Waking Ideas

These are a few of my notes from my trip in late May through early June 2008 to Greece, England, Scotland, and the US state of Georgia. I’ve been rewriting the notes and adding different thoughts and turning scribbled freehand code-like notes into legible, and hopefully comprehendible articles. I’ve also had quite a bit of time to think about everything, time to process all the different cognitive input that I rapidly consumed.  Letting the entire experience soak in allows this, and each time I retell what I did with my summer, I learn more and more from these notes and memories.

One of the first things I did when I found out I was going to Greece was plot out shots in my head.  I had visualized what the photos of Greece looked like before I got to Greece.  This was my first mistake.  It was my first time out of the country in years and I had forgotten what it was like to be in a completely new place, with a completely different language that uses different characters.  While the culture shock nearly threw off my groove, it did throw all my visualization out the window.  Everything was better than I could have ever imagined, and the decision of what to keep and what to crop out of the picture became one of the most difficult parts of the trip.  I wanted to capture the entire visual experience on camera but the scene you see through the viewfinder is different than the one you see with your eyes.   This difficulty aside, I tried to stick to one of my few rules: keep the photos interesting.

Keep the photos interesting means don’t shoot the same photo everyone else.  Don’t shoot that typical vacation photo that everyone else has seen.  They’ve seen it before, they don’t need to see it again.  Do look around for photos.  Look for shots that are just calling for someone to capture a photo worth a thousand words.  Not all photos are created equal.  Some photos are ten word shots, other photos are worth thousands of words, and some their beauty could fill entire libraries of words.

I remember a question someone asked to me when I had just got back from the trip and people were reviewing the photos: why were you taking pictures of the ears of a horse?  Isn’t that a little strange? That question seemed a little bit strange to me and caught me off guard.  I wasn’t thinking, is taking pictures of the horse’s ears strange?  I was thinking, what is the shot no one else will take? What will set my vacation photos apart from all the rest of the billions that are taken every summer? How can I get an interesting shot? Take this common subject and turn the objective of the shoot around. Instead of shooting photos of a horse, I was taking candid portraits of a superstar whose face is known around the world, and no one has the up close and personal shots.  Instead of shooting with a huge telephoto lens like a paparazzi, I’d grab my 24 and 50.  Instead of a full body shot, I’d get up in this horses face and find something interesting to take a photo of.

Once you get into the mindset of looking for photos, it becomes a new game and obsession.  Everything you see becomes an photo opportunity, not to take photos of subjects, but to take interesting photos that tell their own history.  My family had been to Greece twice before and returned with barely any photos. I was devastated each time they returned with a few pictures of everyone and the typical vacation shots.  I promised myself before I left that I would take photos of every little thing and capture the spirit of the adventure.  I went to Greece looking to take photos, create memories, and meet my Greek relatives.  I came back with more than I expected: I returned with stories.

1 Comment — post a comment