Stop Taking Photographs and Start Making Photographs | Julius Motal

For a while now, I’ve been saying that I make photographs, but for a long time, particularly when I started, I’d say take, largely because I didn’t know what I was doing. At the beginning, I had no formal photographic education, and I had to learn the camera and the craft through trial and error. I was practicing image making, that is to say exposure, composition and other technical aspects. I was a machine operator, and with my machine, I took images, with no real intent or desire to give back because my images didn’t say anything. Taking by definition is a one-way exchange. A person who takes does not give back. When I began photographing, I took all the time, and I was way too fascinated with shallow depth of field. If I could give myself credit for anything back then, it’s that I shot on film, something I’m only starting to get back into. There’s only one image worth its salt from my film days. While this image may have value, it’s not one that I made. When I got the film back, I completely blew past this image. I didn’t recognize its quality until three years later, largely because I had neither the awareness nor the visual vocabulary to understand what I’d taken. Even now, I can’t readily articulate why it is that I like this image so much, but the fact remains that I took this image. I didn’t make it………

Source: www.thephoblographer.com