Driftwood Beach State Park, Oregon

Living here in the mountains, distance and scale are understandable to me. My mind can grasp that mountains off in the distance can be 40 or 50 miles or more away. There are enough features between me and those distant mountains to give it a sense of scale.

Not so on the ocean though. Where we were you could stand on the beach, and if you stretched yours arms straight out to your sides, there was nothing in that 180 degree arc other than a strip of sand, a lot of water, and a huge expanse of sky. My mind couldn’t wrap itself around the immensity of it. It was simply too overwhelming for me to grasp.

The only way I could begin to comprehend the sheer size and power of the ocean was to look for familiar objects on the beach that would add some perspective to what was in front of me. Things like this driftwood log helped establish a sense of scale I was much more familiar with.

I don’t know… is it just a peculiarity of mine, or does everyone who hasn’t spent much time near the ocean feel that way?

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Here’s a passing thought for a Saturday morning…

We all tend to think of our work as unique. Normal enough I guess — we all like to feel like we stand out to some degree. We think of our photography as art, whatever we may mean by that much maligned term, and think that it stands apart from all the other photography being shown. Sometimes it’s true, but how often? Can we honestly look through our files and see a solid body of work that represents our own individuality, that stands out as work that truly shows our own style? Or rather, do we see photo upon photo that looks much like the millions of others we see day after day? I can go through the photographs I’ve done over the years, and if I was to spend a day with them, I might find a couple dozen that really strike me as being uniquely mine. That’s not many, but studying that handful of photos would reveal a common thread, it would point to a direction my vision is taking. That’s important, and key to building a meaningful body of art photography.

Those of us who don’t shoot professionally enjoy a great gift. We don’t have to shoot to please anybody but ourselves. We don’t have to shoot a particular subject in a particular way to please a particular client. We have the freedom of choice. What we do with that choice is what will define us as photographers. We can make the most of our uniqueness, or we can imitate others. The choice is ours to make.

More and more I find myself paying close attention to those things that grab my eye, that stop me in my tracks, that demand a closer look. That’s where my images lie. I don’t always end up making a photo, but more often than not, if I take some time to explore those ‘stopping points’, I come across something that makes me trip the shutter. Occasionally something works.

All of this of course points to that other much abused word – style. Styles in photography change, though I’m not so sure that they shouldn’t properly be called fashions. Your style is you. It’s your uniqueness. It’s what makes your work different from the millions of others prowling around out there with their cameras, and it’s worth spending some time digging into. Your style can’t be adopted. You can’t put it on like a new shirt. It’s what you are, it’s what you see, and it’s how you translate what you see into a two-dimensional rectangle called a photograph. You can only discover it, unearth it, and nurture it with constant practice and searching. With time and plenty of work your individuality will shine through, your style will emerge in a body of honest, compelling work. To me that is the heart and soul of photography as art.

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Sand and Shell #2

When you go to the coast and walk along the beach, it doesn’t take long to realize that there is a whole world of subject matter right at your feet, and it’s constantly changing.

Here’s another shell in the sand taken at Driftwood Beach State Park on the Oregon coast.

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Though the version of this blog that you’re seeing now has only been around since January, I’ve been blogging about photography since March of 2007. I’ve experimented with various looks and titles and hosting platforms and what-not, and finally settled on this self-hosted beast called photomontana.net. Though I’ll no doubt continue to experiment with other sites and other ideas, this one is pretty well set the way I want it. It’s kind of my home base now.

One of the titles I played with before was ‘a camera, a laptop, and a life’. That’s been my dream — nay, not dream so much, but goal — for some time now. Finding a way to support myself with photography, using a camera and computer, has been my mission for the last year or two. It’s becoming increasingly urgent since I lost my job in June and am quickly burning through my meager cash reserve. No simple task when, like me, you’re not inclined to go the professional photography route. I know it’s possible, in fact likely, that I’ll have to do a few things I don’t particularly want to do to keep this thing going. I’m prepared for that. Nothing is perfect.

I work on the old desktop computer I’m sitting at right now for the most part, but I have a laptop that I use occasionally when I’m not here at home. I set it up, along with a camera, on the desk in the bedroom my daughter uses when she’s here with me as a visual prop for myself. Along with that, I’ve burned a question into my little brain — if that’s all I owned, if that camera and computer were my only earthly possessions, and my only means of survival was to support myself with them, how would I go about it? How would I make a living with a camera and a laptop?

I’ve had no great lightning flashes of insight yet. In the meantime I’ll keep doing what I’m doing here, improving on it the best I can, and trying out different ideas. I’ll probably play with different ideas for sites, though I don’t want to spread myself too thin, to see what might have possibilities and what won’t. That’s how you find out. Some things might work well and others might fail miserably. If that’s the case I’ll cheerfully admit it and move on.

Some of you may be aspiring to the same sort of life, so in the spirit of play I’ll leave you with that same question this morning. Pitch in with your two cents if you’re so inclined. If all you had were a camera and a laptop and had to support yourself with them, how would you do it? It might prove to be an interesting exercise, it might be a total waste of time, but go ahead and have at it.

Cheers,
pj

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