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No Longer The Only One

~ A site about photography and other stuff by Richard Keeling

No Longer The Only One

Monthly Archives: February 2017

What Counts?

16 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by musickna in Photography

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Tags

appreciation, art, meaning, photograph, popularity, websites, worth

Girl and Seagull by Richard Keeling on 500px.com

I’ve been taking photographs for a long time now.

Decades.

Sometimes seriously, sometimes less so. But it’s only been comparatively recently that I’ve spent much time exploring the work of others.

I’ve looked at a lot of photographs. It’s easy to do so when so many are up on the web. Many of mine are too.

Lots of the pictures I’ve looked at have been technically superb. Lots have garnered considerable praise. But the awful truth is – if it really is awful – is that I don’t like almost all of them.

In this era of freely exchanged ‘likes’ and ‘loves’, it feels heretical to make such a statement. But it’s true.

This doesn’t please me. To find myself as some sortĀ of photographic misanthrope isn’t really where I want to be. Yet – I look at these pictures and all I feel is an indifference and coldness. They don’t speak to me.

Perhaps if nothing spoke to me, I would worry. But the work of the greatest photographers does. Not perhaps the readily trotted out Ansel Adams’s of this work, but renowned but maybe lesser known artists such as Cindy Sherman and Garry Winogrand. Looking at photography books by these artists (Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” usually tops my list) is reassuring. Reassuring not least because many of these photographs would not fare well in today’s online ‘like and love’ environment.

I need thoughts like these as a kind of backup. A backup for a certain sense of disappointment that I get when I put up a photograph (such as the above “Girl and Seagull”) only to find it to be ignored or treated with indifference on the ‘like and love’ websites. Because part of me really wants that kind of recognition, shallow though it may be.

For “Girl and Seagull” remains one of my favorite photographs ever. One I regard as one of my very best. A feeling that has not wavered in the face of indifference over the years since I took it.

It counts.

I need to remind myself of this from time to time. I’m only human after all.

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The Total, Complete and Overwhelming Irrelevance of Camera Equipment

09 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by musickna in Photography

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

aptitude, art, cameras, concentration, equipment, lenses

Maybe I needed to fill my basement with dozens of cameras and lenses to learn this lesson.

Maybe.

Maybe it’s just age and experience and the niggling realization that my best photographs are completely independent of whatever I used to photograph them.

But at last it has sunk in. Good photography is totally, completely and overwhelmingly independent of whatever is used to make the image.

All that counts is what you do with what you’ve got.

Still – I hanker after and buy more equipment. Use it too. But that’s simply for the pleasure of a new toy. Often without planning it, I squeeze out a good photograph if I’m feeling and acting sufficiently inspired.

This is what I need to concentrate upon.

Two Trees in a Cornfield II by Richard Keeling on 500px.com

 

 

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