English content Originally posted on ELLO
The created image video series
NOTE : This is NOT another f\*cking sponsored post!
I’m a huge consumer of pro tips, tutorials, behind the scene stuff and I am very often very frustrated with it. I think that I’m starving for this kind of material, just because I’m a self-made photographer. I’ve never followed a course or took a lesson, only focused on finding my own means of expression and learned everything by myself. Yeah, that’s maybe why my level on some specific stuff is very poor, or you might consider my entire work is crap :x
The thing is, as time goes on, I have very hard time finding good stuff. I’m learning a lot by looking at curated work and my RSS feed provides me with thousand of images a day. In this huge flow, I’ve made a quick calculation and my average is 1/1000: I find something very inspirational only once every 1,000 images. Some would say I need to refine my flows, but I like the diversity and some great stuff occurs from unexpected sources very often.
In the Video tutorial world, one of the greatest piece of work I’ve seen was the One Light workshop video course by Zach Arias. The second opus, called … One Light 2.0 is even better in its construction. And since I watched those, I’ve spent a large amout of time looking for some other work that could compete with this and found only real crap.
A few weeks ago, there was this big Charity offer from 5 days deal that was including Zach Arias, One light 2.0; which was why I initially bought it. In this big bundle of video tutorials, I discovered the work of David duChemin, a wildlife and travel photographer from Vancouver. He has built a series of videos called The created image based on some conferences he gave in 2013, and even if the examples are based on his own kind of photography, everything he says can be applied to any other field of photography.
Obviously as the title of this post seems to say, these videos are completely amazing. It doesn’t focus at all on the technics or how should I technically do this of that, or how do I use a f*cking reflector to … reflect the light :x Instead David duChemin spends a lot of time explaining his process, starting with the very intention. He leads to question yourself by analyzing your work and your process in another angle. For the first time I can read a definition of Creativity that I can agree with. He shows how much work it takes to achieve a good picture: once again, it’s not a matter of technics only, but about what it takes to make better photography.
So, in a few words, the key elements among the long list of notes I’ve taken would be:
- Creativity is not just about ideas. Creativity is not a talent, it is a work ethic.
- Creation is hard, is called artwork not art f\*cking around.
- Incubate, give it time.
- Embrace contraints, what’s in the way is the way.
- Inspiration comes from work, the muse works when we do.
And those are only a few lines, from video chapter 1 :) How it will change or influence my work: no f\*cking clue. We’ll see in the next months / years. Let’s just say that for now it has underpin the way I envision my work and renewed my self confidence.
For those interested in this series of videos here is a link : http://craftandvision.com/products/the-created-image. I promise I do not earn anything :)
Oh, and if you ever find a tutorial, article, book, video that have the same weight or impact, just let me know !
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