My cup runneth over

Shepherd's crook: a small cup with a big meaning.
"Feed my sheep." - John 21:17

This stoneware cup, made by a famous potter whose name resides somewhere around the medulla oblongata, was given to me by a friend many years ago as an expression of faith in my call to ministry.

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PHOTOGRAPHY NOTE

I made the mistake of sitting with this cup in front of me as I adjusted its color in iPhoto, trying for a precise match. I finally realized that the shot was taken in entirely different light conditions and gave up, going instead for a pleasing piece of art all on its own.

I think a lot about how much "fiddling" with a photo is permissible. Who would criticize Ansel Adams for his darkroom fiddling with its magnificent results? Yet I find myself unwilling to Photoshop my own work. I regularly harumph at magazine photos in which it's clear that this model was not within a thousand miles of that beach. Photographs used to be evidence. Now they're more often used to lie. I want mine to tell the truth, in some way or another. As a writer of fiction, which is lies told in the service of truth, I realize that there may be more wiggle room than I currently give myself.

Sharp focus is one thing I admire in the pictures of others and often find absent in my own, depending on steadiness of hand and fullness of light. But when I looked at Julio Mitchel's Do You Love Me? series, it seemed to me that in his storytelling and capture of amazing portraits, sharpness is beside the point. The same is true of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

It occurs to me that I appreciate sharpness most when it means that I can blow up a scene, say a crowd or a landscape, and keep getting deeper into recognizable imagery. That's what makes the work of Andreas Gursky and Edward Burtynsky so appealing. But I don't think I'm likely to be that kind of photographer. If my fuzzy images bug you, well, there are lots of sharper ones in Blipland!

Do you think about these things also?


"For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously.... It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

To take a photograph is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in a face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy."

- Henri Cartier-Bresson