I've had the pleasure of having William Snyder as my professor and mentor. William was the first to bluntly tell me that it doesn't matter how cool the situation was, or what I had to do to get in, or how hot/cold/dark/light it was if you did not make a good photograph. The bottom line is the image. Nothing else matters.
In the process of making my new portfolio, I am going through many old photographs that I cannot justify taking, or even begin imagine why I thought it would be a great idea to click the shutter. To be fair, some not-so-great pictures are standard tourist fare, but many have no content, no composition, no light, some have no subject and all have no point. I should've put down the camera and enjoyed the moment I failed to capture on CCD.
But I didn't, because I am a photographer, and that means my life is spent looking through a lens, right? Wrong. As my long commute is (slowly) teaching me, and which many, many people have tried to tell me over the past 3 years, you cannot make good images if:
1) You are so stressed out you can't see straight
2) You are rushing, and not looking
3) You are too relaxed, and everything becomes conceptual
4) You do not accept the technical limits of your gear.
Think twice, click once, look constantly, remember to live.
And, as William often said, thinking should be done before and after taking an image, not during the process. If only I'd paused longer to think about those words.
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