Personal photography
Other people’s photos are always more interesting to me. When I look at other people’s photos, I always find them better made than mine: the technique is better, the composition is better, the tones are better, the colours or contrast are better, the artistic vision is more obvious, they’re more innovative, and the general idea is more interesting.
One of the things I’ve struggled with lately is what I called to myself “the trap of meaningfulness”. I need to put names on things to think about them, even if it’s not the right one others use, don’t judge me.
I’ve watched, and sometimes was involved in, countless conversations about creativity that devolve into the same tired refrain: “Quality matters more than quantity”, “creativity can’t be controlled”, and my personal favourite “I prefer creating high-value work rather than churning out rubbish”.
This thinking is nonsense.
Since I restarted photography after long hiatus, I decided to concentrate on monochrome. For some reason, it came naturally to me to not produce colourful images anymore.
I’m a technician. Not an artist. I have no doubt about that. So why do I pretend to make photos? (in the Ansel Adams sense)
There is a scene in the animated series Archer where everybody is stuck in the elevator. Krieger, the mad scientist, is holding a Thermos bottle. Someone asks him: is that soup in there? And he answers in an enigmatic way: define “soup”.
I discussed wanting but failing to start a project lately. My conclusion was that if you can’t find an obvious project, one way of starting could be to choose a technology, a constraint, or a theme, then go out and take photos to see where it goes.
I was in Oslo lately (for work). So I decided to put that conclusion into practice. I decided:
Finally, I decided to experiment with a few techniques:
I’ve spent the better part of six months telling myself I need a photography project. The logic is sound: focused work develops technique faster than scattered shooting, sustained exploration reveals patterns in my visual thinking, and constraints paradoxically liberate creativity. Yet here I sit, project-less, waiting for something to ignite sufficient passion to sustain months of dedicated work.
Following my previous post about the obsession with details, photography genres require different ways of seeing and representing the subjects that I find hard to adapt to.
Did you like my attempt at YT-style clickbait? Seriously, there is no such thing. There is no perfect setup; there is no one way to do things; there is no best lens/camera/film. Only you can know what gear works for you given a set of circumstances. Let’s move on from that.
As I’m going to travel to Oslo, as I do a couple of times a year for work (I work for vikings), I thought I’d show my camera travel setup and explain my choices. Not because I do it better than anyone else and I have some magical knowledge of what is best, but just out of interest, because I like to know what people use for their own photography. Feel free to show me yours.
