Postcards from the Creative Journey

Does a Title Make or Break the Work?

The Grotto

My inability to title a photograph is legendary. I have tried many schemes to create titles. I have written articles about my lack of artistic ability in titling a photograph.

But it still does not answer the question posed by the title of this post, “Does a title make or break the work?” I have seen exhibits where the photographs were very good and the addition of a title made the entire exhibit a little bit better because the title was the key in integrating the individual photographs into the whole concept of the exhibit. I think that’s important. If you are creating an exhibit, or a book or another collection of photographs, you (as a photographer) owe it to your audience to guide them to the work, set up the work and let them enjoy what you have done. If you have a message in your photos, have an introduction to the work. Lead them to the work and let them enjoy it. If you need titles to the work to work with the image, that’s important. To me, it’s the entire concept of the photographic collection that’s important. If you need titles to add to the completion of the work, then titles are important.

Now that you have finished my blog post, click on over to my website to revel in the silliness of my hopeless attempts to create meaningful titles for my photographs. Here’s a link to the entire sorry state of affairs as described in “Technology in Service to the Arts!”

From Past to Future

Sand Dune detail,

Xiang Sha Wan, Mongolia

It used to be that big cameras ruled photography (just like dinosaurs used to rule the earth?). 8x10 was the gold standard for cameras. Big was “professional.” It used to be that you could judge how serious a photographer was by how large his kit was. If you came upon a photographer with an 8x10 set up, you knew the person was serious about his photography. Likewise if they were peering down the chimney viewfinder of a Hassleblad you would think, “pro.” You could get away with using 35 millimeter cameras if you had several festooned around your neck and at least one of them had a 300 millimeter lens. Despite the preoccupation with the size of the camera, the prints produced by and large were small. This is no longer the case.

Now the photographs are big and the cameras are small. Digital cameras are now getting smaller and smaller and the prints are getting bigger and bigger. While I do concentrate on the external size of equipment, the key part of the digital camera, the sensor, does continue to grow and grow. Now, cheap cellular telephones have larger built in camera sensors than my first digital camera. A while back I noted that there is one phone with a 40 mp sensor.

Soon, we will have to make a choice. Do we want to get a phone with a camera attached, or do we want to get a tablet computer with a built in lens and image editing software? The visionaries will soon be telling us cameras are a thing of the past and we will soon be headed into the world of the converged device that will be able to photograph, digitally edit and post to the internet immediately.

It’s Not What I Photographed, It’s What I Saw.

Brasenose College, Oxford

The thought came to me while I was photographing on vacation. It’s another version of the pre and post visualization discussion. The Pre-Visualizationists are, of course, lead by Ansel Adams with the zone system and the negative is the score band of disciples. The Post-Visualizationists all fall in line behind Jerry Uelsmann, the original collector and assembler of disparate images. They embody two very opposite ways of creating a photograph.

It used to be almost that simple in the days of the darkroom, but now, with the digital darkroom, the two old schools of photographic thought have merged. I was thinking this as I made a panoramic photograph. I saw the final image as a panoramic photograph. I captured the various elements to be assembled into a final piece of work. I did not photograph a final photograph with each exposure. I saw the final photograph, but I couldn’t make the photograph I saw in the field. I had to photograph something else to make my photograph. I know I would not have done that before the advent of digital photography because the alternative was not available.

How much is enough?

In honor of LensWork #100,

Editor Brooks Jensen thinking about the next issue

How many photographs do I include in a folio, or a project? I think it really depends on the type of project and the medium where the project is viewed. Here’s what I have found. If you are going to one of the many photo festivals that now seem to have replaced workshops as the place to see and be seen in the Art Photography world, you will find the reviewers have determined the proper number of photographs to view at one time is seventeen. This is because fifteen is not enough and twenty is too many. This is number of photographs these reviewers can comfortably review at any one time.

On my website, I pretty much hew to those guidelines, but I have reduced the number of images in a specific web folio to around ten or fifteen photographs. People viewing images on the web want a quick look and don’t want to waste much time waiting for a picture or pdf file to load into their browser.

Books to me, at least, are a separate entity. The book is not limited to a “one time” viewing that seems to be the standard of web users. A book can be picked up, and viewed front to back, back to front or in any order the viewer wishes. Because there is no set way to view a book, the number of photographs that can be put in a book is limited only by what the publisher thinks will sell. The “Sense of the Seasons” is an interesting project, because I originally thought of it as a book project with around eighty or ninety photographs. In order to share it with the rest of the world from my website, I broke down my Sense of the Seasons Project to four separate books, each with about twenty images. (Check it out at this link for the whole story.)

I like to think of the “required” number of images depends on the mode of presentation and what you plan for your audience. It all comes back to trying to figure out what the project is going to be and how to tell your story to the viewers.

Do I Have to Draw You a Picture?

Camel Lot, Xiang Sha Wan

Some people can remember names, some people faces, some people remember conversations. I remember photographs, pictures, people’s faces and other visual things. My first try at writing something usually starts with some pictures and doodles and a few words. A picture takes shape on the paper and in my mind. Then I convert the visual idea to words. That’s just the way I am. I don’t know if it’s the visual learner in me or because of my engineering training. I would bet that most photographers have very good visual memories because that’s the way we are. We choose to communicate in pictures or photographs and for us that is the easiest way to learn, remember and communicate.

If you are a photographer, you are concerned with visual communication. Since communication is a two way process, it stands to reason that photographers learn and think visually. That’s why I think it’s so darned difficult to write about photographs. How do you take a concept that exists as a picture and try to elicit the same response using words? There are people that can do that. They are called authors. They use words to create their pictures and make you feel a certain way about a situation. The more I write, the more I respect the writer’s craft and those folks that can do it successfully.