Your “call it quits” moment is coming – here’s what to do about it

[rdenney]

Rick, I went looking to see if you posted images. What I found was a lot of comments on photographs you like. What I noticed is that you like photographs where the lens was left open for a very long time. Why not try some like that yourself? Another one was some ferns in a forest, with dappled light falling on them. Why not take a walk in a forest and see what there is to see?

You are obviously a man of action, and that's admirable. But you have misinterpreted what I have admired. If you look at Nana Sousa Dias's photos, or Jiri's, or the other photos I've commented on, it's not the long exposure, or the ultrawide lens, or the ferns (ferns?) that elicited my admiration. The photos I admire have a dynamic balance to them, a rightness that I can't seem to see myself on the ground glass, at least on purpose. They say what they have to say with extreme economy. I once entered a photo in a contest that I had reduced to line graphic using Kodalith. The judge nailed me to the wall with the comment, "when you use a special effect, it has to support the idea. It can't be the idea."

When I say I don't need success, don't misunderstand. I have been making photos for decades and have made some that have attracted more than a few oohs and aahs. I have not posted that many here, because not much of my large-format work is in the digital domain. I'm not a production photographer, though. I think--a lot. Then, suddenly, I'll get to a point where something will gel in my mind at the same time as life cuts me some slack in terms of available time and I'll go on a tear. Maybe it works out, often it doesn't. The next time I am compelled to go out with the camera, though, I want a different mental process in place.

You shoot guns; I used to race cars. Track time was unavailable at my bottom rung of professional motorsports. So, when track time is not an option, how does a weekend race-car driver practice his moves? By understanding processes and rehearsing them in his mind, training the right responses. There is a physical training required for any skill, and a mental preparation. I don't need the physical part of photography, but I do need the mental part. I suspect that will be the first to go with me.

Rick "who has plenty of filters and knows what they are for" Denney

[Roger Cole]

Like many threads on here, this one starts out interesting to me, then goes on so long, often with more and more potentially interesting posts, that I just don't have the patience to read it all.

This struck me as an odd question, maybe because it's sometimes asked in discussions around one of my other hobbies where it seems a much more realistic question, namely flying. Compared to photography flying is both a lot more expensive and more medically demanding. Almost every pilot, if he lives long enough, will eventually become medically unfit to fly, if not unfit to fly Sport Pilot (which requires only a driver's license for medical certificate and, if you have questionable conditions, a doc to agree it's ok, not an FAA medical) or gliders (no medical at all needed but you still have to be able to do it!) then certainly unable to get an FAA medical for the private pilot level. Others will, before that time, get to points where they either can't afford it or decide, even if they could keep it up, that it just isn't worth the cost to them anymore. My answer to the question has always been that I have plenty of other hobbies I could put more time and energy (and money) into, among them photography!

About the only realistic reasons I can think of that I would have to give up photography would be severely restricted vision or maybe mobility. I've read in this thread that there are sightless photographers but I don't think I could do it, or would want to. Mobility, well, I could and probably would shoot from a wheel chair if I had to, but one could always be even less mobile, at least unable to handle a camera effectively - very impaired or completely lacking arm/hand movement, for example.

I think until something like that actually befalls us it's pretty much impossible to say how we'd react or what we'd do. So I don't dwell on it. I come from a long lived family with almost everyone living into their 90s and hale and hearty for most of it (at least on my father's side which I more resemble physically) so, at 47, I hope to have quite a while ahead of me, while realizing that any of us could be wrong about that at any moment.

Now what would happen if I just lost interest? That's pretty much happened before and may well again. I tend to rotate among several interests, and I have several hobbies I could dive back into with gusto and get a lot out of, and wouldn't be averse to finding new ones. Astronomy (if I lived outside light pollution hell at least,) back into road bicycling, maybe even back into ham radio - of course as long as I have my health and some money I can also fly, but that isn't so much an alternative since I do it now, some (but not nearly as much as I'd like. Almost no pilot that isn't paid to fly can afford to fly as much as he'd like.)

The important thing is to keep the mind engaged and always be doing and learning something and I see several other people have said much the same thing.

So...rock on. There's photos to be taken among other things!

[paulr]

No, the difference is in art that is inspired by, and intended to evoke, a narrative.

I really don't buy this distinction, because it's grounded entirely on what we've come to know as intentional fallacy—the idea that the meaning of a text or object can be determined by the intent of whoever made it. The critical discoveries of the 20th century pretty well swept this idea away. We found texts and photographs ripe with meanings that authors never intended, and we found authors declaring meanings that we couldn't find if we hunted with a magnifying glass.

I've had people with a narrative bent find narratives in my work, and I'm pretty sure that I never intentionally put them there ...

Intentional fallacy also raises, in many cases, an issue of presumptuousness: how can we we know for sure what so-and-so's intent was? Even if they tell us, how do we know we can take that at face value? Many authors and artists have had fun playing this game (there are some especially interesting stories about Duchamp that I won't get into).

The one thing we know about the intent of Migrant Mother is editorial: the project was sponsored and compiled for rhetorical / propagandistic purposes (less controversially known as documentary). The rhetorical effect on the viewer was premeditated.

But even so, this kind of intent can be exercised so thoroughly from the editor's desk that the final selection tells us next to nothing about what the photographer thought.

[Chris Strobel]

Well I'll probably continue off and on in photography until I'm too old, at which point I'll probably sit back in me rocking chair and rehash old Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath tunes on me guitar

[rdenney]

I really don't buy this distinction, because it's grounded entirely on what we've come to know as intentional fallacy—the idea that the meaning of a text or object can be determined by the intent of whoever made it.

It's not the effect it has on the photo, it's the effect it has on the decisions I make. And that affects the photo. When I try to force the story, I end up missing what's fundamental and important and direct about my response to the subject.

Rick "no longer wanting to make 'sharp photos of fuzzy concepts'" Denney

[Jim Ewins]

Hero, This dreary winter must be getting you down. If you are tired of photography, do something else, or shoot pix of something else. Pretend you are Widgett/Widgeey or who ever he was and take pictures if the mayor - that's about a ridiculous thing one could do, unless making pic of the city or county councils.

Then there will be the demo of the viaduct - almost as good as watching paint dry. Spring was here yesterday and may come again.

[Heroique]

Hero...spring was here yesterday [in Seattle] and may come again.

“Hero”? You talking to me?

Yes, I too enjoyed Seattle’s spring weather yesterday – I was out w/ my long-legged beloved! (The sexy details are in post #44.) That inescapable “quits” moment in the future is good at getting one out there today!

[Heroique]

...We found texts and photographs ripe with meanings that authors never intended, and we found authors declaring meanings that we couldn’t find if we hunted with a magnifying glass...

“We”? You talking to me?

I’m not sure which critics you’re talking about, though I’m confident you’re summarizing their pseudo-scientific procedures very well. (Please name them; I want to know in case I haven’t browsed them.) The Great Artists who are also Great Critics are, as you know, a small bunch indeed – but they’re the critics I choose to read most carefully: Dryden, Diderot, Goethe, Coleridge, Carlyle, Delacroix, Berlioz, Poe, Yeats, Wilde, Shaw. Each would be curious about what purpose a deaf and blind critic could possibly serve – and why such a critic would try to elucidate, in such abominable writing, a text he says doesn’t exist.

[rguinter]

“Hero”? You talking to me?

Yes, I too enjoyed Seattle’s spring weather yesterday – I was out w/ my long-legged beloved! (The sexy details are in post #44.) That inescapable “quits” moment in the future is good at getting one out there today!

I saw that post and was going to comment but I was unsure what a "Ries" was/is.

So I declined.

But unless it's the name of a member of the species homo sapiens I have a bit of a concern about calling it "sexy." Same as people who think cars are sexy. Very strange indeed... at least in my mind.

Cool, fast, hot, awesome, etc., etc... OK. But sexy, uhhh... No!

Bob G.

[Heroique]

I saw that post and was going to comment but I was unsure what a “Ries” was.

You’re absolutely correct, you know – yes, we should all be wary about what sleek, long-legged beauty can do to the eye of the homo sapien beholder. I plead guilty – but she’s still so ... sexy!