Why you create photos in your life? To save and share memories, or to create a piece of art?
The analogy:
Create photo for the sake of documentation (to remember as memories) is like hearing songs for background listening (background noise so ambience around us is not too quite). We hear the melody, but that is just about it.
For example if we just take random snapshot with our smartphone photos in a vacation: Friends, food, coffee, etc. It is easy to just snap and forget about it. Most likely we only took images to share in social media later on for being “exist”. After all of that, we may never seen the photo again, only sit in our Drive for years.
While create photo for art is like listening music carefully, note by note of each instrument, word by word, and try to find the harmony and story inside them. Only focus to the music itself, and not doing anything while enjoying the music performance.
This could happen in any photography genres. Street, food, travel, portrait, landscape, wedding etc. We do not only shoot because we “afraid” to forget the scene. We are willing to put our time, effort, thought, patient, lesson, and sources to create the particular image. Photographer never create a photo for granted. We examine the composition, colours, contrast, and “feel” inside our image carefully.
There are some process behind it. We learn about the related subject, make preparation before shoot (include visualise before shoot), do the process of capturing image, and later we post process it. For sure not just grab a camera, shoot at random things at random timing, and suddenly become great image.
Photographers may look at one photo over and over again, either to post process it (could last for hours for some photography genres), or to understand ourself the meaning of image that we really like, or perhaps to analyse what we like/dislike about the particular image. Any chance if we shot at different time (hour/day/month) could lead to better result? What could we improved from the image we already took? What lesson we got from it? What should/should not we do next time we take a shoot?
All in all, we can conclude that a photographer is photographer because of the knowledge and effort they use to create image, not because they hold big or expensive camera on their hand. Camera is just a tool, either it is smartphone camera, mirrorless, DSLR, Film Analog etc, they can not create image by their self. What matter the most is a person behind it, the one who create the concept, visualise it, and do all the process needed to produce artistic image.
So, which one are you? What is the main purpose when you click the camera shutter? How you treat your photos after you took it? Just forget them or you make analysis and enjoy them?
Whatever it is, always remember to stay have fun with photography!
Nico Harold