns into art. OR, the art of fooling yourself

First, let us begin with learning to draw. We begin with the circle. Don’t worry that you can’t draw a circle, no one can; however, you can make a dot. that is where we start.

Make a dot on the paper. See. Easy, wasn’t it. Tomorrow you will make another dot next to the first, just a little to one side and down. Each day continue, making one dot each day. By this time next year you will have made your first circle.

Repeat this for ten years, until you have ten circles. It took a long time. Was hard to do. Required great patience as well as dedication. You may now think of yourself as an artist.

This is absurd, but, it is what most of the weekenders think photography as art is. Long slow tedius. making the requirements of a picture fall second to the art of picturing.

You should also wrap this in phrases based upon: light, vision, craft and such. Of course, nothing that can be seen isn’t based upon those same words.

Bird is the Wird

Posted on Posted in overnight notes

An assignment for EXS students in the 70s. This time of the year, thanksgiving break, the freshmen had gotten to the point where souping and printing film was comfortable. they’d begun to acquire a vocabulary based upon the history of art; photography being an extension of realist drawings. As a stretch exercise, I told them this week they would do the dreaded ‘figurative’ work. Since they would be back home, with access to friends not at Syracuse University, they could do a ‘nude’ study.

Several years into the assignment, I got the image I’d always expected: Turkey.

It spread. Next year, the assignment was blown. Everyone did something with a turkey. The best shot though was a group of naked people seated at a Last Supper with the Bird in Full Pilgrim attire. don’t know where she went. I hope she did well

put the camera down

Posted on Posted in art school, overnight notes

I’ve been doing pictures my entire life. When I was younger, I thought everyone could draw. I learned they can’t; they’re too afraid. Many people make photographs because they can’t draw, yet they want to make pictures, express themselves. It was a while, maybe 3 years, before I realized that the lousy photographs were made by those who were the worst at drawing, those who were most afraid of figuring out what a picture looks like, what a picture is about.

Please, if you can’t draw, are afraid of making pictures, put the camera down and take up golf.