Taking Pictures in January
Twitter's Photography Community
I was introduced to Twitter's photography community at the start of the year. I had rejoined Twitter in the days following the election in November, simply because I didn't have enough content to doom scroll on Facebook, Instagram, and Discord. I've always found Twitter to be a bit like shouting into a hurricane, no one is going to hear you. In some ways, I feel that's still true, but not entirely.
Somehow I came across Andy Adams, who is working hard to build a photography community on Twitter. It has been a revelation. I've been introduced to so many awesome photographers through Twitter, it's been incredible. Twitter still feels like a hurricane, but if you shout enough, eventually someone will hear your voice whisper on the wind and will come close to hear you better. Then you can shout together and attract more people.
A new development that has helped get my voice heard, literally, is Clubhouse. Clubhouse is a fairly new social media platform that is 100% live voice based. A user will host a room, invite some folks in, and anybody can join the room to listen in or talk. Every day there are multiple rooms of photographers just talking and listening to each other talk. It's amazing how casual conversations speed up the development of community, versus the slow development of community using text-based mediums.
The best thing about the Twitter photography community is how supportive it is. This is partly technological and partly cultural. Twitter makes it real easy to share other people's work in a way that links back to them, Instagram doesn't have this feature. Twitter also has a lot of young photographers who are brilliant, but aren't yet old and jaded. Or maybe they just weren't raised in an era when being jaded was analogous to being cool, I don't know. But in any case, they are a bunch of super positive and supportive folks, unlike what I've found on Instagram.
Each month I'm planning on using this newsletter to highlight one of the awesome photographers whose work I'm enjoyed. I hope you give them a follow and join us in the Twitter photo community.
This Month’s Videos
What I’m Reading
This month I was planning to read Susan Sontag's On Photography, but instead I got sucked into Syd Field's Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. So often, I think of photography through the lens of cinema. It's not that I want photographs to look cinematic, a word I hate applied to photography due to its meaninglessness, but that I want photos to tell a story. So often, my photos do not tell stories on account for them being devoid of people. However, one project I want to take on once COVID is over is to use my photography to tell cinematic stories.
What I'd like to do is to capture stills from movies that never were by taking three pictures--one reach act of the non-existent movie--to tell a story, along with a made up movie poster. For instance, one idea I'd like to do is a story of a solder struggling with PTSD after returning home from war. The first image would be of the soldier at war, the second an image of that soldier beating his wife, and the final image of the wife receiving a flag at a funeral.
Despite the subject matter of the first idea I've had, I think this would be a fun project to do with some friends and models. It would force me to work with other people in my photography, instead of just going out into the wilderness and taking pretty pictures. And, of course, the other reason I'm reading Screenplay is that I'm trying to write a screenplay, but that's not really about photography at all, is it?
Other Things I've Read
What I’m Watching
I'm starting to take advantage of the direct-to-streaming experiment by renting movies that would normally still be in theaters. Ammonite was the first movie like this that I rented. My favorite genre of movies are romance and coming of age films, so I was pretty excited about this one.
While the movie was beautiful and exquisitely acted, it was also terribly slow and boring. Throughout much of the movie, I was left wondering what the characters were thinking and what their motivations were. This was like a novel put on screen, but in a novel we get to read the protagonists internal monologue and here we didn't get that benefit. So much of the communication, both between the characters and by the characters to the audience, was done through body language, facial expressions, and sidelong glances. It was like being in a relationship with somebody who doesn't communicate well, and I say that as somebody who doesn't communicate well in relationships. In the end, it felt like one of those movies that is designed to win an Oscar and that you should watch if you want to seem like you're into movies, but really just leaves you feeling like you've mostly wasted a couple of hours.
However, it was nowhere close to the worse movie I watched this month. That honor goes to Waking. It's not a new movie, but it was new to me. I would not bother searching it out.
On the other end of the spectrum was Short Term 12, which I thought was excellent. Again, not a new movie. It features Brie Larson and Rami Malek before they both made it big. It's on Amazon Prime and is worth a watch.
Other Things I’m Watching
Tenet
Wonder Woman 1984
Elizabethtown
Time Freak
Hidden Figures
The Glass Castle
One Night in Miami
Who I’m Following
This month, I've been inspired by @lebowskigurl over on Twitter. She has a unique style that comes through in every image she posts. So many of the people I follow post photos of epic landscapes that are super saturated, and it's nice to see photos that don't fit that theme. Despite her photos all fitting her style, her range is quite large. She has everything from epic landscapes down to abstract macro photos. She seems to be able to find beautiful photos in things all around her. I encourage you to give her a follow.
