For various reasons I've not been motivated to pick up a camera in anger, apart from when I have wanted to take photographs in the editorial mode to illustrate my Lumbland blog. The editorial mode is how I describe making pictures which serve to illustrate, but have to have an eye catching element to them. Wide angle lenses, unusual viewpoints, shallow depth of field are three of the tropes which are part and parcel of this sort of photography.
Another 'trick' used in this sort of photography is dramatic or unusual lighting. The picture on the right combines a wide angle, low viewpoint and starlight to make a picture that (if I had taken the time and care to set up, rather than shoot hand-held) would have been a prime example of a photograph in the editorial mode. There's even plenty of negative space for a graphic designer to add text if it was used on a magazine cover.
These sort of photographs are often more about style than substance.
There is, however, a cross over into the documentary mode. Documentary photographs record things as they present themselves in front of the camera. Within the limits of the frame as dictated by the photographer. In this mode the subject, the content, comes before style. Although that is not to deny style and composition in the picture making process. There is a striving for objectivity. Sometimes this mode can stray into the picturesque editorial mode. There are many examples of beautiful documentary photographs of a harrowing scenes which make us question what precisely we are responding to in the image and what their real purpose is.
Current among much art photography is the documentary photograph that eliminates the picturesque and the rules of formal composition. A straightforward, deliberately and self-consciously unpretentious (and therefore pretentious) way of framing subjects is employed. As if art is scared of revealing its craft. This art mode has become rather too easy to adopt and seems to be the current default setting in art photography.
Art photography of this sort is very serious. It is not supposed to be decorative. It is supposed to demand thought. To be questioned. And most of all there must be a statement about it. It's not enough for an art photograph to be about itself. That's so post modern.
The photograph below is about itself. It's about colour and form, about the clouds echoing the pools of water. Seen large its location is obvious to anyone who knows the area so has local appeal. The colours are muted and restful enough for it to match the decor of an interior and hang on the wall as an integral part of that décor. Not as an image, just a design detail. It is documentary as it tries not to beautify the scene. It nods to art photography in that it is boring - in content, form and colour.
The next photograph, on the other hand is documentary but picturesque. While it is not in the art mode it is in the Fine Art mode (not the capitals). Fine Art photography aims primarily at decoration. It must be well crafted, it usually looks like any number of samples of itself. The light will always be 'stunning'. It's all tending towards the superficial in teh way that the editorial mode can.
Then there's the ever present internet meme of shallow depth of field. This is probably the most widely used 'trick' in the modern internet photo-sharing photographer's bag. It has its place, used well it isolates a subject from a cluttered background. All too often it is done for its own sake - to demonstrate the quality of the equipment used. My excuse for the picture below is that the photograph is not just about depth of field, it's about complimentary colours, compositional balance, light, and place.
And finally. Two pictures which I took for no particular reason. Of all the photographs in this post they seem the most personal because I made them to suit my way of seeing rather than one of the accepted norms. I don't consider them decorative or illustrational. They are documentary. They could be classified as being in the art mode because they show the banal in a snapshot style. But they are concerned with compositional form and colour. I don't think they are about anything else other than what they show. Unless they are about what they make someone other than me feel or think when they look at them.
As a brief technical aside, some of these pictures were made using the X10 which I have been using to try and regain some affection for it. I simply can't get on with having a viewfinder that isn't at least 95% accurate. Using a rear screen makes me self-conscious if a passer-by spots me photographing something 'unphotogenic'. There is something about pressing my eye to a viewfinder that helps isolate both what I am looking at and me from the surroundings and lets me slip out of time and concentrate on what I am doing without any embarrassment. The camera becomes something to hide behind when a viewfinder is used.
