Len's favourite photographs for the 2016 year to date
So far 2016 has been a great year of photography for me, here are some of my favourite shots. It is amazing that all of these were taken on workshops. Either ones I have lead, or ones I have attended.
Click on a photograph to go to full screen, and browse through them from there...
It is not the critic who counts
Dip Falls, the Tarkine, Tasmania. Copyright (c) Len Metcalf 2016
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
I shoot with my heart
" My photography is not ‘brain photography’. I put my brain under the pillow when I shoot. I shoot with my heart and with my stomach." Anders Petersen
Leura Cascades, PhotographCopyright © Len Metcalf 2016
“ My photography is not ‘brain photography’. I put my brain under the pillow when I shoot. I shoot with my heart and with my stomach.”
Works of art are...
Hopewell, Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand, © Len Metcalf 2016
Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Accidental masterpiece - Chuck Close
Photography may be the easiest artistic medium, with the possibility that someone may accidentally create a masterpiece. This therefore makes it the hardest artistic medium. Chuck Close explains this further very eloquently...
Cathedral Rocks, Kiama, NSW, Australia © Len Metcalf 2016
"The thing that interests me about photography and why it's different from all other media, is that it's the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece. You cannot make an accidental masterpiece if you're a painter or a sculptor. It's just not going to happen. Something will be wrong.
This is simultaneously photography's great advantage and it's Achilles heel: it is the easiest medium in which to be competent. Anybody can be a marginally capable photographer, but it takes a lot of work to learn to become even a competent painter. Now, having said that, I think while photography is the easiest medium in which to become competent, it is probably the hardest one in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision. It's the hardest medium in which to separate yourself from all those other people who are doing reasonably good stuff and to find a personal voice, your own vision, and to make something that is truly, memorably yours and not someone else's. A recognised signature style of photography is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve.
It always amazes me that just when I think that there's nothing left to do in photography and that all the permutations and possibilities have been exhausted, someone comes along and puts the medium to a new use, and makes it his or her own, yanks it out of this kind of amateur status, and makes it as profound and moving and as formally interesting as any other medium. It is like pushing something heavy up hill. Photography's not an easy medium. It is, finally, perhaps the hardest medium of them all."
- Chuck Close p30 Photowisdom, Lewis Blackwell, Hachette, Sydney, Australia, 2015 3rd Edition.
Film is a Disease
Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream, it takes over as the number one hormone; it bosses the enzymes; directs the pineal gland; plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film.
-Frank Capra
“Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream, it takes over as the number one hormone; it bosses the enzymes; directs the pineal gland; plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film.”