Key Thoughts and The Zen of Fishing

I liken the thoughts that I keep in mind when photographing to "swing thoughts" or "key thoughts" in golf. Sam Snead used to say that he’d just hit some practice balls and try to find one or two swing thoughts that worked for him that day, and go out and hope for the best.

In golf at least, the more swing thoughts you have, the worse you do.

Two of my best "key thoughts" while shooting are two mottos I heard about from two different photography teachers. They are "Never clever" and "The name of the game is to fill the frame." I try not to complicate things beyond that. It ain’t easy.

"Never clever" (which comes from a California photo teacher whose first name is Tom, by way of one of his former students, now a real estate agent in Vermont) is helpful because it prevents us from trying to assert ourselves all the way into every frame. Too many photographers are constantly striving to prove how creative they are, as if every photograph they make has to attest to their genius (or, worse, their "style"). Sometimes, what’s in front of the camera is enough; getting out of the way of the picture is better than willfully interposing our own "vision" on every shot we take.

‘Never Clever’: Like a tape recorder, a camera is a recording device. Don’t feel
that the most important thing about every picture is to make people aware
of what a genius you are. Just get in front of your picture and then
take the picture that’s in front of you.

Just fishin’
The other thing I find really helpful is to constantly remember to discard my expectations. Photography is a bit like fishing. You can think and prepare all you want, but sometimes the fish bites and sometimes it doesn’t. (Also like fishing, those who know what they’re doing stand a much better chance of success than those who don’t. But there’s still that element of serendipity involved.) Those of us lucky enough to be shooting as amateurs, for ourselves, ought to remain aware of this. Many photographers force their work to conform to the ideas they had when they shot. But the reality is, some shots work and some shots don’t, and which is which does not always have much to do with what you wanted to have happen.

While shooting, you may get turned on by a certain situation and work it hard, taking many shots from many different angles. But it’s still possible that none of them will be a very good picture. Conversely, you may snap a casual, offhand shot without having any real hopes for it‚ and it may turn out to be the best thing you shot that day.

When you edit and print, forget what you were thinking and hoping for when you took the pictures, and look at the pictures that are in front of you.

This is harder than it sounds. When I took the picture below, of a woman sitting at a piano, singing, the central event in the room was the sound of my friend Becky’s lovely voice: clear, pitch-pure, and expressive of her innate good-heartedness. Naturally, as I shot what was happening I concentrated on her. I also had a very clear idea of what I wanted: I’d photograph her exaggerated facial expressions as she sang different songs for the kids, then print four pictures one above the other on the same page to try to convey the dynamism of the singalong.

Sure enough, when I got down to making the book page, I first tried to realize this idea. I printed out small versions of a bunch of the singing pictures, and tried different versions of the four-pictures-stacked idea. I picked two arrangements that seemed to work best and printed them out.

But they didn’t quite satisfy me. They weren’t quite…well,good. They didn’t quite work. So how come?

Who knows? I had the right bait, right time of day, and I knew where the fish were; I just didn’t catch what I wanted, is all. It happens.

I finally realized that this picture was the best of the group, and that it didn’t need any other pictures to go with it. Some people are frustrated by the blurring…until they accept the fact that the picture isn’t of the singer. It’s a picture of Gina, the little girl on the lower right side of the frame. Who knew? At the time, not I.

‘Discard your expectations‘: sometimes what works is not what you
expected would work. Look at the pictures and don’t get
distracted by your own ideas.

Sometimes you’re fishing for bluegill but you get a perch, is all.

Respect where you stand
As shooters, we all need to be mindful of where we stand in our own development. We need to know when to respect where we are, and when to stretch beyond what’s become comfortable. As beginners, people tend to be impressed with clear, sharp pictures that have good color or tones and are well-exposed. (They look "professional," in the common parlance.) Well, nowadays I can take a clear, sharp, well-exposed picture of just about anything at any time, with any sort of camera; it’s no longer any sort of challenge, and hasn’t been for some time. Some people need to pay careful attention to everything in the frame, and look at all four corners and the background before they shoot. Me, I’d been doing that for so long and so habitually that the challenge for me as of a few years ago became to shoot quickly and reactively, without thinking, trusting instinct. (Using the LCD finder of a digicam has been a big help.) It was tough at first. So, some of my recent shooting is maybe a little too loose. That’s okay. It’s just where I happen to be right now, is all.

Oh, and there’s one more nice correspondence between photography and fishing: the more time you spend, the more inevitable success becomes. You can’t catch a fish without having your line in the water, and you won’t take good pictures without your camera in your hand. Photography is comforting that way. Spend the time, and you’ll get results. That’s a nice "key thought," right there.

Mike

Originally published on The Luminous-Landscape in 2002, and one of my own favorites among my writings on photography. I can hardly believe it's been 14 years since I wrote it! Seems like the month before the month before last. The years they do get behind you.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Thomas Rink: "Where would be the fun if everything was projectable? OK, sometimes I am disappointed by pictures for which I had high hopes when taking them. On the other hand, there are those outings when there is enough pixie dust in the air to make almost each picture work. I sometimes wonder whether the reason for this is somewhere within my own attitude, like letting myself being carried away by the flow, as opposed to remain attached to some expectations? I am quite sure that it is not 'the light.'"

Comments

[Manuel]

Mike, what else is there to say? This article is just so good and insightful there's nothing to add to, or subtract from it. It's easy to see why it's one of your favourites.

[James Weekes]

Yeah, they get behind you......and push.

[James Weekes]

On another note. I have found that when I am shooting for me, every now and then I take a picture that my conscious mind will ask "Why'd you take that?" They usually are the pick of the litter.

[David Hori]

Exellent post, Mike! Thank you.

[Mike]

Excellent post, and doesn't feel like 14 years ago.

I'm quite amused by the forced looseness of the digital past compares to the precision of today.

I like loose - never quite knowing what I'll get when looking through a window finder - but have had the odd thought about trying a bit more precision from time to time.

Thing is, work demands precision, so loose is good when I want to just have fun.

Mike

[John Krumm]

My drawing teacher in college pounded "fill the frame" into me. I tended to spend several hours on a tiny section floating in space and call it good. "Never clever" I haven't heard, and it's a tougher achievement, but I think you described it very well. I know in the art world the word clever is equated with the facile and cliche, which to me makes calling someone's work too clever, clever.

[Nigel Voak]

Those Luminous Landscape articles are where I discovered your insightful writing.

It was this phrase which struck me the most “Conversely, you may snap a casual, offhand shot without having any real hopes for it‚ and it may turn out to be the best thing you shot that day.”

This happened to me when I was photographing the clearing fog on the lake in front of Mantua a few months ago. I took one throwaway shot into the light before taking a whole series on what I thought was a more interesting angle. Guess what? The throwaway shot was for me the best I took that day and one of my favourites of the year. ( http://nigelvoak.blogspot.it/2015/12/surreal-mantua.html )

The part about exploring the corners also struck a chord.How many pictures are ruined by stuff emerging from the edges?

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I don't think I'm brave enough to use blur to direct the viewer to the actual subject, that far off to the edge and that small. However, the theoretical description of doing that sounds perfectly reasonable, and the example photo is certainly not horrible, just a bit startling. And I have kind of old-fashioned prejudices about a lot of things in photography.

It is, at the very least, an idea worth keeping around, to have in the toolkit sometimes. I can't off-hand remember a "great" photo that works that way, but I certainly can't bring myself to claim there isn't one (my own judgment of "great"; beyond that, of course, what's "great" is a matter of personal opinion, or at least of collective opinion over time, and my own opinion does not dominate).

[Tim]

Oh, I do like the idea of "Never Clever". If ever there was a side of the sport prone to agonizing over "developing your style" and "realizing your vision" it must surely be landscape. The Never Clever principle explains how I feel in response - chill out, let the subject speak (especially when it's a nice landscape - who are you to impose artistic fads upon it?).

I was out in Glencoe a couple of saturdays ago. First and last shots were the best - typical, isn't it?

[David Raboin]

I stumbled across this article years ago, at the perfect moment for my photography. We had just had our first baby and my time for photography was really squeezed. Up until the baby came along, I was mostly a tripod-shooting landscape photog. My compositions were all too clever with no room for a happy accident. With a baby I had to fit in photography were I could. The tripod got permanently parked under the bed and this article gave me permission to loosen up. My photos, even with the new constraints in my life, got better, they were less boring with a new sense of liveliness. Maybe it was just because I had a busy family in the frame, or perhaps my pictures livened up because I wasn't thinking so hard?

Now, as the kids get older, I find myself with a little more time on my hands. Last summer, I had one of those moments of recognition that kind of brought me back around full circle. While flying past a distant thunderstorm, and snapping off photos here and there with no time pressure, I noticed that I wasn't making a full effort to get the best photo. My habits were sloppy, my photography had become too loose. The intensity was leaking out of my frames so I made a conscious effort to slow down again. I'm now ten months into this period of slower photography and it's too soon to tell if it's working. I'm trying to keep the best of the zen approach while also thinking more. I realize that's a total contradiction of zen philosophy, but whatever, it's photography.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

I've never been a golfer and only killed one tiny fish in a Wisconsin lake some 55 years ago. But even I can see that you have some thoughtful advice and useful observations in that piece. Excessive self-consciousness can kill spontaneous photography. Unfortunately anyone attempting to follow guidance of any of the few thousand "Become a Better Photographer" books, or attempting to obey complex compositional rules on-the-fly is doomed.

I don't recite anything to myself as I shoot. (Although years back when commissioned to shoot a very important once-only scene I do vividly remember whispering to myself "Don't f__k up." over and over.). My own general trick, if it can be called so, is simple: I look at the image on the lcd or the viewfinder as if it's already been captured. This forces me to pre-critique the frame, to look at it from corner to corner, to judge where relationships don't work toward my objective. This may sound odd but I've long found that making images in this momentary past-tense mode helps keep me tuned to the image rather than playing photographer.

[Simon Grosset]

'Never Clever' could also mean 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should.' I'm thinking HDR, softfocus vignettes, spot colour - all those things people discover when they first start exploring Photoshop.

[Dalvorius]

I have much better luck with photography than with fishing. At least there's something to look at, at the end of the day.

Oh how I envy those who regularly catch fish!

[Martin Fritter]

Very nice.

I don't think any generalizations about photography as a practice are true. Counterexample: Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, much of Bill Brandt, Irving Penn, the Bechers....

On a pedantic note: "fill the frame" doesn't really reflect the Zen aesthetic. They tend to be nuts for negative space, which is sort of what zazen is anyway.

[steven palmer]

A "light bulb" moment came for me when I read something Ansel Adams wrote in one of his books. He was traveling through the South West I think when he wrote, "I saw many beautiful things that day but none that would make a good photograph". When I read that it hit me like a brick. I realized just because a scene is beautiful or interesting does not mean it will make a good photograph. From that moment on I became much better at identifying "non" photographs and constantly repeat his words when I'm out shooting.