OCOLOY Week 31

Friday 16th of October 2015

Another busy week, alas not photographically: deadlines are looming at work which has left me little time or energy for taking pictures.

I have, however, been spending a lot of time thinking about meaning. What do I want to say with my pictures? I feel like I’m approaching Step 4 in Andy Ilachinski’s Eightfold Path Toward Self-Discovery, but it’s a long hard climb to reach it. I want more out of my pictures now – I want to say something, but … I don’t know what. I enjoy making pictures, but I don’t really know why I like the pictures I do. I suppose that’s part of the point of this exercise: to clarify my criteria for success, and to hone the skills needed to meet them.

And yet so far I feel pretty directionless, stumbling on pleasing pictures more by luck than by design. Confronted with the obvious ‘What do you take pictures of?’, I struggle to form a coherent answer, usually coming out with something like, “Documentary stuff, landscapes with signs of human activity, that sort of thing.” Pretty weak.

Moreover, beyond browsing through the OCOLOY tag on this blog, I don’t have a clearly-defined space to show my best work. I have a barely functional and largely neglected photo gallery thing, which I really should get around to updating one day, and I have a Flickr account that I haven’t updated in almost exactly 2 years, but that’s it. Nothing really that exemplifies my work.

Perhaps at the end of this project I’ll gather 1 picture from each week and try to make something cohesive from the collection.

seagull at sunrise