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FEMALE SPEAKER: Welcome to Photographers at Google.
And we are so pleased to introduce Chris Orwig with us
today.
Chis is a fantastic educator, speaker, and photographer.
He teaches at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara,
and he also has videos on lynda.com.
You're going to be in for big treat today.
His topic today is how getting better at photography
can fuel innovation and growth.
And it is my extreme pleasure to introduce you to Chris Orwig.
CHRIS ORWIG: All right.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
CHRIS ORWIG: Thank you.
Super excited to be here.
This is a huge honor.
So for me, I am a photographer and a teacher.
And over the last decade or so, I've
had a chance to interact with a lot of people who were pursuing
or were in pursuit of getting better at photography.
And what I've discovered is that that pursuit,
it somehow ignited a creative spark.
And that that creative spark is contagious,
and that it leads to creativity in other areas of their lives.
It makes people more innovative.
It helps to enrich their life.
So what I want to focus in on today
is this whole idea of how igniting
that photographic spark could help
us to be more creative, more innovative, and more alive.
Sound good?
The way that I want to try to do that is
to share with you some photographs, some stories,
and some ideas, which I hope will change the way
that you approach photography, because I
think our approach is really key.
And also, hopefully help you make better photographs.
And so here I'll just show a few of my pictures to start off.
And I like to capture pictures of life as it unfolds.
And so I photograph a lot of different types of things,
whether it's my daughter here, or a friend up
in the mountains, or someone down in the ocean.
And ultimately, for me, photography really
distills down to this idea that the French photographer Marc
Riboud once said, he said that "Photography is savoring life
at 1/100th of a second."
Savoring life intensely.
And I love that idea.
And what I've discovered is that when I pick up
a camera, whatever kind of camera it is, and I hold it up
and I look through it, all of a sudden I
see the world differently, or if I have a camera on my shoulder
or in my pocket.
And we've all kind of experienced
this in different ways.
For example, I'll go back to high school.
My brother and I bought a jeep.
Once I started driving that jeep,
all of a sudden what did I notice.
Of course, we know this one, right.
Other jeeps.
Like oh, my gosh.
Oh, my gosh.
All of a sudden I'm waving to all these other guys who
are driving jeeps, and they were always there,
it's just that I couldn't see them.
I was looking, but I wasn't seeing
because I didn't have one myself, right?
And so the camera somehow changes, literally,
what we see, because it's giving us a chance
to perhaps look a little bit deeper.
One of my friends David duChemin,
who's kind of a world humanitarian photographer I
think said it pretty well.
He said, "The camera first opened up my eyes, and then
my heart, to a world of wonders."
And I think that's true.
The camera somehow affects how we experience life.
And the interesting thing about photography I think now
is that really we are all photographers,
to a greater or lesser degree.
I can remember a time when this wasn't so.
I remember when photography was only an elective.
It was optional, like high school photography.
Or maybe it was something you'd do on a really epic vacation.
But what I've discovered, what we all know now
is that photography is something that happens all the time.
I can remember going to my first concert not too far from here,
and I snuck in a camera.
Did any of you ever do that back in the day?
And it was a big deal.
And I had this camera, and I pull it out and take a picture
and then hide it.
And flash forward to, I saw the same band recently
and there's tens of thousands of cameras
taking videos and stills now.
And it's part of our life.
And I almost like to think about photography a little bit
like the Gutenberg press.
So Gutenberg press happened 600 years ago, approximately,
right?
And all of a sudden it was this boom
of literacy, and curiosity, and innovation, and knowledge,
and whatnot.
And I think now, perhaps, it's the camera
in our pocket, whatever that is, or the one that we
have with us which is creating a different type of a boom.
It's a different type of a literacy.
At the same time, something fascinating is happening.
That's why there are all these statistics which
are thrown around, like 300 million photographs today will
be posted on Facebook.
And that's an interesting number.
But I'm more interested in the number 100 years from now,
right?
What will that be?
And how will we look back on now and say well,
what is photography now that it's something
that we all do to different degrees?
And why I'm saying all this, and why
I think this is kind of important
is because I think the photograph has
a different value.
It's a different way to communicate and convey.
And I think getting good at photography
isn't just an option.
Rather, it's get good at photography.
Pursue getting better or be left behind.
Because somehow photography is this force.
It's this part of what we do.
It's no longer kind of fringe.
It's mainstream.
Are you with me on that?
And so what we have to do is then
say, well, what is a good photograph?
And so I'll pause just for a second,
and we did this just before the talk,
but I want to do it again, to get you re-thinking about that.
Ask your neighbor, what is a good photograph?
Go for it.
Let's take 30 seconds to answer that question.
[AUDIENCE TALKING]
What a good photograph is is really contingent
upon on who we are.
And sometimes what people do and your photo teachers
show you a picture and say is it good?
And then I'll say well, what's the point, or what's it for?
Do you want to hang it on your wall, do
you want it to be in a gallery, is this for education?
What's the intent?
And so the intent really drives if a photograph is good or not.
Yet we still all sort of have this idea
that we know the difference between photographs which
are mediocre, blah, a little bit empty,
and ones which are magnificent and compel.
And so in this pursuit I think it really
is this transition from mediocre to magnificent.
And I think there is this idea that we
have to start thinking about that we are all photographers.
And that this dividing line between the pro and the amateur
has become blurred.
And maybe isn't even as relevant as it was before.
Now, this makes a few people nervous on both sides
of the spectrum.
But on the amateur or the enthusiast side,
the person who isn't getting paid for it, sometimes what
will happen, at least in my experience,
is I'll be shooting or something,
or they'll be taking pictures and then I'll walk up
and they're like oh, you're the pro.
Like you'll take the real pictures.
But that isn't how it works.
I think the amateur has a really distinct advantage,
especially even when you're taking a photograph of a dog,
especially if you're an ambitious amateur.
And I think the ambitious amateur has at least
these three things going for them.
This advantage over the rest of us.
First one is possibility.
Shunryu Suzuki once said that "In the beginner's mind,
the possibilities are endless.
In the experts, they're few."
The amateur says well, why not set my dog up
on this little railing and ask it to smile?
And that's what the lady did.
It was awesome.
The expert's like no, there's too many dog pictures
out there.
The amateur says why not?
The next one is passion.
The word amateur, as I'm sure some of us know,
it comes from the French and the Latin words which means love.
And so someone who's an amateur does
something because of that passion, because they love it,
because they just want to do it.
And that's why most photographs are made today.
And then the last one is growth.
Edison said, "Discontent is the first necessity of innovation."
Or invention-- discontent.
And I think the amateur knows that they can get better.
How many of you have taken bad pictures,
like horribly bad pictures.
Like oh, my gosh.
There's so much more potential for growth.
And every pro photographer I know who's a really, not
every pro, but a lot of the pros I know,
they're trying to recover these three things.
They're trying to say, well, what are the possibilities?
What's possible here?
I want to rekindle that passion for what I'm doing.
And I also want to continually say
that photography is about growth.
It's something that's different than other things.
You never arrive.
There's no badge, right, that says you now have arrived
and you take great pictures and will continue to do so.
Most great photographers will say
they're only as good as their last photograph.
And so if you can say, well this is about growth
and this is about moving forward,
then those bad pictures are sometimes OK.
And what we need to do is say taking good pictures maybe
is the end goal, but getting there requires bad photographs.
So similar to writing, right?
There are very few writers that sit down and pen something
and then hand it off and it's done.
There is process.
Perhaps this process-- well, it became really clear to me
when my mom took me my brother and sister on a field trip
to the Hostess factory.
We were little kids.
It was summertime.
And my mom's a crazy artist.
So she took us on this field trip
and we saw how Hostess Twinkies were made.
Now, obviously disgusting now.
They don't even exist anymore.
But back then as a kid, these things were amazing.
And we saw sugar and flour in a big vat,
stirred around, and go through a process, and eventually
a Twinkie.
And for us as kids it was like, wow,
that's the same sugar and flour that we have.
And then it's the process that results in something else.
And so photography I think is something
which is a very similar type of a thing.
And part of getting good at it takes really asking yourself
well, who are we?
What's a good photograph to me?
One of my photographic mentor Rodney Smith here, has really
helped me realize that who we are, who you are,
determines the photographs that you make.
And there's this distinct connection
between who we are and between our pictures.
So Rodney, he's a really fascinating person.
He's incredibly thoughtful, he's profound,
he has this really interesting sense of humor.
So obviously, these are couple of his photographs,
those things show up in his pictures.
And what I've found is it that the more closely that
our pictures reflect who we are, the better those photographs
are.
And in a sense, the photographs that we take
are a bit of a mirror to who we are.
Elliott Erwitt put it this way, another photographer.
He said, "Photography has little to do with the things you see,
and everything to do with the way that you see them."
That's why when you capture a photograph, it is, in a sense,
a mirror.
These are a couple portraits that I made.
And so what is this mirror saying?
Well, you can kind of tell that I respect these guys, right?
A world famous surfer on the left,
and Yvon Chouinard, a great adventurer, outdoorsman,
founded Patagonia.
You can tell that I admire their strength of character,
and that I'm really interested in their eyes
and their presence, right?
Can you see those things?
And if we can make photographs that reflect this most clearly,
typically they're stronger than the other ones.
The photographs that are the worst pictures that I've made,
those are the ones that are a mirror that's kind of fogged up
after you take a shower.
And you can't really see through them.
You almost have to wipe it off, and then even after you wipe it
off, you can't really see what's happening.
The best pictures are the ones you're like wow,
I know who took that.
I need to see their name.
I know that's so and so's photograph.
Or that expresses what's kind of on the inside, what
I'm trying to communicate or convey,
and I'm getting that in a frame.
One of the ways that we do this as photographers
is that we use the frame.
The photographic frame's kind of an interesting thing.
And for a second, pretend that you had never seen one.
What you might ask is why isn't it a circle?
It'd be easy to do.
Like why don't we have circular photographs?
For some reason, we have these linear lines, right,
and we have a line which is usually
a rectangle or a square.
And we use these lines to somehow eliminate clutter,
or eliminate things from what we see.
And in order to get good at photographs,
we have to pay attention, obviously,
to what we're capturing.
But perhaps more importantly is what we aren't capturing.
We have to start to think about how we can frame and reframe.
And I want to hit this topic just a little bit,
because I think this is where stuff gets kind of interesting.
This is where who we are and the way we see
effects the pictures.
And I want to start with sort of a walk-by photograph.
Have you ever had the moment, you walk by something,
you're like, oh, that's pretty cool,
and you take the picture, right?
And this happens to us, I think, a lot,
especially when you have your camera with you
because you're sort of looking for it.
You're peripherally aware that might look interesting.
And so I was visiting a friend, Robert Gupta who
plays for the LA Phil at the Disney Concert Hall in LA.
And it was early in the morning, the sun was rising.
It's like oh, this is beautiful.
It's interesting.
And this is just the image kind of straight out of the camera.
But what, perhaps, is more interesting is
the picture I took right beforehand.
And this one reveals, I think, how the camera sees.
It's not good at all, right?
It's clutter, there's the road and everything.
And what happened I think when I took the picture is I held it
up, and all of a sudden when I held up the camera,
it blocked out the city buildings,
and it blocked out the trash that was over there.
And I'm like yes, and then I just zeroed in on the subject.
Yet what we have to do in photography
is zero in on the subject and then travel around the frame
and say well, what's on the edge?
And the art of learning how to reframe
helps us to create images which are more clear, which convey,
which somehow draw people in, which changed from something
which is mediocre or to maybe even magnificent.
And I don't think this picture is quite there,
but I think it illustrates an interesting point.
Let's take another scenario.
This is not a walk-by photograph,
but one which I'm trying to set up.
Sometimes you go out and you find pictures on accidents.
Other times you try to sort of make pictures.
This is one I'm trying to make.
This is Jack O'Neill in his home in Santa Cruz,
looking out over the ocean at some surfers.
And this is the guy who's often attributed
to having invented the wetsuit.
And I love the sport of surfing and I love the ocean.
So I love the fact that we have wetsuits.
I'm grateful to this guy.
So I want to create a portrait which is timeless,
and which really communicates and conveys about who he is.
And so this was the frame, the one that I liked.
But again, I'll show you the one before in just a second.
Yet before I do I have to share a quick side story.
You know, when I met him and I was talking with him,
I noticed that his eye patch was made out of wetsuit material.
And so, like a smart person, or smart person that I am,
I said, oh Jack, I noticed your eye
patch is made of wetsuit material.
Why is that?
He said, "Well, how else would I keep my eye socket warm
when I go surfing?"
I was like, right.
OK.
Duh.
But here was the first picture.
Isn't very good again, and here's why.
It isn't very good because he's a little bit disengaged, right?
He's not quite looking at me.
He's sort of looking a little bit just over my shoulder.
Have you ever had that experience where you're
talking with someone and they're not quite talking to you.
And you're just not-- you're not there, right?
And then the light isn't-- the light's fine,
but it's not hitting him good.
His shoulder's a little bit too far in, right?
He needs to open up.
And then all of a sudden you're like well, those
are his pots and pans, and that's his kitchen.
And the portrait I want to make isn't Jack in is home.
The portrait I want to make is sort of Jack O'Neill, the man,
the myth, the legend.
This person who looks like a pirate, who
invented the wetsuit, whose house hangs out over the ocean.
And in this case, the reframing, all it took was two feet.
Two feet to the right.
And we're just saying hey, well Jack, why don't you sit here
and then I'll take that frame.
A very simple reframe.
And that's how good photographs happen.
But in order for that to happen, we have to have that mindset.
Maybe it's the rough draft and the final draft,
but whatever it is, but it's reframing.
It's the first photo of the building, the walk-by photo,
and then the second one which says I'm a photographer.
And you can't say well, I'm only an amateur photographer
because then the second frame won't happen, right?
And so we have to get into that.
My friend who's a travel photographer,
he shoots for National Geographic,
all these amazing publications.
What he says is when you're traveling,
the first day, if you have two days,
the first day you take the postcard shots.
So if you're in San Francisco you get the Golden Gate Bridge,
and you get the Transameri-- whatever it is.
The next day you do the work of a photographer.
He says if you have 10 minutes with the subject,
the first five minutes you do the postcard, the obvious shot.
Then the second five minutes you do the work of a photographer.
And that's all about that reframe.
You with me on that?
Reframe.
Mediocre to magnificent.
And this, I thought this would be a fun photo because one
of the early tag lines for O'Neill wetsuits was it's
always summer on the inside.
And that's a perfect reframe.
I mean those guys were so cold it's miserable.
And any of you who have been in the ocean without a wetsuit,
you can't even use your hands.
I remember getting out of the water
and you would hold your car keys like this
because you couldn't open your car door
and you're just so cold.
And he invented this thing which was about warmth,
and he came up with this great reframe.
And reframe is something, I think,
the artists, athletes, and inventors do.
And somehow it's that reframe, which
not only affects what we see, but kind of affects who we are.
So I know this from experience.
So for me, one of the reasons why I'm a photographer
is I was hit by a car and I was in a lot of chronic pain.
And I've kind of told this story other places,
so I'll just make it short.
But I had all of this pain, and my dad gave me this camera,
and I held it up to my eye, and all of a sudden I
could reframe.
All of a sudden I found beauty, and hope, and wonder, even
in despair.
And the camera somehow gave me this little bit of a gift.
Or maybe going back to, let's say, the Gutenberg press,
which I mentioned earlier.
The Gutenberg press was invented in Germany, in wine country.
And so Gutenberg, he took a wine press,
and rather than pressing grapes, which he had done many times,
he changed it to press letters.
He went from grapes to letters.
He reframed.
He took something that was already there.
Printable type was invented in China like the way before that,
but somehow he just took this thing and made it new.
And so what we have to do, if we want to be really creative,
is do that.
And I think photography, in a sense, is an act.
It's a statement.
And if we have a camera, again, pocket or whatever,
every time we hold it up to our eye,
we're saying am I just going to take what the world gives me?
I'm walking by-- here it is, the world gave me that.
Boom.
Or am I going to exercise my own creative power and potential?
Am I going to do more?
And the more that reframe with the camera,
I think the more we can reframe in other ways.
For example, I remember when I was early in my career
and I was working in an ad agency,
and there was this one person who would get mad a lot.
Like when it was time for critique of a project,
he would rant and rave and arm slam, the whole thing.
And once that happened to me where he was doing his thing
and he said, I'm so mad about this.
And I sa well, what are you mad about that?
And he's like this and that.
I said, great.
And then we moved on and we developed a relationship.
So rather than cowering, I said I'm just
going to try to reframe.
I'm going to try to bend this a different way,
or maybe its spin, or whatever it is.
And the more we can do those things, perhaps the more
innovation, maybe even the more life,
and in photography at least, the better photographs.
Aristotle said the aim of art isn't
to display the outward appearance of things,
but their inward significance.
The aim of art isn't the outward appearance,
but their inward significance.
And I think in photography we get hung up on the visual,
right, because that's the end goal.
Like yeah, look at that, it's amazing.
But really it's about that inner truth, or that inner meaning.
Are you with me on that?
Why some photographs are good to us
is because they have some sort of significance.
Not just because it's like that's a pretty picture.
That's my favorite.
That doesn't really happen, right?
But yeah, that's a pretty picture, and it's my daughter,
and it's when she was two.
And I remember that moment.
I remember that moment from that photograph
because she looked up at me, and she looked up at me and said,
dad-- and this is my daughter Annie.
She said, dad, you have rainbows!
And I said why are you talking-- She's like, no,
you have rainbows!
And she was talking about the wrinkles on my forehead.
And she counted them, and she would kiss them.
And this is my favorite feature of my body, my rainbows.
They're just going to get better with time.
And my other two daughters, now they talk about my rainbows.
And again, it was that inner significance,
that moment perhaps.
And what we do as photographers, we tell stories with light.
The word photography, as we know,
comes from that Greek word photos and graphos.
It's light and writing, writing with light.
In the visual arts, photography is
all about how do we convey, communicate with light.
But the trick, of course, is we can't go to an art store
and buy ink or pencils like other artists,
visual artists can do.
We can't go by lights, right?
We have to sort of pursue it and discover it.
And it's this bit of this chase almost.
I like to think of the pursuit of light similar to what
my tribe or my friends do when they pursue waves.
Does anyone know a surfer in here?
They're crazy people, right?
And what they do is they go to the far corners
of the world looking for waves.
And they find waves because of their search
in all of these unlikely places.
And they only find them because they're on the hunt.
And the same thing's true with photography.
Like with these two pictures, both of them
sort of happened by accident.
With the one on the right, this happened about a week ago.
I was driving down a dirt road and the sun was rising,
and I know dirt and sun and light,
and I was like there's got--
And I was oh, stop the car.
Jump out.
Capture the frame.
The dust settled and the moment was gone.
But it was that pursuit, that awareness,
that light is here or around.
And it's there, maybe just around the corner.
We can discover it.
And if you believe in light, perhaps you might even find it.
And with this other one, I was shooting
the opposite direction, but the light was too harsh,
and then all of a sudden it was oh.
And it was, again, it was that turnaround.
And that whole pursuit of lightness
may sound a little bit of a stretch for some people,
but I think that that search brings new life.
If you do a Google search for light,
and read some of the entries, or the Wikipedia entry,
or whatever it is, it will say that almost every thing that's
alive on planet Earth can trace its life back to light.
Light is like the great source of life.
You with me on that?
I mean light gives life.
And if that's what you're looking
for, somehow that effects you, right?
Because, again, you start to see it and notice it,
and it changes, I think, how you appreciate the world
and what you see.
This, though, of course, isn't just a Pollyanna pursuit.
This isn't about go photograph sunsets
or sunrises and puppy dogs.
I think the pursuit of light is something more.
Dylan Thomas, "Do not go gentle into that good night,
but rage, rage, against the dying of the light."
This is something that all artists know.
Light, and the passage of time.
We all know that one day the lights of our life
will be gone.
The reason why I decided to pursue photography,
I began, perhaps, because I was hit by a car.
But then I pursued it because I was in graduate school.
I wasn't studying photography, but I
was required to volunteer in a hospital.
And I was assigned to the floor where
people were being treated for, wrestling with, and dying
from cancer.
And my job was to sit and just listen.
To be a neutral party who would just spend time with them.
And what I discovered is that by spending time
with people who are dying, you can't help but learn
about life.
In this pursuit of light, I think is somehow tied to life
itself.
The camera, in my experience, is an amazing teacher.
That's one of the reasons why I think we like photography.
It helps us to remember things, right?
You see something interesting, you're
like oh, I'll remember that.
It's also helped us to really savor moments.
Like so I was talking with someone
earlier who photographs food.
When you photograph food you're like oh,
I just want to remember and kind of savor this
before I gobble it up.
And it also teaches us something about time.
And there's a proverb in the Bible
which says teach us to number our days
so that we can be wise.
And I think having this prospectus
makes us realize life is precious.
And sometimes when you look back at photographs,
you learn this truth.
Somehow it can sort of wrinkle the fabric of time.
And this is a small picture, but a very important one.
This is a photograph of my dad, one
of the most important people in my life.
The reason I am who I am in a lot of ways.
And there he is with my oldest daughter.
It's a few years old.
And when you capture a photograph like this,
what you're doing is you're savoring that moment.
Ah, this is great, my dad and my daughter.
But then when you look at it, what happens
is I realize that's me.
That's me who he used to hold, and that's
me who now holds her.
And then it goes backwards, but it also goes forwards.
And I think one day, even now as I look at this,
I realize that I'm going to look at this photograph
in the future when my dad's gone.
And I'm going to look at this with just immense sadness.
And that's part of the beauty of this moment.
And the thing that's interesting about this
is photographically speaking, rule of thirds
and all these different rules, it isn't even that good,
but it's good to me.
And sometimes the best photographs
are the ones which have that meaning, which
somehow reflect who we are.
And maybe even shape the way that we
experience and understand time.
Part of photography, obviously, is story, right?
And sometimes the way that we tell stories
are these little teeny slices of life stories from daily life.
And again, I'm a dad with three daughters.
I love my girls, so I have to show a few photos of them.
But in these photos, we have Annie, my oldest daughter,
who was little in that previous picture.
And there she is with curlers in her hair.
The first time she ever had curlers in her hair,
and she's sitting in her grandmother's
rocking chair with her youngest sister, and she's tickling her.
And there's that great laugh.
And then on the left we have Elsie, the third kid
in our family, the one who has to go and feed herself.
When everyone else eating breakfast,
she's not getting food, she just goes in and goes for it.
And it captures these small little stories.
And so the stories that we tell and try to convey
are really, really important.
And sometimes they're slice of life stories.
Those are important, but those aren't professional pictures.
Who cares?
That's where that amateur advantage comes in.
You with me on that?
Sometimes those are more important
than the big pictures.
And there are other stories to tell as well.
Sometimes, perhaps, they're more subtle.
Sometimes there's maybe a narrative arc.
This photograph, my friend Martin,
best friend in the world, here he
is at Witch's Rock in Costa Rica, where he lives.
He doesn't live at Witch's Rock, but he lives in Costa Rica.
We're surfing at this really famous surf spot.
Have any of you ever seen surf photographs?
Like kind of picture one in your head.
A guy doing a maneuver, guy in a wave, that's it.
End of story.
I've seen it a million times.
I didn't want that picture.
And Witch's Rock, if I were to show you
all of Witch's Rock, which is hidden by the wave,
you'd be like ah, Witch's Rock.
Nice one, Chris.
But I hid it.
I got low.
So I'm swimming in the water.
And it's a moment before he catches the wave, right?
It's that little narrative arc.
And I love what E.M. Forster says
about narrative versus plot.
He says this.
Says that "Plot is the queen died,
the King died, end of story.
Narrative, the queen died.
The King died of heart break."
Two little words, but all of a sudden there's a story.
And all of a sudden, the story adds some sort of meaning.
And it's that connective thread which
somehow makes the photograph a bit stronger.
So to keep you guys with me because I've
been talking a lot, I'm going to take another 30
seconds, conversation with our neighbor, which is--
and if you're watching this online,
you could maybe pause and ask yourself this question.
And the question is this.
Neighbor, what is something which has resonated with you?
Something that has been said that you're
going to sort of put in your pocket and walk away with?
It could be as simple as reframe, that's my thing.
Or it could be something else.
So we have 30 seconds.
Ask your neighbor, neighbor, what
is the one thing so far that resonates?
Go for it.
[AUDIENCE TALKING]
Are you guys enjoying things so far?
Gain some interesting insight to photography?
Hopefully, a little bit different.
So I give you Jackie Robinson who
said "Life isn't a spectator sport."
and I think we could trade the word life with photography.
Photography isn't a spectator sport.
But unfortunately, for so many of us it is.
We sort of look at pictures from a distance.
Or someone talks about photography, maybe myself,
and you're like, wow, that's a great picture,
but it doesn't do anything for you.
And what you have to say is well, what do I take away,
and then how does that affect the photographs that I make?
And each time you see photographs,
I think it's helpful to ask that question,
why is this resonating?
And why is this resonating with me right now?
What makes this photograph good?
The more we can start to shape and form and answer
that question, the more we can, then,
create those photographs which actually mirror who we are,
versus just say something plain, mediocre and blah.
All right.
Ben Harper, the musician.
"Sometimes the story or the narrative arc
is best when it's subtle."
Moments before I took this picture of him,
there was someone else capturing a photograph of him.
And she was trying to get Ben to smile.
And Ben's kind of the uber cool rock star musician guy.
And she was saying, Ben, smile, smile, smile.
And finally she said, Ben, say cheese.
And he snapped back.
And he said, lady, I smile with my eyes.
She was kind of frustrated and then walked away.
And then in my picture I think he is.
He isn't showing his teeth, but I think there's a smile there.
And sometimes in photography, the best photographs
are those ones which sort of just draw you in.
There's a subtlety to it which keeps pulling you in.
There are other pictures which are big and bold, you walk by,
you can't help but notice them.
But it's almost like it's too loud or too much.
It's stewed with too much seasoning or salt,
or it's music which is just that much too loud.
Are you with me on that?
But the art which really resonates and really stirs
and connects is the one sometimes where that narrative
arc is just those two little words, died of heart break,
or whatever it is, or a smile, perhaps, with the eyes.
And the beauty of these kind of things is in photography,
say like for me, I love photographing people.
All of a sudden Ben Harper taught me an important lesson.
Happiness and smile isn't just right here, right?
It can be the face.
You can see someone smiling with their posture.
Just the way they're standing.
You can see a tree that's smiling,
or a tree that's really just weathered, and sad, and worn.
And the expression isn't always typical.
It isn't always obvious.
Sir William Empson wrote about literature this way.
I like to compare literature and writing to starter fuel.
He said, "Great literature makes us think and feel
conflicting things at the same time."
And sometimes what that means is we can see a photograph
and we can have these different feelings all at once.
This is a picture of another world famous surfer,
world champion surfer.
And this photograph was captured the year
that he lost his 18-year-old son.
And I think in this photograph, now
that you know that, you can kind of see that.
You can see that there's strength,
there's a life well lived, there's strong character,
but there's a bit of sadness.
And sometimes when it comes to stories, especially when we're
new to writing stories, we think it has to be one thing.
It's just like a strong story, or it's just a--
But no, the story's, and the music, and the art
that we like the most, it has this duality to it.
This subtlety to it.
And so, what we have to do is as we think
about creating our own photographs,
or creating better photographs, because that's
why we're all here, right, is say well, how do we do that?
One way I think is by simplifying.
And this isn't just simplifying reframing, like we said.
This is simplifying more like the poet.
The poet will take what the novelist does in 20,000 words
and say it in 20.
And after a poem, what I found is we
not only have more information, but we have more experience,
and somehow they reduce and simplify.
But not just that.
It's like a reduction, a simplification,
and then they also deepen.
If you don't like poetry, take song lyrics.
Usually a song's only three minutes long.
If a song's 20 minutes long, it's just too much.
It's like they're going on and on and on.
But when you reduce and simplify it to something,
somehow you can say more.
And so some of the pictures that are interesting,
or as you start to compose those pictures,
is to ask yourself well, how can I work like a poet?
And what poets do is something which is intriguing.
W.B. Yeats gives us some insight into the life
of a poet with these lines.
"A line will take us hours.
Yet if it doesn't seem a moment's thought,
our stitching and unstitching has been naught."
Ever seen a fake photograph-- posed, overproduced?
Have you ever listened to music that's overproduced?
It's just too perf-- and you're like--
In food photography, which I mentioned before,
that type of photography taught me really important lesson.
What someone does in food photography,
they styled a dish so it looks amazing.
It looks perfect.
And then they had crumbs.
They add a few flaws, because that flaw,
it somehow draws it in.
And I think that's what, somehow, good poets do.
They make it real.
They make it somehow authentic and believable so that we're
drawn into it, and it slows us down so
that we can absorb that.
Silence obviously does this, as well.
Photographers or cameras can be noisy.
Not all cameras, and I think that's the beauty
of a lot of our pocket cameras is there's no click, right?
And they're quiet.
And so there's the camera, but then there's also us.
Silence is an incredibly powerful mode of communication.
This is my daughter, Sophie, and this is just
captured with a camera phone.
Christmas morning at her grandparent's house.
And I just love this simple moment.
And it couldn't have been captured had I said something.
She didn't know the frame was being made.
If I had said, wait, Sophie, Sophie, look towards me
and smile, would you like the photograph?
My mom might like it, but would you?
No, right?
But this one it's kind of interesting.
Or my other daughter Annie after a day
of skiing up in Mammoth Mountain.
And again, a photograph captured without words.
So often in photography, let's say people
photography, where you get that caricature
that you're supposed to say something.
Work it, work it, great, great, great.
But sometimes what we can do is just
be quiet and let the picture take place.
And by doing that often, it can let
the photograph have perhaps a bit of a voice of its own.
William Penn writes, "True silence
is the rest of the mind, and it is
to the spirit what sleep is to the body,
nourishment and refreshment."
The camera I think is an amazing teacher.
And one of things that it's taught me
is that there is a time to be quiet.
It's not always about me saying something.
Sometimes it's about slowing down, simplifying, reframing,
and just letting things be.
In our current era, we have access to amazing cameras
which capture near perfect pictures.
And as a result, we kind of have this idea
that good photographs are photographs which somehow
have everything sort of just right.
But what I have found is that sometimes it's
a flaw that makes the frame.
These are a few portraits.
One of the characters we've seen before, Jack O'Neil there,
captured with old expired film.
And it's almost like the mistake there
allows us to be drawn in to what the narrative arc is.
Here's a photograph of the singer and songwriter
Seal at his home, sitting there at his desk.
And while we were sitting there he said something interesting.
He said when I shoot with film cameras-- Well,
he started off saying, when I shoot with digital cameras
and open up those files, I look for the problem.
I look for the mistake.
I find the flaw, and then I correct it with software.
He said when I shoot with film, I embrace it.
And this isn't about film versus digital,
this is about photography.
And this is about as we capture images,
are we willing to embrace those little flaws,
those crumbs, maybe even add a few crumbs.
Or are we in this pursuit for perfect pictures?
And this could mean something like this,
a portrait of someone-- there's some guys in the background.
Should we shoo them out of the picture?
Why not leave them there.
It adds some ambiance or some depth.
And sometimes it means other things.
Like my daughter Annie, she was leaving for school
and it was crazy hair day.
And so I said, Annie, let me capture a picture real quick
before you go.
And I took that one.
Then I said, hey, let me capture one more.
And this is the face of a photographer's daughter, right?
And I almost like that one more.
And it's the flaw that she intentionally
made the crazy hair, and that moment, and those bright eyes,
and that stage in life.
So we're getting near the end.
Tips and review.
How to make better photographs, at least
for our conversation here.
The first thing I want you to really walk away with
is this idea of finding the photograph.
And I'm going to walk through two pictures.
This is of my daughter Sophie last weekend at the beach.
And I want to kind of review or walk through a few ideas.
The first one is when you see a scene,
or when you go out to capture a scene, at least in my mind,
you want your heart to be beating fast.
You want to say this is it.
I'm so interested in photographing
this gorilla or this hawk, or this mountaintop,
or this person, whatever it is.
And this is savoring what that item is.
And I want to do that right now.
And so you capture the frame.
And you kind of get caught up, maybe even
in the passion of it.
Because photography, for the photographs that are best,
they're not taken from a distance, cold and isolated.
They're you're in there and you capture the image.
And then you have to say, OK, you know what?
This first frame may not be the best frame.
I'm going to embrace the amateur advantage.
And for myself, personally, I always do.
In other words, I capture this picture
and it actually isn't great.
It's not the right picture for me.
And the reason it's not the right picture,
there's some stuff in the foreground,
she's turned a little bit too much,
she's not quite right in the middle.
It's low tide.
Low tide in the fall in Santa Barbara where I live
is the best time of year.
I just love it.
And you can either say, you know what?
I'm no good.
You can say, I'm an amateur, and what else is possible?
And why do I want to make this picture?
And how can I grow?
And then so you say, well, maybe what I can do is reframe.
Maybe I can find a picture within a picture.
Or maybe I can do what Gutenberg did.
I can take the wine press and convert it for something else.
And that's the frame.
That's what my I saw.
I just wasn't quite close enough.
I need to move somehow physically to get there.
And then what I can do is move and get closer,
and I got closer to her and had her turn just a little bit.
And I like this photograph much more because I'm connected.
I can actually see her, right?
You're getting a little bit up close.
But then at that moment, I think it's really important
to slow down and be quiet, and almost listen to the photograph
and say, well, yeah, this is a good picture.
This is a rough draft that's been revised.
But maybe, is there more?
And I'll talk a little bit more about this idea of listening,
but one of the things that I want to do
is I know that when the waves come through,
and you guys all know this, it just cleans out the sand,
right?
Ever seen sand which is just perfect?
And so I can sort of listen or slow down or stop or say
what would the poet do?
And then it's this frame.
And it's just that next little moment.
And when you get to those moments,
there also always has to be this point
where you resist perfection.
In photography, you'll hear people
say your horizon needs to be level.
It isn't perfectly level.
Or maybe your hair isn't styled just right, or whatever it is.
You have to say you know what?
This is the moment.
I'm going to embrace that frame.
You have to sort of let go of critique in a sense
and let it be what it is.
And so here is the process.
Find the photograph.
So, again, if you walk away with one thing,
ask yourself in this process, how can
I do this the next time I hold up my camera, whatever it is.
The second thing that I would suggest to you
is to spend some time to study and learn.
We are all photographers to a greater or lesser degree.
Yet what's so interesting is very few of us
actually study the craft.
Out of those 300 million photographs
which are posted on Facebook or wherever today,
very few of those are thoughtful photographs,
or ones which are trying to accomplish or say something.
There isn't much maybe study or practice behind them.
And so what I recommend you do is
begin by trying to absorb greatness through a book.
An old-fashioned paper book.
I have a friend who's a great cinematographer,
and what he'll do is he'll sit down with a book
rather than watch TV.
And he'll give it an episode's length amount
of time, half an hour.
And he'll just absorb the photographs.
And if you can be around good photographs,
all of a sudden you can discover little insights and nuances,
which you may want to integrate into what you do.
The other thing that I recommend is
to try to learn from the legends.
I'll show you two photographs captured by John Sexton,
an amazing photographer-- used with permission, of course.
And this is one picture and then another.
One of the things that I have learned from John is this.
He once said, and I've seen he's written in other places,
that he listens to the trees.
And at first I kind of wrote that off,
like what is this some kind of new age speak?
And then I realized no, this is incredibly profound.
Have you ever seen two people talking
to each other and you can't hear what they're saying?
And one person is completely disinterested,
and you can tell how they listen--
posture's a little bit down, sort of looking away.
Or the opposite, too.
Lovers are good friends, and you can see someone listening.
And if they have really good news,
you can see the person just respond, and they're so
with them and present.
Or maybe if it's sad news and they're listening,
you can see them just absorb-- that there's thoughtfulness--
absorb whatever has been said.
And I think that listening is about a posture,
being open to what's before us.
And great photographs happen from moments like this.
So when you study these legends, all of a sudden you
discover these little truths.
And while I don't photograph trees,
I do photograph other things, and listening
has become a part of my craft.
You with me?
Study.
Study the legends.
Last one.
Photograph what matters most.
If you can make photographs that are more meaningful to you,
there's a chance they'll be more meaningful to someone else.
Like with this picture here, it was such a journey
to try to get to the top of the mountain.
By the time I was at the top, I was curled up
in a ball in my tent because I was so tired.
And finally I just crawled out and I captured this frame.
But it meant something to me.
The view.
I sort of earned the view.
And it was painful to get there.
And if you can create a photograph that
has meaning to you, it might just
mean something to someone else.
This is one of my favorite spots to go surfing.
This is one of my best friends and his son.
And if you make your own photographs, ones
that have meaning to you, rather than someone else's, they'll
go farther.
They'll become better.
For a long time I've tried to photograph oak trees.
And I tried, and I tried, and I tried,
and I couldn't get any good pictures of them.
And I realized because what I was doing
was impersonating other photographs of oak trees
that I had seen.
And it wasn't until this picture that I
feel like I finally got closer.
I was no longer impersonating.
I was trying to capture one of my own.
Because this was my tree, in my parents' backyard where
I grew up.
Whereas I grew up, I climbed a little bit higher and higher
and higher, and there are rope swings and forts.
This is my tree.
And if you can make photographs that are meaningful to you,
that you sort of own, they'll become better.
They'll be that clear reflection of the mirror of who you are.
This is my wife and our daughter Annika,
after a little dance recital.
And with all of this, I think what
it means is to get started where you are.
The trick with photography is like well,
if only I was in Italy, then I could get some great travel
photos.
Or if only I was working with this celebrity,
then I would create a great portrait.
But photography, and the best photography
starts where you are and emanates out.
You bring that with you wherever you go.
Photograph what matters most.
One link.
My website /learn.
There's some resources there if you
want to dig into other topics in regards to specifics, like how
do you do certain things, and composition, and lighting,
and software, which we didn't cover.
Really, this was more about the heart,
and about the pursuit of getting better at photography.
And then, of course last, but not least, thank you.
It was a real honor.
[APPLAUSE]