Snap Happy
Fun With Cameras L
Light has emotion.
Those three words, courtesy of photographer Joe McNally, stand out from a photography chat I enjoyed recently. I had been thinking about photographic emotions for a few weeks when I watched that chat and latched on to that short sentence.
Before I moved out for a few photo walks, mainly designed to experience much-needed meditative picture-making vibes, I brainstormed ideas, writing down the word emotion as my anchor.
I had no fancy plans, mind you. All I wanted were general pointers to give the experience a touch of cohesion.
Happiness, slippery, shadow, and negative space are the four themes that survived the process. I wasn’t sure what to do with them. But it was a start.
McNally’s quote helped clarify my plans.
Photography is emotion.
While only one term is an emotion, they all include and signal emotion. The plan was to use those four words as challenges to think about and experiment with photographic emotion.
Pleasure photography time is the best way I can think of to experiment and play. I designed a series of walks with basic parameters: explore a few places I hadn’t experienced before and see where the emotional experiments lead.
Today’s first theme is happiness. I’ll add a few lines that detail how I approached capturing happiness and why emotions are as important a part of photography as technical elements.
Growing as a photographer means you’re curious to master the challenge of capturing life in a way that viewers feel something. Evoking emotion is the goal to have when picking up a camera. Only when viewers emotionally connect to an image do they stop, look closer, and think.
Or as Peter Adams said: “Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.”
If that is the Peter Adams from the book “A Few of the Legends” (my search for a match to the name attached to the quote hasn’t been fruitful so far), he sounds like a powerful resource to consider for photographic studies.
But I have just learned about him and his book. And therefore, I’ll share a few names (today and in the next three posts) that I regularly return to for inspiration and education.
For today’s theme, my search ended when I pulled Ami Vitale’s Panda Love out of the bookshelf.
It’s a treasure trove of emotions and conservation goodness. There are too many examples to consider, but two pictures I connect the strongest with happiness are this image of a panda being weighed and this panda portrait.
I’ll write about how I approach emotions in photography next time. For today, let’s start with a broad stroke — anything I associate with happiness suffices. I wanted it to be easygoing and meditative. Sounds easy. Doesn’t it?
But capturing happiness, I found not that straightforward.
At first, I saw nothing. Then I saw too much. So much depends on mood, preferences, and experiences. Almost everything can go, from glaringly obvious scenes to much more thoughtful observations.
But, as always, the more you invest, the more meaningful the result gets.
I selected eight images that connect with happiness. I will share a few words in the captions.
Looking for emotions and how to capture them is an ongoing exploration, one I highly recommend to any photographer. It’s photographically challenging and rewards you with stronger senses and a richer intake of life. It reveals a direction for your photography. After all, photography is a pursuit best described as a lifelong learning path.
