Kia ora tatou:

Time for a Sermon on the Mount.

On Monday night I had the singular honour of being asked to judge the Canterbury Roundup, an interclub battle for projected Images, along with Ian Smith (ex-Photo Access) and Linda Lee, a Fine Art photography teacher from Christchurch. Nice to see clubs looking for input from people outside the system. Widening the range of inputs can only be good for photography as a whole and for enlarging our awareness of the possibilities the medium can offer. CPS came first (again), followed by Rangiora (YAAY!- No, I am not being parochial-much) and then Kaiapoi. Congratulations.

On that subject, I want to raise (and hopefully dispel) a common fallacy: that professionals are better photographers  than amateurs.

Wrong. They are the same, only different. I have seen work from amateur photographers that had a long way to go. And I have been asked to explain ” this depth-of-field thing” to a professional who was making $80k a year, shooting families, weddings and children. A professional makes his/her living from photography. As such, he/she is driven by client expectations. An amateur photographs for the love of it. We are all amateurs. Or we should be.

The great trap for pros, I have noticed, is that they sometimes come to see what they are doing as ‘a job’ and stop making pictures with passion. Then their work suffers and so, curiously, does their client base and earnings. Often as a pro, a new way of making work comes from going out and making photographs for the love of it, playing and finding a new way. Being an amateur. Then that inspirations can be fed back into one’s income stream. I t is called professional development. O, and it is tax-deductible.

To my mind, no amateur should experience the slightest degree of cringe. Do what you do and love it. Celebrate the freedom that comes from being able to make images the way you want and not worry about bitchy clients with unreal expectations. You might be interested to know that Henri Cartier-Bresson was an amateur. Fortunate personal circumstances meant he could follow hi passion and do it his own way.

On Monday night we saw some images that were drop-dead gorgeous and to my mind, world-class. one haunting image of a hummingbird still sticks in my mind. I love it when that happens.

But the killer shot, as far as we judges were concerned, was this one, shot by Neville Rhodes from the New Brighton Club. Neville, this shot is absolutely stunning. You have so nailed  the moment. Your technical control is superb and the sense of moment is there, right down to the divots erupting from the lead dog’s foot. But there is more to it than that. That dog is doing what he does (trying to catch and kill something), being true to himself, and his focus and passion is there for us to see.  Just look at the feral look in its eyes. Perfect. You have put it all together and told a story that is timeless.

And reminded me of the medium’s roots. Photography’s original raison d’etre, its mahi, is documentation; defining a moment and telling a story.

You have done the medium proud.

Dammit, I wish I had shot that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 8:09 am and is filed under Your Images. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.