11-17-10 – Artistic Bent

Aww, man, I guess I’ll break the seal on this question: What about HDR’s this week?

I ask because most of my “artistic shots” are done in HDR.

I hate to be a killjoy, but I really dislike HDR. I see it as too gimmicky and overdone to death.

I respect that. I even agree with it! See, this is why we can’t have nice things! There is a lot of crappy HDR out there giving the form a bad rep.

I love playing with HDR but it was easy to select my shots for this contest without even thinking about my HDR. The real question is whether or not the voting public defines an artistic shot the way I define an artistic shot…

Therein lies the rub. What is art? (Let me find my turtleneck and beret, pack a bowl and put on small dark glasses.) While photography is art, not all photography is art. I take a lot of stuff that accurately depicts the reality I perceive, I tend to think of “art” as an interpretation of filtered through my conscious world view. Sometimes that is how I perceived something, sometimes it how I present what I perceived. Thus my question about HDR, it wasn’t about playing with something cool (even though it is cool and fun to play with) but about how I use that tool to create an artistic vision of the reality I’ve photographed. (smokes) Whoa! That was, like, deep, man.

Therein lies the rub. What is art?

I don’t know, but I know what I like…

/serious answer: I believe that art is something that makes you think, or feel an emotion about it. So, from a photography aspect, that’s the defining level between something that’s artistic, and something that’s a snapshot to me. That nebulous line between ‘that’s a cool picture’ and something that touches you deeper; makes you ponder what you’re looking at on a deeper level. It can be anything from a simple rose to a highly orchestrated studio shoot to a random person on the street, but it has to illicit some emotion, and/or a ‘pondering’ (for lack of a better word) on a core level to really be artistic.

And there’s a lot of things that I would consider ‘art’ that I don’t necessarily like. And a lot of things that some people wouldn’t consider ‘art’ that I do. And a lot of things that people call art that for whatever reason doesn’t speak to me on some root level, and I therefore can’t appreciate it as such, whether I “like” it, or not.

At the gut level, I think it’s an individual thing. One man’s trash is another’s treasure, and vice-versa, if you will.

We might want to put a note about no HDR, otherwise people will think it’s open to that.

Yepper.

Or just a note “all normal farktography rules apply”.

So I have something to go by with this, what types of artistic styles could I use to get jump started on an idea? Only one my brain can come up with now is blur, but I have limited potential for that unless the rain stops. I’m rather flummoxed on this.