Postcards from the Creative Journey

774 A Disturbing Thought…

In excavating the Lipka photographic archives I have made a meta observation about my photographs. As I progressed from the world of 35 millimeter film to view cameras and 4x5 (and larger) film I have noticed both a decline in the number of images and the variety of photographic compositions.

Not a great surprise, because the difference between 35 mm and sheet film is huge. The view camera requires a lot of time to set up, compose, focus and make an exposure. The process is slow and much more expensive than roll film. They are two entirely different styles of photography.

Now here’s the troubling part. It is obvious that I underwent a massive photographic change and looking back I wonder if it was for the better. The variety of image types and willingness to push creative boundaries disappeared when I switched to the large format camera. I now wonder if changing to a large format camera was a good creative idea.

773 - Long Lost and Now Found, First Posted 10/16/2016

The photograph in today’s blog was made on September 10, 2006 at 7:27:33 PM according to the EXIF data. I found it last week when I was trying to figure out what projects needed to be moved from my primary to secondary hard drive. Multiple exposures of this scene indicated I was trying to use High Dynamic Range techniques. Ten years ago HDR was difficult and required so much work I never bothered to perfect the image. HDR techniques are now ridiculously simple and wonderful so a couple of selections, a left click, a right click and voila, a perfect HDR image.

There are a couple of lessons here. The first thing that comes to mind Storage is cheap, so there is no reason not to make the picture when you see it. My oft repeated advice to make the photograph and worry about how to deal with it technically later is the second. Just because you don’t know how to deal with it now doesn’t mean that you can’t in the future. Technology constantly improves and (we all hope) we will also improve technically and aesthetically.

This photograph could have been part of a project that was completed a long time ago, but it missed its’ chance. This image doesn’t really have a home other than on this blog. I’m fine with that because it’s finally going to be seen by an audience. I’m happy to finally share my interpretation of this place and time with you these ten years later.

How many more of these lost digital files will I find if I keep looking? What if I start looking through contact sheets from the long ago days of film photography?

 

772 Getting Back in Shape

That would be photograph shape, as in getting ready to make some images. In about a month, I’m heading out for s Spring photo safari with Brooks Jensen. We’re heading back to the southern Oregon Coast for two weeks of photography and creating art. An event of such cosmic proportions cannot be entered into without some major preparations.

I really need to get my head wrapped around creating photographs, because for the past seven or eight months I have been busy creating art (as in the Journal) with very little (if any) effort place in actually being “out there” creating images. As with any skill, facility comes with practice and I have not been practicing. The weather is better, the days are longer, I’m not worried about that mask fogging up my eyeglasses and so it’s time to put a camera in my hands and get out there to create images.

I need to be ready when I see scenes like this. 

771 - The Fourth Generation, First Posted 4/3/2016

Easter was dull, dreary, cool and rainy, unlike whatever we've been experienced so far this Spring. It was a perfect day to spend collecting my digital assets (remember when they used to be called “negatives?”) to establish my master data base for the kick off of today’s Blog 4.0. (My first blog was a Lightroom gallery on my web site, second was the white on black version, the third is the current iteration and today’s blog is the fourth generation.) I hope to have all the large images inserted in the blogs by July 4, 2016. There are several things I have discovered so far while updating the photographs for this blog.

One: scanned prints are the curse of the devil himself. How did we put up with such nonsense only a few short years ago? For those that think the good old days were good, your memory is clouded. There are a number of images I used in the blog that were from the Fifty Project. I may have to go back and scan them again to get a higher resolution image. I’m not really thrilled about that.

Two: Remember how we used to back up stuff on CDs? Well, those files are getting copied back to my hard drives. Hard drives used to be small and expensive. Relatively speaking, they are large and inexpensive.

Three: Those early digital files were really small. I find a file and wonder, “Where’s the high res version?” Then I see that it is a RAW file and remember there isn’t one.

And finally, here’s something that surprised me.

I went looking for photographs. I wound up finding memories.

Friends caught smiling in the shade of the Alkabo School one afternoon. Snapshots of my daughter and her Grandfather wearing fezzes in the living room of his home in Montana. A "gunfight" in front of the Irma Hotel in Cody, Wyoming. And there are more. If there is anything that will slow down me finding the original images I used for the blogs it will be me finding memories that are certainly better than the drudgery of recovering images to populate this blog. Part of me wants to get this search for images done quickly so I can move on to the next project but part of me wants to stop and savor the memories I thought I forgot. Who knows, maybe I will find some memories to blog about.

Photography is an odd, but wonderful thing, is it not?

770 - Weighing an Anchor

Many of my old gelatin silver prints have been relinquished to the trash heap of time. There were not that many different compositions, but there were multiple prints of many images. Once I discovered the proper exposure, burning, dodging and developing for a negative I usually made at least three copies of the final print because there was always the (high) probability that I would damage a print in the process of retouching (aka spotting) or when dry mounting a print to a mat board.

These prints I slaved over many years ago have been sealed in an archival Glad Garbage bag waiting to be dumped in the landfill. I also disposed of many digital negatives I used when I was platinum printing. That made me sad. They were really nice looking negatives.

My version of the Potlatch was actually liberating. These possessions were an anchor.

769 - The Dutch Masters, First Posted 2/12/2012

I went to see the Rembrandt paintings at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) a few weeks ago. Because Rembrandt was a portraitist, there wasn’t much to inspire me beyond his great lighting technique (he was so influential, we talk about “Rembrandt lighting” to this day). Maybe painters could admire and learn from the brush stroke techniques or some other painterly things. For me, there wasn’t that much to learn.

In contrast, a few years ago I went to the NCMA to see the paintings of Monet. While the painting techniques were (again) lost to me because I don’t paint, I did come away with two impressive pieces of knowledge. One, any man that can take his wife, children and mistress on a six month art safari is truly some kind of crazy. Second, the man knew where to put his easel. Looking at his paintings I came to the conclusion that there was absolutely no way I could improve on any of the compositions by changing the point of view. Monet’s command of light was also exquisite. He was in control of the two most important things any artist needs to control; where to stand and how to use light properly on his selected subject. This experience reminds of one of Life’s Lessons as documented by Brooks Jensen. “You will learn more about art from an artist than a photographer.”

768 Cycle of Acceptance

We copy the latest photoshop tricks to make our photos look like the ones we see on the web. Adobe has made great strides in photoshop and there are huge new numbers of features and capabilities for the many types of people that use photoshop. We create based on the features available and ignore the aesthetic and emotional aspects of the image. We accept the accolades of multiple thumbs up and move on to learning the next photoshop trick.

In doing this we create a cycle of acceptance of bad images. That does not make me enthusiastic about the future.

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This photograph came from the Journal, June 2020.

767 Which foundation? First posted 8/14/2016

Scientists and Engineers are not afraid to stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before to advance their technology. Artists, on the other hand seem to ignore those that have gone before or go out of their way to belittle their success. Both try to look to the future, but one does so from a vantage point, the other from a hole.

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Today's photo comes from the folio "Faraway Worlds."

766 The Power of Example

We learn from examples and quite a few examples of photographs are posted on the web. Images are posted quickly and garner a number of likes, thumbs up, stars and whatever indicators of approvals are currently used. We assume a photograph with group approval is a great example to emulate.

We learn from what we see and most new photographers don’t know what they are seeing. We do not know if the images we see are created by established photographers with a good eye for composition, or someone with a smart phone and a brand new log on ID. We just see a lot of images on the web and these examples begin to influence our photographic aesthetics.

We all know there are more examples of bad images than good. (Yes, even experienced photographers have lots of bad images. We have learned to recognize them and keep them away from the viewing public as a matter of courtesy.) The risk to new photographers is they will learn from and imitate those bad images without knowing it. In doing this unconsciously begin a slide toward mediocrity.

More next week…

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Today's photograph came from the folio "Waiting for the Bishop."

765 - I Hate It When That Happens. First Published 11/29/2015

More than a few years ago I created an entire body of work by combining multiple images to create a fantasy world. The project was called “The Labyrinth.” What made this project so successful is I was able to make the photographs “believably unbelievable.” It took me a long time to be able to come up with that phrase to describe what I learned to do in photoshop. What peeves me now is that I found a perfectly good word that describes what I worked to achieve. The word is verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is the illusion of reality: a thing that is not real, but which seems realistic. That is exactly what the Labyrinth photographs were.

I think it is an important word, because so much of photography, digital imaging and especially motion pictures employ verisimilitude. As photographers, we are more aware of this than civilians, so much so, that I routinely think that any image I see is probably not a single unretouched photograph.

Maybe I didn’t get too photographic today, but at least I have one more wonderful word to use in our daily conversation.

764 Depth of Feeling and Depth of Focus

I think it was Edward Weston who spoke of a preference for depth of feeling rather than depth of focus. The admonition is for photographers focusing on the technical aspects of the craft rather than the emotional side of the task. While we must agree that conveying the thought behind the photograph, having a technical failure really defeats the intent of the photographer. Happily, the advance of technology has made the question, “Will this photograph turn out OK?” superfluous. It is almost impossible for a modern camera to make a technical mistake.

If we can eliminate (or at least dramatically reduce) the physical sources of a poor photograph, then what hurdles must we overcome? The answer is simultaneously easy and tremendously difficult. The answer is we have to come up with original content that will delight, amuse, educate and fulfill the audience for our images. This is a task that is not for the faint of heart. It requires us to be able to communicate out thoughts and feelings in a visual manner.

All we have to do is look at the many photographs we see every day to understand the difficulty of this task.

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Edward Weston is one of my photographic heroes, so it makes sense (to me) that I have a nice sand dune photograph to accompany today's text. I would have photographed a pepper or thirty, but that would be really obvious.

763 - Editing from the Artist’s Statement First Published 9/8/2013

In my version of the Artist’s Statement my goal is to lead the audience right up to the edge of the photographs and then let the photographs complete the story. I want to provide the set up for the story the photographs will complete. I try to create a mood reflective of the photographs, a question the photographs answer or create a premise that is supported by the images.

This is my key in selecting the images for my folios. The artist statement is the heart of the folio. It states the reason for the project to exist and the images are supposed to be the visual equivalent of the verbal description. The Artist’s Statement becomes the criteria for image selection.

Evaluating each image honestly against the criteria is the key to any editing process. There is no room for “kinda” or “mostly.” Editing is a ruthless business. It requires personal honesty and integrity to make sure that each image

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My version of a Jerry Uelsmann photograph with absolutely no photoshop involved. The grounds crew at The Biltmore House replaced some sod and the darker grass makes the fountain look suspended in the air.