Inspired by Michael Kenna

Something I have become interested in learning more about is landscape pictures. I started to become interested in Michael Kenna because I really like landscape and the thing that interested me was the fact that the landscape pictures are taken in places all over the world. So far I have learned that Michael takes all of his photos in black and white, he also likes to think of his topics and locations before he actually does it.

This information is from Michael Kenna's official site. The source of this information is provided in the several interviews that he had been interviewed in that are poster up on his website. The information that I've been reading is from is his website that give you several interviews he is in.

This topic of landscape relates to me and my interests because I like to take digital macro lens pictures of some of the elements of a landscape. One thing that surprised me was the fact that all of his photos are in black and white. One thing that I wonder about this person's work and life is: Have you ever wanted to take pictures of anything else than landscaping photos?.

Michael Kenna was involved with traveling all over the world taking pictures of landscapes. He has been taking photos from the 1970 to the present day. He was not involved with taking pictures of any important events like disasters. He mostly stuck with his landscape photos.

Being that I didn't have a lot of background information on Michael Kenna, I chose to do some more research. As I searched for another source of information about this person, I came across this additional interview: http://www.thenocturnes.com/resources/kenna.html. This interview provided a lot of information and opinions on how he does his work.

"I suppose that I had automatically labeled the landscape as "beautiful" and industry as "ugly," and naively considered the former subject matter more worthy of being photographed." - Michael Kenna. This statement didn't really surprise me all that much, and i also some what agree with his statement. What he is saying is anything is worth taking a picture. No matter how good or bad or ugly something is take a picture because there is a sense of meaning there for anyone.

Now that I have done this research, it makes me think more about my own work Waterfall:

Michael Kenna does his own kind of work after he takes his pictures. Several of his pictures he has high contrast between his blacks and whites. I believe that he uses photo shop to alter his photos or he sets his camera to the contrast levels he has.

Next, with my own work, I hope to work with black and white photos again. For a while I haven't been able to stick with the black and white theme but now i want to take black and white digital macro pictures. I hope to accomplish many photo shop elements to help improve my pictures to make them better.