Photo Walking with Purpose

A recent photo walk taught me some things about seeing and how we influence what we see by what we are looking for.

I’ve often taken walks with my camera, just looking for interesting topics. Turns out that is a massive project because there are almost an unlimited number of pictures in any given location if you consider everything from the microscopic to the panoramic, especially if one adds artistic modifications.

Instead, the other day I tried taking a walk with the goal of producing a picture of a plant, a flower or similar, isolated from its surroundings. I want to make a series of such pictures to explore concepts of individuality, solitude, being alone versus loneliness, relationship, etc. So, in order to build a set of photos that might work, I looked just for such scenes.

The picture in this post is an example of something captured.

However, I realized later that I had missed other potential pictures noticed on previous photo walks through the same area. They were interesting to me, and sometimes part of other potential projects, but not examples of the current focus. So, focusing on seeing just the one type of scene made me miss other interesting ones.

This seems pretty obvious in retrospect, but made me realize how much more there is to see than we notice, depending on our focus, how much there really is to explore.

Another observation was that there were some scenes that were not the type of thing I was looking for, that nevertheless evoked some of the concepts that I ultimately want to explore. Perhaps a bit of moss hanging from the tip of a branch or a lone tree in the middle of a field. However, since they weren’t what I was looking for, I deliberately passed them by.

There is a difference between what a picture is of, and what it is about.

William Jenkins

Looking for a particular type of picture was different than looking for any picture that evoked a particular idea.

So for me, there are at least three different ways to move through an environment: looking for anything of interest, looking for a particular type of picture, and looking for illustrations of ideas.

Not that profound, but wanted to write it down as something to think about while moving through this exploration of photography.

This blog needs to be rebuilt to fix a number of technical issues, and I am considering expanding it to include more explorations of regular photography, including reflections on taking pictures, as I learn about the art. This post moves a little in that direction.