This last Friday night I had the opportunity to attend a photo expo in Salt Lake City, UT. There were essentially 2 parts that I attended. The first was a trade show type thing. Here there were different vendors showing the products and things of the like. The Arca Swiss booth had some very neat things. One in particular was this technical view camera. Although it can take a roll film back it also was optimized for a digital back. It was very neat and may be a future investment. To get a greater scope of what it is and such click
here.
The second part was the key reason I went. We got to listen to
Art Wolfe and
Frans Lanting speak to us about their photography and their vision for a good hour. This was very interesting. Both have shot for National Geographic and various other magazines. Art has a Tv show called
Travels to the Edge. Yes, both are very accomplished. You can see why I am so excited about this. In my opinion they each have very different styles than the common landscape photographer. Different locations, angles, subject matter, composition styles, etc. I find their work to be inspirational as well as having a sense of wonder and awe.
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Me with Frans Lanting
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The way the presentation went was very simple. First Frans went through a slideshow of some of his images. He discussed them as he went through, not just what lens he used but what he saw and why he saw what he did. He discussed his Life Project. One thing he spoke of that really hit me was to "look for patterns in nature and then relate them to something in the heart". This really showed me that things that "don't work" quite possibly do and that its ok. I now seem to have this question in my mind, " what would a photographic representation of this event/feeling look like?" This has expanded my vision.
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| Me with Art Wolfe |
Art did much of the same thing. He had a slideshow prepared and went through it while discussing the images as well as his philosophy. Though very similar to Frans, he was quite different. He seemed to break his work down into these "projects". Each had a slightly or perhaps majorly different theme. Even though they were constantly evolving and growing they all seemed to mesh together. One in particular that I remember dealt with showing the world from the animals perspective. So he would get down on there level and attempt to show the world from their point of view. I feel he did very well.
I think what I learned the most was to seek and to find. And how many place are easily photographable. Sometimes I feel I'm to rigid and that my art has to meet certain criteria. I need to be more inspired. I need to have my vision expanded not only by art but by nature itself in every way possible.
