Seeing Things

In a post to this blog entitled You Don't See When You're Not Looking I wrote, Pay attention! You never know what you'll see, but you won't see unless you're looking!! The point, and I hope it was obvious, is that there's a difference between looking and seeing. The former simply requires waking-up in the morning, the latter requires vision. I try to remind myself of this simple fact every time I pick-up a camera.

Seeing comes natural to some folks, I guess, but I had to learn to do it. I always thought that it's not the kind of thing one can teach, you have to acquire it, like acquiring a taste for whiskey. Knowing this, or thinking I know this, didn't stop me from trying to teach it anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, my almost-16 year-old asked me, Dad, do you have any cameras that use film? I could tell I was in real trouble almost right away. This was worse than hearing that 15 year-olds qualify for a learner's permit in Illinois, and confirmation of my deepest fear: my first-born child, the one I swore to myself I'd protect from everything evil and dangerous in this world, wants to learn photography. Aaaaaargh!!

I'd already given him a digital SLR, my old Canon EOS-350D, now he wanted something a bit more serious for his high school photography class. Luckily I had a perfect solution... a Canon EOS-A2 camera that I hadn't touched in a couple of years, I could satisfy his need for a good film camera without sacrificing my need to retain the ability to shoot film myself (I still have two EOS-1N cameras and an EOS-1 squirreled away). Having set him up for film was going to be the easy part, the hard part was yet to come.

I really don't want to encourage him to become a photographer for the same reason my father didn't want me to become a watchmaker... advances in electronics are sure to ruin the industry and make it difficult to earn a decent living. My dad knew that the advent of the quartz-crystal movement would kill-off fine mechanical watches (well, almost) and he thought my desire to join him in a business that was in decline was not a good idea. I'm glad he lived long enough to see that after an initial shake-out where people, myself included, largely purchased electronic watches, there would still be a demand for fine watchmaking. Perhaps naively, I look forward to the return of film-based photography, but I digress.

Back to the hard part: last Thursday my son asked me to take him out shooting with me on the weekend. Now..... when I go out to make pictures I have a specific objective and a well thought-out plan. I've typically scouted my location and schlep all my gear, including a few tripods. I plant myself in a predetermined spot and make a lot of exposures, and minor variations in perspective, and come away with one image with which I'm, hopefully, satisfied. Yes, I also do some street shooting which is quite a bit more open-ended; but even then I have an objective and a plan, however loose it may be.

Sunday was cold, mostly cloudy, not really a day to be out wandering the streets with a camera, but rise to the task I did. We got in the car with our cameras and I started driving. "Where are we going," he asked?

"Highland Park," I replied.

"Dad," he said, somewhat dejectedly, "there's nothing to shoot in Highland Park. Can't we go somewhere else?"

I was thinking of a glib rejoinder, something along the line of, Where do you want me to take you, Istanbul? Rather than cracking wise, I told him, "There's lot's to shoot in Highland Park, you just have to learn to see." Then I told him a story that Jay Maisel had told me about a conversation he'd had with one of his workshop students. According to Jay, the student tells him that she's dying to go to Provence (or Tuscany, I can't remember) to photograph because the light's beautiful in Provence. Jay's reply: You don't have to go all the way to France, the light's beautiful in Brooklyn!

Amen.

So we set out for Highland Park, loaded his camera with a 36 exposure roll of Kodak Tri-X Pan film and I, thankfully, was able to point out that there is indeed quite a bit to photograph in a sterile Chicago suburb. You simply have to look... and see.
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All above: Canon EOS-5D, 28~105/3.5~4.5 Canon EF Ultrasonic lens, ISO 400