Joe Lipka Weekly Photo Blog

The 99.5%

Sand and Snow,

Xiang Sha Wan, Inner Mongolia

It is said that 99.5% of everything is crud (or worse, if would rather go for the R rated version of the quote). I think that continues to be one of life’s immutable laws. Or at least one that is not really worth disproving. I say this because I read a lament current photo sharing sites seem to make the 99.5% figure seem much higher. That may be so because 99.5% of a large number is a lot more than 99.5% of a small number. There are so many more ways to capture an image (or what we fogeys used to quaintly call, “taking a picture”) and there are so many more people doing this it stands to reason that the 99.5% is now a huge number. That’s why we seem to see so many crummy photographs on image sharing sites. In the old days, we had the courtesy to not inflict 99.5% of our photos on an unsuspecting public. Instead, our innate sense of decency impelled us to keep 99.5% of our photographs in shoe boxes under the bed.

So this little rant got me thinking. When I turned fifty years old, I created the “Fifty Project,” which was my selection of the fifty best photographs I had made up to that point in my life. In selecting the images, I discovered that I had not made the requisite 10,000 negatives required by St. Ansel. I chose the fifty images from about 8,000 negatives. In my current Lightroom database, I have almost 6,000 images and may have that many more archived on external drives. You won’t see them because about 99.5% of the photographs I take are images not good enough to share with anyone – and I plan on keeping it that way.

The Dutch Masters

Damaged Window,

Alkabo, North Dakota

I went to see the Rembrandt paintings at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) a few weeks ago. Because Rembrandt was a portraitist, there wasn’t much to inspire me beyond his great lighting technique (he was so influential, we talk about “Rembrandt lighting” to this day). Maybe painters could admire and learn from the brush stroke techniques or some other painterly things. For me, there wasn’t that much to learn.

In contrast, a few years ago I went to the NCMA to see the paintings of Monet. While the painting techniques were (again) lost to me because I don’t paint, I did come away with two impressive pieces of knowledge. One, any man that can take his wife, children and mistress on a six month art safari is truly some kind of crazy. Second, the man knew where to put his easel. Looking at his paintings I came to the conclusion that there was absolutely no way I could improve on any of the compositions by changing the point of view. Monet’s command of light was also exquisite. He was in control of the two most important things any artist needs to control; where to stand and how to use light properly on his selected subject. This experience reminds of one of Life’s Lessons as documented by Brooks Jensen. “You will learn more about art from an artist than a photographer.”

A Second Look

Church, Oysterville, Washington

While I was posting last week’s blog photo, I looked at it again. I started some self critique. Did I stand in the right place? Did I include enough or too much sky? Why didn’t I get more separation among the umbrellas on the left side? I find myself doing that with lots of my photographs. I try to go back to that spot in my mind and remember where I was and what I was thinking at the time of the photograph. The goal is to identify the answer the questions, “If I could make that photograph again, what would I change to make that happen?” Then, “Would I have been able to make that change?” And then, here is the last question, “Why didn’t you see that when you were there the first time?”

Playing the Monday Morning Quarterback is a valid exercise and is something we should all do because it gives us additional insight into our “in the field” creative process. Those of us that grew up photographing without the benefit of the digital darkroom know the importance of “getting it right the first time.” Back in the old days if you didn’t get it right at the time of exposure, anything you tried to do to “save” the negative didn’t help the image quality. That’s why we constantly reviewed our field photographic technique. So the review is important, but it doesn’t mean much unless you remember to take your own advice and change your behavior in the field.

Thinking about change is good. Making that change is even better.

Post Script: Add something else to worry about. Where you standing in the right place? Scroll down on this blog post and compare.

There’s No App for That

Post Apocalyptic Play Ground, #2
Xiang Sha Wan

I’ve got all this great technology to help me with my photographs. I have used photoshop for almost 15 years. I love Lightroom. I am adept at using all this software to bend, push and pull and polish pixels to meet my every desire. It is a wonderfully efficient, fast and convenient way to process images. Could someone tell me why I still have RAW files that are over two years old? In the pre-digital age I always had a (light tight) box of year old (undeveloped) negatives. I just accepted that years were a typical length of time it would take for me to get film negatives developed so I could determine if the negative was worthy of a full blown “Fine Art Print.” In those days, there was a lot more work to do to get to a print via the wet darkroom than through my computer. Being an engineer by training, I have come to the obvious conclusion taking more time to do less work is really not an improvement in the process.

In true engineering fashion, I analyzed my project process. One of the surest ways to flounder and is to not define what the end of your project looks like. I really don’t like to move forward with a project until I know what the project will look like when it is finished. When I was making single photographs to hang on the wall, this wasn’t an issue because a single photograph hanging on the wall was the end of the project. Now, the project is the project is much more complex; a dozen photographs on a single theme with a written introduction. It takes a lot more time to come to realize an aesthetically complex vision.

Even though we have great technology, it still comes down to how fast we can get inspiration from our mind to the final image. I think the creative part of the art process stubbornly remains detached from the technology. The decision on how to approach the art still must come from the heart and from the mind, not from an integrated circuit or a hunk of software. The tools have changed significantly, but the inspiration and thought still come from the heart. Happily, there's no App for that.

With Great Power, etc., etc.

Hangin' with the Camel Drivers, Xiang Sha Wan

Photoshop is a very powerful tool. You can do almost anything to an image. BUT SHOULD YOU? Unleashing your creativity by using 1,000 new amazing Photoshop filters is not the path to artistic success. In the olden days (when we had to make prints in the darkroom), Fred Picker opined time and again that you didn’t know how much manipulation was just right until you went too far. When you went too far it was easy to throw that print away and know for sure you had the best image you could make. We still have that ability but we now call it “Ctrl+Z” and we can undo any change that may have taken us one step too far down the wrong path. Sadly, many don’t take that last step backward.

We have an amazing amount of technology available to us and knowing when to leave it well enough alone is now a defining mark of a good photographer. I wonder sometimes if this overabundance of photographic technology has made us lazy because the “we can fix it in photoshop” attitude. All that is necessary is to click over the Photoshop Disaster web site to see a daily example of images that weren’t “fixed” in photoshop.

The more technology we have available to us the more knowledge we have to have to know when NOT to use it. Great photographs have been made for over 150 years without photoshop or digital editing. There is no real reason that cannot continue because the true source of creativity is not embedded in a microchip, or residing in the source code of some program. It is the mind of the photographer holding the camera.

Another Contemporary Thought

Church, Oysterville, Washington

Contemporary Art comes in a bunch of flavors. One flavor is Decorative Art, the art that winds up over the sofa, goes with the drapes and is something we regular folks want to see every day. The value of this Art is defined by the desire of people to part with their hard earned money because they want to identify with the sentiment of the art. (Fine Art’s value is defined by the auction houses, art collectors and museums.) Most people are willing to spend their money on Art they want to enjoy, not because an artist is “important” or “collectable.” They want to purchase a part of world they would like to live in. That’s why Robert Kincaid reproductions hang on a lot of living room walls. His sentimental view of what a “perfect life” would be is a world that many people want to live in. That’s why they spend their money to have that vision of the perfect world in their home.

There’s much to that sentiment. One of the best contemporary landscape photographers told me his pictures sell because people want to be a part of the world as he sees it. People want the experience of “being there” when the photograph was made. They want to be in a world that is beautiful, serene and peaceful. We can see the ugliness and evil in the world writ large and every evening on the news.

Contemporary or Classic?

Greenshead Slough

All Art starts out as Contemporary Art. Whether it lasts long enough to become classic, or is consigned to long term storage and forgotten about is a judgment only time will tell. As I wrote that, I wondered, is there a section in every museum warehouse filled with artwork that the curators are embarrassed to exhibit? Does MOMA have a secret cache of Thomas Kincade paintings they really don’t want anyone to know about? (Yes, they do – right between the originals of the Poker Playing dogs and velvet Elvis paintings. You read this on the internet, so you know it must be true.)

But I digress.

How do we decide what is going to “last” in terms of art? To me, what makes art timeless is the ability to transcend the current trendy topic and speak to the soul of humanity. Too often we see a contemporary problem or topic presented in a very specific situation. The artist’s point can be made and we can be manipulated to respond to the contemporary concern. Will the response last? Possibly, but I think the art that will make a long term impact addresses the contemporary problem in a timeless manner. Our subjects are contemporary, but the way we interpret the subject must be timeless. The present representation of the timeless questions that face humanity will last beyond this gallery season.

Start of Year Three in the Weekly Photo Blog!

Chewuch River, Washington

The first blog post was done on my web site on January 3, 2010. Over 125 posts and more than 200 photographs later, I’m still here and still musing on photography.  Last week, I said Art was not a spectator sport and concluded if you can’t work at your primary art, then a secondary art form is good thing to keep you in the creative groove. I guess this blog and the occasional (sometime) random snap is a good way to keep me working. Actually, I think it’s a pretty good idea because I know that the toughest part of folio creation is writing about photographs. Putting together a blog is a pretty good way to keep me writing about photography.

Photographically, 2011 was a great year. I started the year photographing the Singing Sands of Inner Mongolia and it just got better and better. (For sure, at least it got much warmer.) We’ll have to see what this New Year brings, but I know I will be here every week writing and hope you stop by and see what’s going on.

Art is Not a Spectator Sport

Ansorge Hotel,
Curlew, Washington

Art is not a spectator sport. You have to create. You have to do it all the time. Spending two hours on a Sunday afternoon trying to find all the parts to your easel, hunting down the paints or sharpening your chisels before you have to fix Sunday dinner is not an effective use of the time devoted to your art. You really can’t be a once a week artist.

If you want to be a better artist, then you must choose to dedicate a larger portion of your existence to art. You can’t be an artist once a week and expect to be good at it. If you practice your art more often you will become better. Do it every day and you will get very good at your art. But you say, “Joe, I can’t paint murals every day. I work in a cube.” So do I dear reader, and my favorite places to photograph are hundreds of miles from home. I can only get there once a year, at best. This is the problem with fitting Art in around the edges of your life. There is only so much time in the day. You can only be in one place at one time. You have to figure out how to fit your art into that space at the edge of your life.

I think the issue boils down to making the time for Art you like to do versus the Art you have time for.

It takes a conscious effort to be creative. Too often that part of your life is relegated to the edges. What I am advocating is the use of smaller segments of time in your life to create a complimentary form of art that makes your primary art making time more productive. An alternate creative activity would serve the purpose of a priming pump for your primary medium so when you get the time to work on what you love to work on, you need to spend less time getting yourself in the creative groove.

The Secret Language of Post-Modern Photography

Kitchen, Ansorge Hotel

Curlew, Washington

In last week’s post I posited the thought about the necessity of learning a photographic language to understand (and possibly enjoy) post-modernist photography. I wondered if there is a guide to understanding the post-modern photograph that would allow me to gain an appreciation for what is presented to the viewing public. I went down that rabbit hole to see what there was to see.

Oh my.

If there is anything less understandable to me than the post-modern photograph it would be the writing about post-modernist photographs. It’s as if this entire artistic discipline exists in a completely other world that speaks its own language and makes it extremely difficult for non-insiders to truly understand what the artist’s intent is for the work. I cannot fathom the dense, imprecise prose surrounding these efforts. It’s like the authors and artists dare you to try and understand what the meaning and motivation are for the art. The meaning of the work and the critical assessment might be well understood in this fraternity, but alas, I am an outsider.

I wonder if I am missing out on something by not being able to interpret the cryptic writings of post-modernism. Or are the rest of us left out on purpose?

Language of Creativity

Kitchen, Ansorge Hotel

Curlew, Washington

Artists develop their own language of creativity. If you listen to Bach’s music, you learn to recognize his music. If you hear some music you might be able to identify the composer after hearing only a few bars. The same applies to painters. They have a style and a palette which are recognizable.

Photographers also have their own visual language and recognizable style. I think we are moved by some photographs and not by others because we don’t “speak” the same language as the photographer. As you learn photography, you pick up these different languages and adapt them to your own use. My photographic language is a hybrid of modernist and American Western Landscape with an FSA documentary accent.

Post-modern photographers have a completely different language I cannot understand. The closest I can come to describing this situation is my first trip to China. I know some French and Spanish and can make a good guess at words in other European languages, but Kanji characters baffle me completely. I feel the same way about most post-modern photographs. I can see the images, but they speak a visual language that I cannot decipher. I can’t understand the message because I cannot read the image. If you can’t speak the language or understand the message, there is just not very much there to hold your interest.

Doing It Over Means Doing It Better

Shoshone Building,

Wallace, Idaho

A few posts ago I was agonizing over having to re-do several folios that were ruined by my ignorance of the finer points of Adobe InDesign. Learning from my mistakes, I undertook the project of recreating the folios using proper technique. The work was nowhere near as onerous as I thought it would be and in fact, it became easier as I progressed through each folio. Ever the engineer, I thought it would be a good idea to write down each of the steps I took in the process in order to insure that each of the reworked (and future) folios would be identical. I now have a checklist of things to do to create and print a folio. I have proof of how easy it is to create a folio. Reducing this task to a list makes it much easier to accomplish.

Here is something else I discovered during the Do Over. The reworked images look better than the originals. My improved skills plus improvements in software, hardware and materials resulted in a better looking photograph. The lesson is, the more you practice your craft, the more likely you are to produce better images. Here is the conundrum. Later work is much better than earlier work. Yet, collectors value the vintage print over the modern version. Fortunately for me, this has yet to prove itself to be a problem.

It’s always a difficult task to select photos to illustrate the weekly blog posts.  Several photographs published on this blog are noteworthy in that they are prize winners in the Cary Photographic Artists (CPA) annual juried exhibition. The photograph at the top of this blog was selected as “Best in Show.” This one was selected as “Best Black & White Entry.” This one was also juried into the show. That's a pretty good showing.