Geschreven door Starting a search for the source of inspiration for you photography. That moment lands sooner or later for everyone involved in photography, whether for hobby or work. You can get that inspiration from a wonderful book, but in my opinion, the best memories come from conversations with the photographer himself.
Those memories are almost never captured; they live on in every photographer who has experienced something while creating her or his images. But fortunately, there are exceptions. A photographer himself, Peter McKinnon meets Matt Barnes at an Apple event to which both are invited. During a brief conversation, the men exchange their Instagram accounts. The images Matt shares on his account prompt Peter to pay him a visit.
What follows is a short documentary in which Matt shares his memories and experiences. Matt is a photographer who creates his images in his own unique way. For him, the difference is between taking pictures and creating and that is evident in his work. His clients know that.
There is a big difference between making and creating photo’s
Matt Barnes
I myself am looking for a new purpose for my images. I was able to build this website over the past year and here I share some of my memories, photos and videos. Both of my daughters have now received a copy of my entire photo archive with which they can browse through everything themselves. But I’m not done with photography yet. I want to move on, with a new goal and exactly that goal became more and more clear in the past few weeks.
I have photo books in my room and the most recent photo book I ordered is by Nigel Danson titled “Spirit of Luskentyre. That book and the accompanying videos sparked my inspiration. I now know exactly where I myself want to go in the coming year.
Like Peter, I started inquiring from other photographers about their inspiration and experiences editing and printing their images on print or in a book. Many of my images are already printed on paper in Terschelling Magazine. In almost all issues between 2017 and 2022 they have used my images. It is now time for prints of my own, something I did before in 2021 when I was allowed to order prints with the purchase of my Sony camera.
What I’m not going to do is go back to analog photography. Analog is relentless, but it also has facets that you can’t find in digital. Also, you can only do it right once. If you expose too little, everything is too dark, and if you let too much light land on the film, everything is white. With digital, this is a whole lot easier with shooting in RAW. But, I am secretly looking for a method to enrich the images with some film emulation.
I still hear a friend from the USA, also a Peter, say it, “We used to try to remove all that noise from the image and nowadays we cram it all back in. That’s true, but that knowledge is from over ten years ago and a lot of techniques have improved significantly in the meantime. Fuji, for example, has built various film emulations into a lot of their cameras.
My digital photo journey started somewhere around the year 2000 and before then I was working with analog film cameras. In 2021, my digital photo journey started again with the Sony A7RIV and the lenses I purchased with it. That is what I prefer to work with and for post processing I lean mainly on Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and Nik 6. The images themselves, edited or unedited I want to collect in one or more books, just like Peter. You can guess the theme.
Small documentaries like this video below are the gems on Youtube for me. They go out for a photo shoot in the middle of the prairie and film everything to make a story out of it. That story started months ago with the video about Matt Barnes. In this video, Peter himself goes out to create his own images. The fun oozes from it, but also a little bit of uncertainty. It’s a whole new adventure, with a wonderful story and result.
Source reference:
Website Matt Barnes – https://www.mattbarnesphotography.com
Website Peter McKinnon – https://www.petermckinnon.com
Youtube channel Peter McKinnon – https://www.youtube.com/@PeterMcKinnon