Thinking About the “Why” in Photography
In recent weeks I’ve been thinking about my photography workflow. It’s been rather fragmented in the past couple of years. I’ve had time periods when I’ve photographed almost every week but then I’ve also had times that in some month I had barely touched my camera. I definitely would like it to be more at least once a week.
I thought about this. Why is it that some weeks seem so busy with photography and others so much less so?
For me the joy of photography largely comes from discovering new things.
“This path I haven’t seen before.”
“This photo object aligns with the environment in a way I haven’t noticed before.”
“This photography technique I haven’t used in this place before.”
There’s still a battle to be fought against, the thought that goes “Is this special enough?”
What I’ve come to learn more and more is that a photographer can make almost any moment special with well thought out storytelling and inventive techniques. We can develop a certain blindness to our living environment because we see it every day. Photography can serve as a practice to see things differently. To me it can serve as an extension to words, poetry. To show in images how the world flows in my eyes and mind.
The importance of great storytelling will become increasingly more apparent in today’s world in the explosion of AI use. As good as AI is at seeing statistical correlation and patterns, it unfortunately also is trained to push out averages. The creation of new can’t only rely on averages, it also relies on breaking the already existing and reorganizing it into something that hasn’t been expected before.
Of course, photography can also serve the purpose to reminisce the past and what made some moments great. Those feelings I had flowing through me when taking some of these photos on a recent walk. To build a photography habit, you can learn to think of it as a method of learning about yourself. The more you photograph and become better as a photographer, you can start to see also some indications of how you’ve been able to grow as a person.
“This opportunity in the image I totally missed when I took it.”
Or reversely: “This is a moment like which I wish to see more.”
Recent Editing Workflow
I’ve been using darktable as my main image editor like I have done for many years now. I love the fact that I can use it on all operating systems and it’s highly customizable even with your own scripts if you so desire. I do use occasional Lightroom on my phone too but I’m not a fan of the paid subscription model of Adobe.
The addition to my recent edits has been some film emulation on Google’s Snapseed. I’m pleased by how much detail has gone into the different emulation profiles. I’ve mostly used the Kodak Portra and Gold profiles as I’ve used those film stocks the most too. The grain looks nice to me and the film color profiles seem rather accurate in the first testing.
An additional hint is that you can also run Snapseed on Windows and MacOS by downloading BlueStacks and in there downloading the Android version from the Play Store. I did the exposure, color, cropping and other major edits in darktable and then just added the film emulation in Snapseed. Aaand voilà ! By trying out new things in editing, you can also find new novelty for your photography workflow.
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