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Photographers' Think Tank: The Brooks Institute Focuses on the Mind Behind the Camera
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12437 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
2,008 Words |
| Author
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Peter Skinner
Peter Skinner, an Australian journalist and photographer,
lives in Santa Barbara, California. He contributes to
photographic and general interest publications. |
Photography, in its many applications and facets, ranks as the most powerful of visual communications, and if the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is true, then photography's influence is even greater.
Literally, photography is writing with light, but more recently it is often referred to as painting with light, because in essence this is what the photographer does. He uses light as a painter does a brush, gently applying it here for subtle colors, more heavily and with greater color saturation elsewhere for dramatic effect.
Photography is a blending of art, science and, if you want to make it your profession, business. Many aspiring photographers forget that for every hour spent behind the camera there are three or four spent attending to business matters - marketing, accounting, establishing a rapport with clients, and developing all the other intricacies of a successful business.
Historically, photography is a young science and, like most sciences, it has been dramatically affected by sweeping technological advances. Gone are the days of coating glass plates with light-sensitive emulsions and of lugging around boxes of plates and cartloads of equipment for a relatively simple assignment.
The Modern Photojournalist
The great Civil War photographer Matthew Brady would envy the modern photojournalist with his motorized 35-mm cameras, the array of optically superb lenses, sophisticated portable lighting equipment, and extremely fast black-and-white and color films. But even with all its technology, photography still demands that the person behind the camera previsualize the final image long before releasing the shutter.
"There's a saying that the best photographers make pictures with their brains, not with the camera," says Ernest H. Brooks II, president of Brooks Institute of Photography, in Santa Barbara, California, which is regarded as one of the best schools of its kind in the world. "Releasing the shutter is merely a mechanical process: It's the thought which goes into the picture which really counts."
Brooks Institute was founded in October 1945 by Brooks' father, Ernest H. Brooks, who foresaw that accelerating technology would make the traditional apprenticeship of photographic education obsolete. Brooks gathered a
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