Direction

Monday, June 6, 2011 11:01 PM Posted by Hikari Studio
As some of you may have noticed there has been somewhat of a lack of proper updates, especially for someone who prided himself on making a lot of steps forward this coming summer.

Not to dance around the issue too much, there have definitely been a number of reasons for this. In part a lot of it has been due to just being incredibly busy between work, life and photography, all 3 of which tend to revolve around the latter. Regardless of the lack of content updates I've easily spent more time shooting and being involved in the craft than any time prior to the past few months.

With that it's also brought to the forefront a search for direction and goals that have put me on some uneven ground so to speak. The past 2 months have been gradually building, both positives and negatives, towards finding what I truly want to spend my time on, photography wise, and what I have to let go of to certain degrees in order to get ahead in other aspects.  

I read a story not too long ago of a respected writer for the Edmonton Journal who publicly and respectfully submitted her resignation from the publication, mainly to further pursue personal goals. A line stood out to me and began to really resonate when I read it.

To paraphrase: "The things I have to do and the things I want to do not overlap as much anymore."

This was something that felt very synonymous with what I had been gradually feeling the past while. It was not that my fire was fading for photography, heck it's never been this strong. The issue however is I found I was spending more and more of my days shooting material that had no soul in it, at least not to me.  It was as if i had been chasing some social image rather than pursuing and making a career out of what I had truly wanted to photograph.

I've spent the past little while taking a bit of a step back rather than having a knee jerk reaction. Sometimes our moods change with the season, at times it's just that, a short lived transgression that briefly takes us down a side road only to meet back up on the original path with a new perspective.  At this point I don't really know if this is the case or more so me coming to realize what originally got me involved in photography. Perhaps it's just the next plateau.

To be blunt, I'm having a bit of a falling out with fashion, both the style of photography as well as the industry as a whole. There are countless reasons I could list for it however at the core of it I can't say I've ever enjoyed it or had the drive for it to the degree that I do for beauty/hair/makeup and head shots in general. Whatever it is, that's where my drive had been, at least half of it.  The other half lies within working with real people. It's capturing real individuals, with real emotions and real memories. It's not to say fashion is fake but it definitely has it's own flavor, one that is much different than say covering a wedding.

It's it's own thing, one is not worse or better than the other. It is a flavor, one that suits some and not others.

The more time goes on the more I on a personal level do not find fashion related photography rewarding, certainly not where I am now, certainly not to the degree of capturing a moment for a couple that will never come again or finding the essence of the subject your shooting and translating that indescribable something into the image you create.

I guess it all sounds a little out there but at the end of the day we all need some sort of satisfaction and reward for what we shoot. Of course, not everything we shoot, especially when it's a career is for ourselves, more often than not, it's for a client. However, we still have to value what we do.  We all have our own definition of what that value is, in this case, for me, it's saving a memory, not making a magazine print.

It's been a while to come to begin to understand that for me and in the process I've drowned myself in work and for the most part fallen off the face of the earth when it comes to being more involved in the local photography community as well as a personal social life. That will change in time. For now I will be spending more time refining what I have and narrowing my scope to those elements I really enjoy and wish to grow.

I have a trip to Japan coming up in October.  I can't really adequately describe the value this has for me. Originally, when I started becoming interested in photography it was majority influenced by general street photography from a foreigner living in Japan as a photographer. The value in these images was that it often showed every day people but it captured their true personalities. Without words it was something that was translated within the image. Thats something that stands out to me. I want to be able to capture that intimacy and human vulnerability of a person. To me that's something special as it's often not something we get to see. I want to be able to extend that of course, beyond just personal projects and be able to bring that forward in a commercial sense. That's a long term goal but it has finally given me some clear direction

With that, I hope for this trip to bring me back to some of those roots, to put me out of my comfort zone and push me to the next level, so to speak.

1 Response to "Direction"

  1. Jim Says:

    go for it!. Take on the adventure. Look forward to seeing the pictures~!
    regards
    James

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