I think it’s still fair to say that I’m a long way from calling myself an artist, much less an accomplished one. But I’ve been trying to put effort recently into shooting more, and shooting more constructively. A lot of my work to date has been the result of aimless wandering; no goal as to what I want to capture, why, where. Over the last (almost) two years I’ve made a lot of progress in the technical side of my photography. My shots are now routinely in focus, well exposed and when I make an effort to do so, reasonably well composed in and of themselves. One obvious lesson learned, is to care for my equipment; it almost makes me wince the number of shots I’ve lost due to a particular combo of worn lens and worn camera, and I’ll be getting the latter repaired in the near future, since it’s only a leaky baffle.

My choice of ‘permanent’ film is more or less settled on Kodak Double X, which I’ve been shooting for 18 months now. Moreover, I’m finally reaching a steady state on development – I’m happy with the choice of developer, the way I rinse and agitate the film, and as a result I’m getting far fewer of the problems I used to have with surge marks from over-agitation, hollow and unpleasant grain from a poor choice of developer and fog from insufficient fixing.

My post-processing is even stable; scanning images with the OpticFilm 8100 I picked up in January, editing curves and sharpness in Photoshop CS2, as well as my scanner settings for making archival files of different media. I feel like I’m stable, as a technician of film photography. The next step, is to force myself to stop overthinking the process of shooting; follow the intuition that I’m using to set aperture and shutter values; since when I do the math, I’m right anyway. The goal here, is to move from a technician to an artist.

It’s getting pretty pedantic to try and define specific meanings for ‘technician producing art’ and ‘artist’, but let me try. Until now, the only purpose for my photography was ‘to do art’. Simply the mechanical function of learning and as a result, doing. There has been no real meaning or expression behind my work and little to no goal when I step into the street. What I think separates an artist from a technician is the ability to describe why I’m taking a photograph and what it means to me. And as any worthwhile art critic will tell you, it only counts if you can describe it before you press the shutter button.

There’s a clear risk here, and a resulting balance to be struck. If I have to write a gallery-ready description of each shot before I’m allowed to take it, then chances are I’ll never take a street shot again – it’s hard to be candid if you spend three minutes staring at someone and writing furiously before you take their picture. But there’s an alternate approach – look for the shot based on the pre-existing criteria. This is a little more Cartier-Bresson; whose criteria around geometry are well known among photographers and photography critics. What this extremely long pre-amble finally comes down to is a simple expression of intent, my promise to myself that I will achieve more art, and less technical experimentation.

Emi, do more projects.