It’s Sunday and time for the weekly blog update, square pegs, photos that don’t fit in and little nuggets of photographic wisdom, I guess. Having just completed an amazing ten days of photography in Inner Mongolia, the time comes to assess just what in the world I am going to do with this mass of images.
Just going over what I have, I can see the following potential projects
Sand dunes both with and without snow
Camels
The Park in Dongba
Mongolian Fashion details
The Buddhist Temple in Baotou
The photographers, both American and Chinese
The easiest thing to do in my projects is the photography part. It’s the fun part, the beginning, when all the options are open and the creativity is zooming right along. Once the processing is done, which is easier and easier as I get better with lightroom and photoshop, I can get to a nice pdf file because I have standardized my web folios in InDesign. Then I crash into a brick wall. I have to write the statement for the work. Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank computer screen until your eyes bleed. The toughest thing about completing a project is writing the introduction to the photographs. I have the companion project to the Ansorge Hotel folio complete. It has been complete for four months. I have absolutely no idea what to write for an introduction.
I have yet to figure out a way to make writing about my photographs easy. It is easy to write about where you were, what you saw and how you made the photograph. It is easy to write about f/stops, megapixels, and other myriad technical details. It is much more difficult to write about what the photographs mean in a way that can bring the viewer to the transition point where the communication evolves from verbal to visual. I find this difficult because when I am photographing I am so consumed by the moment that I am not thinking, but looking, acting, reacting and photographing with such intensity just about everything else but the subject and myself disappear from the universe. Trying to write about such an experience is very, very difficult. But it has to be done.
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