Paris, 2016, 2024

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Henry David Thoreau

One of our regular stops whenever Barbara and I are in Paris is the Rodin Museum, and it looks like there has been some significant deterioration of this statue in the intervening eight years, between our last two visits. Not really.

The photograph on the right with the cracking torso was shot as a reflection in a large mirror that has some reticulation happening in the glazing. By careful movement and positioning I was able to isolate those lines on the statue, flipping the final image horizontally to get the correct orientation.

My Nikon School colleague Michael Schwarz and I did some small group photo workshops several years ago that combined some classroom, shooting excursions, and critiques. It frequently happened that when we were going through students’ work we might see 2-3 photos of the same subject as the photographer was starting to explore it, but then looking for the “next” shot in the evolution we’d find they had just stopped shooting and moved on, often just short of getting a really good composition.

Never stop looking for a new variation. In several visits before 2016 I’m sure I photographed this guy. In 2016 I did at least 4 variations, and again in 2024 at least 4, finding, at last, a different view. In a crowded place like this, a lot of patience is also necessary, to stand in position and wait for the other visitors to move out of the frame, or at least to a place that minimizes their importance.

If you want to test your ability to recompose the same scene or subject in different ways, try one of the assignments I had in school: take a plain white coffee cup and saucer, on a plain solid tone background, and changing nothing but framing and lighting, see how many distinct versions you can find. If you want a real test, do the same exercise with only 1 or 2 white eggs.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index