journal

Mastery through consistency

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“The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it” — Edward Weston

I’ve talked about consistency many times on this blog.

We need to give our tools and style some time to mature, we need to give ourselves enough room to grow with our current tools. Don’t try to photograph everything, focus on a few things.

A unique lens for unique images

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I got to try something different, a reflex lens. This Kase 200mm f/5.6 is a prime, fixed aperture reflex lens, and it's able to do some crazy stuff. The bokeh it creates can lead to very interesting photographs, and it opens a new whole new world of creative possibilities.

These are some of the images I've made with this lens.

The first days are the hardest

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A photography road trip is a big change from our everyday life. New routines (or the lack of one), habits, motions, and mindset. It takes a while getting used to it, and that's why the first days are the hardest. As I hit the road again, I try to make it easy on myself by visiting a location I'm familiar with, in Northern Michigan.

Obsessed

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In 1977, on the sidewalk outside his loft on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, the fifty-eight-year-old W. Eugene Smith watched from a wheelchair as some two dozen volunteers—mostly young photography students paying homage—loaded his life’s work into two shipping trucks.

When the shipment arrived in Tucson, it filled a high school gymnasium and spilled into outlying rooms.

Included in the shipment were three thousand matted and unmatted master prints; hundreds of thousands of meticulous 5 x 7 work prints; hundreds of thousands of negatives and contact sheets. There were hundreds of pocket spiral notebooks and thousands of 3 x 5 note cards with scribbled notes; maps and diagrams from all over the world; and hundreds of boxes of clipped magazine and newspaper articles. Smith wrote hundreds of fifteen-page single-spaced letters to family, friends, and people he barely knew, and he mimeographed copies before mailing them. There were dozens of cameras, various pieces of darkroom equipment, trash cans and boxes full of loose lens caps, rubber bands, and paper clips. Smith also had 25,000 vinyl records and 3,750 books.

[Smith’s] death certificate read “stroke” but, as was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of “everything.” He was flat worn out. He’d given up. He left eighteen dollars in the bank, and forty-four thousand pounds of materials.

Gene Smith's Sink: A wide-angle view

I’ve long argued that you need to be obsessed if you want to become great at something. But Eugene Smith took this to extreme.

We have to commit to our art with either intensity or longevity. They are almost mutually exclusive, as ferocious intensity can’t be maintained for too long. Even if your mind can hold, your body will eventually fail, as happened to Smith. He died at 58, leaving many years of potential growth and work on the table.

Consistency and a healthier balance over a long period of time are usually the wiser choice.