gdanmitchell Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Thanks, for the comments.
The reaction to #3 (here and especially in some other places) surprised me. I like it, but it has provoked a stronger positive response than I expected.
One of the fascinating things about this set for me is that all of these were "left behind" photographs that I only "discovered" recently in my raw file archives while working on this project. Originally I apparently had looked at all four of them, decided to not pursue them any further, and moved on.
This is not the first time I have had this experience. I've thought a lot about how it is that this happens, and while I haven't come to any single conclusion about it, I have some ideas.
Sometimes I think I am trying to make a subject work in a particular way when I compose the image and make the exposure, and that preconception blinds me to the actual character of the subject initially. It is only after I step back from the subject — usually by ignoring the image for a long time — and come back to it with fresh eyes that I "discover" how the image can work.
This was especially true with the first and fourth photographs in this set. For a long time I think I wasn't comfortable with the density of details in the first photograph. This is one that I know I had looked at earlier and then moved on, perhaps more than once. But somehow this time it made sense to me in a way that it originall had not. I like the concept of the fourth subject all along, but I was not comfortable with the some elements of the photograph. Mainly I wasn't sure how to handle the entirely of the trees, of which more had been captured in the original 3:2 aspect ratio exposure. Looking at it anew clarified for me that some things were best cropped out, with the result that the basic idea of the image seems clearer now.
All of this raises an awkward little question about one of the common-knowledge tenets of landscape photography — the one about pre-visualization. That is sometimes taken to mean that you should always know what the final print will look like when you make your exposure. I think that aspiring to something like that is a good and useful thing, but truth is that the process of photography is not quite that one-dimensional.
Dan
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