Blogs, Blogs Everywhere

It's amazing how the photo-blog as photographer's marketing tool has completely taken center stage these days, almost over the photographer's own website! I'm not only confounded and amazed by powerful it is for your business, but it's so easy to subscribe to hundreds upon hundreds of photo blogs from around the country in no time.

Plus, the www. is a borderless nation. You can view photography from other countries. The words are written in alien languages, but the photography is spoken in the same language among all of us. It's so overwhelming, the reach, the extent of this art! Does it level the playing field artistically? I mean, how many styles do you have to come across before you realize that photography itself is a limited art?

I always think back to the masters, especially Raphael. Walk around any national museum of western art and you'll find a common theme among the classical paintings: the canvases are bordered with squares and rectangles.

I was delighted when I came across Raphael's Albo Madonna:



A painting within a circle! Ingenious. But beyond this altogether mundane difference (in the physical borders of this art), how far can photography reach in pursuit of originality? Is originality even necessary for a photographer, that's the question. Perhaps emotional clarity + technical consistency is the perfect recipe for a successful photography business. As photographer, we all attempt, at least subconsciously, to develop our own styles and visual philosophies, in order to stand apart from the crowd. You can, for instance, tell apart a Jesh De Rox from a Scarlett Lillian. Their styles are ultra-distinct.

But it seems that with a more available technology à la digital camera, the crowd is bigger than ever. Even with the most extreme post-processing workflows and techniques, creating something truly innovative in photography these days is difficult. There are only so many angles and colors, so to speak. I doubt that becoming relentlessly original is even a priority for the average photographer. Photographers just wanna have fun, as per the old Cyndi Lauper wisdome.

I suppose that with an ever-broadening technology at our fingertips, there will be more and more opportunities to discover new ways of portraying the world around us. New, fresh angles that will become the "slight tilt" fad of its time. Perhaps a 1-600mm f/0.1 IS USM "superlens" that will no doubt become available (whoa). Something that may go even beyond the 2-D landscape of our computer screen...

Effectively, not much as changed artistically since the days of Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. We are all on the hunt for the perfect moment. The only difference between us and them is that our current technology has allowed us to capture more of them.

So, if we could suddenly fast-forward, say 50 years into the photography industry, would we be able to speak our granddaughters' artistic language? Will she even need to use a "camera"? These are the horizons that make photography really, really exciting. Possibilities are endless, folks; could be as complex as the unknown, or as simple as the difference between circles and rectangles.