Every one of us has a person, or a few people, whom we look up to and truly admire.  We turn to them for inspiration, creativity, and knowledge in hopes of deepening our own understanding of the photography craft.  David Nightingale is one of those people for me.  Let’s not mince words, I am positively giddy to have David contribute to the Alt Perspective series.  I’ve followed David’s work for some time now and have lost count at the amount of times that my jaw has dropped from looking at his images.  His HDR work transcends to a level of raw reality that I haven’t seen anywhere else.  He has a mastery of emoting through his shots by his locked grasp of composition, tone and color.

So, you could imagine my delight when he accepted my offer to contribute to this series.  I’ve been so fortunate to have some amazing and talented photographers contribute here and David continues this trend with style.

For those of you who may not be familiar with David’s work, please begin that journey now.  His online presence and moniker is Chromasia.  David is an accomplished author and has written one of my favorite photography books, Practical HDR, providing readers with a truly fulfilling and logical lesson in HDR photography.  I cannot recommend it enough.  David also provides an indispensable library of post processing tutorials that are wonderfully outlined.  He shares all of his knowledge with members in hopes of elevating how we look at the final state of our images.  Getting a lifetime membership was a no-brainer and I absolutely recommend getting one for yourself.  David is also the author of Baby Photography NOW! and the upcoming book, Extreme Exposure, which I just pre-ordered.

You can follow David on Twitter, Facebook and on his awesome Blog

Untitled – David J Nightingale

Writing about the craft of photography, for me at least, is a straightforward task. I can write thousands of words on post-production, technique, equipment, software, and so on. Writing about the art of photography though – the ‘why’, rather than the ‘how’ – I find a lot more difficult. Why do I photograph certain things rather than others? Why do I post-produce them in the way that I do? What is it that I want my photographs to say?

Often, I’m tempted to just quote Gary Winogrand:

“I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”

But that’s not much of an answer, at least not on the face of it.

I think the problem, when I try to articulate my answer, is that I don’t have a single goal in mind. For example, Cartier Bresson’s work was about capturing the decisive moment, while Ansel Adams concentrated on revealing the raw and powerful beauty of wilderness landscapes. When I look through my own images though, they’re all over the place: shots of washed up items on the beach, portraits of my kids, HDR images of urban scenes, landscapes and seascapes, night photography, travel images, … and so the list goes on.

So, do they share a common theme? Well, yes, kind of …

 

When I give our six month old daughter something she hasn’t see before, her face lights up – she turns it round and round and round, she chews it, she bangs it on things – in short, she gives it her undivided attention because it’s novel and interesting. The next time I give her the same object, she’s less interested, the time after that, less interested still, until eventually she loses interest altogether. The item doesn’t change in the meanwhile – it is what it is – but her fascination declines with each new meeting. As with all of us then, familiarity breeds contempt.

When I look through my own images, one common theme that seems to emerge is a desire to reverse that process: to present the world in a way that is unfamiliar, allowing the viewer to become fascinated in some object or aspect of the world that they might otherwise overlook. The most obvious examples are my beachcombing images: photographs of the the flotsam and jetsam that float the world’s oceans – discarded objects and items that wash up on shore one day, that are often gone by the next. These battered and neglected items rarely have any intrinsic worth – broken buckets, lost shoes, empty water bottles, and so on – but, if you look again, rather than just stepping over them or walking by without a second glance, you’ll see that they often have a story to tell.

I think this is why I also find HDR photography so compelling. The content of each image is the same as with a conventional photograph, but the process lends each scene a hyper-real (or surreal) quality that compels the viewer to look again: to see the scene through fresh eyes.

In this sense then, perhaps Gany Winogrand’s quote isn’t too far of the mark, but I’d be tempted to rewrite it as follows:

 

“I photograph to see what the world could look like in photographs.”

 

I’d like to end this short piece by thanking Brian for giving me the opportunity to participate in Alt Perspective. It’s an honour.