It's not a question of "practice." It's a question of finding out what works and what doesn't. The first thing you learn by shooting and shooting is what doesn't work. Once you've thoroughly established that, you're ready to learn what does work. At lot of people shoot and shoot and never learn what doesn't work. I see it all the time -- even here on LuLa. Maybe that's what's happening with your guitar.
At the risk of coming across as a mutual admiration society, I have to say that Russ is right. You sometimes have to spend a helluva lot of time in the photographic wilderness, but not always.
Again, I dig deeply into my own life.
The moment I realised photography was going to be my thing, I knew it was going to be fashion. I spent from six to seven years working in an engineering company's photo unit mainly printing b/w and colour. That time felt wasted, then, but the reality is that I gained an expertise in printing, especially batch printing (this was all by hand, in a dish) runs of maybe fifty identical images, something that came into its own when I went solo and ended up doing exactly that for the PR purposes of fashion clients. The thing is, as I have confessed here before, on joining that photo unit I already imagined myself a hot printer. I soon learned that I knew nothing. At the end of that job, I knew all I ever needed to know about darkrooms.
Now, fashion. Yes, I'd shot some PR stuff for drama students, and had never touched commercial fashion. But, I never, for a moment, imagined that I wouldn't know how to do it. It worked immediately. Very well, too. BUT: I had spent those engineering company years buying
Vogue and
Playboy and reading every last morsel of print between the covers, and digesting every goddam picture therein. Was a time I could almost unfailingly name every
Vogue photographer by style, without looking at the credit line. Fashion photography goes so much further than an understanding of how to make an image: that image has to express an ethic, the ethos of its moment. So yes, as Russ has often stated, you gotta look, and look, and look, and learn not just what it is, but also
what it's about. And the about you learn from reading what the people in the industry write and feel about it, not just what the snappers snap; they are already a step out of it, in most ways.
So, when the fashion ended, and the calendars came in for me, I already had the understanding of how to encourage women to be free and contribute, which is not the same as taking direction all the time. Fashion had already conditioned my emotional reactions and likes, so the pin-ups never - I hope - looked vulgar. It just wasn't in my nature to slide towards the pornographic. (I had my own judge and executioner back at home, bless her. I wanted her to feel good about what I did.)
In time, I retired, did almost nothing photographic for years. Then, I lost my wife eight years ago. How do you fill emptiness? I was lucky in that I had photography behind me, so that's what became the alternative to, and saviour from the madhouse. But what to shoot? Models without a client to pay for 'em will ruin you faster than alcohol, so that was out. I never thought of myself as any kind of hero, so street always felt too dangerous for a thin guy to take up. Landscape I never could see as anything but a background to something else, so back to the possible: the two little towns on either side of me. In my website I have a set of galleries under the name of The Biscuit Tin. Those are pretty much a collection of old stuff and attempts at finding something that might interest me to dig further. Nothing there really did, and then one day, I rediscovered a very old photo-love I'd first encountered in the 50s: Saul Leiter. Bang! But that bang took years to arrive.
That spiritual explosion led to the current run of Glimpsed Parallels galleries, and I have found what I expect to interest me until I can either see no more or just fall over dead.
So again, as has been said so often before, it can take you years to find what's you. And it's got nothing to do with any other form of artistic endeavour. And even less about what other folks think should be your anointed route to revelation; everything you need is already there inside you, and you have to work with the mental kit God gave you; it just takes the time it takes.
Rob
