Beyond the obvious

To me the expressive moment is simply the moment captured through the lens by the photographer when there is a clear expression of mood, emotion and feeling. It is different to Henri Cartier Bresson's 'decisive moment' which revolves around a visual harmony and balance in the frame rather than being about emotion and expression. The ideal is to achieve both the perfect visual balance across the frame, the decisive moment, and capture the expressive moment. Of the two I would choose the expressive moment as the most important because the essence of photography is to communicate an idea or emotion to your audience. Of course the aesthetic elements of an image play a vital role, but they support the message rather than being the message - just as in architecture, form should follow function. This is the realm of photojournalism, editorial photography, advertising, street and fashion photography. Here we use the expressive moment to get the audience to: really see fee...

It’s never been easier to communicate; phone, email, text, instant messaging and traditional post. Information flows freely back and forth in blogs, magazines, tweets, forums, websites, podcasts and videos – the channels are many and varied. However when I look at what is communicated I wonder about the real value of much of this information. When someone announces on twitter that they had a cheese sandwich and cup of coffee for lunch, I have to ask, “Who on earth cares?” I certainly don’t. By the way I plucked this example from thin air, so if you tweeted about your lunch please don’t take it personally. Then there’s the endless regurgitating and recycling of information. I just did a quick search on Google for the ‘golden mean in photography’ and got 1,280,000 hits. Anyone who thinks they can add anything of value by writing about this topic again needs their head examined – total waste of time. But I bet right now there are people researching the golden mean by reading some of those...

A man lies collapsed in the street, attended by a policeman who put him in the recovery position and stood by him waiting for the paramedics. Click on the images to see a larger version. This week I came across the event above and took two different images. The first is a clear no frills photo journalistic image. The second image uses photographic language and aesthetics to create an emotion. A friend said of the second image, "I would not qualify it as photo-journalistic as it is too artsy (in the right way) to be published in a newspaper. But man, it does have a strong impact!" I found that interesting. Thinking of the beautifully lit images that W. Eugene Smith made. Would they be considered too artsy for a newspaper these days. Which brings me to the recent debate about the beautifully lit image of the Thai prostitute discussed in Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin's hotly debated article "Unconcerned but not indifferent" , which goes behind the scenes at ...

Everyone is telling you that you've got to learn the technical aspects of photography. Blogs, websites, books all hammer the message home and if you don't know your f-stops, the difference between a jpeg and raw file and how to use every tool in Photoshop, you're somehow inferior and can't possibly take a good picture. I suppose in our technology obsessed world it's not surprising that the how you do something takes precedence over the why you do it. Technique and the technical aspects of photography are vitally important. You have to have enough technical knowledge and craftsmanship to be able to create the image you envisage each and every time. As a photographer you have to have the skills and technical knowledge of a builder, or you house will fall down, but you also need the vision of an architect to create something beautiful and interesting. Recently on two separate occasions I saw promising new professional photographers at work. They knew their technical...