Enjoy your photography

I’ve just been away on holiday, which for me is a time of doing nothing much and spending some time with my thoughts. I do, of course, take a camera with me although having visited Lanzarote now for the past twenty years or more, there is starting to be a familiarity about many of my images. However, this year whilst away, I did give quite a bit of thought to photography and what it’s all about. My conclusion, and hence this post, is that it is there to be enjoyed. I came to that conclusion after I had taken the image below.

 

 

A shot from an Agricultural museum in Lanzarote, I really liked the old world look and how the light from the window was catching the food. However, when I got home and looked at the image there was a very bright patch of light in the centre of the image that I couldn’t recover. It was too bright and there was no detail at all, but I still liked the image and so here it is. There was though a thought that came to me every time I looked at the image. “It will never win any competitions”. and a second thought “Is that a problem”?

My personal view is that photography is there to be enjoyed and if winning competitions is your way of enjoying photography then that is fine, I don’t have a problem with that at all but I have sat through competitions being judged and heard the comments that some judges have made about some images and wondered if those comments may have discouraged that particular photographer from photography for life. I do know that this doesn’t apply to every judge and some are very constructive with their comments but unfortunately not all of them.

Personally I like to see images that are unusual and taken differently, or edited differently and I just wonder if we all stuck to the “rules” if photography would progress.

I recently attended a lecture where the photographer showed a particular photograph that they said they particularly liked and then showed a different version that they had altered because the preferred original version “would not win competitions”! I did find that a little strange.

I tend to subscribe to the view that if you don’t have anything good to say then it’s probably best to say nothing at all. Which means that perhaps this whole post should be committed to the trash, but what I really wanted to say is to anyone out there who has been told that their image won’t win competitions, don’t let that put you off, there are probably still many people out there who will get great pleasure from your images, so keep on going. 

I’m off now to enjoy my photography and I hope you all do too.

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Meta

Recent Comments

psm0114 Written by:

Be First to Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *