Postcards from the Creative Journey

836 - The Image is the Thing. First Published 7/3/2011

Over at The Online Photographer Blog there was a whole bunch of heat and light on the question of archival materials for photographs. I didn’t want to invest too much time on a very lengthy discussion because my thoughts on archival materials are well, archival. I have always felt that if you purchase and use the best materials and follow the directions for proper photographic processing, the photographs will last longer than you do. If the photograph lasts longer than you do, it’s archival.

I have never worried too much about archival processing. I have always thought the Image is the thing. The emphasis should be on creating an image that is worthy of archival treatment. Exceptional effort should be expended on the creation of an image so good people now and in the future will be moved by your image. A timeless image that speaks to the human condition will be worthy of archival treatment. Rather than worry about the paper we should obsess about the real issue at hand; making your image worthy of the finest archival materials. If we put that much effort into creating better images rather than debating the fine points of archival preservation, I think we would have a lot more images that are worthy of archival materials and processes.

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Tomorrow there will be a new issue of the Lipka Journal over at my website. Three new projects, some single image projects and a republished blog entry from the past. Come back tomorrow and see what's new. 

835 - Empty or Abandoned?

I enjoy photographing old buildings and things that have passed their prime. (No gratuitous comments about my latest series of selfies, please.) When I was photographing the Cary Elementary School during its renovation, I figured out that the school was worn out and empty because generations of students had used it. It had fulfilled its purpose and was waiting for the good folks of Cary to find a new use for it. It was this realization that got me to consider how I photograph these old buildings.

I think the difference between how I photograph old, empty buildings and how other people photograph the same place is a sense of hope. I’m trying to convey a sense of hope that while there is no one in the picture right now, someone “will be right back” just after the picture has been made. And then once we get back, we’ll make the place habitable.

Abandoned means losing hope and admitting defeat. There is no one here because they have left forever and are not coming back. This is the sad part of photographing empty structures. Sometimes this is all you will find and there is no way to portray a place any other way.

834 - Playing the Photo Lotto First Published 3/9/2014

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

Yet another success, I guess.

I hit the photo lotto big time last week. Photo lotto? Not the Powerball or Mega Millions, but one of the local juried shows with ca$h awards. Usually these are promoted by local arts organizations as fund raisers (and they do a wonderful job at that). If I like the organization, I will support them by entering some photographs and paying the entry fee. One of my photos earned a juror’s award that will keep me in inks and paper for quite a while. (Used to be film, paper and chemicals, but the photo world has changed, hasn’t it?) My other entry sold the day of the opening. Hooray. It’s wonderful to receive monetary award in one’s own lifetime.

I’m not quitting my day job.

The amusing part of the entire process was my image selection for this event. I prepared three images for a similar event last fall. Two of the images were rejected by the juror and one was accepted. (Art is all about rejection and failure.) At the end of the fall event, all three images remained leaning against the living room wall until they were called upon to be judged in the latest exhibit. One of the rejected images earned the juror’s award and the previously accepted image was sold at the opening.

That’s why I call this type of exhibition the “photo lotto.” You never know how a juror will respond to your photographs. At the very worst you have made a contribution to a local arts organization, maybe your work gets hung on the wall, maybe you take home a prize. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

833 - Awash in Images

With the ubiquity of smartphone cameras, digital cameras the ease of sharing images online, we are awash in camera generated images. The photo sharing sites seem to reward volume with quality being relegated to an inferior position. When people begin to share ALL their images art takes a turn for the worse. Image selection and editing have become lost arts.

Sadly, the continuing onslaught of visual overload is here to stay. The current trend (and I hope it is only going to last a short time – but not likely) is to have (almost) millisecond jump cuts between images in any presentation. Ninety photographs in sixty seconds would not seem to be out of the question. As one image appears you can only register the fact an image is in front of you before it is replaced by the next image.

One is left with only the vague impression of some images and the rest disappear from your memory. I surmise there are two reasons for presenting images at such a rate. One is to view as many the images as fast as possible before their mediocrity becomes apparent. Two, in the question of style over substance, style wins out.

I fear this fad will not pass quickly.

832 - Eventually You Are Going To Own Something First Published 3/23/2014

If you photograph for a long enough you will discover subject matter that is just yours alone. You will wind up doing it so much better than everyone else that everyone will know you by the photographs of this single subject. You will be so good in this one area no other photographer will attempt to tread on your photographic turf. In practical terms, how many people have photographed Peppers since Edward Weston? Many people have photographed Yosemite, but few have survived a comparison to Ansel Adams. Want to do cowboy portraits? You’ll have to do them better than Jay Dusard. These photographers owned their respective subjects. They earned the ownership through hard work and dedication to the subject matter.

Eventually you will find a photographic subject that loves you as much as you love it. Something that will be very easy for you to photograph very well once you figure it out. And there’s the rub. Figuring it out takes hard work and time to discover what you photograph best. Very rarely are wonderful things just dropped in your lap. Good photography takes a lot of hard work, trial and error and maybe a little bit of suffering for art to achieve the goal.

831 - It’s All About Preparation and Execution

See the smudge above the column on the left? That's my thumb print.

It’s a Sunday morning in autumn and I bet this morning you can hear some College Football coaches talk about preparation and execution as the explanation for success and victory (and the lack thereof as the reason for their failure and loss). Those key qualities apply to every endeavor in life and in my case carries over to the world of photography, too. 

Quite simply, I had substandard results one day this past week because I forgot to do two simple things. First, I forgot to check the settings on my camera and look at my lens. Not looking at the settings on my camera resulted in the image files being 8mB jpeg files instead of 16mB RAW files. If you are a photographer, this is a big deal. Second, not looking at my lens before photographing meant  I didn’t see a huge thumb print on the front element of my lens. This failure ruined about eighteen images. That failure to prepare and execute was caught early in the day, so there was not that much damage done. The jpeg issue remains. 

This doesn't look all that bad, but my future non-web options have been compromised.

The only good news was that I was using two cameras that day and some of the images were captured as RAW files without my thumbprint on the front lens element. It wasn’t a total loss for a day, but was a very effective reminder that proper preparation, attention to detail and execution to plan are the foundation for success in any endeavor. 

830 - Just Can’t Stop.

We decided at the last minute to head back to the Grand Canyon today (Friday) to (we theorized) avoid the Saturday crowds. (That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.) While we really didn’t want to go back and cover the same real estate, the thing is, when photographing the landscape, each day is a different experience. Today was a partly cloudy day with those nice puffy clouds casting all sorts of constantly changing wonderful shadows all over the Canyon. Truly a memorable day. Every moment was a different scene. Just stand there, watch the shadows and make an image. It was wonderful.

It was one of those days that reminds me of a conversation with some Australian Tourists I had in Utah about ten years ago . The Aussies said they did not understand why America was such a religious country until they visited the American Southwest. They said it was impossible not to believe in God after you see the American Southwest. It is humbling to stand there on the edge of the Grand Canyon and you have to believe in a power much, much greater than humanity.

Saturday (today) is our last day on Safari.This Safari was a little bit strange in that we thought the Grand Canyon visit was going to be like the Griswald's visit in Family Vacation and we were going to spend a lot of time in Monument Valley. It turned out to be just the opposite. All the images we made of the Grand Canyon were to the East of the Visitor Center. We did not even try to photograph on the way to Hermit Point. This means we will have to return.

829 - A Few More Views of the Grand Canyon

Spent the day at the campground with some of those domestic chores while Brooks had a bunch of tasks he needed to do to keep his business running. It was a day with no new photography. That was not a bad thing because we had some rain showers this afternoon and were pretty tired from a couple of consecutive really long days. A day of rest was a good thing. 

I spent the day learning some new presentation skills using various Adobe products and was able to take a little bit better look at what we did at the Grand Canyon on Wednesday. Here are some more images from Wednesday.

We decided to head back to the Grand Canyon on Friday to see if it looks different in the morning. The goal is to make some more images before noon and to take some pictures of signs. Signs? My camera doesn’t have GPS, so I have to mark locations the old fashioned way - photographing signs.

 

Only one more day of photography before I have to head back to the Old North State and get back to another view of reality. 

828 - For a Canyon, It Was Grand

Continuing the theme from a few days ago, (“I didn’t come this far to lay up”), we dedicated today to visiting the Grand Canyon. Because yesterday was a tough day, we slept in this morning and after Brooks’ tending to his business for a couple of hours, we were quite late in getting out of camp. There are two almost equidistant routes to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon from our camp. We chose the route that would take us west to east because we would have the sun behind us for most of the day. More importantly, we would wind up near the Cameron Trading Post around dinner time. That was another important consideration.

We had a fun drive up to the South Rim. There were a lot of people there but we had no problem getting a parking space near the Visitor Center. We did all the touristy views from Mather Point and then decided to start the west to east transit of the park. It took us about three hours to go from the Visitor Center to the East Gate. That is about twenty miles or so. We made a lot of images from the various approved scenic overlooks. We made some images from other places, too. As the afternoon progressed, the light got "better" (that is lower in the sky) and the Canyon became Grand. 

We returned to camp after dark...again. The only sad part of the days’ adventure was forgetting to purchase beer on the way home. An almost unforgivable error in most cases, but we were pretty tired from a full day of photography while wandering around.

The interesting thing about today’s images is that we can now separate what something is from what it looks like. The Canyon was hazy and smoke filled today. People mentioned it was smoke from a fire in Nevada. Through the miracle of technology as created by the wizards at Adobe, what it looks like and what it is can be separated through technology. 

827 - Lunch with Kenny and Thora First Published 10/11/2015

“You kids should be hungry from photographing all morning. Why don’t you come into town for some lunch tomorrow?” This request from Thora Heckman was not an invitation. It was a summons, borne of love. “Well, I’m not much for lunch. Just a sandwich would be fine. I don’t want to put you up to too much trouble,” was my reply. Thora said, “Don’t worry. We’ll have some real food.”

When we showed up for lunch, we found out what real food was. Thora made some sandwiches for us. Hot Roast Beef sandwiches, mashed potatoes and gravy. Did I mention we had pie for dessert? Oh, and none of this feast was left-overs. If I might mix metaphors, it was a bespoke lunch. Thora got up early, roast the beef, made the pie and fed us like royalty. After lunch, Brooks and Kenny played Euchre (Kenny won) while I helped Thora with the dishes.

We lost some photographic time but gained ever so much more.

826 - A Fun Day to Drive

View from the Jerome-Perkinsville road. Note the lack of guard rails. 

In looking for some places to visit and photograph we came up with the idea of visiting Jerome, Arizona. We thought it was going to be one of those lost in time towns, like Port Townsend, Washington; a boom town that went bust and then rescued before it was a complete ruin. We made the drive down and found that Jerome is a tourist haven. We didn't make any photographs, but it is a wonderful place to spend an afternoon, stop for some adult beverages, purchase some local art, do a little sight-seeing and head back to your starting point. We ate lunch there and kept on driving. 

We thought it would be fun to drive the Jerome-Perkinsville Road to see if Perkinsville might have some old buildings to photograph. The J-P road is designated as a “Primitive Road,” requiring high clearance 4 wheel drive vehicles. In the grand tradition of such roads, it is winding with no guardrails between you and sudden death from a thousand foot drop. 

You really do need to pay attention to the signs. One must make that left turn. It's a long way down. 

After going through all that, it turns out Perkinsville is more of a state of mind than a place. The Google Lady couldn’t find the place. (Another one of those places that might be on the map, but beyond the reach of the Google lady.) We continued to drive. About the only thing we found was a small creek over an obscure bridge that yielded the best photographs of the day. Photography while wandering around is like that. One finds wonderful things in the most obscure places. 

We finally made back to I-40 passing through the Town of Williams. In terms of touristy things, we liked Williams better because it wasn't so artsy-fartsy. Its raison d'etre was a sincere and deep dedication to Route 66. Seemed like a lot more unpretentious fun.

Today we didn't make many pictures but we had a pretty good time. 

 

825 - Photography While Wandering Around

Monday was Labor Day and we were hoping that everyone was heading back home so they wouldn’t be hanging around places we wanted to photograph. (Did I mention that we like to avoid people when we are photographing the landscape?) We went back to the Graffiti Motel (we photographed that place on Sunday) because Brooks had some new ideas on how to photograph the place. I enjoy that type of photography, so it was a good start.  I could make some more pictures of that place. The second time you go somewhere it is easier to photograph because you have some knowledge of what to expect and how to react. 

The graffiti was part of a project called “paint the desert” and closer inspection showed that some of the graffiti was actually photographic. They might have been billboard type printing put on the side of buildings. I thought that was pretty neat. A few miles further down the road there was another example of this project. One of the photographs was on an isolated building.

We explored north on US89 going past the cut off for Tuba City and made it most of the way to Page before we turned around to head back. By that time it was early evening and the light for  landscape photography was exceptional. 

Just driving along and you can see a rock formation like this. You have to stop and make some images. 

One of the things that happens when wandering around is you notice a spot and say, "That will be great this evening." We saw such a spot, some Bentonite hills in the morning. We returned on the way home at a better time. Bentonite is grey, dull and lifeless during the day, but near sunset it is an entirely different thing. 

The thing is, when the light is wonderful ordinary landscapes are beautiful. Shadows, textures and colors come to life. We photographed until we lost the light. Yet another day we made it home after dark.