Postcards from the Creative Journey

953 Delaying tactics; Why We Don’t Finish Photographs First Published 12/13/2020

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.

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A side note here. While I was creating blog posts for this year's Photo Safari, I decided to take a look at this post. When I opened it up, I noticed that I had posted the image, but not the text. What a wonderful example of not finishing something. I laughed at the irony, went back to the original post and copied the text here. This was an object lesson in finishing a project. 

 

952 A Day of Pleasant Surprises

We took off this morning with nothing special in mind other than a general idea of heading west to the Klickitat River starting at the Columbia River and then circling back around to our base camp. The other day we passed by a small roadside fire. Someone was already on their phone summoning help so we kept on driving. We stopped by that spot this morning and were shocked to see how far the fire spread before they stopped it. 

We stopped by the Maryhill Museum recreation of Stonehenge to stop by and take a look. About an hour later we left after having a fun time. I used an incredibly wide angle 7-14 mm zoom lens (35 mm equivalent to a 14-28 mm) and had a fun time playing with shadows at the monument.

Brooks had a 6 mm fisheye lens (which covers 180 degrees in a circular image) which was even more fun to play with. 

Our journey up the Klickitat River Valley turned into a stone cold winner. The motivation was for Brooks to continue with his river portraits. The lighting conditions were different than on Saturday and not exactly to his liking. The rain we had on Monday finally made it to the Klickitat. The water had a cloudy green color and was not as photogenic as Sunday. The volume and speed of the river also increased, submerging some of the river rocks. The big surprise was an unexpected waterfall that was spectacular. There was a lot of jockeying for a proper camera position, and the results were worthwhile.

We made a lot of images today and these will eventually become components of multiple projects. Today was a wonderful photographic experience.

951 Taking a Day Off

Columbia Plateau

Rain was the forecast for most of the day, so it was a day away from photography and a day to catch up on domestic chores and web surfing. My photo buddy Brooks Jensen was catching up with his business activities so we stayed in camp today and didn’t go hunting photographs. Here are a few images from the previous days just to keep the mojo working.

Rock Wall, Deschutes River Canyon

Grasses, Rock Creek

Oak Trees and Cave, Rock Creek Canyon

Trout Creek Road, Klickitat River

950 Rollin’ on the River

The Mojo came back in full force this afternoon. The smoke and haze made photographing long distances impossible. Mount Adams disappeared in the haze. We went after a more accessible subject.

Two days ago we stopped at a view point and saw a river canyon with a road. It looked just like something we could photograph well. Today we found how to access the road and made it to the bottom of the canyon. The haze and smoke moderated the light and the conditions were just about perfect. 

The Klickitat River became the subject for the afternoon. We have photographed the Klickitat River closer to where it joins the Columbia before. Today’s efforts helped me continue a project on what could become a Portrait of a River.

After a few days of warm up, concern and rethinking, it’s good to be back in the groove.

This morning it's raining, a rare thing on the Columbia Plateau. I'm hoping this will knock down a lot of dust and reduce the threat of prairie fires. We saw a prairie fire a few days ago and it moved incredibly fast. 

949 - Workin’ the Mojo

After experiencing a bad day, there’s always the challenge to respond. It’s a return to basics, checking those things that are key to success. We did that after a pep talk and some thoughts about how to approach the day. We sallied forth.

Today’s adventure got us workin’ the Mojo and it’s going to get better. There are some forest fires in the Pacific Northwest and the smoke and agricultural dust are acting as a gigantic soft box creating some lovely directional light. We were able to find a nice canyon with the right position in relation to the sun and made images during our exploration.

Things are looking up. 

948 When the Art Fights Back – Part I

Sometimes my projects fight back. I publish The Lipka Journal (please click on the link to my website at the top of the page and see the latest issue) each month. I enjoy creating three or four projects and assembling them in a pdf document for you. Sometimes it’s really easy to pick out three projects (I have a waiting list of projects to choose from) to create a Journal. Then, there are other times when the art fights back. The images don’t click as well as I thought, there might be technical issues I never saw in the proofing stage. The individual image suites might not like each other, and they quarrel and sulk and are most uncooperative. Then there are the words. Sometimes, no matter how hard I try I cannot find the right words to make everything fall into place. Sometimes I can find some great words, but they don’t match the images.

As Roseanne Roseannadanna always said, “it's always something — if it’s not one thing, it's another.”

Tune in next Sunday, gentle readers to see one method to defeat art that is fighting you. Because sometimes art is a struggle you must win.

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This image is from the July Lipka Journal. Please click on the link above to go to my web site and see the battleground for this epic struggle between Art and myself. 

947 Missing My Mojo

We’ve noticed that on this safari we are missing our Mojo. This is not  a good thing because when your creative Mojo goes AWOL, the art life becomes much more of a problem. The current challenge facing us is how to respond to the area we are in to create groups of photographs. Recent safaris have placed us in beautiful places, Northern Arizona and the Oregon Coast, but this trip on the Columbia Plateau is far different and proving more of a challenge to create art.

The big difference between what we are facing right now is the huge difference between taking photographs and making photographs. In our last two locations it was easy to take photographs because of the innate beauty of the locations. The challenge we face now is to figure out how to create artwork in an area where beauty is a lot more elusive than our previous locations.

The challenge is to teach ourselves how to make the photographs in this part of the world that are beyond pretty pictures. We need to figure out how to make images that are more than just what we saw when we took the picture. 

This has turned into an intense series of discussions that have been a whole lot more interesting than going out chasing scenery.. 

We shall look for inspiration today, not images. If we find our Mojo, so much the better. 

946 - More Stories than Photos

Today was a day for lots of driving and only a few photographs. The quest was to make some “closer” photographs of Mount Adams.It was one of those days where the stories were almost as good as the photographs. 

We drove Forest Service Roads as far up Mount Adams as we could until we reached the border with the Yakima Nation. Without the proper permits we could go no further. We turned around.

On the way down Mount Adams  we saw a pickup truck parked on the side of the road with a satellite antenna and solar panels on the top. We stopped and spent a few minutes talking with a young fellow who was on his lunch break. He was working remotely from the tailgate of his pickup truck. His main concern was that his Yeti cooler could only keep ice frozen for three days, so he had to move every third day,

Further down the mountain we came upon a traffic jam of three trucks. A two foot diameter tree fell across the road after we went by earlier. Of course there was no cellular service at that location. Not very many people travel with the equipment to deal with large fallen trees. Happily a large truck was coming in the other direction. This fellow had a large towing strap which he wrapped around the tree and pulled it out of the way. We thanked him and he continued up the mountain and we continued down. 

We skipped lunch today so we stopped at the Glenwood Station for an early dinner and enjoyed a fresh, homemade Marionberry pie. (With ice cream, of course.) It was glorious. We drove back to our base camp.

We took a few images on the way home.

945 - Gold and Blue on Safari

Gold fields of harvested grain and blue skies. That’s what’s in store for this fall’s Photo Safari from high atop the Columbia Plateau in the State of Washington. Lots of people (me included) have photographed the Columbia Gorge from the Oregon side, but this time we’re staying in Washington and doing our exploring in areas much less traveled. The first few days are always reconnaissance and we just drove around the plateau getting ourselves acquainted with the territory. 

This trip will be as much about the clouds and sky as anything else. The land here is wide open and there are wheat farms and vineyards. And wind turbines. Lots of wind turbines.

Paul Strand once wrote about the landscape of Texas and said something like there weren’t many features in the land, but what man does to that landscape is interesting. We’re going to try to collect some interesting images that tell a stories about the landscape.

Stay tuned for daily updates!

944 Did You Need a Name for that Project? First Published 4/8/2018

You created photographs, processed them, edited them spent three weeks sweating out the artists statement and the only thing holding you up is what you are going to call your project. You created a project name, you just don’t know it. Go back and read the statement you’ve spent weeks working on. The title of your project is a phrase hidden in your artist’s statement. All you have to do is find the three or four words that are the very essence of the project. Look through everything because the right words may have been edited out of the final statement.

Once you figure out that the name of the project is in your artist’s statement, then people will think you are clever to have created a project where the title, the statement and the photographs are all working together.

943 Don’t Get Locked On

If you know what you are looking for, if you have decided on your subject and what it is supposed to mean, then you should not be surprised when you find what you are looking for. Some photographers will do a lot of research on potential areas and then go out and find those images. Sometimes they are referred to as “trophy hunters.” It goes like, “we need to make a photograph of Yosemite from the Wawona Tunnel Parking lot, Half Dome at sunset and maybe a Moonrise near Hernandez, New Mexico.” Let's go do it.

This is perfectly acceptable if you are out on assignment, or if you must make an image to fill in the hole of a specific project. Of course, this also means you might miss out on many other interesting things you could encounter along the way. There is a distinct difference between being focused on creating images and being afflicted with the tunnel vision of bringing back a specific image.

Leave yourself some time and some room to fall into something wonderful.

942 Photographs Without Memories First Published 8/19/2018

I have photographs I cannot remember making. They are mine, of course, but I have no memories of how they came about. I recognize the locations, sometimes, but exactly how I came to make them I do not remember. I wonder about these photographs without memories. How can they be memorable images if I can’t remember making the images themselves? Could they be great images if they were made when I was in some kind of subconscious state where I had achieved enlightenment and my conscious self was not aware of the subconscious creative me?

I had to dig this photograph out of the archives. I can’t tell you about when this was made, but I do know it was made in Eastern Oregon on one of my photo safaris with Brooks Jensen. This is the type of subject that today would be the subject of multiple photographs. But back when I was using the 5x7 view camera you had to settle for just one photograph.