Ice #91 (The Fried Egg). Eldorado Springs Canyon, Colorado, 2013
Talented photographer and teacher of photography, Eli Vega, presented the program at last night’s meeting of the Colorado Nature Camera Club. Naturally, there were some wonderful lessons learned.
Here is a brief summary of Eli’s philosophy and technique:
1) He shoots in JPEG, does most of what he needs to do in camera (double exposures, artistic camera movement, etc.), then does some minor tweaking of his images in post-processing. Generally, he says around 90% of the image is complete at capture with maybe another 10% of the work done in post.
2) He was initially trained as a visual artist (painter) so his philosophy begins with the concept that one should be “an artist first and a photographer second.”
3) He first asks, “How do I want this to look?” So, he starts with the end product in mind.
4) Much of his work is abstract, or very close up pieces of the whole. So, for him, the real, whole subject is secondary–he wants to capture something else much more intimate and detailed about it…things like line, texture, designs, layers, patterns, shape, and/or mood.
5) He says, “The main subject is a suggestion–then you make it into art. The idea is to capture the ‘spirit’ of the subject.” (One of his examples: Street dancers…they were heavily blurred, which captured the spirit of their lively movement, but the complete subject of the dancers themselves was not obviously visible.)
This is some great food for thought for our personal photography. It is tempting to try to capture a literal picture of the entire subject or scene before us when what might very well be more interesting and artistic would be to capture some smaller, more intimate, detail that would express the mood or spirit of what we are looking at.
For more about Eli, his interesting bio and his wonderful work, check out his web site here.
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