Chasing the Look - David duChemin.pdf - Photography - farral

CHASING THE LOOK

DAVID DUCHEMIN

Author of Within The Frame

10 WAYS TO IMPROVE THE AESTHETICS OF YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS

Introduction

I was 14 years old when I began

making photographs; I bought a

Voigtlander rangeinder at a neigh-

bor’s yard sale and fell in love. I’m

still falling in love with images and

the process of making them. I’m

still learning to discover my own

vision and evolving in the ways in

which I use the camera to express

it. More and more I see this as a

journey, hence the subtitle of my

irst book, Within he Frame, he

Journey of Photographic Vision. I

suspect it’s a journey for all of us

because if photography is a means

by which we express ourselves,

and we ourselves are always grow-

ing, learning, journeying, then our

photography can do nothing but

move with us, grow with us, and

change as our vision & experience

of the world changes.

last two years. I began a crat that I

knew to be about expression but I

learned it from a purely technical

means. It has taken me over twenty

years to come to the place where

I recognize the primacy of vision

over technique, of principles in-

stead of rules; those simple discov-

eries have brought me to re-learn

everything about my crat.

If I could go back in time and have

a conversation with the teenager I

once was, I’d perch on the edge of

the bathtub in the red glow of the

ad hoc darkroom and beg him to

stop chasing technical perfection

and start chasing an aesthetic that

really says something. I wouldn’t

even try convincing him not to buy

that monstrous Soligor 400mm

lens with a mind-numbing maxi-

mum aperture of f/8, because I

know he wouldn’t listen. But I

would encourage him to pursue a

diferent goal; one that considers

two important questions, “What

I mention all that because it’s what

brought me to start writing the

books, articles, and ebooks I’ve

been so furiously writing over these

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are you trying to say?” and “How can that cam-

era and lens help you say it?” In that order.

I’d stay in that darkroom until he understood

that all of this learning was leading somewhere

but it would go faster if he simply grasped this

one truth: Every setting on your camera will

change the look of the photograph. Every deci-

sion you make, from the lens you use, to the ex-

posure you choose, and the position from which

you shoot, afects the look, the aesthetic of the

image. And then I’d warn him about a couple

of future romantic interests that should prob-

ably be avoided. hen I’d vanish while he still

thought it was the heady mix of developer and

ixer fumes causing the hallucinations.

Back then what mattered to me was getting the

exposure “right” and the focus “right.” Problem

is, no one ever talked me out of this nonsense of

“right” and “wrong” exposure or focus. In fact

everything I read encouraged me in the pursuit

of perfection, not the pursuit of expression. And

it was years before I considered issues like the

quality of light versus the quantity of light, or

the optical efect of compression caused by lon-

ger lenses. It was years before I began to give se-

rious study to a question I hear now as a teacher

time and time again. hat question comes when

“Perfection is over-

rated, and technique

without passion is

like vision without a

voice - it rarely moves

the heart.”

Chasing the Look - David duChemin.pdf

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