BECOMING A PHOTOGRAPHER

Published: 20 July 2022
on channel: Eric Kim

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PDF: https://erickimphotography.com/blog/w...

What does it mean to be a photographer? Being a photographer means the camera is your way to engage with, interact with, and interpret the world around you.

Why the notion of becoming?

I’m starting to think and believe that progress, and “getting better“ at something is too soft of a concept. Why? It is mostly a post industrial one, in which we are trying to use numbers, and other quantitative measures to rank one another. The ethos behind that is a new religion; the defecation of numbers, or data. For example, the underlying ethos behind Google and a lot of tech companies is if data doesn’t prove it, it is not substantial.

However, to live in life in which you are just relying on data is a cowardly one. Why? I think the reason why people rely on numbers so much is that they lack faith in themselves. Rather than pursuing their own inner artistic ingenuity, like Steve Jobs, people just allay their responsibility and outsource the risk to “control groups“, or “focus groups“. There is no focus group on earth that would have initially approved Steve Jobs‘s vision of the iPhone without having a physical keyboard. Remember just a decade ago when Blackberry phones with the physical keyboard was all the rage? And when the iPhone first came up with a touch keyboard, how much criticism and critique it got? Or when Steve Jobs first made the iPad, how much hate mail he got for not having USB ports?

Detaching yourself from numbers

In today’s world, I believe that one of the best ways to become more courageous, is a “via negativa” (Taleb) one.

For example, acts of subtraction makes one more courageous. Or acts of deletion make one more courageous.

For example, physically deleting, and permanently deleting files on your computer takes great courage. Or permanently deleting email, instead of archiving it and hoarding it forever. How funny is it that we millennials disdain how our parents hoard all of this physical junk in their garage is, yet we hoard all of our data on the cloud.

Therefore, a great act of courage you could do is just delete your Instagram.

Nowadays, I think having an Instagram is almost akin to saying you go to McDonald’s. Everyone has one, thus you should have one. But then again 80% of America is obese, should you? Most people drink Coca-Cola; should you? Most people prefer to drink a Starbucks Frappuccino; should you?

When is it wise to take the harder road?

Another strange bias we have in America is that the more difficult the path, the harder is, the more virtuous it is. However, I believe this to be quite foolish. Maybe then it would be more virtuous for us to use a horse and carriage instead of an automobile car.

As for us photographers, perhaps the most basic thing we could learn actually how to do is how to build and maintain our own website and blog. Our own self hosted domain. Yes, there is some level of technical difficulty which is required of us, yet it is still a quadrillion times easier than learning how to code.

For example, I only know the basics of FTP, website domain hosting stuff, HTML, etc. I know the purest basics to just get done what I need to get done. But beyond that, I have no idea. I have no idea how to hand code my own website; I prefer to just use templates. And no, learning how to self build your own website by hand is not virtuous. I recently had a conversation with an aspiring artist hipster who said he wanted to learn how to build his own website from hand, but in reality, my sense was he was making zero progress on it. That for him, it was kind of more of an aspirational one, rather than a true reality he desired to pursue.

And this is the thing; striving to take the harder path for the sake of the harder path prevents one from actually doing it. This is why artistically and creatively, I believe it very wise to use templates, and the simplest method and technique possible. This is even why in photography, I think knowing the purest basics of photography is all we need. For example, exposure compensation, shooting in JPEG, program mode, that is all we need.

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