The thread about whether we learn to see, and a question that Bethe asked... "how do I learn to see at 40?" got me thinking. Perhaps a thread detailing exercises or assignments designed to hone your observational skills. I have two that were assigned to me by an excellent photography teacher... no cameras of film involved to start...
1. Go to a museum of gallery, and find a photograph to look at. Look at it for five minutes. Just look. Don't analyze it, don't assign meaning or metaphor to it, just look. For five minutes. Look at the tones, the shapes, the textures. See at how things LOOK in the photograph.
2. Spend a late afternoon in your room from about 4pm until it's dark. Watch how the light changes on the walls during the course of the afternoon, and into early evening. Again... just look at the changing light.
I'll confess... they sounded like torture when they were assigned, but once completed, I found some real value in having taken the time to slow down... and really look... without a camera or pencil or paintbrush. It's the hardest damn thing... but so worth the effort!
Anyone else have some exercises they'd like to share?
This comes easier for imaginative people. And let's face it, we photographers can be an imaginative lot. I have taught myself over the years to try and block out the third dimension when looking at a subject. I think it was Dewitt Jones in an OP article once discussing how the mind works. You see the grandeur in a scenic landscape and compose and make a photograph. You get to the print and you're like 'Hell, this is nothing like what I envisioned'.
Vision I think comes naturally to most folks. It's the translating that vision of a three dimensional world onto a two dimensional medium, such as a photograph. We see the clouds and the trees and the brook and the ridge in the distance and we picture this beautiful smarmy scene in our minds and that is what we want to capture. If we stop and think about how the brook is at our feet and the ridge is WAY off in the distance and, well, you get it. Sometimes the things that our mind puts together is with its mental vision, not our visual vision. This is what we need to train ourselves to see, ONLY WHAT WE WILL SEE.
Try blocking everything out except for what you see before you. Of course if you can change the camera position to get a better composition then so be it and all the better. But without patience, I have forced more than a few exposures over the years of stunning mental composition when the relation of shape and form in the viewing area just doesn't carry it off. We need to, and I think this is where Suzanne's great suggestion comes in, look at paintings and photographs, anything two dimensional. Learn to seperate the dimensions in your mind. By doing this, in time (Oh crap, another dimension) you can learn to 'see' photographically, not just visually.
2. Spend a late afternoon in your room from about 4pm until it's dark. Watch how the light changes on the walls during the course of the afternoon, and into early evening. Again... just look at the changing light.
This is a great exercise, and one that can be carried out just about anywhere, at anytime.
On the few occasions I have been asked by relatively new photographers, about how they can improve their photography, my advice has been to look at the light. Ignore the actual objects they can see, but observe how the light falls on them, where the shadows fall, and what type of shadow is being cast under the prevailing lighting conditions. Also how the colour of the light changes in the early morning, or late evening.
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Steve
"You don't need eyes to see, you need vision" - Maxi Jazz
I took a History of Photography course last fall. The students were reluctant to talk about the work. The Professor was frustrated at first but then would put an important picture on the screen and ask each student in order around the room to describe something they saw in the image. By the 23rd student they were really grasping to find something that had not already been said. The exercise produced some very interesting results and had to have taught quite a few of us to stretch.
My apologies to William and to all the literate world...
Quote:
To see, or not to see: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by inviting make them? To live: to wake up;
More; and by a wake up to say we begin
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To live, to wake up;
To wake up: perchance to dream...
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aristotelis grammatikakis www.arigram.gr black & white film is sexy
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I've pretty much convinced myself that any sense of photographic composition came from this exercise assigned in the university color photography class I took back in the early '70s. The task was to draw a set of lines on paper so that the end result would look balanced as far as visual weight was concerned. If you can imagine a Piet Mondrian (monochromatic) geometrical painting, you've pretty much got it nailed.
Start with a line that spans the paper either horizontally or vertically and then add to the composition with lines of varying width and length (which thus includes rectangles) until the composition becomes balanced. Do this as if you were the Eveready Bunny.
Another very worthwhile Gestalt exercise involves taking identical cut-outs of simple geometric shapes and arranging them on a surface to show concepts of balance, implied motion, grouping, contrast, etc.
Richard Zakia of RIT and The New Zone System Manual fame has authored several excellent books on Perception and Imaging (among other topics) which are very worthwhile if enhancing your visual skills is important.
James Elkins is another author you may wish to investigate.
Harald Mante was also a very early influence on my understanding of color theory and photographic composition. His short book "Color Design in Photography" was the text used in the afore-mentioned class and is based in large part on color theory as developed by Goethe and later enlarged upon by Johannes Itten at the Bahaus.
I see Mante has a new book out which has just gone to the top of my wishlist on Amazon.
Anyone else have some exercises they'd like to share?
This is only an opinion, so let's not take it too seriously.
All the exercises in the world will not open a person's eyes to that world. Granted, one can learn to see and produce what others consider acceptable but, as I told a friend one time, "I really don't care what you see - I'm more interested in what I see. If you happen to like what I see, that's great. I'll let you call it art if you wish". I was trying to go overboard with that comment.
Whether or not one is religious or keeps a faith (let's not confuse religion with faith), when it come to art, the words "to enter the Kingdom, one must become as a child" makes a lot of sense. As another person said in another thread, the wonder of a kid looking at the pebbles as compared to what an adult might see makes all the difference.
As adults, we've learned over time to discount little "unimportant" things like small sparkles in a pebble. We've learned to concentrate on the big stuff leaving the little stuff to fade out and become obscure. That little stuff is what the child sees and it's not immaterial - it's the entire substance of what we're doing with the cameras. Exercises make that type of sight mechanical.
Sorry for the overboard rant
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a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon, you're talking about real money!
Everett Dirkson
Everyone who is not blind can see. I think the question needs to be changed to how can I learn to respond to what I see. What will make you have an emotional response to what you see is different for different people.
Looking at other photography just overloads my brain and makes it more difficult to see for myself. What got me out of cliche' postcard/commercial photography type vision was studying painting and especially Kandinsky which one day popped several brain cells in my head. Another thing that affected my response to what I see was working in ceramics. I think it is very helpful whether you are talented or not to work in different mediums to exercise your aesthetic desire from different angles.
Recently I have gone into a collaboration with another artist who is not a photographer. We are going to do a project where it is part photography and part what he is going to do. The project concept evokes images in my mind that I want to make at the same time as evoking creative response in my collaborators mind as well. That has me looking at things in a whole different way and responding to a completely different aesthetic desire.
One of the photography exercises suggested by a very talented and accomplished photographer, Tom Magno, as my students were starting to shoot color 35mm transparencies (E100VS) was to face the camera, on a tripod, toward the east or perhaps the north at about 90 minutes before sunset. Shoot the same scene every 5 minutes until you run through the roll. The kids thought it was a lame idea until they did it. The slide shows they put on elicited comments about the color of the light that would have been impossible for me to predict. It ain't cheap, but it was deemed worthwhile by every one of them.
Suzanne, thanks for picking up on that comment and posting this. There have been some good suggestions so far and I look forward to what else comes. I'll be trying your 2nd suggestion today. I've been meaning to get into Pittsburgh to go to the Carnegie museum, so hopefully I'll do that soon, too. In the other thread, someone mentioned a study of eggs. I may try that, too. I think learning to see how light falls on something is a big part of it all. Only problem with eggs here is that they're all brown.
The way we mean "learn to see" does include the emotional side of taking an image from recognizing it all the way to the final print. I think there are things we can do to make that process succeed more often than fail. I don't really agree that exercising makes it mechanical. Ask an athlete about having a great moment in a game and I bet it's due to having practiced a lot and gotten in shape for that moment. And that moment will feel like something's been released and set free and all the muscles just work right. I think that's what we're going for when we talk about exercising our ability to see.
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