Keep it tight ? or maybe keep it loose?

Keep it tight – or maybe keep it loose?

I’ve been reading that Andrew Loomis book again… And what he wrote half a century ago is rather contrary to some of the ideas around in photographic circles. ‘Keep it tight’ somehow smacks of Full Metal Jacket and Platoon: images of young men trained to do everything in a very precise and prescribed manner. Tight formation, like the Red Arrows.

Yet there’s Loomis, suggesting that it may even be necessary to do a drawing repeatedly to get the necessary ‘looseness’ of style in the result. What’s going on here? And how does it affect your picture-taking?
The way that a commercial artist like Andrew Loomis approaches a task is illuminating for photographers: his interest is specifically NOT to produce a boringly-accurate representation of the physical, but to make something that conveys an impression of the subject, and is an individual representation of it.

Does that ring any bells for you? It does for me. I can’t draw, because the only way to do it, in my mind, is to draw the tree one leaf at a time. A broad brush moving fast and creating something that is at the same time definitely NOT a tree, but is also, somehow, the impression of a tree… There’s a magic there, and it’s a magic that I would like to share.

I’ve written before about Lensbaby kit, and the way that using my Lensbaby kit requires me to abandon the search for precise focus by inching a helicoid ring back and forth. Instead, it’s a search that engages my instincts, and never more so than when I use the first of the range that I bought, the appropriately-named Muse.

A degree of disruption in the process can loosen inhibition and tightness. A joke can take the tension out of a difficult moment, and a weird prop can take a novice model’s mind from the difficulty of posing as he or she explores the delights of working out what a strange artefact is FOR. Rolls Royce have been known to use this as an interview technique – what is THIS object?

The best candidates don’t just guess, but engage their creative side to imagine what it might be, based on the evidence they can see and touch. Engaging the logical and creative brains at the same time is a powerful tool – even apparently-uncreative jobs benefit, and while hard logic may govern what you do, the drive to do it in the face of difficulty can come from powerful emotion.

And it definitely isn’t part of the process with a remote shoot, where the camera is necessarily on a tripod – a major reason I’ll be glad when I can return to taking images entirely in the real world! Until then – hang loose, people!