“Who is the creator of a beautiful photo? Is it just a photographer? No! If the thing photographed is not there, that photograph would not exist! The creator of a beautiful photo is both the photographer and the thing being photographed!”—Mehmet Murat Ildan
As a journalist, I have two things that I like most – aside from meeting and talking with some of the famous people around the world. Those two things are traveling and taking photos. And even if you are not a journalist, you ought to like, if not love, these two things.
Travel is the movement of people between distant geographical locations. It can be done by any or combination of the following: foot, bicycle, automobile, train, boat, bus, airplane, and ship – with or without luggage – and can be a one way or round trip. Travel can also include relatively short stays between successive movements.
So, who doesn’t like to travel and see new places, meet new people, immerse in a culture different from what you used to have, and eat truly novel foods? Along the way, travel enriches not only your mind but also your experience which, according to one adage, “the best teacher.” Some places are quaint; others are eerie if not weird. But there are also places that are exotic, rustic, brilliant, and breathtaking.
I definitely subscribe to the idea of Scottish novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson. In Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes", he wrote: “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
Aside from travel, I also like taking photos. I think I was still in high school when this desire came into my being. When my aunt Aida and her American husband Carl – along with their two kids – visited us so many years ago, I had my first time using a camera. I was really fascinated by it.
So, when I started working, I bought my first camera. I don’t remember what kind of camera it was. I just wanted to have one. As Jon Luvelli puts it: “A camera is just a tool, and you’re a tool if you’re worried about what camera you are using.”
I really didn't know much about taking pictures – until I met Donald “Don” Rutledge, one of America’s most awarded photojournalists. (He died in 2013 at the age of 82.)
Rutledge’s travels over a lifetime had taken him into 143 countries and all fifty of the United States. His work had included international assignments from the well-known Black Star picture agency in New York, civil right efforts, including the documentation of the work of John Howard Griffin for his famous work, Black Like Me, to photo stories in Life in the United States, Stern in Germany, Paris-Match in France, and numerous magazines in Canada, South America, Japan, Europe, and Asia.
I came to know and meet him when he was doing some assignments for The Commission, a publication of the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. He and Erich Bridges came to do a story about my former boss, Harold Ray Watson (the 1985 Ramon Magsaysay awardee for peace and international understanding). This was in 1996.
Being a journalist, I was asked to accompany them. During our travels in-between or while walking, Don shared some thoughts about photography. And that was how I got my first-hand information on taking pictures.
“My main subject matter involved people, showing them in natural surroundings, lifestyles, and the variety of environments in which they live their lives from work environments to pleasures and relaxations, among others,” Don told me.
During our time together, I observed that Don took a lot of pictures of one particular scene or activity. On why he was doing that, he replied, “It is much like a writer or a speaker preparing an article or speech. They write lots of notes from which the message is narrowed and developed into the final presentation. I take extra pictures for that same reason.”
With digital cameras and mobile phones now readily available, a photographer won’t have a problem following that tip!
“In photojournalism,” he said, “there is constant change. A subject is smiling, frowning, talking, listening, walking, standing, sitting, working, or relaxing. Often in the background, while subjects are being photographed in the foreground, people walk in and out of the picture. Making choices as to when to click the shutter is constant and important. The challenge is both difficult and exciting. The photojournalist becomes ‘eyes’ for viewers and places those viewers into the position where he stood while making the photograph.”
To those who are just starting photography as a hobby or a career, he offered this tip: “New photographers can find excitement in isolating wonderful elements of our world and its people in that viewfinder of their camera. That becomes the photographer’s world. Outside that finder, beyond the moment of clicking the shutter, is of course a world of enormous size and activity but the photographer’s world right then is defined in the viewfinder, and he freezes it to hold history as he clicks the shutter.
Don continued, “His activity should be more than just raising the camera, looking through the viewfinder and just clicking the shutter. That is a moment of personal history whether it involves special moments of his family or friends, activities of famous and unknown people, or even elements of nature scenes around him.”
When traveling, you ought to take photos. After all, not everyone has a photographic memory. That is why we must capture them through our lenses.
“All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget,” says John Berger. “In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.”
One thing to remember: “There are no rules for good photographs,” multi-awarded photographer Ansel Adams stated, “there are only good photographs.”
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