Postcards from the Creative Journey

Semper Apparatus

Self Portrait at the Ark

The "Fifty Project"

I just have this feeling that someone, somewhere is about to blow the lid off the camera accessory world with the ultimate cable release.

I don’t believe I have ever written about photo gear, but the above thought occurred to me in one my more mischievous moments. As newer, faster, better (and certainly not cheaper) photographic gizmos replace our previously newer, faster, better gizmos it is inevitable that we accumulate a steadily increasing amount of “obsolete” photographic paraphernalia.

I have done well in reducing photographic clutter. My darkroom is now a brewery.

Camera gear on a shelf, a nice stout fermenting in the sink.

The only clues to its photographic past are a venerable GrayLab timer, a Kodak tray siphon (of indeterminate age) and lots of trays to hold various bottles of beer (none visible in this photograph).  Photography is now a brave new world of integrated circuits and software. The cable releases, spot meters and polaroid film backs that I happily toted around are no longer essential accessories.

The amount of gear I used to carry to make photographs has dwindled to almost nothing. My multi-pocketed photographer’s vest hangs in the closet. The pockets are empty but the hanger sags with the weight of memories.

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.