Digital BW, The Print

This is true in any creative field. One of the biggest problems graduate 
students have when they come out is to shake off their teacher's (thesis 
adviser) influence. Your are so ingrained with his approach and his 
insights (while not nearly as honed ) to a problem that you 
unconsciously find yourself approaching it the same way.

You have to set you on a path and develop your own method and style. 
Otherwise you will make no progress. It is very difficult to do - 
especially if your adviser was a giant in the field.

When I was in graduate school, the department chairman invited over to 
dinner every PhD candidate that was finally getting out that year. I 
remember the conversation well, when after dinner he congratulated me 
and over brandy he said - while Phil (Hartman) is the best in his field 
he's not you and it time you find out who you are as a mathematician. It 
was difficult and it did take some time but it was necessary.

The same thing for photography - you have to chart your own course. It's 
not easy. What an ispriation it was for Weston to look in his vegetable 
garden when he got bored. Good photographs are everywhere - you just 
have to know how to find them. That's the hard part.

Truman

Clayton Jones wrote:

>Point is, I don't want to imitate anyone, and I realize the danger is
>that it's easy to do it unconsciously.  And one cannot just decide
>they are going to do something different.  That's just another form of
>imitation.  It has to be real and spring up from within.  All I can do
>is continue to photograph and try to be aware of my thought processes
>and be attuned to the subtle intuitions that come along.  It's easy to
>get into a brute force mental mode and miss them.
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