Postcards from the Creative Journey

935 On the Level

I have always noted that my landscape photographs seem to tilt in one direction. I never gave it much thought and always wound up straightening the images in Lightroom to get the horizon level. When setting up my camera for this safari, I wound up leaving the automatic level indicator as part of my viewfinder set up. I paid attention to the level and photographed when the line was green.

When I got to process the RAW files in Lightroom, I didn’t have to fix any tilted photographs. After about three days of not leveling images in Lightroom, I finally figured out I had been holding the camera at an angle all these years. I am not sure why I did this, but since that time I have tried to break years of bad technique.

I wonder what else I have been doing wrong either through faulty set up or my actions that might be limiting my image captures.

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Overlook of the dunes just north of Florence, Oregon.

934 Dimensionless Photography First Published 3/16/2014

In my world of science and engineering there are values called dimensionless numbers. These numbers are used to denominate a physical phenomenon. The most widely known dimensionless number is the Mach number, a comparison to the speed of sound. I thought about this a few nights ago when I viewed some “dimensionless photographs.” These photographs were abstract landscapes that provided no clue to the viewer as to the scale of the subject.

What these dimensionless photographs did to me was to remove the distraction of scale and allow me to focus more closely on the composition, tone and texture of each image. They transcended the pretty picture landscape genre to become something far more than the subject originally photographed.

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It's now August and that means a new issue of The Lipka Journal is posted on my website. Surf on over to my website (link at the top of the page) and download a copy of the August Journal. 

933 Whatever It Takes

Reflecting on the technical process for my More Memories than Dreams (AKA Fifty Years of Photography) Project the advances in technology are writ large. When I copy my 35mm film negatives they are flawlessly captured, warts and all, as they say.

When I convert the negatives to a positive image should the look of 35 mm prints be faithfully duplicated? Should the images be displayed as they would have looked forty or fifty years ago, or should they be digitally transformed in the same manner as today's RAW files?

I am finding myself using more digital techniques to give the old film negatives a more modern look. Noiseware smoothes out crunchy skies (photoshop’s select sky tool is a technical marvel). Cloning and healing flawlessly remove the scratches, pin holes, and dust spots that doomed many negatives to a life in the negative file. Transform functions correct perspective. The powerful digital editing tools at our command flawlessly update the look of film negatives.

I am conflicted about what I’m doing. Part of me remembers the effort and work to get an image to get close to what I really wanted. Part of me is overjoyed that I can salvage images that were impossible to print forty or fifty years ago and make them be exactly what I wanted. So I am learning to live with the disappointment of leaving the film look behind but am happy to finally achieve the vision forty years after I made an image.

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Tomorrow morning is August 1 and that means a new issue of The Lipka Journal will be posted on my website. Remind yourself to surf on over to my website (link at the top of the page) and download a copy of the August Journal. It's easy to recognize. The image above (from a 35 mm negative made in 1976) is on the cover and from one of the image suites in the Journal. 

932 Photography on the Z Axis. Part II First Published 7/1/2018

I am seeing more drone based landscape photographs and I wonder how long it will take before the elevated camera position offered by drones will become the new standard for landscape photographers. Are earth bound photographers now the next school of photography to be declared obsolete? Or will we continue as an eccentric group of earthbound photographers practicing a long lost art form?

Clearly new skills will be required to be a landscape photographer. We’ll need to learn how to fly drones and need to do “on the fly” editing (I like that pun) and be more adept on trying to maneuver the drone to the exact spot we need to make our photograph successful. We might be required to be licensed to operate our drones and might even be prohibited from flying drones in certain areas landscape photographers love. Technical and legal barriers have not been settled on flying drones.

The skill that we will have to practice is one that photographers have always faced. That is how to keep our images from becoming trendy and gimmicky. Photographers have always been faced with the big issue of making a photograph be more than “just a photograph”. I think drones are a new toy for photographers to play with, but the key thing to remember will be this; like any other new toy, it’s getting by the gimmick and using the new toys to make art.

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Budapest, Hungary and the parliament building photographed from the other side of the Danube. Elevation is a wonderful thing. This photograph would definitely be better if I made it from a drone.

931 Technical Assistance

We spent a considerable amount of time just waiting for the right moment to make our images. Once the proper time comes, we ask for technology to make the precise captures we have been waiting for. In the past it required precise manual timing and good reactions. With technology, we pick the right mode and the camera cracks off a bunch of exposures in under one second; each one perfectly exposed and focused. We can then pick the decisive moment from this series of images.

The only problem with this type of (a hastily named) “volumetric shooting” is determining which image most closely meets our vision. That can’t be done until we see the images on the computer screen. It takes painstaking viewing to edit the huge volume of images down to the one or two that are “the best.” It is this process that separates the great from the good. (Today’s image was one of fifty-four images taken in a few moments from a single vantage point. I liked this image the best because of the various stages of wages breaking and receding on this rock formation.)

Editing images is so much more important today than it has been in the past. In the days gone by, we edited images before we made the exposure because there was a very real investment in the image. The cost of film and the time spent processing the negative were always factored into determining our need to make an exposure. The editing was accomplished pre-exposure. Today it is done on a computer screen. Editing images is and has always been a skill that is only learned by doing.

930 Photography on the Z axis. Part I First Published 6/24/2018

I normally avoid technical topics, but today I have to relent and use terms we learned in middle school geometry. Camera position is half the issue with making a photograph and that position is determined by not only where you stand, (that’s the X and Y axes), but how far the camera is from the ground (that’s the Z axis). We now have options we have never had before in determining the “Z” location of our camera.

I have said before that 99.999% of all photographs made at eye level are dull. One must move away from eye height to create an interesting composition. Getting low helps quite a bit, but we are now facing the ability to move in the opposite direction by raising the camera level far above our eye level using by using drones.

The extra elevation brought by making the camera airborne is significant. It will bring a greater understanding of the topography and context of the scene being photographed. It will make the landscape photographer’s ability to exploit the three dimensional aspects of the scene, improving upon the two dimensional exposition that we now have. We can access vantage points that were impossible before unless we rented cranes or helicopters. The whole of landscape photography may be poised to change.

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Being a droneless photographer, I chose to gain elevation in the traditional manner, climbing a bunch of stairs and a hill to get a vantage point. In this case, the vantage point is from an old castle above the town of Miltenberg, Germany. And yes, this is a stitched panoramic photograph.

929 Keeping up to Date

Lots of photographers have web sites. After looking at the images I will look at the site and try to determine when the website was last updated. This tells me a lot about the photographer. If the website was updated in the last month or two, that tells me the photographer is working and adding to their online presence. If the website hasn’t been updated in several years, I wonder if they’ve given up on photography, passed away, or moved on to a different method of sharing work. I’ve seen photographer’s websites noting a move to another social media site such as snap chat, flickr or instagram. Moving to one of those platforms gives me a thought they might be changing platforms to pick up an audience. That’s good because they know what they need to do to find an audience.

I have found building an online audience depends on a constant, periodic introduction of new artwork. Content is introduced on this platform twice a week. My Daily Photograph Blog is just that. My website, The Lipka Journal, is updated on the first of every month. If you visit any of my sites, you will find new content on a periodic basis. It takes a while to create the audience, but the result is worthwhile.

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This photograph from Pioneer Village in Crosby, North Dakota was first published as a Daily Photograph in 2020.

928 Breakfast Can Wait, The Light Won’t First Published 7/15/2018

Another reminder that photography is inconvenient. Sunrise happens early in the day. It’s amazing that I forgot that. I am much more inclined to photograph in the evening because I do have the option to sleep in, have a nice breakfast and generally approach the day in a leisurely manner. But, if you are a landscape photographer, you might need to be reminded the “golden hour” occurs both morning and night.

Even if you have to be up early, you don’t need to fire away blindly. Be ready to take advantage of the first opportunity and then be patient to see if there is another opportunity that you can use to your advantage. Amateurs take the first opportunity and are happy with it. If you’re good, you recognize that a first opportunity is just that and then wait to see if there is a second or third opportunity that follows. Remember, while everyone wants to get the sunrise picture, the old rule about turning 180 degrees to find another picture is a great rule to remember. Oh, and if you are still tired and only want to turn 90 degrees, the light will be really great in that direction, too.

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Early morning on the Danube. This is what happens when you’re late for breakfast. One needs to be up and looking for photographs, all the time.

I picked this blog post from random, and golly gosh, I first published this post on July 15, 2018.

927 Making Terrible Photographs

I’m going through all my old negatives (from like, when, photographers used film in cameras and developed film and all that old fashioned stuff) and am totally amazed by the number of truly bad photographs I made twenty, thirty and forty years ago. It’s astounding. Some of them I remember, most of them (thank heavens) I do not remember making.

It is interesting to note that just about all of the negatives exposed during that period were of absolutely no significance. Or maybe, being of absolutely no significance is significant because making terrible photographs was necessary to becoming a good photographer. Which refers to my famous saying, “Nothing is completely useless; it can always be used as a bad example.”

We become “good” at something through repetition. Authors don’t write the “Great American Novel” at their first attempt. Athletes don’t win gold medals without training and practice. The “overnight success” usually happens after a lot of preparation and minor successes. You can’t expect to make consistently good photographs right away. Learning is involved; that takes time and a lot of practice.

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This is a film image from about 1974 or so. The 35 mm negative was backlit with a video light and photographed with my Lumix G85 fitted with a macro lens. Lightroom did the rest.

926 The Devil in the Details First Published 12/6/2020

Some folks have taken the efficiency of digital editing and turned it on its head. Originally designed to make photographic editing quick, effective and incredibly precise, some are using digital editing to postpone completion of images. Take the incredibly precise and numerous digital editing tools available in Photoshop. I have seen explanations of digital editing techniques used on one digital file going through multiple processing steps with mind numbing details and sweating out the details at the pixel level.

Why?

Viewers can’t see the details at that level, much less care about the time and effort spent in making the image “just so.” The only people that will know about it are people the photographer tells about it. Maybe they will care about the technical details in kind of a technical one-upmanship way.

But what this fuss and bother about inconsequential does is complete the photographer from completing an image and moving on to the next image. So finish the image and move on to the next image.

925 Image Clusters

When reviewing my Lightroom Catalog in a quest to find images for The Lipka Journal or my Daily Photograph Blog I am fascinated by how often I find little groups of images that work well together. I might get into a single spot that over a relatively short period of time yields five or six photographs. I might be looking in another location at another time and find a dozen or so images that work well together. Surrounding these little islands of creativity are a mighty sea of images that don't seem to impress me at all because they have no immediate use.

The interesting thing about those images that don't impress me at all is the very important point that the images don't impress me at all at this particular time. They very well might impress me later, or they might compliment another group of images.

Maybe they are some of those little islands of creativity that haven't quite yet made it above sea level yet.

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The above  is just one of 142 images in just about an hour from the same spot. Granted, there were a lot of 4 panel panoramic images, but that’s quite an image cluster.

924 “Rules of Art” Are Necessary First Published 11/5/2017

The concept of “rules of art” is old, respected and is a requirement for such art as the Haiku, the Sonnet, the Fugue and just for fun, the Limerick, or even the “one liner“ joke. Every one of these artistic forms of expression is governed by a strict adherence to form and rules. Yet, in spite of “restrictive rules of art,” artists continue to solve the problem of creative expression. The problem of creating within a framework places more responsibility on the creator, giving him (or her) the responsibility of constructing their art within a set of rules.

I do not advocate a slavish adherence to “rules of art.” One should learn what they are, how and when they can be used effectively and how they can help you create a coherent image. Learn the rules first. Demonstrate that you can abide by them.

Then, if the situation requires it, go out and smash them with impunity if it helps you deliver your message to your audience.