Time goes by!
Recently, I was fortunate to be able to go to one of the studios of a very professional photographer who is a houshold name. (No name dropping here) It was encouraging to see that although he has risen to fame on the back of one or two named images, he, like us, never throws away images from his previous life prior to his climb to fame. No matter how bad they look at first.
Now we can ask. Do we at Rainbow take bad images? Nope, not ever!
Hm, dosen’t sound honest does it. The truth is……………… Yup, tons of them. (Slight deviation of truth here for dramatic effect) In reality quite a lot.
Now I don’t mean that they are not printable. They are. It’s just that they are not quite right. Trying to acheive the impossible effects from an obscure scene and so on, rabbit rabbit.
But, one of the funny things that you learn when you tote your pictures around after a shoot is that not everybody sees your bad (your opinion) pictures as bad. (Are they being polite. No…………… some of them don’t even like me, and would welcome the chance to have a pot.)
Now, this leads me the point where I say… let me ask you a question…why? Deep thinking caps on here. Pearls of wisdom follow.
It’s not rocket science really. Over the years of taking digital photographs, I have noticed a tendency of mine to go back through the archives, review pictures that I have previously discarded and crop sections from some of the less likely pictures. I then create new pictures that have captured the interest of the few followers that we have. As we have always used high pixel rated cameras this has always been possible.
Nothing clever there then. But here’s the thought. Did the people who liked them, before I cropped them, “see” the part of the picture that I had cropped as being “the” picture. Perhaps they were more aware of the value of the picture by seeing what was there and what in fact I had blindly seen but missed in my conscious awareness when I first framed up the picture and pressed the button. Sort of looking for a picture, recognising it, but not really seeing it. (Ouch, my brain hurts!)
Anyway, we got a bit deep there into the psychosis of the Rainbow mind. Yea, yea, I know what that means. It means that we as photographers are some kind of nerd when it comes to looking at an object to photograph. So, (hang about a minute there’s more.) I did a blind census of as many prople that I know without them knowing my reasons why I was asking as to what they did with there old slides/prints/images. Less than one percent threw them away. And if you asked them why? In their funny little human ways they all said the same thing. “There’s something there that I liked about this particular print/slide/digital image. Now, take it further and ask about cropping the pictures and give them a moment or two of reflection they all say that they would cut this of hack that. Ureeka. That we are not all nuts here at Rainbow Journeyman. Almost everybody does see something in an image. Not just in those images that you know are WOW!, but other lesser mortal images where there is a much softer wow factor.
Ok, I hear you say what is he rambling on about now. Well in my own indecisive way I have arrived at the point that says. If you are an artist or a photographer keep your scrap items and treasure them. You may want to steal from them later. And Hey, that tiny corner of a big picture could make your fortune.
Just remember you heard it here first
More soon
Mike T
www.rainbowjourneyman-southwest.co.uk
