My example: I was standing on a bridge looking at a local brewery, I thought (I don't carry a camera) about what kind of photo I might take--how to capture--what? The brewery (so the context would be: let's not show the viewer that bit of cement by the river); or I could go for a river shot, where the context might be "lose the factories, they're ugly"--or I could take a photo of the whole thing as a blank shot--"this is what it looks like"--
There are postcards from our town designed to be as...unphotoworthy as possible--terrible angles, subjects all out of sync with surroundings--and they worked well because that is often our daily experience: that the world contains all those elements the photo has chopped out--
--so "context"--what's missing? What was taken out of the shot, and why?
(In my head it ties into the idea that photos are lies we tell, like films and theatre etc...)
heh....I no makea de sense again! Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
By "lie" I mean that they are not representations of reality--or no more a representation of lived human reality than a painting or a piece of music. They can explicitly aim to be nothing more than passive recording devices, but how to capture the emotion at the time--so sometimes (I was thinking of a picture DoDo posted of a hill, and melo's shots of sunsets) you have this thing that happened that you want to pass on--unmediated, but there's an obtrusive element that distracts--so there's idealisation. Then there's our favourite shot of ourselves, the complimentary one--etc. So "the camera never lies, it just bends truths through the matrix machine while saying, 'yeah, this is the truth, well, this bit, and maybe that bit, and oh--hey! Did you think of this--look!'"
...as the subject for the photo blog--only more wittily expressed! Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
I told Bush; don't play chess with the freakin' Russians.
Although we (being me and Colman) did have a quick discussion on the OT on wednesday and decided on 'rules of composition'. If you have any shots that have been taken either deliberately or accidentally looking as though they fit with the rule of thirds, diagonal rule or the golden section then they can go in that bit of the blog. Ad astra per aspera
