Postcards from the Creative Journey

567 The Path to Knowledge

I was riffing on acquiring digital editing skills last week and I would like to continue with that thought. It is simply this; some people learn and then go out to find a way to use the knowledge and other people learn when they have a problem they can’t solve.

I am definitely of the latter type. I try to figure out something with what I know and when that well of knowledge dries up, I look for another method to solve the problem.  I use Google, YouTube and sometimes I might even take an online tutorial to help me learn enough to solve a particular problem. My Project Manager background also plays a part in that, too. I spent most of my career as a member of project teams that built things and moved on to the next project. 

The need to learn new things should be a lifelong passion. Our world is changing so quickly we need to continue to learn to maintain a skill set to help us complete our projects. I have pointed out before that being a master of version 2.3 isn't much of an accomplishment when the beginners are starting out with version 9.4. 

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Here, the path of  knowledge goes up some stairs and passes a bicycle. It is another image from our morning’s walk through Passau. This image is destined to be part of a project of bicycles and street scenes from Europe.

566 Practice and Performance

There is value in practicing the arcane transmutations of digital editing so those skills can be used on worthy images. Learned skills are used to make good images great or to make your visual statement abundantly clear to your audience. Making an unusable image mediocre is really a waste of time. Well, unless it’s a family snapshot of Aunt Emily at the family reunion. That can be forgiven because the audience is your family.

From almost the beginning we were taught that the less manipulation you do, the better your photograph will be. I think that was because the options for and ability to manipulate film negatives and prints was very limited, primitive and fraught with peril. Post development manipulation of a negative was problematic and physical alterations of prints often resulted in a ruined print. I almost always made two copies of a sheet film negative (in the event one negative was damaged in processing) and three copies of the final print "just in case" I ruined one (or two) in spotting or dry mounting the print. 

With the advent of the digital darkroom, we now have almost an infinite number of ways to manipulate the digital files we capture; and we don't have to worry about ruining an image - ever. We also have a constantly increasing number of YouTube tutorials with tips and tricks on improving our images. “Working an image” just to use those recently learned skills is like a musician playing scales just to show off his dexterity. There is practice and there is performance. Please don’t confuse the two.

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This stairway is one of the many happy snaps from this past summer's lifetime event river cruise. I’m pretty sure this is the entry to the Museum of the Treasure of the Cathedral in Passau, Germany. As a tourist you get to stand in line a lot and sometimes the line is on a stairway. Here's a folio made on the stairs of the Abbey in Melk, Austria.

565 Missed It By That Much…

In photographing the grand landscape, the scale is tremendous. Photographs can include many, many miles from horizon to horizon. To change a viewpoint significantly, you have to pack up the camera and travel miles. You travel miles to change the viewpoint, and then in the final positioning of the camera, the success of the composition is decided in the fractions of millimeters in the viewfinder. Just where did you place the horizon? How many fractions of a millimeter will that rock extend into the photograph? How everything fits into the photograph is now measured in fractions of millimeters. In those little details lay the success of the photograph. I still miss the large ground glass of a view camera. At least they were big enough to measure the image in the viewfinder in fractions of inches! But those days are now gone.

But what hasn’t changed is the success of a photograph being influenced by incredibly small changes in the things that we as photographers do. We photographers still confront and solve these (and other) technical and aesthetic problems every time we pick up a camera. Success has always been and always will be in how we handle the details. 

We show people the photographs where we successfully solved the problem in our viewfinder. The rest of the time, those files never make it out of Lightroom.

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One of the issues in landscape photography is answering the question, "Where is that?" My Panasonic G85 doesn't have GPS tracking, but my iPhone does. All I have to do is remember to make an iPhone happy snap when I want to identify the location. Fortunately, I did so when I constructed a stitched panoramic photograph of Big Indian Creek near Steens Mountain in Southeastern Oregon. 

564 Another Year of Blogging

I forget a special day. The special day was January 5^th, the ninth anniversary of this blog. The blog started out as “Square Pegs” because it was going to show good photographs that didn’t fit the criteria for the projects I was creating. The old bromide about square pegs in round holes was the inspiration for the original blog title.

The title was eventually changed to the current one which is a lot more descriptive of what this blog is all about. A picture and some words describing the creative journey we are on.

“Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”

Thank you for reading the blog and hope you return soon.

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Apropos of the Blog Anniversary, today’s image is a random landscape photograph from North Eastern Washington State made in 2009.

563 I Must Be Resolute.

Yes, it’s the beginning of the calendar year and it’s time for those New Year’s Resolutions. It seems like a pretty good thing to do with self-improvement and all that, so I’ll let you in on some of my resolutions – from last year. Last year I wanted to make my web presence responsive. In IT terms it means my web presence should look great and be readable whether you use a desktop, tablet or smartphone. Well, the good folks at TypePad have a responsive template for my blog and that’s what you’ve been reading this year. That change was pretty easy and I was halfway to my goal in January of last year. Now, the second half of the project, making a responsive website was a bit more of a challenge.

It’s taken quite a bit of work on the design and functionality end trying to figure out how the words and pictures should fit together harmoniously. Once that tough work was done, I wound up heading down a couple of dead ends in taking my concepts to reality. After those delays, I finally relented and taught myself enough CSS and HTML5 to get my thoughts onto the screen. That was surprisingly easy to do, once I got my head wrapped around having to learn coding to make my design a reality.

It's almost ready. I ran into some issues with redirecting pages this morning and I won't be able to re-launch until sometime later this week.  So, there's a little bit more to do. 

In the meantime, I must think of some resolutions for 2019…

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Today’s image is a close up of a Messerschmitt ME109 that didn’t make A Boy’s Dream, the latest project on my website. The airplane is part of the Erickson Airplane collection photographed during last year’s photo safari. It’s kind of odd having to talk about something done four months ago as last year, but that’s what the calendar says.