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stormdogSomething I was talking to Ankhorite about this past week was the zen of photography.
As someone who thinks of himself as more of a Taoist than anything else, I have a deep love for, and awe of, the philosophy of wei wu wei - action through inaction. I've never studied Taoism in any formal sense. I've only sat zazen a handful of times. My knowledge of the subject is gained largely from the concepts in Raymond Smullyan's The Tao is Silent. It's a philosophy that jives with the way I've always intuitively seen the world.
Action through inaction is often mentioned in the context of a joke, or touched on by artsy-fartsy intellectual movies like The Motorcycle Diaries. "Let the world change you and you can change the world." (I do like artsy-fartsy intellectual movies....)
And it's directly applicable to making photos. I can sit in front of a marble and granite memorial and complain all day about all the people blocking the image I want to make, or the sun coming from the wrong place, or the cloud cover ruining my shot. Or I can sit in my little corner of the world, think about how I want to compose my image, let the sights and sounds of my location dance and sing to me, and wait. And in time, the world will align itself in just that certain special way, and I'm waiting to to click the shutter. And if it doesn't work out that day; the lighting isn't quite right, or the crowds never clear the scene, or something else goes wrong, that's ok. I can come back tomorrow, or the next day when conditions are what I want. Or if I'm travelling, and I don't have the luxury of coming back another time, well; I make the best photo I can and move on. Maybe it wasn't meant to be. Maybe I'll still be back again some day. You never know what the future will bring.
There's a website that belongs to a really amazing landscape photographer out there. When you click the link on his pictures for more info, one of the things it tells you is how long he spent waiting for the light. It ranges anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. And that's what it's about. Being calm, staying immersed in the now, and letting the world change and align itself until it becomes what you're looking for.
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Perfect Every Time - The Chicago Union Station Underground
As someone who thinks of himself as more of a Taoist than anything else, I have a deep love for, and awe of, the philosophy of wei wu wei - action through inaction. I've never studied Taoism in any formal sense. I've only sat zazen a handful of times. My knowledge of the subject is gained largely from the concepts in Raymond Smullyan's The Tao is Silent. It's a philosophy that jives with the way I've always intuitively seen the world.
Action through inaction is often mentioned in the context of a joke, or touched on by artsy-fartsy intellectual movies like The Motorcycle Diaries. "Let the world change you and you can change the world." (I do like artsy-fartsy intellectual movies....)
And it's directly applicable to making photos. I can sit in front of a marble and granite memorial and complain all day about all the people blocking the image I want to make, or the sun coming from the wrong place, or the cloud cover ruining my shot. Or I can sit in my little corner of the world, think about how I want to compose my image, let the sights and sounds of my location dance and sing to me, and wait. And in time, the world will align itself in just that certain special way, and I'm waiting to to click the shutter. And if it doesn't work out that day; the lighting isn't quite right, or the crowds never clear the scene, or something else goes wrong, that's ok. I can come back tomorrow, or the next day when conditions are what I want. Or if I'm travelling, and I don't have the luxury of coming back another time, well; I make the best photo I can and move on. Maybe it wasn't meant to be. Maybe I'll still be back again some day. You never know what the future will bring.
There's a website that belongs to a really amazing landscape photographer out there. When you click the link on his pictures for more info, one of the things it tells you is how long he spent waiting for the light. It ranges anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. And that's what it's about. Being calm, staying immersed in the now, and letting the world change and align itself until it becomes what you're looking for.
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Perfect Every Time - The Chicago Union Station Underground
