Its been a while. It is maybe a month since I used my camera to create something which satisfies me. Something that will soothe my itch to create something. I feel myself growing more frustrated.
I was not planning to be here, in this situation. While on the long flight back to sunny California, I imagined myself to go to a new place every weekend and take some breathtaking shots of the beautiful wintery landscape that California has to offer. Maybe shoot some beautiful portraits of birds that I so love to observe and admire.
It has been difficult to adjust. Frequent travel between two completely different societies without enough time to settle in one is hard for me. Two completely different societies, Bangalore and California.
With so many people around, so much humanity around me. Bangalore fills your head. When you are engulfed by so much of one thing, it is difficult to let anything else take shape in your head. My care and my eye for wildlife, nature suffers during this time. It becomes all about people. I start observing people, things they do. Their problems is what I see. The issues here are small, basic. Something simple like drinking water. I am engulfed. Here, my photographer side urges me to shoot people. Shoot the million different interesting things that you will see happening daily. This is so different from what I used to shoot in California. So, when I think about the upcoming travel to California, the thought of having some personal time, the idea of traveling around spending time capturing and observing wildlife is something I look forward to.
It is a different thing though, once I get transported across the world to what appears to me as a suddenly impersonal place, an advanced society with modern infrastructure, with more personal space than is ever necessary. I find myself in a strange position. I find it hard initially to actually care, appreciate the wildlife and nature that I was so much involved in before I left for India. This care feels insignificant when compared to the more personal issues in Bangalore. It takes a few weeks to re-order my priorities and focus on the less personal aspects of the western life. I feel it is hard to get myself to even volunteer at the banding station here. But, once I do, thanks to the scheduling process they have, I feel at home. The passion to care about wildlife and birds does re-ignite.
But then, it is time to travel again.
Right now, I feel this drive to use my skills to capture something worthwhile. Something I can keep and share. Its been a while and I do not like this lull. I consider photography to be an art, by which logic, I wonder if writers, painters, singers and actors feel the same itch. I haven’t met any of them personally to confirm this, thanks to my profession as an Engineer. I wouldn’t be comfortable starting a conversation with them anyway, even if I did meet.
There is also this aspect of photography where you look at other people’s work for inspiration. I am sure this exists in other forms of art as well. I believe it is important to look at other’s work as inspiration and stop yourself before it comes down to a comparison. After all, the work one produces is for their own satisfaction. Receiving appreciation helps but not a priority. One can never look at their work from the perspective of every viewer. But I confess, I have tried to do this last bit while posting something on facebook. But then, the sample space of viewers there are limited.
Being on the subject, the digital camera revolution and cheap storage has made it easy for people to shoot without thinking. I believe even professional photographers and of course wedding photographers do this much more than they used to, during the film days. The time spent composing and thinking about a shot is now less. Quantity in photography is almost never useful. I wonder if any other kind of art has faced this kind of radical change due to the progress of technology. Maybe it is much easier now to write and publish books than it was? Maybe it is much easier now for the singer to sing in short snippets and join it together later? Maybe the same with actors acting? But has it affected the quality of their output in anyway?
The Indian movie Ship of Theseues dwells on this topic in the photographer’s section of the movie. (Begin — Spoiler Alert) The photographer’s who is blind is shown to be slow, uses her hearing, composes a shot and captures it. People like her photos, she likes them as well. After having a graft which fixes her eyesight, she is shown to capture many many photos but is never satisfied with any of them (End — Spoiler Alert). I believe even a non blind photographer who changes shooting style from slow and composed to high volume random shooting would face similar dis-satisfaction with the results of the high volume shoot.
Email me when Karthika publishes or recommends stories