Apr 8, 2022
Photographer David Ulrich: 5 Things Anyone Can Do To Take Stunning Photos
Photograph daily, or nearly so. Take photographs of everything that deeply strikes your fancy. Do not edit and do not judge your perceptions — not yet. Photograph freely out of a wide range of your responses to the world: love, beauty, outrage, indignity, affinity, resonance, agreement, criticism, and satire. Do not ignore humor or polemic insights. Keep a visual journal, a daily record of your thoughts, insights, and perceptions in the form of pictures.
As a part of our series about “5 Things Anyone Can Do To Take Stunning Photos” I had the pleasure of interviewing David Ulrich.
David Ulrich is a professor and co-director of Pacific New Media Foundation in Honolulu who teaches frequent classes and workshops. He is an active photographer and writer whose work has been published in numerous books and journals including Aperture, Mānoa, and Sierra Club publications, and his photographs have been exhibited internationally in more than 75 one-person and group exhibitions. He is the author of The Mindful Photographer: Awake in the World with a Camera (Rocky Nook, 2022) and Zen Camera: Creative Awakening with a Daily Practice in Photography (Watson-Guptill/Random House, 2018). Find him online at creativeguide.com.
Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I have never been without a camera in my hand. My favorite toy was my father’s broken camera when I was one or two years old and I received a Kodak Brownie Starmatic camera for Christmas when I was eleven — that came replete with a flash holder and crackling flash bulbs. My poor family and friends had to endure the constant blinding flash whenever I took a photo. My father built me a small darkroom in the basement when I was twelve or thirteen, and I have never looked back.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
There are two equally relevant stories. In 1970, as a young photojournalism student, I witnessed and documented the events surrounding the deaths of four students from National Guardsmen’s bullets at Kent State University in Ohio. This had a profound impact on me and represented a turning point in my way of thinking. I began to view the arts as an alternative to the alienation and violence in our society and as a personal and collective means toward a renewal of humanistic values. This is the ultimate paradox of the creative process; that the deeper we strive to penetrate within ourselves, the more we reach a common ground of shared human concerns.
Other circumstances have forcefully intervened in my life as well, not the least of which was the loss of my right, dominant eye in an impact injury at the age of thirty-three. Fearing the loss of my capacity to see and photograph, and with all hope to the contrary, this blow helped to awaken my own awareness. Losing an eye and facing the resulting need to learn to see again, this time as an adult, assisted the growth and development of my perceptual capacities — and helped me better understand the function and process of sight. Above all, I learned to not take vision for granted. It was a profound learning experience, one that continues to this day. The experience was traumatic and painful — like nothing else I have ever experienced — and a great privilege.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
As a young photographer, I sought clichéd subject matter such as sunsets and barns and even went so far as to put theatrical color gels over my lens to heighten the “effect” of the photograph. Soon, one nagging observation came to the forefront of my mind: pictures are not about pictures. They are about something. They are not just about the skill of the photographer, or the camera and lens, or about the mode of presentation. They reveal a point of view, highlight something about the world, or reflect our inner states of being or particular life conditions. They have meaning that can be decoded and can evoke something in the viewer.
The best photographs teach us that your own eyes and mind, not the camera, are what make an image unique and compelling. Many great pictures were made by run-of-the-mill, average, or even low-cost cameras. Many great pictures have broken the rules reflecting a genuinely unique perspective or a new, highly personal view of ordinary subject matter. And many great pictures say something, reflect meaning about the world and/or the unique truth of oneself to the viewer.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
As a photographer, author, and university professor amidst a community of peers, I wish to contribute to the dialogue of our times. The nature of my contribution arises from my constant efforts to learn to see what is and assist others in the search for authenticity.
I can almost instantly recognize the seeds of uniqueness in student work. If I look closely, the clues are abundant. As with the spoken word, the tone and cadence of an image communicate as much as the content. Color relationships, form and shape, and an underlying orientation to content create implicit meaning. By the second or third class, it is immediately evident which photographs belong to which student. Something of their identity can be seen in the visual form of their images while their unique nature and authentic being mysteriously shine through beneath the explicit content of their work.
When I look at student work, I often see their influences. They unconsciously emulate a certain kind of photograph or look. Most of these influences are cultural; it’s what they see in books, magazines, online, and in the media. However, from time to time, certain images appear that have a ring of authenticity that speak of one’s truth — not one’s conditioned viewpoint. These images have a different flavor; they feel real. They have authority. These images feel like the photographer has penetrated into their natural state of being and seeing. Good photographers can blend this innocence of eye with their mature knowledge, skill, and experience.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
This would require too long an answer for this venue and in these times. The single tip I would convey here to avoid fragmentation and loss of your center is to stay within your own integrity — no matter what the consequences. Personal integrity can be an unshakeable ally. Currently, the bravery and courage of the Ukraine people and their President Zelenskyy provide shining examples of honor and integrity in the face of great adversity.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
From 1970 until his death in 1976, I had the great privilege of working with Minor White, one of most influential photographers of the mid-twentieth century, as a student, assistant, and friend. Minor White taught the art of seeing, of becoming aware, of being present to the living world around you. When my peers and I would go to Minor seeking praise and admiration for a “successful” photograph that we made, he looked at us with an expansive silence that stopped us in our tracks. He then often quoted Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange: “The camera is an instrument that teaches you to see without a camera.”
Are you working on any exciting projects now?
I am working on a book of photographs concerning the environment from the Oceano Dunes on the Central California coast titled, Oceano: An Elegy for the Earth, to be published in November 2022.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
My overarching goal is helping people learn to see — to witness the richness, diversity, and reality of the world, themselves, and others; to see with compassion and empathy; and, above all, to learn to see what is.
The challenge that a photographer forever confronts is found in the dynamic interplay between seeing things for what they are compared to seeing things based on how you are. The biases, predilections, and points of view of the photographer are what makes an image interesting and invests it with meaning. On the other hand, the world exists apart from who you are. The world and others deserve respect, care, and attention for their own sake. Great photographs have been made on the subject of one’s identity arising from autobiographical inquiry. And an equal number of powerful photographs have been made through direct perception of life itself. This forms the great lesson of photography. We can see how we see.
Can you share “5 Things Anyone Can Do To Take Stunning Photos”. Please share an example for each.
These principles — designed to help you make photographs with insight and meaning — as well as some of my answers in this interview are excerpted with permission and adapted from my new book: The Mindful Photographer: Awake in the World with a Camera (Rocky Nook, 2022).
1. Photograph daily, or nearly so. Take photographs of everything that deeply strikes your fancy. Do not edit and do not judge your perceptions — not yet. Photograph freely out of a wide range of your responses to the world: love, beauty, outrage, indignity, affinity, resonance, agreement, criticism, and satire. Do not ignore humor or polemic insights. Keep a visual journal, a daily record of your thoughts, insights, and perceptions in the form of pictures.
2. TMP. Take more pictures. Practice, practice. Work into the heat of the moment. It’s a form of arrogance to believe that arriving in a place, taking three or four pictures, and then moving on will yield strong or insightful results. Stay with a subject or a place. Warm up by taking photographs freely. Take pictures as a form of foreplay until you can photograph freely, with measured abandon. Don’t worry about the results. Engage the scene and the subject. You want to shake loose the reluctance to be wild and spontaneous and childlike. Be glue-like. Stick around long enough to synchronize with the subject. An athlete or a musician would never consider running the race or giving a performance without first warming up.
3. Be present. Quiet the mind. Don’t overthink. Thinking is too slow to capture a moment. Use your mind to stay focused on the moment. Prepare and think about your intent in advance. Your entire history of thought and experience can be found in the present moment. Stay rigorously, but lightly, rooted in the body, connected to your feelings, and using the directed attention of the mind.
4. Observe. Pay attention. The quiet of the mind leaves space for clear and present seeing. The meaning is often found in both the whole and the details of a scene. Look. Learn. Let the nuances speak. Find empathy. Leonardo da Vinci would use drawing in his sketchbooks as a means of studying both anatomy and the human condition, and, notably, as a way of establishing empathy with the subject. Empathy creates an invisible, indelible link between your mind’s eye and the nature and character of the subject.
To help focus your observations, consider how you use the five visual elements of photography in your image-making. Consider each of these and how they interact, in synergy, within an image.
The frame
The moment
Light
Use of color and tonality
Treatment of subject
5. Know your camera. Master your materials and tools. Ideally, your camera should become a seamless extension of your eye, hand, and brain. Learn to see how a camera sees. There is a sizable transformation between the three-dimensional world of appearances in all the colors and the brightness range available to human vision and a lens-based, two-dimensional image. Photographer Garry Winogrand once said, “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” Good advice, and all the more reason to take many photographs on a regular basis. You cannot be free with the medium and facile with your perceptions without knowing how your camera works, mastering the use of the exposure triad of f-stop, shutter speed, and ISO, and learning the expressive possibilities of either software or the darkroom. Don’t shirk from learning the tools.
Everyone is creative. Everyone sees the world in a unique way. And anyone can learn to use a camera. I wish for you the fullness of creative expression and the potency of an in-depth interaction with the world. Creativity can help make us whole and camera practice can reflect the world back on itself and reveal the shape of your engagement — your passion, pleasures, and, at times, pained observations. Avoid clichés and tired tropes. Aspire to be authentic and express how you see the world. Have patience and learn to see how you see.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Go beyond selfies and their attendant self-admiration on platforms such as Instagram. Social media is, above all, a publishing platform. Use the power of your device and the great reach of these platforms to speak of things that matter, to make positive change in your communities and in the world. Maybe bring awareness to the environment by chronicling changes and environmental degradation in your region, or speak out for social justice by seeking diverse representation in your feeds, or challenge the media distortions of beauty that have negatively impacted so many young people today.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/david.ulrich.9461
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zen.camera/
Website: https://creativeguide.com
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
