Defining Photographic Quality and Vision

[wolfnowl]

I think the challenge is two-fold. One is being able to decide for yourself what photographic quality means to you (and being able to recognize it when you've achieved it). The second, often harder, is recognizing that everyone else has their own ideas - whether or not they've been able to articulate them - that may be quite different from yours! As photographers we must walk a line between finding a way to allow an image to portray what we want it to say while at the same time recognizing that no matter our efforts, everyone will 'read' it differently. Anyway, I was explaining this to someone recently and stumbled across a number of links on the topic - all with different ideas, of course!  Still, I found them worth reading.

A Key Step To Becoming A Better Photographer in 2014 (Update!)
Defining quality
Photographic quality
FINE TUNING YOUR VISION
The humility of the artist

For those who are interested...

Mike.

[Isaac]

Photographic quality

"For me, the photographic qualities that are important in a work or a series are the ones that best serve the needs of the content, not the ones that are habitual and comfortable for the photographer."

[bill t.]

An important moment for me came when I realized I was making products for people to cover the large empty space above their sofas.  That liberated me to go out and just take pictures without a cloud of obligatory profundity hanging over my head, that profundity being a very large and inhibiting monkey I carried on my back through most of my young life.  Have enjoyed photography much more ever since.

But I would caution against quality or artfulness or profundity as a goal.  Those should be spices you add on top of an already interesting image.

[Rob C]

A timely thread.

I recently rediscovered this site - the one of our sometime contributor Chuck:

http://www.chuckkimmerle.com/

It's been a while since I had last visited, and my impression on revisiting was that he'd constructed a new site, shot a helluva lot of new images and had reworked a few standards.

Whatever the truth, I think his site is now one of the best displays of sheer photographic quality that I have found.

I also think that is proves that we cannot ever hope, as individuals, to be able to do all kinds of genres as well as we might do some.

Congratulations to the man.

Rob C

[Isaac]

An important moment for me came when I realized I was making products for people to cover the large empty space above their sofas.

Indeed ;-)

And as Susan Kismaric, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, wryly observed, "Large color photographs decorate; small black-and-white photographs don't decorate."

[RSL]

Whatever the truth, I think his site is now one of the best displays of sheer photographic quality that I have found.

+1 Rob. Hated to see Chuck leave LuLa behind. I especially loved his North Dakota stuff. He caught the place. Really caught it.

[churly]

Whatever the truth, I think his site is now one of the best displays of sheer photographic quality that I have found.

The same is true of his blog.  He doesn't post very often but what he does put out there is well worth reading.