Postcards from the Creative Journey

1008 The One That Got Away

Fishermen and golfers tell those stories about the fish they couldn’t land or the great shot that “missed by that much” (as you might hear Don Adams say in his Maxwell Smart role). We photographers have these stories too. It involves another photographer going to spot that we have photographed many times. You recognize the location, the spot they stood, and dagnabbit, they saw something that we didn’t. To add insult to the bruised ego, their photograph is better than the ones we made in the same location.

I received an email from Notre Dame, (my alma mater) with a photograph that would have fit in perfectly with my publication, I Raise My Eyes but it is one I didn’t see when I was photographing.

At that point, all you can think of is, “Wow. Nice photograph, and dagnabbit, they saw something I missed. “

1007 The Whole Thing Is About The Clouds, First Published 1/17/2021

A great sky can save a photograph. The quest is to find the right type of clouds, the right number of clouds and (of course) the right lighting. We didn’t have any clouds today so the problem to be solved is how to divide up the sky to avoid the blank areas.

A few months ago Adobe unveiled their “sky replacement filter.” Not happy with the sky in your image? Adobe can help you replace that bland sky with something dramatic. You have multiple choices of Adobe clouds or maybe a cloud formation you photographed. The technology is very sophisticated and it works.

This doesn’t bother me too much, because in the early days of photography, blue sensitive emulsions required two negatives for a photograph. You needed an exposure for the blue sky and clouds and then another exposure for the foreground. The two negatives would be printed on the same piece of paper separately to get a proper exposure for the scene. Sometimes photographers would use the same clouds in multiple images. Photographers even traded (or sold) good sky negatives to other photographers. It’s a photographic tradition updated to the twenty first century.

---

It didn’t take long for me to exploit this function. The April 1, 2022 Lipka Journal contained a project where all the photographs used the sky replacement tool, and because it was April 1, I used the same sky for each replacement. No one told me they noticed the same clouds in every image.

1006 A Follow up on Marinating Your Project

After writing the initial blog post, I came back later to see what I could add, and it is simply this. Walking away from your Project for a week or two to let it marinate means that you didn’t stay up all night the night before the deadline completing the work. It meant that you planned and executed your Project to allow time for the marinating to commence. You built time for marination into your project schedule.

This works not just for your Projects but for blog posts, too.

1005 Reverend Joe Dan Donny's* Home for Orphan Prints, First Published 7/4/2021

I am trying to get rid of old prints to eliminate images that don’t mean much. I’ve gone through Van Dyke prints, cyanotypes, platinotypes and the silver gelatin prints (both on fiber base and RC paper). I’ve disposed of the silver gelatin prints, but the alt process prints I’ve removed from the mat board and keeping them in some of the remaining archival storage boxes. So far, I’ve emptied five 11x14 and six 16x20 storage boxes.

I keep finding orphan prints. I don’t know why I have so many prints that do not belong to any project. They are the orphan prints that have lived here for decades. I think I have a stack of orphan digital prints several inches thick that belong to neither project nor exhibition. They are all fine photographs. I can’t imagine why I made so many photographs that have no “home” (that would be part of a project or exhibit). Out they went with their analog brethren. If I do need to make a reprint (in the near future, at least) I have the printer and paper to make another.

---

*The Reverend Joe Dan Donny is one of my alter egos, the itinerant, tent show preacher and founder of the Church of the Holy Polaroids. The founding emanates from the days of developing Polaroid film on cold mornings by sandwiching the film pack between your warm hands to hasten the development of the image. It looked like prayer, and prayer was often needed to assist with the success of the photograph.

---

Boy, did I goof up on this post. There are those photographers who always try to embellish their deeds in order to make them sound much more impressive than they really are. That's OK with me, self promotion is one of those necessary evils of being an artist. If you don't tell others about what you do, then how will they find out? Upon reflection, I have decided to embellish and embiggen my description of the disposal of my old photographic prints. Ahem. (Listen to this.) My vintage prints are now part of the permanent collection of the Wake County Landfill. 

This sounds so much better than saying I threw out a whole bunch of old prints. 

1004 Marinating Your Project

We marinate meat to add subtlety and richness to the meal. I have a similar process for my photographic projects. When I think I have completed the work on an issue of The Lipka Journal, a blurb book, or a blog post such as this one I walk away from it for at least a few days, or if I have the time a week or two. This absence allows the work to marinate, age and remove itself from my mind. When I return to the work after a period of absence, I see the work with “fresh eyes” to discern weaknesses and think of improvements to make the Project more successful.

Then I make the changes and let it marinate a little bit longer.

1003 The Concept Of Constant Thinking, First Published on 5/30/2021

A few years back I wrote about how my professional and artistic life complemented each other in writing. At that time my career involved a lot of writing and I found it very easy to create blog posts, project statements and other photographic texts because I was used to expressing my thoughts in written words.

Now that I have evolved into a “post career lifestyle” I no longer have a professional requirement to create a lot of text. My blog requires new content on a weekly basis, plus a reach back to earlier posts on each Thursday. It is getting more difficult to push the rock because I don’t have the convenience (?) of a career to exercise my writing skills.

Over the next couple of months I will be out and about and as a result I had to “get ahead” of the blogging requirements by preparing a month or two of new material. It was not as daunting a task as I originally thought because once I began “thinking photographically” the new topics miraculously appeared.

The lesson learned is to keep thinking and the topics and ideas will appear.

 

1002 A Double Lesson Learned

I wanted to assemble a specific photographic project for an issue of The Lipka Journal. I went back through my Lightroom catalog and found the images I wanted to use. I selected, edited, perfected the images and even put them into the first draft of the Journal.

Once I saw them, I was not the least bit happy with them. Something happened to the images between Lightroom and InDesign. I tried to figure out what the technical problem was, but after looking at the images I finally figured out what was wrong. What was wrong was me.

I went back to Lightroom and sought out more images and discovered that I visited that same beach twice. I stumbled upon the first set of images and used them without doing a more exhaustive search. The second set of images was much better than the first and that’s what made it into the Journal.

A lesson learned twice over. Your first visit to a place may not provide good images. A further investigation gave better images. Your first search of the Lightroom database needs to be something more than cursory. When selecting images of the same place make sure that you select the correct images.

---

Double extra bonus points lesson learned. When editing this post, I thought there was something else to learn here. It is this; the more you photograph one place the better your images will be. I came back the second time and made better images. I’ll work up this idea in a future blog post.

See what I mean. The Project is entitled The Big Picture in the February Lipka Journal. Click on the link at the top of the page to reach my website where you can download the latest free PDF copy of The Lipka Journal. 

1001 The Siren’s Song First Published 7/5/2015

This is probably a repeat of a repeat, but since it fits so well with last Thursday's post "But it's not ready yet," I had to use it for this week's Throwback Thursday post. To my credit, the above photograph is a copy of a Platinum Print from the Project in question. 

---

As long as we’re talking about letting that project go, I always remember this story:

Being asked to present your photographs at a workshop is a pretty high honor for the non-professional artist/photographer. This type of invitation is a real boost to the ego and the experience can needlessly boost your self-esteem to great heights. And so, it was with me. I presented my photographs at a workshop and greatly impressed the participants. They hung on every word I spoke, pored over my photographs and discussed among themselves in hushed, respectful tones my artist’s statement.

After my presentation was completed, one of the participants came to me and quietly said, “We all noticed a spelling error in your statement.” I thought I wrote the sentence, “I heeded its siren song.” My fingers typed an extra letter at the beginning of the word “its.” The consonant added at the beginning of the word “its” is already in the word - and it is not the letter “s.”

This is why I no longer rely on spell check. Proofread, proofread, proofread and then let that project go.

---

If you want to read the entire, G rated artist statement, the Project is Light Through a Window on my website. 

And while you're there don't forget to download the February issue of The Lipka Journal!