This is part seven of a four part series on composition. Yeah, I know it's getting long, but I keep finding more things I've not addressed in the previous episodes. So we're just going to keep going. This episode is for Lori in Ottawa, Canada. Lori went to Mongolia with me back in July and she recently shared a photograph with me that I thought was really quite amazing. The funny thing about Lori's photograph is that it kind of pissed me off. Actually, it pissed me off a lot, because she was standing right next to me at exactly the same moment when she took the shot. But I did not get the shot. My photograph was fairly close to hers, but there was just something a little bit different about hers that I thought made it so much better. Yep, I just admitted it. Second place. There you go. There was something else about her photograph that really got me thinking. Not only was her angle better, but her post-processing was definitely better too. When she shared the image with me, I went back to my own photograph and realized I had had a hard time figuring out what to do with it. The way I post-processed it kept it reasonably clean, but it was also pretty boring. I realized that I hadn't looked at the scene the way Lori looked at it. She saw something different and that came through in the way she post-processed the image.
So I found myself going back to my own photograph and trying to process it much closer to the way she processed hers. And it did improve my shot, but I did miss the better angle anyway. All of this got me thinking about something I've talked about in previous episodes, thinking outside the proverbial box. We talk about this all the time. You have to think outside the box. You have to push your creative thinking. But here's the problem with just saying that. How? How do we actually think outside the box? How do I help somebody get outside their own box? But the truth is we all live inside our own boxes. And as we gain more skills, that box becomes even bigger. As you learn photography, you're given guidelines and rules to live by. Teachers teach you how they think you should compose an image. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. I do that all the time as a teacher. Following those guidelines can get you to a reasonable image. You learn how to compose, you learn some post-processing, and suddenly you're making clean, okay-looking images, maybe even good-looking images. But if you only follow those guidelines, your images can become what I call pedestrian. They're clean, they're competent, but they're not really pushing the boundaries. They're not spectacular.
Another thing I've noticed over the years is an interesting phase that happens when you first learn post-processing. You suddenly discover all these amazing things you can do with your images and you start doing them and you think you're doing something really cool. But at the end of the day, sometimes you're really not. It's just smoke and mirrors. You're using post-processing to cover up a bad photograph. And even if you're not covering up a bad photograph, you're probably doing something better than the average person is doing.
So suddenly you think your stuff is great, but it's still pedestrian. And unfortunately, a lot of people stop there. There's another thing that I find a lot of new art students, especially in photography, go through, and it's what I call the trash phase. When photography students are pushed a little bit to look outside the normal boxes, one of the first things they see is trash. And by trash, I mean empty warehouses, cemetery shots, or sometimes literally trash.
And we think we're being really clever because we're seeing something that the average person isn't seeing. For me, what I was seeing during my trash phase was the way light was wrapping around objects. And those objects happen to be trash. If a photographer works hard enough at improving their work, I find everyone grows out of it. But I think everyone kind of has to go through it because you're looking at things differently.
I bring a lot of the things I learned in my trash phase into the work that I currently do. The important thing is that you have to have the wherewithal to keep pushing the boundaries of your work. But the problem is I see the trash phase in so many beginning photographers, especially in camera clubs, but I don't find that they're pushing beyond that. It's also interesting because I realized that it's not just photographers who go through something like this. I remember meeting a new graphic design student.
She was a freshman at an art school here in New York, and I realized the graphic design students go through something similar. Their version of the trash phase is often minimalism. It's when you suddenly realize that you don't need a lot of elements in a design to make it work. You can have just a few lines or very few elements and create something really effective. It's almost the Bauhaus approach to design. So I think students in pretty much every artistic discipline go through some kind of trash phase. It might be literal trash, it might be minimalism, it might be something else. But I keep coming back to the question, how do we push beyond that? How do I, as a teacher, help students move beyond that? So let's come back to Lori. Another image she shared with me was an image that we all took on that trip.
We were sitting in a valley in Mongolia having dinner and there was this weird storm that came through right around sunset. The sky was starting to turn yellow and suddenly the wind picked up. In the distance, the dust was pushing around and I think there was some rain moving through the sky as well. It was really amazing. Lori suddenly ran to get her camera and we asked, what are you looking at? All of us had our backs to the storm, so we hadn't seen it. But as she pointed it out, we all ran for our cameras. At the end of the day, the photograph she shared with me was actually pretty close to the photograph I had taken too. But she saw something very different from what I saw. And I could tell that from the way she chose to post-process her image compared to the way I chose to post-process mine. I'm not going to say she had a better photograph or that I had a better photograph. The point is that the post-processing on those two images was very different.
That's because she was looking at the world differently and she was starting to push her visual communication outside her box. And honestly, I'm not sure how you teach somebody to do that. I can't take responsibility for Lori's photograph at all. I would like to believe that I had some influence on it, but ultimately that's Lori. She saw something, she responded to it, and then she figured out how to express it. So the question I keep asking myself is, how do I help people see the world differently from the way they're seeing it today? And then how do I help them figure out how to express that? I've talked before about the third element. I believe the third element is yourself. It's not just the thing in the image. It's what you bring to the image. It's your emotion, it's your vision, it's your experience. So how do we get beyond pedestrian and not just follow guidelines or just rely on the smoke and mirrors of post-processing. How do we do that while we're actually taking the picture? And by the way, it's not simply, how do I make this different? It's really, how do I express what I'm feeling and share that feeling with the audience? I think it has to go beyond simply taking a clean picture of a beautiful location. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but the question I'm interested in is, how do we go from good to great.