Discourse

Its Mono Monday: Dialogue. Perhaps this is an easy one for me to attempt because I ascribe to the notion that photography IS a dialogue, a discourse. What I choose to say about a particular moment.

As part of my path back into the visual arts I very recently joined a camera club. Really lovely, welcoming people, much like the community I have experienced here on blip. I’m so glad I joined both. There have been a few competitions in the club over the few weeks I have attended . On listening to the judges comments I became overwhelmed with the listing of mechanical artistic “rules” and “formulas” to make a good “shot”.

I don’t subscribe to the idea of a particular set of rules make “good shots". Don’t misunderstand, when some of referenced "rule book” items align and the photographer has the where-with-all to utilise the moment, great results can ensue and I wholeheartedly enjoy and applaud them. Technique and tools are needed and important yes, but a rule book, no. Personally I think of it as give and and take and sometimes you have to give more of yourself, work harder to see, to make and enjoy.

On my personal journey I find that I am embracing photography as a deliberate art much more than I did when I was last making photographs. The pre-visualisation and post-visualisation process that was described to me so many years ago resonates louder. The way photographers recent and past, through their individual process make unusual, exciting, beautiful and deliberate choices about their discourse; the presentation of the moments they experience and make and wish to convey. Suffice to say my personal choices fell far from aligning with the judges choices in the competitions and I have no doubt that my photographs would prove lacking on these standards. Each to their own, its one of the things that makes life exciting.:-)

In my blip for today there are pure whites and pure blacks, there is no foreground interest. I enjoyed the bleak expanse, patterning in the sky and simple texturing of the grass which I chose amplify with a wide angle, sharp focus and depth of field. I enjoyed the raw simplicity of the nature reserve and the simplicity of a walk with my camera between the black and white extremes of rain showers and not rain showers. That’s all I wanted to say, so in todays blip dialogue that’s all I am saying.

Mono Monday Challenge