What are you taking a picture of....The value in simplicity

I find one of the things that I remember the most about when I was traveling and taking photos many years ago was that I was trying to bring back  pictures so that I could show people what I had seen.

 Now for a great majority of people this means snapping a picture with as many elements as possible. This translates into snapping  the little cafe on the tiny street and the glass of wine  on the table of course the acoustic band all backing this jazz singer because all of these things contributed to the moment.

 The difficulty  is that life is rarely staged the way we would like it to be.  Capturing all that you get the distracted woman on the left. The drum player who is picking up his sticks. the obnoxious Evian water bottle  fallen over on our table. and even though we got all those things in the frame does it remind viewers of the excitement of the moment. These  elements would take the viewer out of the feeling that you so desire. Even if we did have the time to stage it , would  it still feel as natural?

However I think we should challenge ourselves further. Instead of trying to capture just what we see , we should try to capture how we felt at that moment. Now most people I meet immediately recoil and go I don;t have time for all that. I just want to take a picture and move on. But my contention is that the result is pictures that we have to describe when we show them because the pictures do not stand on its own. It becomes a snapshot that people just flick through. Often times they don;t even know why we took it.

 Now I am not trying to say that my pictures are not just flicked through your wrong. However what I am trying to do is give the viewer something to ponder on. I can't help what people actually do, but I can give the viewer the opportunity by selectively choosing what I show. By reducing the number of elemnts in the frame I am forcing the person to look longer at the things that are left. This gives the viewer more of a window into the moment. The digital darkroom or editing is where you refine your vision to clean things up and nail down the moment

Have two subjects and you weaken each subject. Trust me if you can get it down to one subject or just one feeling you make it easier to identify with.  This singer is focused and the bass player is focused on her and the moment has its own magic complete with her gesture.  That is what I was trying to capture her  focused attention... so palpable you can almost hear the beat.