dione961 wrote:
I was wondering why these things matter so much. But then I realised that even that is OK. Have your own opinion, vision, etc., but maybe, let others have theirs as well??
I've travelled a good part of the world - almost all of it "off the beaten track". I began travelling for a reason: to learn about the lives and views of people outside my own narrow world. I use a camera to capture what I find out there (here) and what I do find is this: there is pure, simple love, and arresting beauty, literally everywhere - even right at home. You don't have to look to find it: you just see it. The camera is my tool for trying to capture it. I haven't worked out how to show other people what I'm finding, but that's my vision: to show the love and beauty that is absolutely everywhere around us, that we are part of. Every image I make is an effort to show this.
I don't think of my efforts as art, but as a story. I am trying hard to learn how to get most things "right" (fraught as that term is) before I press the shutter, because I have no PP skills or software.
Yet it seems as though it should be OK for others to see their work (or anyone's work) as art, or not; and to think SOOC is "pure", or not, or PP as "inevitable" or not, and so on. Provided it's done respectfully, maybe even thoughtfully, all such views should be OK to share, especially on this forum.
So, at great risk of being labelled a hypocrite for even asking the question, is there a way we can all just live and let live?
I was wondering why these things matter so much. ... (
show quote)
Um, yes?
There are probably a zillion opinions here. We are mostly an older crowd who know what we like. We know what we think about the world, and how we think it is structured. That's influenced by culture, education, experience, family, peer pressure, and all sorts of other baggage that makes us who we are.
How I see my work as a photographer is completely different from many others' work, yet similar to many others' work. And that's okay! I respect others' rights to do as they please, so long as they don't step on my rights. We reach problem territory when people get into narrow, ignorant, fundamentalist mindsets — i.e.; "My way of thinking or belief system is right and yours isn't."
I make some attempts at art photography. I do some photojournalism, some portraiture, some event photography, and a lot of step-by-step training documentation. I do stills, video, and hybrids of both.
Once in a while, I'll photograph a sports event, or a landscape, but I'm really not equipped for that work, so I have to rent gear to do it.
I use some "SOOC" JPEG workflow, mostly for low-budget, tight deadline, controlled lighting in a studio setting sorts of work. I use a raw workflow with post processing for anything I need to manipulate, and in situations where the environment, lighting, and other factors are fluid.
It helps that I worked in black-and-white for a long time before I took up slide photography to create AV shows and multi-image programs back in the '70s and '80s. Everything I learned in the darkroom helped me learn Photoshop and Lightroom and work with raw files. There are digital parallels for virtually everything we ever did with film.
I also learned techniques that benefit 'SOOC' work. Everything we did with slide films has a parallel with JPEG capture. It's just a lot easier with digital!
So, I just like photography. It's a very versatile tool for me. But it's always been just one of my favorite tools. The others are all convergence technologies exemplified by the tools in my iPhone.