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As I allow myself to flow through the waters of this artistic hobby for the sole purpose of self-discovery, oftentimes I can never help but revert to the competitive Eastern academic kid instinct of wanting to overanalyze aspects of this craft in an extremely numerical and formulaic manner. Ever since I managed to learn the basics of camera operation and the infamous “holy trinity”, I legitimately just stopped learning photography formulaically. I wanted my photography to stay true to what I set out to do as a photographer, which was to explore the most vulnerable aspects of my own character and thought processes. And to attach professional methods and meticulous processes, to overwhelm the shooting and editing process with numbers, is a gross disrespect of that mission. But even now in the eighth year of my partaking in this craft as a hobby and a semi-professional occupation, I am still left wondering what all of this means with regards to what my photography is attempting to answer. Or what it is even asking in the first place? After eight years on the quest to search for answers, I dug up a mountain full of more questions.
All this time, my photography and photographic philosophy and artistic direction are governed by the yet inexplicable forces of my own intuition. At least inexplicable in any quantifiable and formula-based measures. Thus, I wanted to find answers for all of this, looking at my photography from another perspective. I mean… with data science and the unknowns of regression analyses, having more data points can, in most cases I encounter, only help add more features to form the best-fit most effectively.
And so begins my adventures into a more signal-processing and data-sciencing approach to understanding my photographs. I have an unlimited amount of space within my university online storage subscription provided “free of charge”, so I am making sure I am putting every millimeter of that digital storage unit to great use. I have kept every single RAW photo I have ever shot (barring a couple really obvious mess-ups whose evidence was conveniently cleared on-camera) since six years ago, so I have a lot of data points to work with. I want to only pick a select few raw shoots and finished albums of interest, since a lot of shoots I did were also for private commissions, on-assignment shoots for newspapers and magazines, along with various other very minor experimental dozen-photo albums, that really don’t showcase the true nature of what I want to and actively choose to shoot, and thus would do a terrible job representing my artistic choice and artistic directionality. This step eliminates a lot of the bias of external influence onto the creative direction of my shutter finger, but also eliminates (in my opinion with a smaller degree and a lesser impact) some of the artistic liberties I chose to take during constrained shoots, which also could have been valuable data points as well. But this is a deliberate choice that I make, and I need to make that intentional data bias inherently clear, in case I ever want to replicate this analysis in the future, and it would also serve as a minor sanity-check data point when I draw my conclusions at the end of this experiment.