I got a new album of music to listen to this week called ‘Inner symphonies’. I liked the title but it was only when I opened up the gatefold sleeve of the album that I understood the title. Inside were the words ‘for those who feel deeply’.

And it got me to thinking about the role of our emotions on our photography. As a good friend of mine has often said to me ‘the camera points both ways’. I have always understood that my own ‘art’ whether it was music making, drawing and painting as a kid, or photography now, has been, and still is, routed in something within me.

Photography does seem to attract a fair share of different personality types. The technical aspects of the medium can attract those who are more ‘geeky’ in nature. I also think photography also attracts those who have a fine attention to small details. How many times I have witnessed someone on a workshop being on-edge because of a distracting few pixels in the frame of a picture that is being reviewed by the group on a projector. Then there is the ‘feely arty’ type of person who isn’t so up on the technical aspects, but is more drawn by the effects that light and shade have upon them. I think these people ‘feel’ the landscape, and I think I am one of them.

As much as my writing over the past decade has sometimes been analytical : particularly the e-books I have produced when trying to explain composition, or editing techniques, I know for sure that most of the time, I just ‘feel’ first what I do. Later I have to analyse what I did, so I can explain it to participants on workshops. So although you may feel I am quite analytical, I’m really not.

But I am also, by nature, someone who tends to overthink things. It is just part of my nature, and I think I tend to feel and connect things more internally.

With regards to light and shade: I know that when I darken a sky, I feel the change as an emotion, more than as something that may be symmetrical. I pretty much listen to my feelings change when I am editing. I do the same thing when I am composing out in the field also. I rarely ‘think’ about the composition and tend to just set it up because somehow, it just feels right.

Emotion or inner feelings in photography aren’t really discussed so much. It is often a focus on the quality of the final work. But I think how we feel is really important, first as in what has drawn us to something in the first place, and secondly, why we chose to convey it the way we have to others.

Each time we make a photo, perhaps we are making a mini inner-symphony? Each image we make can often symbolise something more about us, than the actual subject. Well, I think that is the way it should be.

Logic in a way, shouldn’t even come into the equation when making images. Think less, and feel more is perhaps the way we should approach what we do. Or perhaps ‘respond’ rather than ‘think’.

I know I am someone who overthinks things, but when it comes to producing art, it is one of the rare moments in my life where I seem to dissapear, and where I seem to enter a form of meditation. I prefer to be drawn to something for reasons I do not know, than for reasons I do. I am sure this is tapping into my inner emotions in a way that I cannot qualify. Hopefully, this is the right path to creating authentic imagery and art. For I certainly believe so.