Hello: I'm deeply rooted in the 'how' first, before the 'why'. It's my nature to try and understand processes before I experiment with them, so thus far, I'm mostly an 'armchair' pinholer (I spend alot of time planning great things rahter than doing them).
I think there is some validity in this approach even in a more balanced case... I draw parallels among different artforms - To produce poetry of any depth, one has to learn the language ....vocabulary, grammar, style, etc, and study previous works. To produce music, one must learn and practice a great deal of mechanical and theoretical matters before creating art. Someone once said of jazz, "you have to learn the rules before you can break them." Heretoo, one has to learn the language to 'speak Painting requires a mastery of technique to allwo the process or craft to deliver a feeling, rather than be an obstacle to expression Some people have told me "this is pinhole...just do it." I'm heading there...I just don't do well with a purely Edisonian approach (by gosh or by golly results). I then don't know why something worked or didn't work. Getting to the 'why' part, I'm practicing with an SLR right now, taking shots of things I want to do in pinhole...I feel like maybe if I can learn to 'see' composition conventionally, it will give me better pinhole results, since composing them is a 'blinder' approach. Speaking of blind photographers, which has been discussed here earlier, someone told me they met an artist recently who sold a painting to Stevie Wonder...I paused for a moment, trying to imagine what or how he would select, and she said that someone with him guided him and he selected one by touching it. That was interesting, but that leaves us photographers out of the loop. Murray
