enlightenment

As many, if not everyone, has heard by now, a highly contagious virus is making its way around the globe seemingly faster than light itself. Here in South Korea, the number of cases continue to balloon not only daily, but hourly.

One thing that this temporary (hopefully) lifestyle change has brought with it, is the reduction in the amount of time that I would normally spend outside exploring. Luckily, at the time of this post, there have been no confirmed cases in my city, although they did track one person through a nearby subway station. (Yes, track. There is a website that posts the known travel paths of some confirmed patients before they knew they had the virus.) So, as a nature/travel photographer the question became what could I do with my time if I’m not going to be outside.

When you sit down and plan it out, there are a number of things that will easily fill a day.

Planning

One thing that is quite important as a photographer is being able to recognize your weaknesses. Having no traditional formal training in photography, I have a few.

YouTube videos, these days, play a huge role in my learning. I have learned to be careful when I use the term “self taught”. Many people tend to use the term to say that they didn’t go to a college or university photography programme, like myself. However, as I was growing up, I read books and magazines (the Internet was still very, very young at the time) to learn techniques, what f-stops were, lens distortions and how to work with them, etc. All of these books and articles were written by people, many of whom did go through formal training. It is these authors that taught me. There may have been more experimentation on my part as I physically tried to understand what they had written. But make no mistake I didn’t pick up a camera and figure out everything without any help. They were my teachers.

One thing I think that traditional formal training would have helped me immensely is lighting. Being able to handle and physically set up strobes and soft boxes in a controlled environment with supervision is something I wish I had experienced. Throughout my entire life with a camera in my hands, I’ve relied on natural lighting. I didn’t even start using reflectors or diffusers until fairly recently (relatively speaking). One of my first purchases after my first digital camera was a big powerful speed light. One that I’ve never really learned how to use.

Task #1

Learning how to use my speed light and how to light still life or products in a mini studio.

I started by using the soft box that my wife had given me years ago as a gift along with my one speed light. I started experimenting with where to position the light and how to light whatever object I could find around the house.

This also lead to watching a lot more videos on how to use artificial lighting.

Task #2

Studio Design

After editing some of the shots, I started to see some more possibilities. It also got me thinking about the studios that these lighting videos were being shot in, and their lighting set ups and the similarities. This lead to me redesigning my office. I built a track that runs from one side of the room to the other and attached my speed light to it. I also attached a diffuser to the rail so it could slide into the position and angle that I wanted.

Task #3

Re-editing

It is also a great time to go back through the archives. There are 4 things I like to so when I go back through the archives.

Look back at some of the iffy files that I had thought I would go back and edit at a later date.
Delete files that I thought I might fix, but have come to the realization that they will never get edited.
Edit the iffy files that made the second cut.
Re-edit files that had already made the cut, but using new techniques or since it’s a new day a new artistic outlook on that file. *

*There was one photo in particular that when I edited I wasn’t sure which I had liked better, the warm white balance or the cool white balance. Your vision can change from day to day.

By watching editing videos, (as “photoshopping” is still pretty new to myself as well) I learn different ways of doing things. I watched a video earlier today that even showed a whole new (to me) artistic angle to take with the photos.

Task #4

Website Updates

This is also a great time to keep up with website and blog updates. Keeping a (regular) blog in the past was something that was extremely difficult for me. My brain tends to run at 1000 km/h most of the time (hence the importance of my @koreantemples Instagram account to help me slow down). The one thing that I’ve learned while writing articles for Wikitree.us a few years ago, and last year while I was writing the textbook, is that I like writing. It’s something that I know I have time to do regardless of how busy my schedule is.

Task #5

Looking for Work

With my newly found love of writing along with my photography, this inside time has also allowed me to focus on networking and writing proposals to magazines and publishers. My full time elementary teaching contract has just finished and I was going to take this time to build my photography business. There are a whole lot of steps to take and hard work before it gets off the ground. I’m going to try my best to make it work.

So there we have it. 5 tasks that easily fill up a 10-12 hour day. Many times, each one of these days will only be filled with 2 or 3 of these 5 tasks.

Photography can be anything for everyone.

It can be art, history, meditation/relaxation, escape, adventure, exploration, enlightenment, sport, or a soap box. This can be true for both photographer and viewer. The beauty of photography is that these reasons can be interwoven and mixed with any percentage to make each brick or stone along your path to say what you want it to say, or mean what you want it to mean. It is your experience, your world, and only yours, which is what makes your path in photography so different.

For some, the path itself may be very similar, or even the same, but the cobblestones are arranged in a different order and/or using any number or other aspects that I didn’t mention, as they venture along their experiences. My path, as a photographer, started with the historical stone. I love to travel, and I wanted to take photos of the places I had been to show friends and family, and as a keepsake for years down the road to gaze upon and reminisce and daydream. This stone lead to exploration, the search for more daydreams and places to reminisce about. This lead to relaxation and escape as I started to find more and more places that allowed me to exhale and say, “ahhhh.” As I started to get off of the beaten path, I got to see a lot of things that woke me up to how the “real world” is, which lead to my soap box, trying to get more people to see how difficult the world is for many people who are undeservedly suffering. Which lead me to enlightenment, as I use photography to help me become a better person. Recognizing how much love and how much people are willing to give regardless of how much or how little they may have for themselves, and how much I want to be like them.

Within this enlightenment and soap box, I try to maintain the same constant throughout the path: art. I may not have any one brick that may be exclusively ‘art’ as so many other photographers around the world have, but it is the common thread, the mortar if you will, that holds my bricks together. But it is also this stimulus that allows, no, forces my path to meander through my experiences. A straight path from A to B may be the quickest way, but there are so many more interesting stories to experience when the road zigs and zags. Likewise, the stories are more interesting when there is the artistic element intertwined in each turn.

It is also the artistic side that allows my style, and yours, to change over time, and even from shoot to shoot. There are so many different factors that happen in each photograph, that no matter how many times something has been photographed it will always be different than the ones before it. That is the individuality of each photo and each person. Theses are the things that I hope to explore together with you as we make our treks down our paths, and with a little deeper understanding of my reasons and experiences of my photographic journey. Together we can learn from each other, and I hope that we can inspire not only ourselves but the people and subjects around us.

To quote the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, “Everyday is a journey, and the journey itself home.” Everyone is at a different point on their paths, some are just starting and others have been on their journey, if you will, for a long, long time. My hope is that this column will inform without teaching. By that I mean, I will not for the most part, be going through the numbers, exact shutter speeds, f-stops, and hyper-focal distances. (I may touch on them from time to time as each story may dictate its necessity.) That is being done everywhere in books, seminars, and online. Mr. Basho also said, “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.” When it comes to art, and especially photography in today’s world, this quote is one of the keys for me. So let’s start down our paths together and seek what the wise sought.

I also hope that this column can inspire without prejudice. It shouldn’t matter where each of us is on our paths, they are just that, “OUR” paths. I hope that those who have been taking photos for years can get the same amount of inspiration as those who are just starting out. We’re all under the same sun, same moon, and same clouds, and they don’t care if you’re taking a photo with a phone, a DSLR, or a disposable film camera. The only thing that matters is your own interaction with your experience and the building of new bricks for your path. Let’ s welcome these new experiences with open arms and let the art guide us down our paths.

Leigh

Tag: enlightenment

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