Danie Bester's new year message to DPC Students and Photo Critic members speaking of the opportunities and challenges we have as photographers in the Digital Era, while sharing DPC's programme for 2017.
Wait what? That heading is the wrong way round is [...]
So what exactly is photographic art?
My personal journey to becoming a wedding photographer. This is my story... I am entering my 5th year in the wedding photography business since I shot my very first wedding and I have been reflecting quite a bit on the journey past. If you had told me 5 years ago that I would be making a living of wedding photography today I would have laughed in your face and called you a loony. I can actually remember Danie telling me this on a DPC portrait session when I did my very first course with him 5 years ago (I was part of only his second class) and thinking man, this guy obviously feels he need to say this as I paid him for the course!
This week's featured Photographer is Brutus Östling. Brutus is a Canon Ambassador and a remarkable bird and nature photographer that boasts with a number of great photo collections and several best selling books on birds and their nature. View some of his work below; This is bird photography at it's best!
I would like to expand on the importance of giving people good, useful and most importantly honest feedback. As beginner photographers embark on their journey they amass a huge number of images. Generally they produce prolific quantities of work, which inevitably ends up on social network pages. When you upload to a site such as Facebook and tag friends and family members the comments start rolling in. These comments offer great self-esteem boosts causing us to add more images to get our fix of ego stroking.
Those 3 little letters W-H-Y just about knocked me for a six and has made me re-evaluate what it actually is that I am doing with my camera. Naturally, this made me depressed as photography suddenly went from being fun to frustrating in no time at all. (Thanks ALOT DPC). When you start thinking about WHY you are taking a picture, it completely over shadows the what, how, who and where in an instant. The other questions, to a degree, all have tangible answers to them but the WHY leaves me floundering and is now forcing me to really think a lot harder about what it is I am trying to accomplish as a photographer and what it is that I what to communicate in my pictures.
I often work with new photographers and when I ask to see their work they become shy and introverted “no, I’m not showing you that”. This is surprisingly common, and if you think about it, it is also a surprisingly counter intuitive stance. As an artist or a photographer specifically, you have chosen a solely visual medium and its very purpose is to be seen.
