Over the weekend, I had the chance to witness something I thought only happened in movies. It was an event ripe with photographic opportunities, but I chose not to shoot a single frame, leaving my camera in the bag.
Why? Because some events are too private to be documented, and some experiences are meant only for those who are present. Because some moments are meant to be lived, not made to be captured. Because sometimes, those gaps between frames do not belong to you, even if they were shared with you.
Inside those gaps, brilliance can still arise, even if they are not of your art. I live to photograph, I do not photograph to live.
And no, I couldn’t tell you what happened even if you asked me, because I promised to keep those gaps for ourselves.
As a photographer, it’s both inspiring and maddening to see a beautiful photograph and wonder just how the photographer did it. I mean, there are photographs that are really good, with excellent composition and beautiful light. And then there are photos that transcend the really good; you don’t just appreciate them with your eyes alone but respond to them with your heart. Those are the photographs I wanted to learn how to take.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single book that talked about that. There were a lot of books about composition, technique and gear – which were great, but nothing about how to distill moments of feeling into a single frame.
Until I found Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision by David duChemin. To be honest, I’ve wanted to write about this book for the longest time, but I kept putting it off because I have no idea how to summarize a book which I’ve learned so much from. In the end, I think the best way for me to put it is to put it bluntly; this book changed my game.
It helped me move up from taking photos like these of Japan in 2008:
To photos like these in 2009:
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I pushed myself to take better photos while I was in Tokyo recently; shooting in the rain while my friends were enjoying hot coffee indoors, bruising my feet walking round the streets and overcoming my fears to shoot complete strangers. I wanted to do better than I did in 2008, where I shot mostly buildings on a Tadao Ando pilgrimage. I wanted to capture a sense of life in Tokyo, and infuse my photos with a sense of story. I’m not sure if I succeeded, but I learned a few lessons from the experience. So if you will, here are lessons learned from the adventures of a hobbyist photographer.
1. Wear Comfortable Shoes
Sounds almost too obvious to be ridiculous, but I paid for this lesson dearly with bruised feet that hurt for days after I returned home. See, I like to pack light, and I had to dress for a formal occasion during the work/pleasure trip, so smart me decided to pack a single pair of dress shoes and walk up and down Tokyo in it. Not only did it make walking hell after a couple of days, it impeded my movement and my ability to shoot, and I had to rest more as well. Never again!
2. Be Brave/Shameless
Tokyo was the first time I tried street photography, and it was hard for me to overcome the fear/shyness barrier to shooting complete strangers, unasked, on the streets. A photographer I spoke to told me I just had to get over it, and this is something I still need to work on. Read More →
Concluding Parts 1, 2, 3 & 4 of a recent photographic trip to Tokyo, Japan.
I visited the 21_21 Design Sight museum this morning, and was lucky to catch The Outline, an exhibit about the work of product designer Naoto Fukasawa. I’m a fan of his work and really enjoyed looking at the flowing, organic shapes of his designs.
I love Tadao Ando‘s architecture as well, and looking at the 21_21 museum he designed, I thought it would be a lovely thing to shoot in the evening light, but alas I was there at noon and nothing worked. It wasn’t all wasted though, as I managed to catch these autumn leaves behind the museum, my first in Tokyo. Even though I visited Tokyo in late November and everyone was telling me how beautiful the autumn leaves were going to be, I hardly saw any (the Japanese were also telling me how unusual it was raining so often – global warming, I’m looking at you).
I then walked over to the National Art Center. I didn’t want to spend too much time shooting it as I wanted to move away from shooting architecture this time round, but I enjoyed playing with how its shape interacted with the beautifully blue sky that day.
These birds flew by just as I lined up the camera to shoot the Art Center dome. There was no way to see it coming, there was only time to shoot one frame – it’s just one of those happy coincidences where I was in the right place at the right time. Read More →
