Saturday, November 5, 2011

Saving a fish

Today we went for a walk by the Bodom lake in Espoo. It was a gray day, thick cloud cover hovering overhead.

At the lake our youngest daughter found a fish on the ground, between two stones. It was a Common Roach, and some fisherman had left it there. But then our second youngest daughter claimed the the fish was alive, moving its mouth. And so said the others as well.

Well, I threw the fish back into the lake, not expecting much. And the fish just floated there on the surface. But then its mouth started opening and closing, and it slowly started to move. And finally it righted itself and started to swim away. - A fish saved!

Brian S pointed yesterday to the blog of an Albertan phtographer Dan Jurak. I had a look, and I like the pretty pictures there.

I also read some of the postings, and both agreed and disagreed. For example, this I can agree on:

SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT

Shoot like a mad man. This isn’t film, it’s digital. It doesn’t cost anymore to expose a thousand frames than it does to expose a dozen. Shoot and then edit.

KEEP YOUR BEST

Don’t get sentimental about your photos. Why on earth would you want to keep your rejects? They’re never going to be printed or sold. Out of sight out of mind.

But this I disagree with:

I’ve written many times before that when I studied photography for two years the students that couldn’t take good photos at the beginning of the two years still couldn’t take good pictures when they graduated. If you can’t pick it up on your own no amount of instruction is going to get you there.

If all teachers would be thinking like this, we would get only more of the same, never anything new or original. Or as David Bayles ja Ted Orland write in their book Art & Fear: "risk rejection by exploring new worlds, or court acceptance by following well-explored paths. […] the real question about acceptance is not whether your work will be viewed as art, but whether it will be viewed as your art." (I wrote a review of this book in Finnish.)

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