Postcards from the Creative Journey

445 - What Do You Do Until Then?

Patriarch Grove,

White Mountains, California

I downloaded “Wear Good Shoes: Advice from Magnum Photographers” and found it to be an inspiring collection of thoughts from some of the world’s best photojournalists. The great part about this document was that it really never mentioned anything technical about photography. (Well, except for the advice about shoes, I guess.) If I had to sum it up in just a few words the essence of the advice was to cultivate a broad interest in the arts and follow your passion of photography by photographing every day.

Lots of people say do what you love and follow your passion. What if what you love doesn’t pay enough for your food, clothing and shelter? While I do love making photographs, for most of my life I had to provide for my wife and two daughters who really, really wanted to live indoors, wear shoes and eat regularly. My photographs weren’t going to make that happen.

I made my photographic life part of the life I needed to live to support my family. I managed to squeeze my photography in around the edges of my life letting it fill up those moments when nothing else was going on. Making photography fit into the rest of my life was about as good as I was going to do. If you can make photography fit in around the edges and you have the enthusiasm to continue "be photographic" (See “Being Photographic” July 6, 2014) photography will be your life long friend. 

444 - Other People’s Passions Are Odd

Stained Glass and Shadow

Don’t you find it odd that some people are as passionate about their avocation as we are about photography? I am a veteran of the Canon/Nikon war and survived the near apocalyptic analog/digital Armageddon; two big examples of passions peculiar to the photographic world. We all have our lists of non-photographic things to be passionate about. We don’t understand why people would wear the logo of a team that isn’t “ours.” We have our little bubbles we float around in and sometimes we lift our head to look at someone else’s bubble floating by and wonder why in the world they would be doing something so odd.

They are doing the same thing, too. At least we can take a picture of their oddity.

443 - It Still Takes a Long Time

Academy Street (A Long Time Ago)

Way back when I was a completely analog photographer it used to take me months (years?) to get to develop the negatives from a photographic outing. It would take even longer to get the prints made, much less get them mounted matted and framed. Analog Photography took a long time.

When I went digital, I thought, “Wow, Digital photography. I am not shackled to long periods of work in the darkroom. Am I gonna crank out the work. This is gonna be a breeze.” Ummm, I was really wrong. It still takes a couple of years to get from the original photographs to finished work. Even with all the advances in photographic technology, it still takes me a long time to create a project.

I am beginning to think the creative process is independent of technology. The thought process is still the same, trying to coax a coherent statement or objective out of the photographs I have made, wondering if I have the right images to tell the story; or more importantly is the story worth telling? It really doesn’t matter what the photographic process is. I think it just usually takes me a long time to complete a project.

The changes I have noticed deal with the number of images. I have many more images to edit, I am no longer working with one or two images and my final projects contain photographic images, text, layout, fonts and other design details. So, rather than taking a year or two to make a couple of photographs, I am taking a year or two to make folios of twelve to sixteen prints. I think that’s an improvement, but it still takes a long time to get there.

442 - A Learning Experience

Basilica of the Sacred Heart

If you are unhappy with a photograph and you have the opportunity to get a “do over,” will you go ahead and do it? (Please answer, “yes.”)

Faced with that most recent opportunity, I chose to not only revisit the site, but sketched up images as a reference and included on notes where I stood when I made the original photograph. I thought that was pretty obsessive, until I came up with the idea to make up small prints, so I had a record of what I did the last time I was there. Thankfully, I came up with the small print idea after it was too late to actually make it happen.

The project was important enough to me to make sure that I “got it right the first time” because sometimes photoshop isn’t enough. I remember back (a really long time ago) to a workshop with David Bayles discussing the proper exposure of film. He said that if you didn’t get the correct exposure at first, neither minus or plus development would help salvage the print because both of those procedures compromised the information on the negative. There was really no substitute for getting it right the first time. When faced with the opportunity to do it better than the first time,  use that "do over."