Blog About Photography

© Greg Wasserstrom

I tin­kered with the new look of my site a bit more as well as the pho­tographs included in The Dol­drums and I’m happy with the results. You can check that out at greg​wasser​strom​.com. Sub­tle changes, and I car­ried the pink through to the blog. Looks ok, I think though I want to redo this entire thing. At the moment I dont really have the tech­ni­cal exper­tise or the time — plus I should focus­ing on more posts!

Also, I’m going to start post­ing more of my writ­ing which hope­fully won’t bore you too much (I’ll illus­trate when­ever pos­si­ble). I’m real­iz­ing, con­trary to what I have said in the past, that my pas­sions for pho­tog­ra­phy, writ­ing and pol­i­tics are all com­ing from the same place. It’s all the same pur­suit — it’s all obser­va­tional, descrip­tive, revelatory.

And this just occurred to me. The pho­to­graph I’ve included in this post is a newish one, from The Dol­drums, and I’m quite happy with it. But a pho­to­graph as sat­is­fy­ing as this one isn’t with­out com­pli­ca­tion. When pho­tog­ra­phers take images like this one, are we not lit­er­ally tak­ing it? What I mean is, since I didn’t this scene up myself, since I came across it in some­one else’s apart­ment, was it not their cre­ative sen­si­bil­ity that makes this shot inter­est­ing? Cer­tainly, I com­posed the pho­to­graph, chose what to include and exclude, but doesn’t that make it a col­lab­o­ra­tion? Can I really take credit for it?

And finally, if i may say so: I’m very happy you’re here. Writ­ing this blog has been tremen­dously reward­ing for me in more ways that I can recount. The rea­son for this isn’t any­thing I’m doing at all — it’s you. Inter­act­ing with you is won­de­ful and I’m thrilled to get to know so many peo­ple I’ve com­mu­ni­cated with through this forum in the real world. This whole thing means a lot to me, so please don’t go away!

Posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 3:11 am

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4 Responses to “Site update redux, other scattered thoughts”

1. Laurie McGinley Says:
   October 24th, 2007 at 9:35 am

   You never take a pho­to­graph. Even pho­tographs of scenes that you didn’t set up or light have ele­ments of what you make of them. Your tim­ing, the light, the angle you choose, how you frame it, the fact that you stopped to make the pho­to­graph — all of that is made by the pho­tog­ra­pher. A Photo Edi­tor talked about a sim­i­lar idea today.

2. michael Says:
   October 24th, 2007 at 12:41 pm

   i agree with Laurie…i feel like you rec­og­nize and take inspi­ra­tion from your environment…then you make a con­scious deci­sion to cre­ate the piece of art, here a photograph.…

   to me, being an effec­tive artist often has a lot to do with cap­i­tal­iz­ing on the many artis­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties that exist in the world around you.…

3. Shen Wei Says:
   October 25th, 2007 at 4:27 pm

   The Dol­drums is lovely!

4. Molly Says:
   November 7th, 2007 at 12:58 pm

   Dol­drums is so from Oceanog­ra­phy with Pro­fes­sor MacAvoy. That man.

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