Brutally Honest Critique Section

[ShutteredEye]

I don't have a lot of life experience here, and even less photography experience. So take this grain of salt and toss it over your shoulder for luck, or use it to season your soup.

I agree a lot with what Hertz says about people. For the most part they are easy to figure out and manipulate. The caveat here is those people who break that mold. And they do so in a couple different ways. Either they do something that we can't possibly understand--to the negative--such as a serial killer or lunatic. Or, they do what we thought not possible--to the positive--as in acheivements.

And to this point we are defined as people by not only WHAT we experience in life, but how we allow those experiences to change (or not) and mold (or not) us.

To say that being a photographer is all about you--if YOU like it then who cares what others think--is a bit egocentric. I'm not saying there aren't good reasons to feel this way or not good images that result from shooting that way. However, shooting to communicate with others has a much broader, and perhaps more noble(?) purpose.

In my experience people react to photographs by relating it to themselves. For example: An image of a lonely swing hanging from a tree. One person may see it and remember those long summer afternoons spent swinging on theirs in the back yard, and lament the loss of their childhood. Someone else may see it and remember that it was similar to the view out of the window to the backyard they escaped to why they were being abused as a child. I would wage they will have very different reactions to the image.

We as photographers work to help that reaction along; foster and develop it: high/low contrast, afternoon/noonday lighting, color/bw etc. But ultimately we have to depend on the viewer to be able to relate to the image enough to have a reaction to it.

If anything, we as photographers must work on using the elements of the image to create a relationship with the viewer long before we can reasonably expect to mold and direct their reaction to it.

Am I making any sense at all?

 

[mysteryscribe]

It made sense to me on one level... van makes sense on one level ... Mark on yet another.... so I'm not sure that I know what I knew when I came here LOL... Now I'm going outside to go walk in circles and bable to myself for a while.

Alas be careful you were making the first agruement that I made. But in the end, I think you shoot for you, but nobody will see exactly what you saw. We have to be careful, we go around one more time we are going to turn into butter.

 

[Hertz van Rental]

I agree a lot with what Hertz says about people. For the most part they are easy to figure out and manipulate. The caveat here is those people who break that mold. And they do so in a couple different ways. Either they do something that we can't possibly understand--to the negative--such as a serial killer or lunatic. Or, they do what we thought not possible--to the positive--as in acheivements.

Your 'people who break the mould' are just extreme cases. Largely the only difference between you and a serial killer is that you have more Social conditioning.
People are a lot more similar than we like to believe seeing as how we live in the age of the Individual. We have a great many shared or common experiences. It is only in the detail that we differ.
I offer the Advertising Industry's Socio-Economic Grouping as Exhibit A.

 

[mysteryscribe]

I once (years and years ago when I was even more immature) lived with a woman who was much wiser (not to mention older) who said, "We only like to think we are unique. It's our way of covering up our short comings." I was afraid to ask her what my short comings were.