I know nothing about photography. Let it be known that I see a picture, I stare at it, and I move on. My best friend has a knack for photography and he’s been artistically talented for his whole life (I mentioned going with him to the art museum in ‘the project’. He’s the guy who felt overly embarrassed because I got us yelled at at every exhibit. Love him, though.) whereas I have been very involved in storytelling. Only when I came to college did I realize I had a knack for film; from screenwriting to my first project I ever did as a director, the more I took notice to` photography, but it wasn’t to the extent where I’d bat an eyelash and learn.
So studium and punctum were weird concepts that I couldn’t grasp. How could someone look at a photo and say “I have an unintended purpose here”? The concept was foreign to me that you could sit there and look at a photo and see some profound things in there, things that the photographer wouldn’t have intended to be there. I guess since we [the class I’m talking about] went over it so much that it sort of burned into the back of my head that this was an actual concept and people studied this for a living.
What did I know? I was just an RTF student who was minorly closed-minded when it came to trying to learn photography terms when in reality, it’d help me in with my own film endeavors. Paying attention to what was in the shot rather than focusing entirely on the narrative; until I took my film production class and got behind the camera for the first time, I barely batted an eyelash at what was on screen or what I would believe to be on screen as I wrote my stories. Why did it matter? I was only writing what would happen, not how it would look.
Wrong. Now that I managed to get my hands dirty from getting behind the camera, I didn’t realize just how much studium and punctum mattered, or why framing and what was in the shot could be so pertinent. I guess it was a good thing I learned it, as it made me a better rounded camerawoman and director in the grand scheme of things.
So studium and punctum were weird concepts that I couldn’t grasp. How could someone look at a photo and say “I have an unintended purpose here”? The concept was foreign to me that you could sit there and look at a photo and see some profound things in there, things that the photographer wouldn’t have intended to be there. I guess since we [the class I’m talking about] went over it so much that it sort of burned into the back of my head that this was an actual concept and people studied this for a living.
What did I know? I was just an RTF student who was minorly closed-minded when it came to trying to learn photography terms when in reality, it’d help me in with my own film endeavors. Paying attention to what was in the shot rather than focusing entirely on the narrative; until I took my film production class and got behind the camera for the first time, I barely batted an eyelash at what was on screen or what I would believe to be on screen as I wrote my stories. Why did it matter? I was only writing what would happen, not how it would look.
Wrong. Now that I managed to get my hands dirty from getting behind the camera, I didn’t realize just how much studium and punctum mattered, or why framing and what was in the shot could be so pertinent. I guess it was a good thing I learned it, as it made me a better rounded camerawoman and director in the grand scheme of things.