Guy Tal Photography Newsletter
June, 2009
All text and images Copyright © Guy Tal.
Greetings from scenic Utah! The spring monsoons seem to have arrived early this year. The streams are gushing with melted snow, thunderstorms roar in the evenings, and the mountain sides are bright with the green of new aspen and oak foliage. In the canyons the leaves of cottonwoods both young and ancient contrast with the red rock, and wildlife is abundant. It's a great time to be out in the wild. Then again, any time is.
Social Networking
As I mentioned on my blog, I recently signed up to Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter. Admittedly this is more of an experiment than a strategy for me at this point. I hope time will help me better grasp the appeal and value of these new frontiers. As a personal statement, I would urge anyone to carefully balance "sociaizing" in solitary sensory deprivation behind a keyboard with a hefty dose of immersion in the natural world. No amount of 140-character missives or pixelated video will enrich your life as much as a single breath of air after the rain or the sight of the milky way in the night sky away from the city light.
July 4th In Torrey, Utah
Michael Gordon, David Fantle, and I will have a booth at the upcoming July 4th celebrations in Torrey, UT. If you happen to be around Capitol Reef National Park during the holiday, be sure to come over and say hi. We’ll have a large number of prints, cards, and posters, as well as copies of The Ultimate Guide to Digital Nature Photography.Have We Made Things Too Complicated?
In "The Proud Robot," 1940s science fiction writer Henry Kuttner tells the story of an eccentric inventor who wakes up from a drunken stupor to discover that while intoxicated he built a talking robot with a complex narcissistic personality. He then struggles to remember why he did it. By the end he realizes he really just wanted to build a better beer can opener and got a little carried away.
Think about modern photography in the same light and how much we have wrapped around the basic concept of making images. I'm not talking so much about the astounding technology involved, but rather about the tremendous amount of peripheral buzz that complicates, hobbles, discourages, distracts from, and get in the way of the simple desire to make an image.
 Every so often when reading through the ever-present debates on "X vs. Y", the supreme importance of such things as metadata, "digital asset" management, geo-tagging, morals of "manipulation," and a myriad other extraneous topics, I stop and wonder why so much of the virtual world of photography is not about photographs. It's no wonder there is so little creative and innovative image-making out there when so many camera owners spend more time and energy talking and bickering about the practice rather than actually pursuing it. Seriously, if you head into the wild in search of inspiration while your mind is preoccupied with what keywords you should use to optimize your search engine results, you may as well tie a boat anchor around your waist before hitting the trail.
While I'm quoting from sci-fi authors, a quip form Philip K. Dick is especially relevant here: "The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." I'm pretty sure we would not have some of our greatest literary creations if their authors related to them or promoted them as "bleached wood pulp assets," or chose their titles and narrative based on search engine optimization.
It is the nature of inspiration and spirituality to transcend technical minutia and mundate tangible considerations. If you became a nature photographer because your soul soars and transforms with the power, delicacy, and sensory stimulus of natural forces, stand up right now and shout out "enough!". Strap on your boots and head out. Touch the leaves, smell the earth, run your fingers on the gritty surface of rocks, listen to the gurgling of water in a stream, watch an insect crawling into a flower, stare at the clouds or stars or ocean waves or mountain tops, listen to the songs of birds - these are the ingredients of great art. Put all else out of your mind, open your heart, and make it your goal to see something you've never noticed before.
I'm confident there are no keywords etched anywhere on Michelangelo's "David" and that Beethoven did not embed optimized metadata in the score of "Pastoral". In the end, greatness prevails. It may take time to be noticed but great art will always surpass and transcend the mediocre, repetitive, and mundane, no matter what its Google ranking is, whether it's film or digital, manipulated , found, keyworded, twittered, HDR'd, geo-tagged, cropped, or anti-alias filtered.
"There are no rules for good photographs. There are only good photographs." --Ansel Adams
If your photographic goal is to inspire and express your creativity; do what you do for the love of it. Everything else is secondary. It's that simple.
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