Tuesday, May 1, 2007

what a photo means to you...

(Merrill Parks website, satellite map)

bridge next to Stange Park, Merrill, WI
taken May 1, 2007 by jls
See the Merrill gallery & many other photos at fourpointedstar.smugmug.com


a little lesson for everyone...
In photography, there are several things that are very easy to master. Things like focus, lighting, and steadiness are simply controlled. What makes photography interesting is the artist's aspect of taking a photo; composition, alignment, structure, advanced focus, portayal, etc.
I 'grade' all of my work in Aperture. I assign from zero to five stars to each photo based on how well I portayed (in the photo) what I saw (in real life). When I imported this photo, I gave it one star, and it got one star because it wasn't out of focus, otherwise it would have gotten zero. I just plain didn't like the photo. It's focused, the lighting is within acceptable tolerances (for a simple point-n-shoot camera), and the photo is steady; but from an artist's standpoint I didn't like it...not one bit.
Shannon on the other hand looked at the photo and immediately said "I love that photo, Josh!" For a reason that neither of us could ever explain, our artist's eyes are vastly different. So just for my wife, I am posting a photo that I thought was useless, but she thought was fantastic.
Let this be a lesson: Art is truely in the eye of the beholder. What you might think is stupendous, other's might not think is great at all, and not everything that you discount is indeed worthless.

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