Postcards from the Creative Journey

719 Thinking is Bad, Concentrating is Good – First posted 8/9/2015

The golf instructor Harvey Penick often told his students the secret to good golf was to think on the practice range and concentrate on the golf course. To think on the golf course is to court disaster because thinking gets in the way of doing what should be routine. I think this also holds true when photographing. Having complete confidence in your ability to handle the camera and its controls reflexively leaves a whole lot more mental energy available for the creative part of photography.

For the many years I took a view camera on the photo safari, part of my pre-trip preparation was to get out the view camera and practice setting up the tripod, unfolding the camera, attaching the lensboard, focusing and setting the shutter. It was a necessary activity to insure that I could “get the shot” when faced with rapidly changing light.

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All these years later I still practice before I head out for any serious photographic expedition. Even if it's out in the backyard, down the street or across the country. Physical mastery of the equipment you use is a necessary part of being an artist because when it comes time to create spontaneously you need to have your equipment function without your thinking.

718 On Being a “Non Revenue Photographer”

I am a “Non-Revenue Photographer” because I do not generate income from my photographic skills. If I spend money on things photographic it’s because I think it will help me make better images or present them to a larger audience. This causes me to think twice (at least) about investing in my photographic world. Adding equipment, software, or something else to help me create art does require some self-examination and justification prior to purchase.

On the other hand, I don’t have to work diligently to make the purchase “pay off” by creating income from my photography.

717- Retrospectives and Greatest Hits Exhibitions – First posted 8/1/2012

Please resist the temptation to stage this type of exhibition. If you show your greatest hits, or “everything I have ever photographed” in one exhibition or show, what are you going to do next? I saw an exhibit the other day and it was spectacular in documenting the breadth of the photographer’s oeuvre (I just love using that word – it makes me sound so artistic). As I left the exhibit, I thought, “What does he have left to show us? Where does he go from here?” When you assemble a greatest hits exhibition, it usually signals the end of an era. Is it the end of photography, the end of that style of photography or are you celebrating a major breaking point in the creative process? Some thought needs to be given to what I would call a “terminal exhibition” because retrospectives exhibitions are usually reserved for deceased artists. That’s why I think very carefully about what I submit for juried shows. You need to leave the door open a bit so you may be invited back.

On my web site I created my “Fifty Project” as a statement about photography in my life as I achieved my fiftieth birthday. That type of project had a definite “time stamp” to it and was a survey to that point. I did call it a mid-career retrospective. As I look back on some of those photographs I can see that my photography has changed from where I was then. That’s a good thing.

I’ve thought about the next “career project” and thought that it might be interesting to have a Fifty Years of Photography Project (Hey, if Brett Weston can do that, why not me?). When that rolls around, it would be interesting to see how many photographs from the Fifty Project survive to make the Fifty Years in Photography Project.

716 - Image and Artifact

Virtual and physical images are the two facets of contemporary photography. Maybe it’s photograph and image. We have split image creation into two distinct branches; virtual images such as you will find on this blog and everywhere else on the internet and the physical manifestation of the image which we can call a photographic print. (Did you like that Po-Mo phrase, “manifestation of the image?” I thought it was obtuse, and therefore desirable.)

There’s no doubt about which trail I took when it came time to make a decision. I am firmly in the virtual world. The internet is the (pronounced “thee”) place where I share my imagery. I rarely make any more prints from my Big Ol’ Epson printer. I concentrate my efforts on the digital distribution of my images on this blog and on my website. I do appreciate your taking the time to stop by and see what I’m doing.

715 - The Future Aesthetic – First Posted 3/4/2012

Who decided that HDR’d, over sharpened and super saturated colors are the aesthetic for contemporary photography? I attended a recent presentation by a professional photographer and was presented with many such examples of “photographic art.” Some other curmudgeon (Bless his heart) asked the above question while I sat there stunned from the visual assault. Apparently, some photographic associations are rewarding this type of aesthetic in their competitions. Novice photographers are getting the idea this type of “look” is good photography. It is an under-reliance on skill in the field and an over-reliance on post processing to carry the day.

I lament the end of the photographic world as I know it. I also lamented (and survived) the demise of fiber paper, prime lenses and manual focus. I am concerned the end might be much closer than I think it is. In my old fogeyness, I expect photographs to have a certain look that reflects a photographic aesthetic. Silly me. The teachers from that school of photography are almost all gone. The new teachers of photography do not come from the ranks of film photographers, but from the ranks of the software manipulators.

Those that teach photography in the digital age are creating an aesthetic evolving at the same rapid pace as the technology that creates the pictures. There is little time to go through the refinements of the process because we are barreling headlong on our way to the next software release. There seems to be a concentration on utilizing the latest features just because they are there and not necessarily because they help make a better looking photograph. My big fear is that the folks that decide “what makes a good photograph” no longer will be able to recognize a good photograph and substitute a judgment rendered on the most creative use of photoshop.

I am a bewildered observer. For the most part I am happy in knowing the trends will come and go quickly. I am fearful that the future will be no better. When photographic teachers emerge from the field of software manipulation I have reason to be wary.

714 Delaying Tactics – Why We Don’t Finish Photographs

The more I thought about last week’s post the more I came up with another take on why it takes so long to finish a photograph. We can take an inordinate amount of time to slave over a photograph to postpone moving on to the next step. We hit that wall of “comfortable incompleteness” and just decide to stay there for a while. This is a deadly position for the creative person. We need to finish and move on and progress to the next image or project.

I have written about the Fear of Completion before. It also goes by the name comfortably incomplete. We get to a stage in the project where we have made significant progress, can see the end of the project, can talk with our friends about how happy we are with the work in progress and then try to stay in that wonderful state for a long time. For some reason we don’t want to finish. 

We engage in delaying tactics. We begin a whole series of arcane and obscure digital editing techniques. We have multiple luminance layers in small sections of the image. We edit at the pixel level to insure image perfection at a level unviewable by the human eye. 

We have the ability to edit our photographs to levels of precision unthinkable not even thirty years ago. We don’t always need to, but we have that ability. And we can use that ability when we want to delay completion.

Why do we want to delay completion? I think it is a fear of having to start the next project. We are afraid we’ve run out of good ideas, the fear that we have run the well dry; we have nothing to say with our artwork; that we are just plain finished with making art. 

713 - The Fifty Project – Much Later – First posted 9/15/2013

I went back through the Fifty Project as part of the reformatting of my web site. (What? You haven’t seen the new redesign? Click on over to my home page and take a look. I’ll wait right here while you check it out.) I had a birthday a couple of weeks ago and I remembered considered doing a “Sixty” Project to celebrate that milestone. After careful consideration, I figured that wouldn’t be the best idea.

The Fifty Project was a watershed project because it pushed me into the (then) new world of digital presentation. It was the foundation for all the web and folio projects since. It was the end of the era of the individual print. I was not ready to commit completely to the folio as a final product, so “Fifty” was a compilation of “greatest hits” in an exploratory presentation.

A greatest hits compilation at Sixty would be completely different because I really don’t deal in single image art any more. I still (two years later) don’t even know how to deal with the concept of “greatest hits” in terms of folios, so I had to let it pass. Maybe by the time I do my “Fifty Years of Photography” project, (with apologies to all Brett Weston fans) I will have figured out how to share the best of my folios – or maybe whatever medium I will be using in the future.

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This post was nine years ago. Now it’s time to start my “Fifty Years of Photography” book so I can join the club. Go ahead and google Fifty Years of Photography and see how many results you get. After a lot of thought and discussion with photo buddy Brooks Jensen, I decided that the best way to get this milestone exhibit out into the world was to create a series of PDF publications (just as I have on my web site) over the next year or two with each PDF covering one of the five decades. I’ll let you know when this project is going to start.

712 The Devil in the Details

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. 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. Just because photoshop has a multiplicity of editing options and tools does not mean that every one should be used on every image. 

Why do people take so much time working with something that was created to make life easy?

Viewers can’t see the details at the pixel 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.

The Devil in the details wants you to stick with that image and make invisible (to the viewer) changes to keep you from finishing and moving on to the next image. Fight the temptation, finish the image and move on.

711 Okanagan Forest, WA 2009 First Published 01/24/2010

We had just crested Forest Road 37 near Mt. Baldy and had finished making some panoramic photographs. It was a typical forest road; dirt, gravel and a thousand foot drop off without a guard rail. We were so busy looking forward (and trying not to fall off the edge) we didn’t look back until we had finished with the panoramic photographs.

The old photographer’s rule “If you see a good scene in front of you, there is probably a good scene behind you,” was proved true again.