Postcards from the Creative Journey

I’m Fixin’ to Start

Somewhere near where Montana and Idaho meet

For those of you not familiar with Southern English, “Fixin’ to” means that preparations have begun for the task mentioned immediately after the “Fixin’ to.” I completed printing the photographs for the Light on China exhibit and I am about six weeks away from delivering the prints to the gallery. The matting supplies arrived at the end of last week and now I have to begin cutting mats for all the photographs. Since I last wrote about this exhibit, one additional photographer was added to the group of artists. My photographs from the Hong Kong Bird Market were not needed. While I was disappointed in not being able to exhibit this work, I avoided having to scan and clean up a bunch of negatives.

Our living room will now become the mat cutting center for the next two or three (I hope) weeks. I will have all sorts of stuff strewn about until all the mats are cut, prints mounted and everything framed and put into plastic tote bins to wait for their trip to the Green Hill Arts Center in Greensboro, NC.

A while back I mentioned that every project hits a spot where the fun ends and the work begins. I’m fixin’ to get to that spot right quick.

On Exposure

West side of Maui

It is easy to become enamored with software manipulation to compensate for a weak image. We might think this is peculiar to the present world of digital cameras and computers, but it has always been this way. No less than Saint Ansel himself codified the whole thing with plus and minus development described in his Zone System of Exposure and Development. It’s always been there and always not the best thing for your negatives. If you don’t start out with something “that’s right on,” compensating techniques will cause you a lot of effort and at best you might wind up with something that looks “just okay” after a whole lot of work.

I remember a photo workshop where David Bayles told me determining the correct exposure was the single best thing a photographer could learn to do. (This, of course, was in the day where we all had our 1 degree Pentax spot meters and dutifully measured the exposure to arrive at Zone III shadows and Zone VIII or IX highlights.) “If you underexpose and attempt to compensate by overdeveloping, you will block the highlights. If you overexpose and under-develop, the shadows will be weak. Either way you lose.” Simple enough.

While the “Zone-istas” might rail against my simplification, perfect exposures continue to be the absolute best starting point for a photograph. This is why I absolutely love the technical advances in determining exposure made in the past several decades. There are no more technical failures in determining exposure. My camera is much smarter, quicker and far more accurate than I ever was and I am glad for it.

Good equipment doesn’t make you better, it eliminates excuses.

You Make Landscape Photographs?

Sunrise, Shadow of Haleakala on Ma'alea Bay, Maui

Landscape photographs are not popular with the contemporary photography crowd. The really with it happenin’ trendy types don’t place much value on landscapes. It is possible landscape art is so far removed from the contemporary lifestyle as to be irrelevant and not interesting to the viewers. They may have not experienced the grand landscape or scenes of great natural beauty and thus cannot truly appreciate what they are seeing. Or maybe, just maybe, consideration of what the landscape actually represents is too challenging to the beliefs of the viewers.

Consider the landscape as a visual representation of a value system that believes in a higher power responsible for the beauty of the world. Once one considers the grandeur of the natural world one must face the inescapable conclusion man is not all powerful on this planet. Some folks are fixated on the individual human and the “importance” of the human being as being the all-powerful force and “ruler of the planet.” Considering scenes of natural grandeur leads one to the conclusion there is a greater Power working on a scale much larger than anything man can conceive and execute.

Where the Photograph Is the Project

View from Kalahaku Overlook, Maui

I saw a link on a news site to a photographic project of Hollywood Stars photographed as Disney characters. That sounded like a good time waster before the office gang was heading out to lunch. The “photographs” were kind of interesting, but after looking at “the making of” photographs compared to the final result, I was impressed by just how little part the photography played in the final result. Each photograph looked like a movie set. Props, backgrounds, lighting, special effects, make-up, wardrobes, art directors, assistants to all roles and assistants to the assistants all arranged and managed for the photographer to immortalize the critical sixtieth of a second. The budget for this effort was so big there was money in the budget for a photographer to photograph the photographer making the photograph. (I’m not even going to venture the number of folks involved in post-production, marketing and who knows what else.) I’m sure that the good folks at Disney figured out how to monetize this entire big budget endeavor.

The role of the photographer is truly a small part of the overall effort. Maybe my vision of the lone artist producing work through his individual effort is a long lost romantic ideal and this “cast of thousands” approach is where Art is.