Did you know our eyes can see roughly 18 to 20 stops of dynamic range? Come again? Yes. Our eyes, built for this world, have a profound spectrum of understanding the contrast between the brightest brights and the darkest darks. When you look at your phone or an LCD screen on a camera, you may notice that there’s just a bit of difference between what you’re seeing with your eyes and what you’re seeing through your phone screen. Sometimes it’s ever so subtle (which means you probably have a really good camera), but it’s there. You look up, squint, and look at a screen or viewfinder and like that, there’s a distance between what you see and what you want to see; a gap between the world’s range and your interpretation of it.
Last year I dove headfirst into photography like a trust experiment. At the time, I’d been laid off, I wasn’t my healthiest, friendships were rocky, parenting an overwhelming and daily ordeal, and I didn’t have many hobbies aside from strumming a guitar now and then. In a sense, I’d lost a bit of my creative range, choosing instead to go about life as if pulled along on a tube in a river. While leisurely, there was a slow atrophy happening, unnoticed at first and then startlingly present.
I went out between work calls this week as the sun shone uncharacteristically on Seattle. I wanted to photograph the beginnings of spring, the cherry blossoms on the horizon and the discovery of errant daffodils around our neighborhood. It’s revealing what we can let our minds do when we give it a bit of rest and separation from the noise emanating from our digital lives. I’ve been working over the last six months on continuing to refine a style or an aesthetic, thinking about what I like to shoot and what I don’t like to shoot, what lends itself to a story I want to reveal or a feeling I want to express. Lately, that’s been focused on people, strangers, in dramatic and spontaneous light. But what you typically don’t see are the selections of photographs I take that are boring.
Like this
Or this.
Or this.
I find these subjects capture more of the dynamic range of my sensibilities. When I go out, I’m typically optimizing every detail of how I curate through the foreshadowing of what people may like or what may garner reactions. But this sucks.
There is severe and detrimental limitions when thinking like this because I’m invalidating my truth about why I love photography. I love the mundane not because it’s boring but because the light that day made me feel something and I was ready to capture it, not because of where I see. You ever look at a piece of trash and think this, right here, is kinda beautiful? I know you do. Don’t lie to yourself.
I love the mundane because to me it’s exhilarating, and I’m trying to communicate a feeling, always fleeting, to another human. Someone out there may see one of these photos and say, “Yeah that’s my cup of tea.” In the end, it’s just about connection.
Earlier this week, I joined a Fujifilm Facebook group (I know what a nerd) and said hello to the community. I posted a few photos and talked about how the Fujifilm XT5 I purchased last year after being laid off revived a passion dormant for a long time. My qualms with camera gear hype is for another newsletter, but I truly have so much fun with this camera. It allows me to work quickly, capture my vision as I see (like any tool that you’re hoping will work on your plan), and is really easy to take everywhere. In that post, I added a photo I hadn’t even looked at more than once since I’d taken it. It’s still getting likes. So I posted to other channels. More likes. More engagement.
I don’t even really like this photo but there’s been a connection. And it really made me really that I have no idea how to connect with people. It’s not a slight, but just another wonderful human experience to develop.
I recently got some scans back from my study abroad in Spain and its reinvigorating this idea about the “range” I had back then. Whether it was knowledge about a variety of things, interests in different subcultures, ease of moving in and out of certain groups, or simply being a bit more open-minded about the images I was trying to capture. These photos helped me identify a theme for this week’s newsletter and hopefully they make you feel something to, if not directly from the photos but to revisit your memory archives and think about where your dynamic range was, is, and will go from here.
This week, I’ll leave you all a Yussef Dayes track and collaboration with Tom Misch. I discovered Tom Misch a few years ago and saw Yuseff’s name on a few tracks. Since then, Yussef has been playing and collaborating with a variety of artists and recently released Black Classical Music, a record I will likely play until the needle clears through the wax. Enjoy and happy Sunday.
I think I understand the appeal of the B&W amusement park photo. There’s something about being on your own little spaceship going around in circles while the rest of the world is too blurry to see straight that feels very contemporary. I dig the shot for sure.