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Photographic Projections: Open-mindedness in photography

The Dalai Lama once asked the great Henri Cartier-Bresson:

“- What makes you a good photographer?
– The ideal moment that must be predicted and expected.
– Hmm, so you live a good period of time in the projected future and after you make the photograph, you look at it and admire something that happened in the past.”

When I’m out in the field, practising photography, I don’t know what to expect and I don’t know what to find. In fact I can’t find anything, because everything finds me. I’m out in the open…

Out in the open, in the field, I try to be as opened as the sky is, and I try not to interfere with what is going on but rather play along with it and respond to what I encounter. I found that not struggling with life itself, for life itself, is sweeter and life goes smoothly without bumps, without obstacles of any kind.

As philosophical as it may seem, one thing I’d like to point out and concentrate upon and that is being opened to everything which doesn’t mean accepting anything even if it is dangerous for us, but being attached to nothing. It means being aware. :)

There is a trend, so to speak, in the world of photography that imposes its practitioners to wait for the right moment to click the shutter and make the exposure, that is the “decisive moment” that every photographer dreams of. While I say it is a good practice, in reality I don’t have time for it because when I’m out in the field, like I said, I don’t find what I want to photograph, it finds me. I encounter everything there. It’s like I photograph what I need and not what I want to photograph. This had happened to me many times, especially in the last year of practice.

I don’t really have time to think of what I want to take a picture of but instead I think of what needs to be photographed, meaning that things unfold before my very eyes, things happen and I think I’m sort of lucky to find interesting moments without planning them before the shoot, things to compose in the images that I’m making in the fields. Then, at home, I continue the composition started in the field to bring it to what I saw and felt in the said moment. The camera doesn’t record but suggestions of the graphical elements of the composition to remind me of what I need to accentuate to finalize the image.

So, for this I’d like to tell the story of what I experienced yesterday, on the 13th of September, 2015, again, out in the open, on Crow Mountain, which is one of the biggest mounts of Leaota Massif in the Carpathians in my country, when I arrived on the peak, after a great climb that exhausted me quite a lot, I had an expectancy in my mind. I knew that there were a few dead dwarf mountain pines (Pinus mugo) that I think were burned during a summer storm a few years ago and I wanted to photograph them. I expected them to still be there and to capture them in interesting poses. I was thinking about some out-of-the-box abstract photography of them or about some interesting but kind of creepy :) landscape photos with them in the foreground as primary subjects. I admit, therefore, I had expectations but, as I said earlier, when I arrived there the reality of the situation was a little bit different. They were still there, of course, but working the shots I couldn’t photograph them in the ways that I imagined but instead I had to adapt to the situations and to the environment and compose in the way that I think is the best way to describe what I experienced there. It was a fine mingle between planning the shot and being opened for the new. :)

While shooting the scene I noticed another thing, some interesting plays of lights and shadows in the landscape in the midground left of the frame. I shot many frames and chose one that is the best composition of the scene. Light was traveling many times out there and I had another expectation in the field. I expected a more potent, more powerful light projection over the land in those places because I noticed that they created some leading lines to the dead dwarf mountain pines, with which to guide the viewer intelligently to them. I expected them to light up more so I could have these strong leading lines in this composition. And I was rewarded. This, I think, is the moment we need to wait for in the field, while photographing. It is the moment that happens in the present and with it we can build strong photographic compositions. It is the expected moment when one knows exactly what would happen and what is worth seeing.

So, just like in life in general we should be open minded but also capable of doing some planning. It comes with the flow of things, as I noticed. Not interfering with what is out there, so to say, is the key to us being exceptional at everything we do, or at everything life gives us to realize. It is way better than practising one or a few things training ourselves to our exhaustion. It is actually the power of practising everything equable which fuels us to make best moves everytime and never exhaust neither our energies nor our possibilities. Actually, we don’t need to exhaust our energies. What we need is a well-balanced way of practicing life. We can even surprise ourselves in the process with what we could be capable of doing.

Out in the Open - Study I - photography

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