:: visual connections ::

If you’re like me, there are plenty of times during which you go without picking up your camera, and no, I don’t mean the times when you close your eyes to sleep.  This kind of thing happens to me a LOT.   Lack of motivation?  Lack of opportunity?  Doesn’t matter.  The only thing that matters is that you’re not shooting.

Don’t get me wrong.  Not shooting isn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless shooting is what you do for a living and you’re on the verge of getting tossed out of your well-appointed home because of the aforementioned lack of production.  For the average hobbyist, the photographic equivalent of writer’s block is merely irritating, and not in any way life-changing.  But there are ways around almost any roadblock, if you care to find the one that works best for you.

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The word photography, etymologically speaking, is derived more or less from the combination of the Greek words photos, meaning light, and graphos, meaning painting or writing.  So photography is in essence concerned chiefly with using light and shadow as pen or as paintbrush.  It’s really at root a very evocative and romantic concept when you think about it. These days, I’m working mostly on portrait photography. And finding ways to use light (or to let light use me) to create good portraits is for now the most interesting, entertaining, and challenging part of pursuing this hobby. On the other hand, I’m certainly fickle enough to change my mind and begin to explore some other realm of photography before long.  That having been said, the question becomes this: how am I best to engage and manipulate the light?  Turns out that there are answers to this question just about everywhere.

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