Tip: Go on a photo diet!
Saturday 1 May 2021, 16:32 by Elvira Smit | 3,821 views | 0 commentsThis article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.
The more often I take photographs, the more I think in images. The photographs I see regularly also influence how I take photographs. Once you become aware of this, you can use it to your advantage. For example, by going on a 'photo diet'.
Tourist in Marken
Recently, I was in Marken, a former little island in the Markermeer. For a moment, I felt like a foreigner greedily gawping at this picturesque place. Although I did not go as far as visitors did in 2019. The Noord-Hollands Dagblad wrote the following at the time:
Tourists peep into residents' homes, knock on the wooden panels to check whether they really are made of wood, pick flowers from private gardens and use flower boxes as ashtrays or rubbish bins.
Those hordes of people had disappeared, along with the touring coaches and guides. There was actually no one left, apart from the residents.
Anyway, I took a string of photographs, without any particular purpose. Probably to relate to the surroundings, to have something to do. That is what tourists do.
This was one of the photographs I took there:
At home, I looked at the photograph on my computer and saw a strong resemblance to a photograph I had taken a few weeks earlier at a holiday park in Hellevoetsluis:
I rarely use a composition in which the image is framed by two 'receding' walls. I think the fact that I did so here has to do with the fact that I had looked at the photograph I took in Hellevoetsluis very often and for a very long time.
Because I had spent a long time wondering whether or not it belonged in my photo series about that park. So I had 'calibrated' my eyes to this image.
But what can you do with this? Well, this:
Go on a photo diet
Dietitians like to say you are what you eat. The same actually applies to a photographer:
Your photo diet determines what you see
So be very selective about what you (really) look at, because that will show in what (and how) you photograph. If you want to take this seriously, create a calibration folder. This lets you calibrate your eyes just before you start taking photographs. Or just before you start editing.
Finally, one more photograph I took. Many of my photographs show road signs, and this one does too. Unfortunately, that does not come entirely from me. These are the kind of images I kept seeing in the work of Stephen Shore and Hans van der Meer.
About the author
Ik heb een eigen fotografieblog, Kronkeling. Daar schrijf ik om de week twee artikelen. Over hoe je je blik kunt scherpen, je creativiteit kunt aanwakkeren, en over fotografen die mij inspireren. Geen technische zaken, wél over hoe je leert kijken. En dat blijkt nog een hele klus. Een mooi startpunt zijn de Kronkeltips, die vind je hier.
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