urban ku # 171 ~ can you say d-e-l-e-t-e?
Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 02:03PM 
Misted window and red car • click to embiggenI am reading through P.H. Emerson's Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art thanks to a link to the complete manuscript provided by TOP. The book contains a wealth of very good and timeless advice.
How about this challenge? - The fact of the matter is nature is full of pictures, and they are to be found in what appears to the uninitiated the most unlikely places. Let the honest student then choose some district with which he is in sympathy, and let him go there quietly and spend a few months, or even weeks if he can not spare months, and let him day and night study the effects of nature, and try to at any rate to produce one picture of his own, one picture which shall show an honest attempt to probe the mysteries of nature and art, one picture which shall show the author has something to say, and knows how to say it, as perhaps no other living person could say it; that is something to have accomplished. Remember that your photograph is a true index of your mind, as if you had written out a confession on paper.
Or, having trouble editing your pictures for a book? Here's some good advice - Thus it will be seen how difficult it is to produce a picture, even when we have thoroughly mastered our technique and practice, for, to recapitulate, in a picture the arrangement of lines must be appropriate, the aerial perspective must be truly and subtly yet broadly rendered, the tonality must be relatively true, the composition must be perfect, the impression true, the subject distinguished, and, if the picture is to be a masterpiece, the motif must be poetically rendered, for there is a poetry of photography as there is of painting and literature.
Never rest satisfied then until these requirements are all fulfilled, and destroy all works in which they are not to be found.
There you have it. Now get to work making that one picture, and, of course, delete all the rest.
Reader Comments (3)
There is an important omission from that last line:
"and destroy all works in which they are not to be found"
There is certainly a lot of good material in Emerson's book.
Such an inspiring reading...this Emerson.
Thanks
mleg
The flip side, from Johnson's tutor:
"Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."