Photographing People and Healing

No question I've been under the weather lately. Depression? Perhaps. Mental exhaustion? Perhaps. Pure laziness? I thought of that too. I've slept most of the past four days, but seem to be able to rally when I absolutely have to. I guess that's a good sign.

An interesting thing happened last night. I had to take my daughters to the annual school picnic. Somehow I was able to get in the mood. I am a photography nut and take pictures for our local newspaper. This picnic is pretty much a required photographic event and those of you who are into photography, and I mean really into photography, know you cannot let an event like that go by undocumented! Well, I actually planned on not taking my cameras, but in the end the photographer in me came through. As usual, I probably looked like a complete dork with two cameras around my neck, one with a big telephoto lens and the other with a wide to normal lens.

Photographing people, especially children, is hard to do when you are dissociated. I guess you can do it, but the pictures will come out looking like you are dissociated. Making a photograph at an event with people requires a fair bit of thinking and internal connection. You have to first get the right expression from your subject, then make sure you've framed the image correctly, and finally get the right exposure. The first two are the hardest if you are not connected inside and outside, but often are the most overlooked.

Getting the right expression means there usually needs to be some interaction with people. Kids are a fair bit easier than older people. Kids love being in the newspaper. Older people, well, not so much sometimes. It's the photographer's job to make the people feel comfortable about having their picture taken, and sometimes, you need to direct them a little bit, especially if you are going for a cover image. If you are a news photographer, you are always looking for that perfect cover image. For kids, this requires getting down to their level and, at the same time, getting permission of their parents. Getting down to the kid's level is something most of us are good at, so this helps a great deal. And, yes, this is a rare quality because I look at most of the parents around me and see that almost nobody gets down to even their own kids' level.

Framing the image means that you have to pay attention to everything in the frame of the camera. For news photography, clean images are an absolute priority. This means you cannot have ugly or cluttered backgrounds. Good photographers can take a boring subject and make it quite exciting by positioning themselves and their camera in exactly the right spot and using the best lens for the job. There are a million ways to frame any given image. You have to be connected internally in order to pay attention to that detail.

So, I'm walking around last night at this event with hundreds of kids and most of their parents and I knew I wasn't fully connected. I knew my photography wasn't at its best. One of the reasons I knew that was that I didn't take that many images during the two plus hours I was there. I took a bit under 200, when I would normally take two to three times that amount. But, even still, I did a decent job. I got home, processed the images, uploaded them for the paper, and went to bed. And I got up at 4AM to go to my office this morning. So, I haven't been able to get up for four straight days and then this morning I get up and out at the crack of dawn. I wondered if it had something to do with photography. It probably was an internal boost that I was able to rally yesterday and make some good images.

For me, photography has been a healing force. To be sure, there are times when I absolutely cannot do it and I will cancel a photo shoot. But, by and large, photography has been an activity I find to be intensely grounding. While I do interact with people a great deal, there's a certain safety to be found behind the lens. The trick, though, with people photography is that you have to learn to alternate between the safety of being behind the lens and the risk of interacting with your subjects to make your images pop.

I recommend photography to others in the hopes it can be grounding for you too.

Note that I am not posting links to my photography websites, but if you email me and I know you, I will send them to you.