Postcards from the Creative Journey

1017 Same Place, Different Vision, First Published 6/2/2013

Even if you put two photographers in the same place, it doesn’t mean they will make the same photographs. While I hate to use myself as an example, I will do so because,…well, …because, …well because it’s my blog and I can write what I want. Harrumph.

Brooks Jensen (Editor of LensWork) and I have photographed together for more than thirty years. We’ve been up and down the West Coast of both the United States and Canada and to such remote locations as Mongolia and North Dakota. We have photographed together in the very same spots. We are convinced each other has completely missed the artistic merit of the location we are photographing. The only thing we have both succeeded in is being wrong about that. Our photographs from the same place are not remotely similar.

The sum and substance of it is we photograph the same thing differently. Not just a little bit differently, but a whole bunch differently. Our approaches to the subject, composition of the image, the post capture processing (or for you traditional types, darkroom techniques and practices) are very different. I think the basis is that we just don’t see the same photograph when we look at the same thing. That’s how I feel about it and I bet Brooks will disagree with that, too.

1016 Mining the Rejects

As part of my continuing retrospective project, More Memories than Dreams, I have been digging through old piles of negatives. I came across a number of negatives marked “Reject. Scratches.” These negatives were never printed because of a defect caused my yours truly during development. The group of images hung together as a small project, but their inherent flaws kept them from being made into platinum prints.

After digitizing these defective negatives, I can remove the flaws with Lightroom and be able to use these once rejected negatives in a project.

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This is not part of a project, but an image that was incredibly overexposed because, well, because sometimes I didn't do my Zone and Tone calculations properly. I salvaged this image by copying the negative with high dynamic range(!). The three copies of the negative were merged in Lightroom to get a usable image. Not a world beater, but it turned out pretty good.

1015 Looking Backward For a Change, First Published 1/8/2017

What will you find when you go back to look at photographs you made decades ago? When Edward Weston looked at some of his old photographs, he remembered how young he was at the time and was almost kind of embarrassed to look at the images. I know my standards for what constitutes a “good” image have risen considerably since I began making photographs. The technical standards for excellence have increased with the ability of digital cameras to focus and expose perfectly every time. More importantly, my aesthetic standards have risen, too. The important question is, “How many of your old photographs can live up to your current standards?”

If the answer is “not many,” then I think that’s a good thing. Continued improvement is what you want to have not only for your photography, but for your life. With the advanced tools available in software, you should be able to “fix” just about any technical problem in a film negative. Of course, the only thing you really “can’t fix in post” is content. And isn’t content the thing that separates the good from the great photographers?

1014 There Are No Longer Distinct Photographic “Looks”

A few years ago, I made a note as a potential blog topic which asked the question, “Does a 12 megapixel image of a 35 mm negative make a better digital print than a 12 megapixel image of a 4x5 negative?” I think I have come up with an answer that doesn’t make me happy.

My answer is “No.”

I have been working on projects that span the length of my photographic career. I have digitized 35 mm, 645, 4x5 and 5x7 format black and white film negatives. These film negatives produced original prints which each had their own distinct “look.” When I made prints from the digital files, the unique look of each format disappeared. Digitization visually homogenized each of the negatives to a common digital look that we have come to expect from contemporary photography.

As part of the project, I captioned each image with the date and location because the images were created over multiple decades and locations. It might seem like I was grandstanding on the pursuit of this subject matter, but because the images had such a visual consistency because of the software treatment I thought the captions would demonstrate the dedication to a long term project.

1013 I Spend More Time in “Post Photography” Than Photographing. First Published 10/14/2012

Is that odd? I’m not sure. There are lots of folks that seem to spend a lot of time with a camera in their hands, out in the world capturing images. I am not one of them. I don’t really go out to photograph unless I have something specific in mind. I don’t really think that’s too odd because I think in terms of projects that need to be done. My realization of photography is not a single image printed out by a commercial lab or service, but a folio of images either displayed on a web site or printed up as a magazine sized folio. Golly, I might even show photographs with text as part of a blog! There is considerable work done outside of gathering images with a camera. I would think that were producing a photograph occupied ninety per cent of my photographic efforts twenty years ago, my guess is that photography is now about thirty per cent of the effort in producing my work.

1012 High Grade Tourist Photography

Tourist destinations do not have to mean tourist photographs. The challenge is to bring a unique vision to a common location. There is a technical component to this vision, but the personal approach to where, when and how the images are created is solely that of the photographer. Being willing to take a chance on something that is very different from everyone else is the first step in finding a personal vision of a common location.

1011 Orientation, or How Do You Look at Things? First Published 3/24/2013

Vertical or Horizontal? Do you have a native orientation for you photographs? I noticed this a few months ago when I decided to make a calendar for 2013. I needed to come up with a dozen horizontal photographs that I could live with for a month at a time that. Horizontal? That made it much tougher for me to deal with because quite a few of my compositions are vertical (or portrait) orientation.

I have noticed this whenever I edit images for a portfolio. My vertically oriented images seem to be stronger than their horizontal brethren and many of them are favorites. When I sequence images in a folio, I separate the horizontal and vertical images. This separation is a personal choice due to my limited skills in desktop publishing, but it does highlight the difference in the number of photographs I chose for my folios.

1010 Well, I Got That One

I told you about the one that got away last week. (Go back and read it here. I’ll wait until you finish) Well, turnabout is fair play in life and art. When I had the opportunity to make that same type of image, I went ahead and made it. I was not going to be beat at my own game, so I shamelessly copied the technique with my own image.

Not only did I copy the technique, but I also improved upon it by creating a vertical panoramic photograph. Vertical panoramas. Not something you see every day.

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It's a new month and there's a new issue of The Lipka Journal at my website. Click on over and download the latest issue. 

1009 Photography is exciting. Editing is not. First Published 9/1/2013

When the result of your project is a group of photographs, editing becomes the key task of the entire process. Let us assume that you (or your “auto-everything” camera) are technically competent, so the quest for technical excellence is readily achievable.

While it starts out as a quest to find the best photographs, the final goal is not to find the absolute best photograph (which you will eventually do), but it’s to assemble the best group of photographs that tell the story that you want to tell. It’s important to have all the photographs support each other to bring about the best product.

The most difficult part for me is to present a variety of photographs to tell the story. There is a fine line that borders monotony and scatter shot selection of images. I look for horizontal vs. vertical images, tonality (or color palette), varying close up, mid-range and telephoto images, detailed versus overall views, consistency or variety in lighting are choices to be considered in selecting images.

When dealing with a group of photographs sequencing of the images is very important. The audience is not going to be looking at one photograph, but many. How the images transition one to another is a very important issue when you sequence your images. I want to offer the viewer some variety in the images while telling the story with photographs. These are pretty basic criteria that you can use to select the photographs for your project. The artist’s statement will guide you to the correct criteria you need to select images for your project.

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It's a new month and there's a new issue of The Lipka Journal at my website. Click on over and download the latest issue. 

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.

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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.