Postcards from the Creative Journey

Sometimes You Get Lucky

Landscape photography is a lot about luck. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. If you give yourself the opportunity, you find your luck. Today looked pretty dismal, leaden grey skies and the threat of rain all day. It’s the type of day when you head out to reconnoiter the area to see what there is to see. We took off today to check out the area east of Capitol Reef, because we missed looking at that area last year. In particular, we wanted to take a look at Factory Butte, a major feature that has been the subject of a wonderful photograph by William Clift. The light when we drove by today was not very conducive to dramatic landscape photography.

I found some other interesting rocks and water north of Factory Butte and photographed that.

On the way back out of the area, we stopped by another “dry wash” just to take a quick look. What a great find this was. About two hours later, I climbed out of the dry wash about a half mile downstream and fifty feet below grade. While the sky and light was not conducive to dramatic grand landscapes, it was just dandy for the this narrow wash of eroded rock, cracked mud and little pools left over from recent rains.

The weather forecasts call for scattered thunderstorms. I hope our weather luck stays with us.

 

Going Back for Seconds

Clearing Storm, Capitol Reef

(Yes, every landscape photographer

has a "clearing storm" photograph)

We (that would be Brooks Jensen and me) are heading back to southern Utah for this year’s photo safari. As you reading this, we are in transit or on the ground getting ready to photograph the wonderfulness of southern Utah. This is truly a historic event in the annals of the Brooks and Joe photo safari because in all of the twenty six years we’ve been heading out into the world to pretend we’re Fine Art Photographers this is only the second time we have gone to the same location in consecutive years. For those of you that might be interested in knowing the other location we visited in consecutive years, it was North Dakota (North Dakota?). Projects such as “Sense of the Seasons,” and the “Stillness Borne on the Wind” folio came from those two trips.

Barring any technical glitches or being far, far away from any access to the interwebs, I’ll be sending these postcards from this creative journey as we photograph southern Utah.

 

 

Elaboration on the thoughts of a Cranky Old Man

Cottage Roof from "A Change of Pace."

Post production editing never was a huge event for me in the old, old days of film based photography. As a dedicated large format photographer, I and others of my type had an investment in the photograph we were making. We had to lug our gear all over creation, to set up and manipulate the camera to make a photograph. We had the cost of the film (which became increasingly more expensive as time wore on). We then had the investment in our time for processing negatives and prints. This investment of time and money made us old timers very stingy with exposures. We had to do a tremendous amount of real world (before we set the camera up) editing as well as editing in the camera before we committed the scene to film. There were times when I gave up on compositions because what I thought was a good idea did not pan out on the ground glass. If it wasn’t on the ground glass, there was no way to “fix it in photoshop.” That’s what led me to the observation that not everything in front of a camera needs to be photographed.

While it might seem I wax nostalgic on film photography, nothing could be further from the truth. Today’s equipment is so much better and makes it easier to produce a good looking image with much less work than the view camera I used for decades.

This resulting ease of making technically perfect pictures and the perceived notion that all art is wonderful results in the proliferation of really mediocre images. The “top ten” images still number ten, but they have to emerge from an exponentially larger mass of really unworthy images.

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Get ready for the daily blogs from the Annual Brooks and Joe Photo safari starting this Friday at this blog site!

Another Method to Finish a Project

Academy Street, from "A Change of Pace."

There’s a big sign hanging from a chain stretched across the access road that says “No Trespassing.” I’ve been wondering if I was really finished with the current project that is very near completion. The sign on the access road answered the question for me. I guess I won’t be going back to that abandoned building because I do pay attention to “No Trespassing” signs.

I like to think that you don’t get to the end of a project. My preference is to go too far and then back into the end of the project. This is important because you have to go a bit too far to figure out you have made all the photographs you are going to make. When you start to see the same photographs over and over again, then you know you’ve gone too far. That’s one way to know the project is complete. Sometimes you can see this looking at the photographs you made, or sometimes they put a big chain across the access road.

Falling in Love With a Project

From "By the River."

There comes a time when you get to really enjoy doing a project. It’s something you can tell everyone about, you have some success, can show some work that indicates the project will be successful and everyone is cheering you on. You are having a great time with this project. The danger with this enjoyment is that you are lulled into a comfortable state of incompletion. As the Grateful Dead sing to us, “When life looks like Easy Street there is Danger at the door.” The Danger is wanting this euphoric state of partial completion to go on forever. Projects are meant to be finished. It takes discipline and a sense of adventure to leave the euphoria behind and finish the project properly and completely. After you complete the project you can enter the uncomfortable “Now what?” stage of the next project.

Using Lessons Learned

River Scene
(from photo-safari number twenty one)

We’ve decided to head off to Utah again this fall as a repeat destination for “The Brooks and Joe Annual Photo Safari.” This will be the twenty sixth occasion of our attempt to act like real Fine Art Photographers (one of these days, we'll get it right). So the time has come to start making preparations for another epic photographic event.

I’m bringing along a second set of glasses/sunglasses so I don’t have to panic if one set of glasses is damaged. I need to figure out a scheme for downloading, evaluating and backing up all the great pictures I am going to take while we are our photographing in Utah because I fear I will run out of capacity on my laptop. I have a scheme in mind, but I will have to test it to see if it will allow me to do the download and backup with multiple file types in one pass. AV/HDMI cables will be packed so we don’t have to chimp at our photos on the back of a camera.

I can feel this trip coming because as I walked out of the gym on Wednesday morning, I looked at the setting moon. It was either full, or very close to it. We’re about four weeks away from being out in the wilds of Utah. I have it in my head that I might be out and trying some night photography. I don’t know why, but when you can get away far enough that you can see the Milky Way, it just seems silly not to try and see if you can incorporate it into a photograph.

More importantly, I need to get back in the swing of using my camera and practicing using all the functions that I might have to use when I go out into the wild, wild west. All the thought and visualizing in the world will not help you if can't figure out which buttons to push and in what order they should be pushed.