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| © Rodney Lough Jr. |
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There are times when the long road to photographic enlightenment turns inward. Rodney Lough Jr., 42, urges his students to "open that drawer from when they were 9; to regain that sense of amazement at life, when everything was new and exciting," he says. How to release that emotion? He asks students to reveal their worst life experiences, in front of strangers.
At his workshop in Yosemite National Park, this happens on the first day, after an initial sunrise shoot. The students aren't expecting trauma talk. (Lough says later, "They think I'm nuts.") So he tells his own scary story of abandoning his workaday career to support his family with photography.
Then the group starts, slowly. The first person tells a pretty generic story, but after a dozen, the tone gets heavier. A neonatal nurse, who tends sick newborns, talks about how, routinely, some babies don't survive.
The point of this drama: breaking down the emotional walls adults build up through such worldly struggles. Lough, a grateful escapee from corporate-land, is keenly aware of these creativity-killing defenses. "Rodney doesn't want us taking postcard photos, but to filter Yosemite through our emotions and life experiences," says Richard Sogn, a student at the spring workshop, where he discussed both his soldiering in Vietnam at 19 and his wife's recent heart attack.
Adult defenses stifle feelings and imagination, says the 60-year-old Sogn, a psychiatrist from Portland, OR. "But 9-year-olds see twigs on the ground and fantasize about building spaceships or forts from them." So Lough's quest for the creative impulses of a child makes sense to him.
Revealing difficult experiences does help, concurs Sogn's son, Erik Sogn, 24, a computer programmer and photographer who is also taking the workshop. (His trauma: Being alone with his mother during the heart attack, and reviving her through CPR.)
Traumas are about feelings, not thinking, he adds. "Rodney brings out the part where those deep feelings are." This helps you "get closer to the environment, so you're not holding anything back. You almost see photos from your soul once you're past these emotional barriers."
This unusually emotional approach breaks down these barriers fast, Lough insists. "When I think the group is ready, I say, 'Now, let's walk through the woods and see what we see!'" The result: an immediate improvement in the students' choices of subjects and compositions.
Does this have a lasting effect on picture taking? We asked the mental health professional, Richard Sogn. He was as surprised as anyone when Lough asked him to share some pain with his fellow students. He thought he was on vacation. "I expected to do some photography," he says. "Instead we're at a fireplace in Ahwahnee Lodge talking about personal events, feelings, and emotions."
Adds Sogn, "We learned the importance of forgetting everything that goes on in everyday life and focusing on the moment -- where you are -- to see it clearly and take it further than you normally would."
Lough's exercise worked, not just on his students' psyches but on their photography. "Instead of dynamic panoramas, people sought moods, patterns, textures, colors," says Sogn. "We all felt we improved, and not in f-stops, but in seeing -- with the visual and emotional part of the brain."
A MASTER'S TIPS
Clyde Butcher shoots large-format, but few of his students do. Here's some of his practical advice for DSLR shooters:
• Try an ultrawide-angle. Put a 10mm lens on your DSLR -- you might like the dramatic results.
• Stick with one focal length. Find the focal length that sees the way you do, then use it exclusively, at least for landscapes. You have a built-in zoom -- your feet.
• Cover one eye. Photography turns a 3-D world into a 2-D image. Preview this effect by closing one eye when surveying a landscape.
• Look for a mood, not a scene. Try to see with your emotions, and look for images that combine "masculine" and "feminine" (hard and soft) qualities.
• Shoot RAW. Yes, this negates the edict to embrace simplicity. But why argue with results?
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