Photography | Inspiration | Illumination
Can Your Photos Inspire Optimism and Cheer? Absolutely!
Find meaning by creating images that evoke positive emotions.
How does this image make you feel? What emotions does it evoke?
I’ll leave to you to judge its quality, or whether this image or any of my photography constitutes art. But I’ll let you in on a secret. It was a total grab shot, made on the spur of the moment during a vacation trip to Europe.
Many of my photos have meaning well beyond their origins as happy snaps, quick family photos, or vacation records. Your photography can, too. They can inspire, instill optimism, cheer us up. That’s important in these trying times.
How does your photography make you feel?
Photography in Trying Times
We are inundated daily by a flood of photographs on television and online in mainstream media and social media. The majority of the imagery illustrates bad news, too often with photography that agitates even as it informs. Images of protests and violence amidst racial discord and growing cries of inequality. Masked and gowned doctors, nurses, and first responders battle the pandemic. Photos of political leaders cherry-picked to illustrate domestic political polarization and rising geopolitical tension.
I wonder how Thomas Paine might have illustrated The American Crisis had the technology of photography been available when he wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls” in 1776. He could have been writing about today.
Reality, Vision, Metaphors
Sometimes the disturbing stories and images make it seem like our world is spinning out of control.
How does this image make you feel? Dizzy? Awed? Enlightened?
Reality is not necessarily what we can see. Star trails, like those in the image above, do not exist in nature. We can’t see them by looking up at the sky. But the photograph provides a vision of the reality: The Earth turns, and through the magic of digital photography (and it isn’t really magic), we can, in a sense, see what our science teachers in grade school tried to teach us. We glimpse what we were taught but can never see with the naked eye.
But the image can be a metaphor, too. When I made this long exposure shot, it never occurred to me that I would later use it as a metaphor for a dizzying world.
Your photographs, too, can provide vision beyond what you can merely see, a reflection of reality impossible to see, or a metaphor that evokes feelings, hopefully positive.
What, Really, Divides Us?
Much of photography is photojournalism. We expect photojournalism to record what is happening, and to be honest and impartial. To be fair, much of it is.
Yet, so much of the media’s imagery is inherently biased toward bad news — because “if it bleeds, it leads.” Consequently, it seems to magnify differences rather than connect communities with one another. Human nature, I suppose.
We all consume it, the imagery in the news media and social media that seems to divide rather than inspire and unify. To some extent that means we’re guilty of causing the endless, constantly available supply.
It is said that including a picture in one’s social media post will get more “likes.” The result too often is unedited photography promulgated instantly, virally, and without context. Rather than bringing the “community” it promised, social media becomes an illustrated, self-perpetuating echo chamber that foments discord and exacerbates differences.
How unalike and intolerant it makes us all seem. Race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity. Education, income, and wealth. We all have different ambitions, personal industry, and perseverance. Opportunity? Happiness? Empathy? Personality?
But we are all human. No matter the issue, no matter the attribute, we are, all of us, fundamentally not that different. Not really. The late poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, famously said, “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”
I think this as I look at an image of a flowered hillside in Gorman, California, shot early one spring morning from the window of my car from the opposite side of the interstate.
It’s a pretty picture in and of itself. But look closer. I find additional meaning. Both sides of the fence are mostly the same. The fence might as well not be there. Best of all is the splash of early morning sunlight, evoking hope, the dawning of a new day, rather than the division and disunity implied by the barbed wire.
How does it make you feel?
Illumination
Constantly fed with photography infused news, it is too easy to forget the Sun is always there. We see ourselves on an endless gray sea, dark clouds all around and above, as in this unplanned image, captured along the California coast late one afternoon. How does it make you feel?
It reminds me that the Sun will burst thru and shine upon us.
In addition to learning how to operate your camera, train your eye to recognize the moments of beauty that will come along, and open your heart to the inspiration you can capture.
Sometimes we need reminding that while documenting events or illustrating society’s issues, photography need not shock or disturb. There is value in evoking those feelings when appropriate, but when the world seems dark, too complicated, or just mean-spirited, you can seek out or create images that calm and illuminate rather than agitate or darken.
A Wondrous Universe
What do you see in this earthly image shot from amid the ruins of a twentieth-century desert ranch?
A branch reaches into space alongside the splash of the disk of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy, a fellow traveler over 2 million light-years distant, stands out like a large diamond embedded in the pavé of myriad stars.
How does it make you feel?
It gives me a “feeling of awe for the planet,” our “tiny, fragile ball of life, “hanging in the void”, ” as author Frank White writes in his book, The Overview Effect. Most of us have not had the experience he describes, of astronauts “seeing firsthand the reality that the Earth is in space.” But a photograph, earthbound as it may be, can provide a taste. Enough to know the universe is a wondrous place, and that our planet and all our seemingly insurmountable problems are but a tiny part of it.
How Does Your Photography Make You Feel?
Even before these tumultuous times of pandemic, lockdowns, and economic distress, I found meaning — and escape — in finding, creating, and looking at images that evoke positive emotions — hope, unity, the natural world, beauty, wonder, mystery.
Jarring, disturbing images are perhaps an essential facet of public discourse, tools to inform and empower in societal progress. Accurate, thoughtful journalism is essential to help answer fundamental questions in society, politics, science, and many other areas. Where are we? How did we get here? Is this right? Where are we going? Why? How will we find our way?
But is the amount of disturbing and divisive imagery that too often seems to dominate media today necessary? To be fair, I’m not a photojournalist, at least not by formal training. Not my photographic cup of tea.
Just as writing is thinking, photography is thinking. To photograph is to think visually, to create more than a record of what is before us.
Photography as art or even as a casual hobby can inspire, show what is real but cannot be seen, or evoke visions of what could be rather than pull us down with so much of what is wrong. It can take us away from all of that.
Hohensalzburg Castle overlooks the Salzach River in Saltzburg, Austria. I was photographing the floodlit castle high above the opposite bank. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the woman turn off the Mozartsteg footbridge (the one in the “Sound of Music”), and walk down the riverbank path through dim pools of light beneath the lamp posts. I thought it would be a cool shot, and quickly turned my camera from the castle and had time to fire off a single frame before she faded into the darkness.
Who was she? Where was she going? What might she encounter further down the path?
More broadly, the image evokes the feeling that the paths and roads ahead of us can seem dark, perhaps lonely. A fitting metaphor for these tumultuous times.
But the way ahead is lit, if only dimly. Photography that conveys optimism can be that light, cheering us out of the ennui that many of us are feeling.
Not bad for the unplanned snap of a non-photojournalist tourist on vacation.
You can do the same with your photography. Think about how it would make you feel. Think about how it could make others feel.
