Postcards from the Creative Journey

1026 So Much for “More is Better”

"I went wild photographically speaking, averaging fourteen negatives a day…” Letter from Edward Weston to Cole Weston, March 1, 1938

Well, unless you’ve had he experience of wrestling with an 8x10 field camera you might not be impressed with Edward’s comment to Cole. Those of us that have had that experience know that is just a whole heck of a lot work. We can now operate in burst mode that will crack out 14 exposures in under a second. Will they be any better than Weston’s fourteen? More than likely not.

I think this is just another confirmation that photography almost a hundred years ago was far, far different from what we practice today.

---

For those of you that might be interested the above image was originally exposed on 8 x 10 sheet film.

1025 A Dollar a Picture, First Published 5/1/2016

Hanging around is a good thing. Some photographers are more concerned with mobility than productivity. These are the photographers that go from spot to spot quickly, jumping out of their vehicles, snapping a few quick images, jumping back in the vehicle and moving on down the road. They make a quick, obvious photograph and are gone.

I am more likely to get out, walk around, take a look, observe, study, consider and then maybe get out the camera and begin photographing for an hour or two. Then I might entertain the thought of returning if the spot is really that good. Taking time to understand the surroundings gives the advantage of learning to see what is special about the place. I learned this by being a view camera photographer for decades. When film was a dollar a sheet, you took your time and made sure that the image you wanted was worth the money, time and effort it took to make the negative. So, you pretty much had to hang around a bunch, look carefully and visualize your final print before you committed to spending a dollar on a negative.

The objective is to get past the obvious image and see what is really there, what is really worth photographing and finding what other photographers walk right by. While they are speeding off to the next photo site, I am making the photographs they left behind.

1024 Which Way To Point The Camera?

“It has reached a point where photography, whose entire purpose is to look at the world beyond, has become about the self with the advent of the selfie.”

I can’t remember where I found this quote, but boy, oh boy did that person ever hit the nail right on the head. Over the last few years, I’ve been photographing in some incredibly popular and scenic areas. There is a certain demographic that piles out of the car, heads to the scenic overlook and makes a selfie. Taking time to enjoy a view that would lead one to contemplate the natural beauty of the landscape and ponder the forces that created the land is foresworn by that selfie with a pouting face and high fashion model pose.

I’m just not with it anymore.

1023 Exit, Kent School, First Published 9/13/2015

An advantage to camping and photographing is being able to photograph right up until it is almost dark. And then, be able to be in the right spot to catch the early morning light. We camped in the parking lot of the Kent school (or what was left of it) in Eastern Oregon. We learned at the local café that a man bought the old school with the intention of turning it into a school for diesel mechanics. He moved his family into the school while he made changes to the building and tried to establish his school. They said a kerosene heater was the cause of the fire. Because it was so far away from any fire-fighting equipment, the school was heavily damaged. The family got out, but the building was uninhabitable.

The remote location was not a good thing for the family, but being very far away from civilization is good for photographers. At night, the only available light was starlight. It was so dark I was able to unload and load my sheet film holders in the camper, a task usually done under a light tight blanket. For those of you that have never experienced the joy of sheet film unloading and unloading in a hot camper under a couple of wool blankets, this is a big thing. You’ll have to trust me on this.

With such a dark night, sleep came easily. Until sometime in the middle of the night, our camper was buzzed by a Navy bomber. The roar of the jet engines was deafening and I was not only awakened immediately, I truly think I bounced off the ceiling of the camper. It took quite a while to get back to sleep after that.

But the next morning, the early morning light was great. The light layer of clouds filtered the light enough to soften the edges of hard shadows. We were we were ready to photograph the ruins of the Kent school.

1022 It Was Just Right Around Here, Somewhere

All I have to do is find it. That would be a photographic file in my Lightroom catalog. With about 70,000 files it’s not like the good old days when I only had a couple of hundred large format negatives to sort through to find what I was looking for. With my digital cameras creating perfectly focused and perfectly exposed images every (well, just about) time, looking for a single image among 70,000 images is a little bit more work.

If you come up with a great method for being able to access and find specific digital files, by all means, do it. It’s worth the time and effort if you want to find exactly what you are looking for quickly.

On the other hand, you can be amazed at the great images you find as you look for “the one.”

I start these searches looking for a photograph and I wind up finding memories.

 

1021 More Learning From Snapshots, First Published 6/23/2013

After wondering why I didn’t buy one of those cords for my eyeglasses while I was on vacation, I related that to a recent round of golf. My level of play on the links is directly attributable to how quickly and accurately I can find and fix my mistakes. I find that I can almost always accurately figure out what was wrong with my golf swing the day following the round. That’s not a real big help. As I play more rounds of golf each season I can reduce the time from mistake to correction from the next day to before the next shot. Being able to correct mistakes on the fly is the key to not having the same mistake hurt you over and over again.

So it is with the photography. When you can figure out what you are doing wrong quickly and make sure you eliminate, or keep from repeating that same mistake your photography will get much better. That’s why I think that digital photography is a grand improvement over the analog type I practiced for decades. The results are immediately visible and corrections can be made immediately. Some that decry “chimping” as the mark of a rank amateur, but I am happy for instantaneous feedback and use it as much as I can.

1020 Equipment Is Not All That

We have the finest cameras in all photographic history. The lenses can resolve greater detail than ever before. Our darkrooms are now computers. The software can manipulate exposures with far greater precision and editing capabilities are far beyond what we had even a few years ago. Printing of images can be accomplished with a few keystrokes of a computer. The results are far better than what came out of a wet darkroom and accomplished with less effort, smell and time.

Why aren’t the photographs any better than they were in the past?

---

Not only is today Easter Sunday, it's also the day (maybe) of the last round of the Master's Golf Tournament. I had to include a photo of the Twelfth Hole, also known as "The Azalea Hole."

1019 The Accidental Project, First Published 3/13/2020

I didn’t mean to start a new project, but it just sort of happened. While searching for images for the Daily Photograph Blog (see the link at the top of the page), I started seeing some interesting images. A theme developed right in front of me. I saw a recurring subject in many places over many years. I had no idea that particular subject kept showing up over and over again. I had no particular vision of this theme happening, it just did.

I have no idea why it happened, but now I just have to finish the project. I don’t know how it really started, but I do know that I will have to finish it.

---

And finish it I did. The project is "Set a Spell" and is featured in the latest issue of The Lipka Journal

1018 Format and Approach

While collecting images for my “More Memories than Dreams” retrospectiveproject, I have noticed a change in the images through time. I started with a 35 mm camera and I took many photographs of subjects exploring different viewpoints and wound up creating small projects with multiple images.

I began using a view camera and both the subject and number of photographs I made decreased dramatically both in variety and quantity. The image content changed as I started to concentrate on the “greatest hit” photograph. I attributed the decrease in the number of photographs to the expense of large format film and the small number of film holders I owned. If you begin the day with the knowledge you can only make eight photographs that day, you spend a lot of time selecting your composition and work very hard to make sure that image "comes out." The project orientation of my 35 mm camera images disappeared until I could afford a larger number of film holders. Only after about fifteen years of large format photography could I afford to begin a day of photography with twenty film holders.

When I transitioned from the view camera to a digital camera, the 35 mm size and insignificant cost of recording images sent me back to the 35 mm ethos of capturing many variations of different subjects.

I wonder what path my photographic development would have taken had I not become involved with large format photography.

---

It's a new month and there is a new issue of The Lipka Journal at my website. Stop by and download the latest issue.