For myself personally, the amount of work I put into obtaining the image or post-capture processing has nothing to do with how I judge the result. In fact some of my best images are ones that took almost no effort at all. Conversely, sometimes the harder I try, the more I screw it up.
Call me results oriented. :-) Bruce (I enjoy this discussion), some people do seem to have particular talents or gifts. My son also plays viola and has really taken up guitar for the past three years. He makes it look so easy, and I'm always impressed. Yet I know he practices for hours a day. There were songs he played a year ago that I thought 'Yeah he has all the chords right, but there's little feeling behind it'. I now hear him play that same song and think 'Yeah, that his him I hear in the music' and the music just flows from his fingertips to the instrument. You and I both are in the software business. I've been developing code for 30 years now. Last month I estimated that a task would take me 160 hours. Well, my brain engaged, and I had two weeks where as I describe it, the code just flowed magically out of my fingertips to the keyboard. It took me half the time I thought and it felt almost effortless. Wow was that ever cool! Might it not be the same way with photography and other visual arts? Practice seeing, familiarity with a subject and with the tools at hand, can make a task appear easy. In reality it may be a very complicated or technical task, yet if a degree of adeptness has been acquired, it becomes easy for the person performing it.. Yackety-yack yack. I suppose I could just have written, "When someone makes a task look easy, there's often a lot of unseen hard work that's gone into it, before we had a chance to observe". Tom C. On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Mark Roberts <[email protected]> wrote: > Bruce Dayton wrote: > >>One thing I have found very interesting is to see what others think >>of my pictures versus what I think of them. Many times some of the >>things mentioned come into play as individuals like or dislike (less >>like?) an image. One aspect that comes into play for me is how hard >>I had to work to get the image - basically a difficulty factor. If I >>didn't have to do anything (relatively speaking), then the image has >>less meaning for me. > > Very insightful, and something I hadn't thought of. This probably > (partly) accounts for why some photographers are poor judges of their > own work: They place too much importance on how difficult, or how > gratifying, the photo was to get. A few times while putting The Book > together I stopped and thought "WTF? This person has much better work > than these three shots. What's going on?" You may have provided part > of the answer. > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
