Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
As humans, but also as artists, all of us have felt anxiety and fear. No matter how skillful we are and how long we’ve been doing something, there’s always that little “what if?” somewhere in the back of our minds.
In this 12-minute TEDx talk, photographer and activist Benjamin Von Wong talks about fear. Precisely, he talks about fear of irrelevance and how you can turn it into fuel for creating powerful and impactful art.
Filmmaker Daniel Sean Campbell is relatively new to YouTube, having only started posting regularly to the platform a couple of months ago. He wanted to start posting content a long time ago, but you know what stopped him? Yeah, that’s right, it was fear.
Fear is something that all creatives face at some point during our journey, and will likely always feel whenever we want to try something new. In this video, Daniel talks about overcoming your fear, why many of those fears are unfounded and why you’ll never improve and succeed at trying anything new if you don’t push yourself past that barrier.
Street photography is a weird genre of photography. So many want to try it, but they’re afraid. Afraid of rejection and potentially hostile reactions. There are two schools of thought when photographing people in the street. The first is to just shoot, and worry about consequences later. Legally, that’s fine in many parts of the world. The latter is to obtain permission first and then shoot the photo.
There is the argument that asking takes away the spontaneity. What you saw and wanted to photograph ceases to exist. But it becomes something else. A street portrait. That, too, can be a great thing. In this video, photographer Jim Rogalski shows us how he approaches strangers in the street, even in other countries where there are significant language problems.
Today I used Lightroom Mobile to capture images on the street for the first time. I recently remembered that you can sync images from Lightroom Mobile right to the Lightroom desktop application. This was huge for me as I’m tired of syncing via Airdrop… It legit takes forever to select which images you want to import.
Anyway, when syncing the images I noticed each one took about 10-20 seconds, quite long, but worth it considering the images were RAW. This also gave me a little bit of time to inspect each image. I had nothing else to do so I looked over them one by one as they dropped in. I didn’t make any changes, simply evaluated them based on quality.
Fear and creativity go hand in hand. At least, I believe they should, if you want to really push yourself. But getting over that fear can be very tough. But it’s a weird kind of fear. It’s not like a fear of flying, or rattlesnakes, or something tangible that does hold at least some chance of causing you physical harm. Fear in creativity is often created solely in our minds. And we suppress it.
Because we can avoid it by simply not pushing ourselves and not putting ourselves out there. Ted Forbes from the Art of Photography discusses this fear in a recent video, and makes some extremely good points about how what might be the cause of it. It turns out that, as well meaning as they may have been, it could be our parents fault.
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