In a message dated 1/26/01 6:16:18 PM Pacific Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< To use > your analogy of writing music, or writing anything, many
authors > have said that the words/music just flowed from them, as if
> someone was writing through them, or as if the words were
given > to them. >>
Given? From whom? As a published writer and editor, I can tell you writing
takes place in the head after hours, maybe years of study. the gist of any
story, thesis, dissertation, novella or book, in whatever form, is the words
we learn, all of them. They are personally inhaled by each of us, then
cogitated, structured, formulated-essentially "composed" all in our brains.
Months, years, hours, moments before the first legal tablet and fistful of
No. 2 pencils are tossed on the table, the story, like dammed waters, waits
within the brain of the writer to be born.
A mental switch is thrown and the story *flows* out of the brain as from a
wide-open tap.
Like a photographer who *knows*0 the image s/he wants to shoot as they form
the initial frame in his/her mind, then finds the image in their viewfinder.
*There's a Hispanic church about four miles away. It has Spanish
architecture. It sits in a low spot near the freeway where fog often gathers.
On some days we get a condition where fog covers the church and little valley
but the other fog, lifting, crowns the church with a glow, the barely risen
sun blasting its way down through to light the church. I saw that some 30
years ago.
I have no idea of how many times I've attempted to get that same scene I saw
so long ago I've shot the scene, with 500mm to 16mm. I've yet to recapture
the church/fog as I first saw it so long ago. But that solitary image burns
in my mind as if I's seen it on paper. Someday, when the fog is just right
and the sun is just so, I'll be there, this time finger on the shutter...
Some say their photography is spontaneous, extemporaneous, unplanned. I used
to do that kind of shooting all the time:
"grab" shots, "two" shots, "got to get the shot" shots. Hands over my head
because there's a rush of people. The principals rush toward us, I have but a
tiny window to shoot-wham! Shutter-button down-motor drive humming, I fired
and composed at the same time...Photojournalism they call it.
With that background in mind, on those when I am *not* acting as a PJ, my
images are planned, as today. Thought about, if not for days, then seconds
whenever or wherever the subject of my mental "composition" presents itself.
Thought about while traveling cross-country at 3:30 am, trying on this
aspicious morning to be in position along the freeway to catch that sunrise...
"There's a shot" my mind says, and in the minutes, seconds it takes for me to
prepare my camera for shooting, I'm looking, composing, determining where the
sun is, where the shadows are falling, whether there are obstacles in my way;
"can I make the shot" I ask myself, "before it (the long ago remembered
scene) gets away."
So yeah, I guess we all do a little off the cuff, "whip it out and let go"
stuph but always, at least with the practiced photographer, always with a
conscious thought to order, if not compose, the image.
I will speak no more about composing forever.
(At least not this particular thread). <g>
Happy weekend!
And since I'm from New York, "Go Xxxxxx!"
Mafud
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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