On 11/16/2011 2:05 PM, William Robb wrote:
I believe I read much the same thing by Susan Sontag when I was a teenager. I don't know if she had an original thought or not. OTOH, to have been that close to a shark and not have seen it because he had his eye to a camera the whole time would have to be disappointing. I noticed when we were shooting that we seemed to have a similar attitude, which is it's nice to be where nice pictures can be had, and it's nice to get some pictures of the nice stuff, but that isn't the be all and end all of the expedition.
30 years ago, when we'd go climbing in Yosemite, inevitably when hiking up to the climb, one or more groups of Japanese tourists would take out cameras and photograph us. We started playing the game of looking and pointing back at them, like they were something strange and unusual.
The last Japanese tourist photographer I interacted with because he had a stormtrooper K-x. He was a bit confused by what I was saying when I asked him about it (I didn't initially realize he wasn't just another local of Japanese ancestry) until I pulled mine out of my camera bag. It was one of several stormtrooper K-xs we saw that day.
He does have a very good point, which is that if the sole purpose of your travels is to get pictures, you are probably missing out on some very good opportunities.
I do a lot of photography as my way of "giving back to the community" both in aikido and dance. I've noticed that when I'm photographing a class, I miss a lot of what's being taught, because all the brain chatter involved with taking pictures keeps the subject matter from sticking.
-- Larry Colen [email protected] (from dos4est) -- 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.
