Sam Abell

On Monday, we had another photographer come in as a guest lecturer - Mr. Sam Abell. Sam had a 20+ year career with National Geographic and continues to take pictures on a daily basis. He taught us the importance of layers - seeing the foreground, middle ground, and background of a picture. He talked about the 3 essentials to a documentary photograph: the setting, the gesture, and the expression. He showed us many pictures from the initial shot taken to the final image of a series of shots. His talk was very inspiring and makes me hope I can be half the photographer he is someday.

This is Sam:


(picture from Google.com)

Some of the quotes he said were:

- "Bad weather makes good photographs."
- "Do you need to see someone's face to make a compelling portrait of a person?"
(Think about it...some of the images he showed where people's faces weren't visible were captivating)
- "The right thing to do about mistakes is learn from them, but don't talk about them."

Then he talked to us about a passage that Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in 1932:

''If one does not lie back and say to the moment, this is my moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one's gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough. Always hurry. I am now going in to see L. and say stay this moment.''

Often, I just wish that a moment would just s-t-a-y.

It was an amazing talk. Here are some of the images he talked to us about and told us how he composed them:









I think one of the most important truths he spoke was this:

"Compose the picture and WAIT!" For a photographer, this is - at times - painstaking. But seeing the images that he got after waiting for a picture to be made in front of him made me want to just go and sit and see what happens for me.