I am a professional composer, retired professor of music, and hobbyist photographer. Together with my husband, an orchestral conductor, I now travel the world, drawing inspiration from both natural and urban environments.
The similarities between music and photography become ever more apparent to me as I gain experience using my eyes as if they were my ears – seeing textures, lines, and shapes as intently as I hear them. I have discovered that multi-layered landscapes often appear to be contrapuntal, like a Bach fugue, that cameras and lenses can be "played" as artfully as musical instruments, and that visual patterns have rhythm too.
Musicians focus on the color of sound, its clarity, and brightness. Photographers describe light in the same terms.
Both composers and photographers give much thought to matters of balance, repetition, contrast, and emotion. It has also been revelatory to witness how a photo "resonates" with a kind of silent music or mood, just as music conjures up images to tell its story.
There are also technological parallels. For example, a macro lens can be considered analogous to a microphone, both providing opportunities to see or hear beyond the realm of normal experience to a magical place of abstraction and wonder.
The two media, of course, also differ, perhaps most significantly in their relationships with time; one captures a single instant, and the other requires minutes or hours to convey its messages. Maybe it's that ability to freeze time through photography that most appeals to me, something impossible to achieve in music. How often have I wanted to hold on to that breathtaking musical moment – but no – it disappears in advance of the next musical "frame."
The similarities between music and photography become ever more apparent to me as I gain experience using my eyes as if they were my ears – seeing textures, lines, and shapes as intently as I hear them. I have discovered that multi-layered landscapes often appear to be contrapuntal, like a Bach fugue, that cameras and lenses can be "played" as artfully as musical instruments, and that visual patterns have rhythm too.
Musicians focus on the color of sound, its clarity, and brightness. Photographers describe light in the same terms.
Both composers and photographers give much thought to matters of balance, repetition, contrast, and emotion. It has also been revelatory to witness how a photo "resonates" with a kind of silent music or mood, just as music conjures up images to tell its story.
There are also technological parallels. For example, a macro lens can be considered analogous to a microphone, both providing opportunities to see or hear beyond the realm of normal experience to a magical place of abstraction and wonder.
The two media, of course, also differ, perhaps most significantly in their relationships with time; one captures a single instant, and the other requires minutes or hours to convey its messages. Maybe it's that ability to freeze time through photography that most appeals to me, something impossible to achieve in music. How often have I wanted to hold on to that breathtaking musical moment – but no – it disappears in advance of the next musical "frame."