March 29, 2011
The rules
I now have around 11.000 fans on Facebook. Deserved or undeserved they are there so I owe a couple of answers to questions asked and some additions of my own that I find much more important. So here is a set of rules:
- There is no secret. It’s trial and error, experimentation, experience, looking at others. It’s play and if you don’t really like the game you should not play it. There is no secret about anything, once you start looking for a secret you are on a wrong track.
- Everything I learn I learned myself . I have never ever seen a tutorial, I just played and looked at what others do. Don’t ask so many questions, experiment as much as you can and watch others .
- Camera does not matter that much. Do not ask about the camera referring to it like a messiah of photography. Yes, it is important but it’s mostly about the light, the experience, the eye, the moment, chance, the subject, the mood, the feelings, the effort to go someplace strange and deserted, and last but not least the post processing. Many times it’s just a boring photo you took some years ago you did not find any potential to it. At some point, in some mood it will say something to you and learn what to do with it. All my recent photos are actually very old, many of my them taken with an ancient 300d camera and kit lens. You will not know what photo was made with what, maybe only the lens if you are an expert in DoF.
- I am not a professional photographer. I don’t make money out of it. Money may come some day but if you try to do something for the money you will fail. Even if you do make money you will still fail in the end.
- My images may be good, but mostly aesthetic. There are thousands of photographers (and artists in general also) out there that don’t get enough exposure because of the uneducated public. If you like photography, if you really do you will give it the respect it needs, look it up and try to understand what you don’t yet. What you find boring and does not speak to you may speak some day with a voice much louder than anything else. Taste, senses evolve, have the patience and let them evolve. What I do is what I call bridge photography. It’s not cheap, it’s good taste but not extraordinary. That means that anybody can enjoy it but it is rarely truly art.
- Good artists rarely get to be known and what society as a whole perceives as valuable art is usually just shit (with enough exceptions). It’s a somehow funny set of rules that imposes value based on hype & media taking advantage of, yes, the uneducated public. For almost an year I have been recommending Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop as the most important example of how anything art/value-related works in society. See it, laugh at it, laugh at yourself and the world you live in, learn a lesson, apply it. Make the world a little better by not being a dummy.
- Be an educated public about anything. You will not find much on tv or anything mainstream.
- Question yourself, accept your mediocrity, it’ the only way one can learn. And I don’t mean that in the way of “oh my god,that guy is so good and I’m such a noob”, but accept the fact that you may put the wrong questions and what you percieve as good might not be. Always, always learn.
- Watch Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop 🙂
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