I came across a couple of interesting videos of photographers on the web today.
The first is a wonderful video of Michael Kenna photographing in the snow in Hokkaido, Japan. The video is partly an interview, partly a visual narrative of Kenna at work, and partly a collection of interesting scenes and images associated with some of his photographs. There is a lot to think about and consider in the video, and it struck several chords for me. Among many was his use of the word “hunt” to describe the act of looking for and finding photographic images, and not perhaps just in the sense of tracking and capturing an image, but also, I think, related to the need to be patient and to understand the “quarry.” I often have thought about the “hunt” aspect of looking for subject. (Link originally seen at George Barr’s Behind the Lens blog.)
The second video is rather different but also features a very talented landscape photographer, Charlie Cramer. Unlike the slow moving and rather poetic video of Kenna with its long silent shots and occasional sparse music, this video interview (on the Marc Silber show) is pretty “straight ahead” – basically a record of Charlie talking about his ubiquitous framing guide, a sheet of mat board with a 4 x 5 cutout that he uses to help him visual photographs while he is in the field. This is interesting and Charlie makes a compelling case for using this “tool.” (I’ve thought about it, but never “gone there.” Perhaps I will now…) More interesting to me were a few side comments that Charlie makes in the course of the interview. For one, he refers to the frame as a “blood pressure meter,” and suggests that he more or less “just knows” when a scene is going to work because when he views it in the frame he feels his blood pressure rises. (In another context he has spoken of hearing the scene whisper, “Take me!”) The point, I think (and forgive me if I have this wrong, Charlie!) is that all of the rules of composition in the world won’t help you that much in the end – essentially you need to be able to look at the subject and “just know” that it will work and how.
