Creativity!
Of photography, I have always said...."You just have to have been there". And I still believe, reduced to basics, that is the secret to preserving that one 250th of a second of our lives, absorbed by our brains, then recorded on film, or placed in the digital ether.
Ya just gotta be there, at least to start with.
Sorta like if a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody there to see it. Did it make a noise? Or some sort of drivel like that. I think I once took a course, probably psychology or something, in college looking at that same stuff about the tree falling. Can't remember if it was pre-flunking out or post! But the wild child stories have to wait for another time.
The above image says "Boy were you lucky to be there at the right time".
Sure!
No, I just had to be there. Take a small boat out of Annapolis, Maryland....cruise out the Severn River past the Naval Academy and into the Chesapeake Bay. Lots of photo ops along the way. Take about 10 rolls of slide film, at $9 a roll of 36 {yup that was when we actually used film}, get home, develop the film {at $9 per roll}, cull out three quarters of the photos made.....and then print something. Well if you had a bluebird or grey sky, you pretty much had nothing but a postcard image.
But, if you were tricky in the darkroom, you could take the basic image of your liking, slap on a sky picture in another slide of the appropriate size...merge the two and make a new slide and print that. Let's see is that cheating pure photography, or the art thereof. It was all photography and darkroom. Nothing else! Ansel Adams was known not so much for his art of going click, click, but of his extraordinary work in the darkroom. Of course if you had to lug hundreds of pounds of equipment up 5,000 feet of western mountains to take one picture you'd be known for something else as well.
Today we do the same thing in the "Digital darkroom" and it's called cheating the photographic process. Basically the same thing only different tools. Some would say better and more effective tools. But isn't "Taking" the picture digitally, the initial and basic cheat on the photographic process?
No....no...no, it's a different art.
We call it photography, but only for lack of another title....we are lazy in that regard. But that is why my belly is growing and I got turkey neck and elbows.
This is an image of the Chicago skyline taken with Lake Michigan in the foreground. Kind of a crummy sky but the city is clean and tack sharp. Probably a simple postcard image or one of those you see on the social media with some catchy phrase embossed like "Visit Chicago, the world's murder capital". Or some other sort of degrading comment about the town, the mayor, the lake, the buildings, yada yada yada! But you get the point.
What to do. What to do.
How about this!
A different form of creativity!
Will it sell....well, we'll see. It would be fantastic printed on metal for a lakeside office or condo.
Or maybe there was a reason for flunking out?
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