RE: Where Do You Find Your Inspiration?
I like this quote:
"...I've found nearly all of my emotional inspiration for my photography in anything but photography."
One reason your photography is so different to what other people are doing, I have no doubt!
I deal in a less conceptual realm of photography, where my subjects are what they are, and it's hard to project my own vision onto them with any clear story or theme. The best I can hope for with landscape photography is to convey a tangible feeling.
With my more creative photos I've wanted for a long time to draw more inspiration from external sources, but nothing I've made so far really shows this.
I did once directly copied a painting from Norman Rockwell - of course, there's no additional artistic merit in my photo, but it was a fun exercise nonetheless. ;)
Omg, Derek, that's amazing! Hahaha.
As far as projecting your own vision in landscape photography, I've found that photographers typically have a vision they've developed in their mind, and then they respond to a scene that activates and reflects that vision they've developed by capturing it. Is this sort of how you work?
Hehe, thank you. It's fun trying to copy a painting like this, finding props and arranging them to be just right, or as close as is possible. ;)
Yes, I would agree with that assessment. I have ideas in my head about the kind of photos that I want to take, and how I will process them, and to some extent I mentally project those ideas on the scene in front of me. And definitely having a vision in mind already helps to distill order from the chaos of a scene and more quickly hone in on the best vantage points to make that vision come to life. Although I've never thought about it that way until you mentioned it.