Postcards from the Creative Journey

1108 How to versus Why to?

The technical aspects of photographic education are far better and more plentiful (and less expensive) than when I was first learning photography. Back in the olden days (of the twentieth century) learning photography was accomplished in a classroom, or if you were the self-educating type, direct from a book. In short, one really had to look for photographic education. Today, technical education comes from a variety of You Tube “experts” who sometimes provide understandable and usable education. Or at least they (maybe) get you close enough so you can figure out the solution to your problem. Today, the “How to” aspect of photography is easily solved.

The ”Why to” question of photographing is still elusive as ever. Figuring out what you want to say, how to say it and then make sure those thoughts translate into a photographic image remain as elusive as they always have been. The “Why” question can only be answered by you in your own good time. There are those that want to sell you a workshop on unleashing your creative potential through mental gymnastics. There may be some value in those activities from competent teachers (and that’s still a crap shoot) with thousands of dollars in workshop fees at stake.

There is no easy answer to the “why” question, but it’s always been that way and will continue to be that way. The art half of art photography will always be the difficult part to accomplish.

1107 There Were No Good Old Days, First Published 5/3/2020

In gathering images for my Daily Photograph Blog, I get to go back, I mean really far back, into my LightRoom database to seek out old images that just didn’t fit into the projects I was doing at the time. My first digital images were made in about 2004 and that is really old, in digital terms of course, and the rapid growth in digital technology is quite evident in the quality of the files. Fifteen year old digital files are not as good as the files I am creating today. Mechanically, today’s lenses and sensors are orders of magnitude better and then there’s the software. Take my word for it Lightroom CC2020 is much, much better than Photoshop 3.0. Current software is so much better that it makes the “old” digital files look really pretty good.

Now, the thought strikes me that someday, (and it probably won’t be too soon from now) we can look back and call today the “Good Old Days” and wonder how we survived with such primitive digital tools. Digital tools will continue to improve, but…

Silver prints are frozen in time. There is no big difference in silver prints made today and silver prints made thirty or forty years ago. The same could be said for platinum prints. The technology used for these two images creating processes has reached the ultimate level. There is no reason to advance this technology because there is no reward for a better way to make a gelatin silver or platinum print.

A few years ago Brooks Jensen (of LensWork fame) and I attended an exhibit of Ansel Adams Masterwork Prints. The best prints of the best images Ansel made. It was a great exhibit by a master printer of gelatin silver prints. We both left the exhibit feeling the images were a little bit flat and a soft. We knew these were among the best gelatin silver prints ever made and they came up short against our current print experience of digital prints.

Eventually, there will be some time in the not too distant future when our current image capturing and printing technology will no longer be current. Then the prints we make today will look just as dated as the silver prints we made thirty years ago.

1106 Open Heart, Open Mind or Open Wallet?

Approach photography as an art, with an open heart and open mind, not as a technical pursuit which requires an approach with an open wallet. The answer, my friends, is not the pursuit of gear, but the pursuit of communicating your ideas, thoughts observations and to illustrate how your life (or the life of others) is reflected in the images you produce. One does not need the latest, greatest (and increasingly expensive) equipment to create art. It might be fun and ego boosting to have the best kit available, but doesn’t it feel a bit hollow when the images you create aren’t any better than the ones you made a few years ago with far less sophisticated (and less expensive) equipment?

Remember, the artists that made the photographs you admire did so with equipment that was far, far less advanced, and probably far less expensive than the equipment you have now. That art was created with an open mind and an open heart.

1105 A Point of View (Mestrovic’s Pieta), First Published 3/27/2016

One of my photographic mantras is about where you stand (See Where To Stand) and when to press the shutter button. I am beginning to think this might be a universal truth in all of art and I would like to add another data point. I was photographing a large religious sculpture from a standing position. It looked like a snapshot from that vantage point. The problem with the composition was a “kneeler” (or Prie-dieu for the cultured) directly in front of the sculpture. I really didn’t want to move it, so I thought I would crouch down a bit to take it out of the composition. While on my knees looking up at the sculpture I understood the correct vantage point for this sculpture was kneeling in front of it. The photograph made from that vantage point was more than a snapshot.

1102 You Aren’t Using The Latest Camera And Software?

Your technology might not be the latest and greatest, but that’s not to say it doesn’t work at all. What new technology means is that there are now more ways than ever to create your own photographic vision. We still have old technology, and we can mix and match old and new technologies to get even more ways to produce your art.

I used to make platinum prints from large format negatives. Then I scanned large format negatives and had them enlarged by a pre-press production house. When desktop printers evolved, I abandoned the pre-press process and printed the enlarged negatives on overhead transparency.

The more technological advantages are present the more options we have to create our art.

1101 Getting What It Takes Part II of II First Published 4/13/2014

Creating photographic images is not a twenty first century task. Creating photographic compositions does not have a quick start guide and requires much more than pointing and clicking. It is not a skill that anyone can be mastered in a weekend. Some may not even master this skill in their lifetime.

There are also mechanical and physical skills to master that just take time. Camera handling and learning what the buttons do can be learned quickly, but do require some repetition to become ingrained behaviors. Beyond the physical skills, there are the aesthetic “rules” that must be practiced, learned, internalized (and quite possibly broken in a grand fashion) in order to develop a personal vision. This type of experiential learning happens in a different manner. This is where the ten thousand repetitions rule enters the play. Photography is learning by doing, making and correcting mistakes. It is an iterative process that takes time and requires input from others and time to understand why things work or don’t work. It is a social type of learning that requires input and feedback from others. It is very different than sitting in a chair, pointing and clicking and interpreting error messages. There is no doubt in my mind new photographers find it easier and quicker to learn software than photography precisely because software is easier to learn than photography.

What it all comes down to is this: You can teach software. You can’t teach experience. Software can be picked up quickly and proficiency is achieved in short order. It takes a much longer time to learn how to make an artistic composition that means something to more than just the photographer. It is because we have these diametrically opposed styles of learning we have amateur images with professional manipulation.

1100 Pacing of Photographs

I noticed something the other day while reading. I am a fan of spy thriller novels and was taking a break between novels featuring Court Gentry. I chose a Mike Hammer novel just as a change of pace. I found that I had to change my approach in reading each novel. The non-stop action of the Gentry novels could be read in a relatively hectic environment, but the Hammer novels required a much more sedate and quiet atmosphere.

Pacing is important to the images in The Lipka Journal. Big landscapes seem to go by quickly and the more intimate landscapes or interior images are much more deliberate in their viewer requirements. I tend to include more landscape photographs than detailed views of the world in an image suite.

1099 Getting What It Takes Part I of II First Published 4/6/2014

Being a photographer these days consists of being a lot more than a photographer. In the past, a photographer exposed a negative, developed film and made prints. A straight forward proposition; a single skill set focused on the production of an artifact. Today, I create a digital file, use a computer and eight different software programs to catalog, view, perfect, remove noise, desktop publish and create content in three distinct formats. Along the way I design graphic, layout page, select fonts, write and edit stories. I have been known to write poetry, too. Not only is there knowledge required to manipulate all these software packages, the operating system and the coordination of all the programs requires yet another set of skills. Photography is a lot more complex than it used to be. The complexity expands the spectrum of results, from good to bad.

I think one of the reasons for my disappointment in contemporary photographs is contemporary photographers have to acquire all these disparate skills simultaneously. Trying to learn so many different skills at once is incredibly difficult because each of these very different skills is learned in a very different way at a very different rate.

New photographers are used to learning software because learning new software is a skill set that is a requirement for citizens of the twenty first century. Software authors have developed educational methods to get users competent with their software in very short order.

We’ll continue next week with why you can be taught software but you have to learn photography.

1098 Sequencing Images in a Project

There are many ways to sequence images. Whether you have a gallery exhibition, a book, or another collection of photographs, how the viewer sees the images is usually under your control. People, being people may just ignore your hard work, but that is just part of being an artist. Sequences may be chronological, geographic or thematic, or some other method of arranging images. The most important thing to remember in sequencing images is make sure there are enough images to tell your story and no more. The second most important thing to remember is as the viewer progresses through the images, there should be a connection between adjacent images that advances the story you are telling.

That’s not really helpful advice, like saying that fifteen images is the perfect number for any exhibition, but the key to sequencing images is to know what your story is and to tell just tell the story.

How quickly you tell the story is the pacing of the images you sequence. Next week, I’ll write a bit about pacing of photographs.