Now, this is a post I have been wanting to write for a very long time. Michele is a great friend of mine (independently of her photography work) but (I think) this has only a limited impact on my appreciation of her work. I definitely love the way she does small documentary-like photographic reports where pictures are telling a story, flying from a wide view to a detail, to a side view, etc. This way to build photo stories is very apparent in her blog where she irregularly publishes small sets.
But this story-telling kind of photography is not the only ability she has. She sells posters are framed photo-work because her pictures look great; That’s all.
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When I asked Michele about what she considers her worst weakness in photography (admittedly a difficult question to an artist from a friend), she answered:
My weakness (apparent mostly or uniquely to myself) is that I am a digital photographer who’s never been in a dark room. I confess, I’m a lazy photographer as I have given up on) with the concepts of it: Bracketing, light metering, F-stops, apertures; They are all still like a foreign language to me. Burning and dodging are Photoshop tools to me and don’t take me back to any dark room experience!
I am doing my best, not necessarily to correct it, but to compensate for it by my love for photography and my hard work: I try not to take lazy pictures, I am a ruthless editor of my own images and I am always eager what other people are shooting and how.
Now, this is how to always become better. Whatever, the art.