People take photos for so many reasons, but what’s the real reason? What is the underlying reason we have a desire to photograph things? In this inaugural episode we will discuss that.
Transcript
All right, hello, everybody.
My name’s Sean.
You found The Tie Dyed Wanderer, and this is The Tie Dyed Wanderer In Focus podcast.
It’s a podcast about photography, as you can see by the description in the artwork for the podcast, as well as the actual description.
So I guess that’s not a surprise.
And this is brand new, this is episode one.
So a really quick history about myself.
I am a photographer, I am a storm chaser.
I do a lot of landscape, wildlife, obviously, storm photos as much as I can, although not as much as I’d like.
I used to be a photography instructor for a local camera store.
I sold cameras.
I’ve shot Pentax, Canon, Nikon.
I have a Mamiya medium format that I love to shoot, and an ancient graphic view four by five.
A camera which is an absolute blast to shoot.
I’ve shot film.
Obviously, I shoot predominantly digital now because that’s just the world we live in today.
The purpose of this podcast is to share, not only photography knowledge, because there’s a ton of how-to videos on YouTube, which I’ll get to some YouTube topics here in a second.
But there’s a ton of information on how-to out there.
And yeah, I’m going to touch on things.
I’m going to talk about that.
That really isn’t the predominant focus of this podcast.
This podcast is about the thought process behind the photography, the thought process about why we take pictures, which is actually today’s topic is, why do we take pictures?
Why do we click that shutter button?
But I want to share the thought process behind capturing images.
And some of it’s going to be for me as we move forward and hopefully get this podcast established and be relatively consistent and normal and good and helpful, more importantly for you, we’ll have some guest speakers on here.
I’ve already talked to a few, a couple sound kind of interested, so we’ll hopefully have some absolutely amazing content.
The target audience for you guys is really the newer photographers, but really any photographer.
You know, us photographers that have been shooting, I mean, I’ve been taking pictures now for, wow, 20 years.
That’s, okay, a couple of years.
Not professionally that whole time.
And also, I took a pretty long break in the middle where I didn’t pick up my camera at all.
It just sat in a camera bag and looked pretty for a while.
But it really is intended for everybody because we can always use a different perspective when shooting pictures, when creating images.
So that’s kind of the things, the goals that I want to accomplish, what I want to do here.
If at the end of this podcast, you like it, you like the style, you like kind of where I’m going with things, be sure to subscribe to the podcast.
And what’s really cool is, yes, this is a regular old podcast.
But if you head over to my YouTube channel, which you can find me at youtube.com/attiedyedwanderer, the at symbol there.
And I’m going to be making these into basically enhanced podcasts.
Apple years ago had an enhanced podcast where it was a podcast, but you could add imagery into the podcast that would play back on the podcast.
They don’t do that anymore, and it’s really frustrating because it was so helpful for podcasts.
It really took this medium to a different place.
So I get it, YouTube has kind of replaced that.
So I’m going to take these podcasts, and if you follow over there, you’ll actually be able to get a little bit additional content that will have up on the screen.
Now, I’m not recording it as I’m having any plans to do it.
So I’m recording first, and then I’m going to go back and put in the images.
So honestly, I have no idea what you’re going to be looking at as I’m talking here.
So let’s get started with today’s topic.
Again, I mentioned it already.
It’s why do we take pictures?
Why do we click that button?
And I guess where I’m kind of thinking is, there are really three reasons, right?
That we take pictures.
There’s the everyday person with their camera phone, or maybe even point and shoot, or people that have way too much money and don’t know what to do with it, SLRs, or mirrorless, sorry.
I still call them SLRs even though I know they’re not.
It’s a force of habit.
That’s what I grew up with.
It’s a hard habit to change.
I’m working on it.
But those are the people that, you take pictures of your kid swinging on a swing set.
You take pictures of this really cool thing that you saw while you were out driving around.
It’s the snapshots.
It’s the, I’m taking pictures to document that I was here.
I’m taking pictures to say, I did that, or my kid did that.
I do that all the time.
I’ve got a daughter myself, and I’m always taking pictures of her just being silly.
The reason I make the distinction between documenting as a snapshot and documenting in the next group that I’ll talk about is that group, there’s, you’re not putting, you’re not putting the thought into the end result.
Your goal is simply to capture that moment.
And I’m not going to say that those people are not photographers.
There are some people that will say that, well, they’re not actually photographers.
They’re just taking pictures.
No, if you’re actively capturing an image, you’re a photographer.
That’s what it is.
That doesn’t mean you’re a pro.
That doesn’t mean you’re an enthusiast or even an amateur photographer.
That just means that you took the picture.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I encourage more people to do that.
Photography is a way for us, as humans, especially people like me that have horrible memories, although really good for some things, to capture that moment in time.
And it doesn’t matter if that moment in time is an important moment.
If you’re taking a picture of it, it’s important to you in that moment.
It’s important to you.
It might…
nobody else may care.
But to you, it’s a moment that you want to capture and remember.
Otherwise, why would you take a picture of it?
So, that’s the first category.
And again, there’s nothing wrong with that.
That’s awesome.
And that’s where I think a lot of us start.
And then as we start doing it more, we’re like, oh, we like doing this.
How do I make my little snapshots better?
And it grows from there.
I can’t count the number of people when I was teaching photography.
That’s exactly how they started.
They came in there like, yeah, I want a camera so I can take pictures of my kid.
And then over the next few months, they’re like, well, now some other people thought that my pictures of my kid were amazing, and they asked me to do pictures of their kid.
And I need to get a better this to be able to do that, which that whole what is the best of anything is an entirely different discussion that I am adamant about, and we will talk about that, but not today.
So, the snapshot photographer is the spark a lot of times for photographers that go on to make meaningful careers out of it, or just create absolutely beautiful and stunning images.
As you take that up a notch, when now your snapshots become deliberate, you’re thinking about the story that you want to tell with that image that you’re capturing.
Now, we’ve moved into the actual telling a story with photography.
And there’s a lot of ways to do that.
The first thing that always comes to mind, I’m going to tell a story with photography, is I’m a photojournalist or I’m an editorial type photographer.
Because that’s their job, whether they’re coming up with the stories to tell or their editor is saying, hey, this is the story, go out and get me images to help me convey that.
Now you’ve moved into a different realm of photography.
Now you’re not just taking pictures because you just want to record that moment.
You’re taking pictures because you want to record that moment and tell others why that moment was important.
You want to convey a message behind your image.
And again, like I said, sometimes it’s you’re telling the story.
Sometimes it’s you’ve come up with an idea and a message that you want to share.
For example, me, I’ve got a long-term project that I will be working on for most likely the rest of my life.
But I want to tell the story of how climate change is impacting our environment, our planet, but using our national parks as that lens because everybody can associate the national parks or with the national parks.
So I want to try and tell that story.
And it’s going to be a long project.
There’s a lot of national parks.
There’s a lot of topics and things to cover in that.
But that’s my story that I want to tell.
That’s the message that I want to convey.
And again, it could be you work for a magazine.
And the magazine says, hey, we’ve got this story about Jim who just beat the world record in, I don’t know, taco making.
I have no idea.
You need to go out and give us images that share that excitement or share that message with our audience.
So again, that’s a really important world of photography too.
The next side, and this is where I more fall into for the predominant amount of my photography, as well as so many other photographers that I know, is you want to share an emotion.
And that’s really important in photography, in any photography really, you want to capture and share an emotion.
In this case, instead of trying to capture an emotion for an editorial purpose, which is incredibly valuable to telling stories, because we can tell stories more effectively by conveying the emotion that’s associated with that story.
I’m more talking about you’re conveying the emotion that you felt the moment you were looking at that scene.
For example, in this image, I know we’ll be up on the screen.
Two years ago, has it been two years already?
Or is it a year?
I don’t remember.
One of my trips out to Badlands National Park in South Dakota, I had the goal of taking some sunrise pictures.
So I woke up well before sunrise, traveled the half hour, so 40 minutes, to the location that I was kind of thinking about in the park.
It’s a surprisingly big park for not being a really big park.
But got there, the thing is, when I got out of my tent that morning, I couldn’t see my vehicle that was parked 20 feet away.
The fog was so incredibly thick.
But I said, I’m going to go out, and we’ll see what I can capture.
So I get to the location, and I can’t see the canyon, we’ll call it canyon, that I was photographing.
I can’t see the spires, or the rock formations at all.
Now granted, the sun’s not up, so it’s still dark, but there’s no detail at all.
The fog is so thick.
So I set up my camera anyways, to at least be there and ready.
And then I put in some headphones, with some awesome music, and just sat there, until the sun came up.
Until things changed.
And as the sun started finally breaking the horizon, as the sky started lighting up, the fog started to burn off.
And the image that I saw in my mind, looking at that scene, was by far the most beautiful sunrise that I had ever photographed.
The serene feel, and that’s the name of the image, is Sunrise Serenity.
But the serenity, the peacefulness, the calm that I felt in that moment was absolutely amazing.
And that’s what I wanted to convey in this image.
So, capturing emotion is, can be one of two things.
You’re either capturing your subject’s emotion, or you’re making decisions about the composition of the frame.
What to put in the, or in the frame, what to leave out of the frame.
The technical settings, you know, our shutter speeds, our apertures, all this.
All of those coalesce into creating an image, and that’s where being proficient in all of those things help you become a more effective photographer.
You know, I don’t want to preach on the, you have to be a technical master in photography to be a good photographer, because you don’t.
I know a lot of photographers that they know the basics, and that’s it.
But they are so skilled at being able to compose a shot and capture that emotion, that those technical shortcomings can sometimes be forgotten or forgiven.
Within reason, obviously.
On the flip side of that, knowing those skills can help you change the feel and the emotion of a scene compared to what is actually there.
You know, whether we’re blurring or freezing action, whether we’re using a shallow or a deep depth of field to help isolate the subject or control where our eyes look.
And that even goes with the overall exposure of the scene, deciding where the bright spot, bright points are in that scene because our brains tend to zoom in and focus on the bright areas of a scene.
So knowing all these things are incredibly important tools that we have at our disposal as a photographer to help convey that emotion.
But you as a photographer have to decide what that emotion is that you want to convey and what the best way is to convey that.
And again, I’m not saying that like the other types of photographers aren’t conveying emotion because they absolutely are.
The most effective photojournalism images over the last hundred years of photography, the most effective, the most meaningful are the ones that have shown pure emotion.
So emotion is really, that’s our goal in the world of photography.
That’s why we push the button.
Is ultimately, it comes down to, we want to share a moment in time of how we felt.
And that really does go for any of these three categories that I’ve kind of broken things down into.
But ultimately, that’s what photography is about.
That’s why we take pictures.
Is we want to share how we feel, how we see with the rest of the world.
And the awesome thing is, is it can both be as easy or as complex as you want, but it can potentially be open to anybody that wants to take the time to learn the skills that they need to learn to be able to get there.
The other thing I want to point out is, along with that, I guess it kind of goes into the same line, is a lot of times, is there, especially in the social media world.
And I’m guilty of this too, that I put too much stock into what the world of social media says.
But social media isn’t real a lot of times, unless you have the few honest friends that you do actually trust, and those are the ones that I value the input of.
But if you pick up a camera, whether it’s a cell phone camera, whether it’s a film camera, whether it’s a digital SLR, or a mirrorless, or a medium format, whatever, if you’re capturing images, for whatever reason, you’re a photographer.
End of discussion.
Are you a top-notch pro photographer?
No, maybe not.
Are you a serious enthusiast?
No, and that’s okay too.
Are you just somebody that likes to play with the camera on your phone?
Guess what?
Cool.
You’re a photographer.
Take images.
Have fun.
Tell your story.
Share your feelings with the world.
That is completely okay.
And if somebody says that it’s not, they’re wrong.
Anyways, that was the topic for today.
I hope that that insight was at least remotely helpful, and I wasn’t just rambling.
As we go forward, and especially right now, although I do have a topic list kind of put together already, but as we move forward, I definitely want to hear your ideas for future topics and share your questions.
I will do my best to answer them.
I do not know everything about photography.
I am the first to admit it.
Again, I haven’t been shooting professionally for a very long time.
And even then, that was part-time professional.
And I’m not going to get into the discussion of what professional versus not professional is.
But it is what it is, right?
So be sure to hop on to my website.
You can get there much easier by just typing tiedyedwanderer.com.
Just like tie-dyed t-shirts, you know?
Because I do enjoy those greatly.
And leave a comment on the blog post for this episode.
Or if you so chose, and you decided to wander over to YouTube, make sure you leave a comment on the video there.
And either way, I hope that you subscribe so you can catch the next episode.
I’ve got a few ideas for what I’m going to talk about next week.
Yes, these are going to be hopefully weekly episodes.
So go out, take pictures, and most importantly, enjoy yourself.
Have a little bit of fun.
Thanks for listening.
Again, my name’s Sean.
I’m The Tie Dyed Wanderer, and this is the first episode of The Tie Dyed Wanderer In Focus.