Look at other photographer's work?

[PixelRabbit]

This came up in a thread and I thought it might make an interesting discussion.

Do you look at a lot of other photographer's work, old and or new?

If you do, why and what effect do you think it has on your work?

If you don't, why not and what effect do you think it has on your work?

I don't at this point. The main reason is I don't want to be shown what is possible, I want to figure it out myself.

Ultimately I will most likely mimic someone else's work in many respects, especially when playing with things like longer exposures on moving subjects and that is cool if I've never seen their work before. I just don't want to be influenced by their work.

The effect it has is I don't have a predetermined idea of what works already in my head, I have to go through the process of piecing everything together myself.

 

[JoshuaSimPhotography]

This thread is going to be damn hot soon.
Yes.
Photographers take photos to share with the world. I respect that analogy and I DO look at others work.
It does effect my style, but that is…if I wanted too. I am ALWAYS looking at famous photogs work, mostly to get inspired.
But i always look at DIFFERENT works. I feel the only way that I’m going to be influenced be another style, is if i keep on looking at THAT style.
And sometimes i do this on purpose if i respect this style, and sometimes use it in my own work.
BUT the style ONLY influences me, i don’t try to copy the whole darn technique.
I feel that you should look at others work…but most importantly…look at YOUR work. And ask yourself…is this me?

 

[tmjjk]

I absolutely look at other photographer's work! It's an art (or disaster) and I love to appreciate it! I see what I like in others' images and try to learn from it. And even if I tried to mimic another's idea, I normally take what I like from it, add my own personalization, and like the new concept even more. I have never mimicked another's work even when in fear of doing so. There's always another angle or different lighting. So many things go into making an image great. I think the effect it has on my work is clearly that it makes it better. And you have a great number of amazing photographers here that have excellent images for you to be inspired by. My advice would be to take a look around

 

[amolitor]

Yes, I do. I think it makes my work better.

I think it is a necessary part of becoming a decent photographer. Amateurs in the creative arts frequently seem to arrive on the scene with the idea that they can just go out and start creating. Other amateurs encourage them by telling them things like "go out and SHOOT! SHOOT! SHOOT!" (to budding photographers) or "just start writing! write what you know!" (to a wannabee writer) and so on.

You don't learn how to be a plumber by just starting to glue and solder some pipes together. You don't learn to be a physicist by just making up some stuff about particles. You don't learn to do much of anything without actually studying it a bit. You learn to write novels, oddly enough, largely by reading a lot of novels. You learn to install plumbing by watching a lot of plumbing get installed. You learn to do physics by reading about what other physicists have done, and by duplicating a substantial amount of their work.

By looking at other photographs, with intent, you learn what works and what does not. You learn, possibly just by osmosis, what visual tropes have been used in the past, what people are used to seeing in this kind of photograph or that. You learn visual language both the formal stuff and what we might call the "slang" - the trendy visual ideas that come and go quickly, but are nonetheless expressive in their era, There are endless web sites that will try to boil photography (or writing, or acting, or, or or.. ) down to some simple rules, usually while asserting boldly that these aren't really rules. In reality there are simply things that work and things that don't. Knowing the "rule of thirds" won't help your photography nearly as much as looking carefully at 100 photographs that DO have some major division or divisions on 1/3 lines, and looking carefully ay another 100 photographs that DO NOT.

The fine arts suffer from the fact of prodigies. Prodigies actually can take excellent photographs, or write very well, or act brilliantly, or play the piano brilliantly, with surprisingly little instruction. Make no mistake, there's always instruction, and usually a great deal more of it than the average amateur dilettante has, but it is nonetheless surprisingly little. The legends of these people, the Mozarts and Francesca Woodmans, make the amateur think that, maybe, if they were a prodigy, or sort of nearly one, they could just go out and take a bunch of photographs and they'd be great. Or, well, maybe not GREAT but GOOD!

 

[KmH]

I don't at this point. The main reason is I don't want to be shown what is possible, I want to figure it out myself.

What is possible has been developed over the nearly 200 years photography has been done. It's likely you will not re-discover on your own even a tiny fraction of what is possible.

Look at the work of others, and look at the work of all visual artists, not just photographers.

 

[whitecatcud]

Changing the point of view is brilliant, letting others inspire you I cool, but not too much. I usually look through forums and flickrs to find new ideas for my work. You have to be careful, though, mixing someone's style with yours might make your work can make your work looks gorgeous, but it might as well make you work crap if it doesn't mixed well, or you're inspired too much.

 

[amolitor]

Possibly also worth pointing out:

1) you do so look at the work of other photographers. we're soaked in photography all day every day, advertisements, movies, magazines, motivational posters. You're absorbing a great deal of visual language, constantly.

2) if you're going to look at photography with intent, look at both good and bad. Bad is easy, good is harder to find: Get some books out of the library. Go to shorpy.com. Go to your local art museum. Don't spend all your time on flickr - flickr (and friends) is 95% people recording their life with snapshots, and 4.99% wannabees copying terrible ideas from one another.

 

[PixelRabbit]

Wow, ok I'm on my iPod and want to respond to all of you but will wait until I can type with more than one finger lol

I will say that I DO look at the work posted here, pretty much every single picture posted and follow some on Flickr. If I'm working on technicalities of a shot and search educational material it always comes with someone's work attached but I currently don't spend time looking at a lot of work elsewhere.
I didn't mean to sound like I think I'm all that and a bag of chips and think I'm going to discover something that has never been done before. What I am saying is that I'm a year into photography and I'm still learning technically what my camera can do and how I can translate that in a creative way. Kinda learning to walk before trying to fly?

I CAN see looking more and more as time goes by though.

 

[pgriz]

The ability and talent of others is no threat to me, and is, in fact, a source of inspiration and wonder. Although we say that photographs (and other images and works of art) "should" evoke emotion, we should also be honest and say that most of the time, they do not. When I come across one that does, I try to understand why the image or work caused that emotional response in me. Depending on what I discover from that exercise, I may decide to try and learn the art and see if I understand it well enough to reproduce the emotion in a work that I create. 99.9% of the time, it's a miss, usually by a wide margin, sometimes by just a little. But the exercise of recognizing the emotional effect and trying to do something similar, has pushed me out of my comfort zones and helped me learn new techniques, and even new ways of looking at things. But underlying it all, is the emotional response. If it isn't there to start with, then it does not promise much benefit to learn how to do it, at least for me.

 

[Derrel]

I used to spend a lot of time looking at the photography of established photographers. Since the development of the internet though, I look at less and less, since so,so much of what is shown on the various "big photography sites" is very cliche, very of-this-decade, and it seems like people from all over the USA (and indeed, from all across the western world) all want to try and do the same,exact chit. In every single field...portraiture, sports, travel, landscape, wedding...today there seems to be a tremendous "sameness" in the work shown on the interwebs...go to the "big sites", and take a look at landscape photography. For the most part, there is a sameness, a cookie-cutter mentality, in which the same,exact, fricking processing approaches are used by 95% of the people there...you could simply take off the credit lines from Shooter A and swap them with the credit line for shooters B through Z...and nobody would be able to tell who shot what.

In part, I think this is because today there is a HUGE amount of direct copying going on, especially on the part of "newbies", who look for locations via the web, or look for techniques, via the web, and then set out to re-create EXACTLY what they saw. Same in portraiture and studio lighting among the "Strobist" group, who follow one man's blog as if it were written by Jesus Christ himself. All of that speedlight + awful shoot-through umbrella stuff...eccck! With EXIF data now what it is, there are sooo,sooo many newbies who piss and moan when EXIF is not spoon fed to them on every single freaking shot, because they want to know how to "be creative" in the same, EXACT way as ____ ____, for example, or _________ De'__________. So, these days, no, I don't spend as much time looking at the work of others because, frankly, it just doesn't interest me much to see the same old chit, regurgitated by people in Cali,D.C., Colorado, South Carolina, NYC, Boston,Prague,Miami,Paris, Tokyo,Berlin, etc... The degree of "sameness" these days is staggering. Perhaps that's because there is soooo much work being don with such SIMILAR equipment, and there is so,so much instant, world-wide distribution of images, and so many images seem to flow together at the big photo sharing sites. It's not that there is no good photography being done; far from it, there *is* good work, and even great work being done. But the thing is, I don't care what other people are shooting. or how they do it. Or what lights they buy. Or how they do anything. I just do not have time to spend looking at stuff that's basically a re-hash of what Dave Hill or Anne Geddes started a decade ago. "Popular" photography styles are always changing. Some styles have proven themselves worthless, like in fashion, let's say the leisure suit, or the clear, vinyl raincoat. And the bubble umbrella. All three of those things were at one time hot,hot,hot! Try wearing all three today.

 

[amolitor]

When I look with intent it is almost always b&w photography from before 1960, or contemporary fashion photography. Fashion guys all copy from one another, but there's usually at least a pretty brisk forward progression of ideas, so you see new things pretty often, but since they're all copying from one another and working for clients, the forward progression isn't too crazy. It's a nice evolutionary process of distilled popular ideas.

 

[rexbobcat]

I used to spend a lot of time looking at the photography of established photographers. Since the development of the internet though, I look at less and less, since so,so much of what is shown on the various "big photography sites" is very cliche, very of-this-decade, and it seems like people from all over the USA (and indeed, from all across the western world) all want to try and do the same,exact chit. In every single field...portraiture, sports, travel, landscape, wedding...today there seems to be a tremendous "sameness" in the work shown on the interwebs...go to the "big sites", and take a look at landscape photography. For the most part, there is a sameness, a cookie-cutter mentality, in which the same,exact, fricking processing approaches are used by 95% of the people there...you could simply take off the credit lines from Shooter A and swap them with the credit line for shooters B through Z...and nobody would be able to tell who shot what.

In part, I think this is because today there is a HUGE amount of direct copying going on, especially on the part of "newbies", who look for locations via the web, or look for techniques, via the web, and then set out to re-create EXACTLY what they saw. Same in portraiture and studio lighting among the "Strobist" group, who follow one man's blog as if it were written by Jesus Christ himself. All of that speedlight + awful shoot-through umbrella stuff...eccck! With EXIF data now what it is, there are sooo,sooo many newbies who piss and moan when EXIF is not spoon fed to them on every single freaking shot, because they want to know how to "be creative" in the same, EXACT way as ____ ____, for example, or _________ De'__________. So, these days, no, I don't spend as much time looking at the work of others because, frankly, it just doesn't interest me much to see the same old chit, regurgitated by people in Cali,D.C., Colorado, South Carolina, NYC, Boston,Prague,Miami,Paris, Tokyo,Berlin, etc... The degree of "sameness" these days is staggering. Perhaps that's because there is soooo much work being don with such SIMILAR equipment, and there is so,so much instant, world-wide distribution of images, and so many images seem to flow together at the big photo sharing sites. It's not that there is no good photography being done; far from it, there *is* good work, and even great work being done. But the thing is, I don't care what other people are shooting. or how they do it. Or what lights they buy. Or how they do anything. I just do not have time to spend looking at stuff that's basically a re-hash of what Dave Hill or Anne Geddes started a decade ago. "Popular" photography styles are always changing. Some styles have proven themselves worthless, like in fashion, let's say the leisure suit, or the clear, vinyl raincoat. And the bubble umbrella. All three of those things were at one time hot,hot,hot! Try wearing all three today.

Who do you consider to be "out-of-the-box when it comes to photography nowadays? I agree with all that you said, but I have yet to find a photographer that makes me want to stay updated with what they're doing because it's so interesting.

 

[Derrel]

I dunno..."out of the box"...not too much really...most ideas that are "new" are actually recycled. And as far as you not yet having found a photographer whose work is super-compelling....yeah...I know what you mean. The thing "today" is that a HUGE preponderance of the images we see are not really photography, or photographs, but heavily manipulated examples of the retoucher's art. AND, we see a lot of images on the web and very SMALL, in magazines. As SOON as something, anything, becomes "hot", or as it were, "cool", or "sick", or "epic!"...the mass of shooters today are on it like stink on ****, and BOOM!...It's all over the world in six months. Not to sound full of hubris, or anything, but I literally do not CARE very much what anybody in the world is shooting. I just simply do not "care" who's doing what any more. And you know, this is not exclusively an internet-era phenomenon, this concentration of style, this en mass copy-catting: for many decades, various "schools" of photography existed. The work of the various members of the individual schools was quite often very similar within each "school".

To me, there's not much reason to "like" or to become enchanted by any one,particular photographer. As I was telling my son the other day, "I do not HAVE a favorite color!", as he asked me for the umpteenth time what my favorite color is! I feel somewhat the same way about liking and not liking various styles of photography: elevating one or the other to favored status just...does not make much sense...like the crayons in the box--I like them ALL more or less...I really don't CARE for one or another much more than beyond seeing what it can do for me on any one particular coloring book page, ya know? One of the things about so,so,so much of today's work is that 95% or more of it is so heavily manipulated that it just doesn't interest "me" a great deal. Especially if what I am being exposed to are web-based images, or very small, magazine images. A great preponderance of today's "mass culture" photo images (not gallery stuff, and not portfolios people have worked on) have, to "me" at least, become very much like TV or comic book imagery...images cranked out to fill "time", or "pages". To me, they are still "comic books"--and not "graphic novels".

 

[Tee]

While my preferred genre of making images is beauty and glamour, I follow popular wedding photographers the most. I feel what they are doing to advance their craft has the biggest effect on photography today in the social world. BTW, I'm not talking about the Facebook/ Craigslist photographers but the serious game changers.

 

[rexbobcat]

While my preferred genre of making images is beauty and glamour, I follow popular wedding photographers the most. I feel what they are doing to advance their craft has the biggest effect on photography today in the social world. BTW, I'm not talking about the Facebook/ Craigslist photographers but the serious game changers.

Are you referring to people like Ryan Brenizer? Lol

Derrel, yeah I've pretty much come to the conclusion that I just enjoy certain images without really focusing on the actual photographer and who we think they are and who they think they are.

I think that the age where it's possible to become a big name like Annie Leibovitz, of Dorothea Lange or Henri Cartier-Bresson is over, and even though powerful contemporary images will remain eventually nobody will give half a damn what the photographer put into their images. Depressing...