Postcards from the Creative Journey

1000 Another Milestone for the Blog

A few weeks ago, I celebrated the thirteenth anniversary of this blog. That’s a lot of topics and writing. The Thursday throwback posts have increased the number of posts, but that’s OK because most people haven’t read decades old posts. If you haven’t read something, it’s brand new to you.

One of my blog secrets is I have an inventory of ideas, questions and topics I want to write about. Just where do these ideas come from? Many of the ideas come from thinking about what I’m doing in photography and the problems I encounter and my reaction to them. I don’t rely too much on other photographic web sites, blogs or YouTube channels because for the most part the rest of the internet is interested in the technical aspects of photography or the latest and greatest gear to buy. Some ideas come from discussions with different photographers like my photo buddy of four decades, Brooks Jensen (of LensWork fame). While we live on opposite sides of the country, we skype and correspond frequently. These conversations are a source of thoughts for both of us.

The more you do something, the better the chance that you will become good at it. That’s why I never stop thinking about (or writing about) the creative part of photography.

999 But It Is Not Ready Yet First Published 3/22/2020

Here is another thought or two on Procrastinating Perfectionism to help you get past that fear of completing the project. There are times when good enough has to be good enough because no one can produce anything that’s perfect. Sometimes you just have to let go and send that project on its way just the way it is. Even if you think it’s perfect, it isn’t. As soon as someone looks at something you have completed, they will tell you something you can do to make it better or more disastrously they tell you of an error. Once you let it go, you will see something you can do to make it better. You can always make it better later. Everything you do is the sum of what you know and what you can do with what you have right now. Tomorrow, next week, next month, next year you will be able to do it better because you have the experience of today’s work, plus whatever advances have been made in materials and tools since you finished that work.

It’s ready. Let it go.

998 Collecting Images or making photographs?

What is the end goal of your photographs? Are they the finished product of your work once you print them up, or are they just the beginning of an art project? Will they be part of a book, a pdf on your web site or will they be mounted, matted and framed as that nice image you hang over the sofa?

The end point of your photographic project must be considered before you start out to photograph. More care must be taken when the end point is a project because you need to collect the images with a specific thought process in mind for telling a story with images.

997 A Thought on Longevity First Published 4/22/2018

I’m working on a project incorporating both old photographs and images scanned twenty years ago. There is something wonderful about holding a photograph that is one hundred years old. The prints that are coming close to their centennial are still viable and yet the scanned images from twenty years ago aren’t useful for this project because the scanned files are sized at 500 x 800 pixels at 72 dpi.

I find it odd the much older print is still useful to me in this project. The scanned images were done in the early days of digital processing and suffered from (digitally) primitive processes. Today, I will photograph the old print with my camera and get a very sharp 14Mb RAW file to process.

996 The Great Equipment Debate

What format should be used for the best result? I don’t care. I won’t participate in such discussions or arguments. I survived the Canon/Nikon wars and am a decorated veteran of the analog/digital Armageddon. After all these conflicts I really don’t care what type of format you choose, how many pixels you have, or any other host of hardware options you have or have not selected. I don’t care about your kit at all. There are more important things to consider. We get what gear we like, what will work for us and what we can afford. We move on from there to create images. That is what is important. 

I want to look at what your camera has produced and be moved by the emotional content and message you are communicating with your images. It’s not about the tools, it’s about what you make with those tools.

995 Better Looking leads to Better Looking Photographs. First Published 10/21/2018

Breathtaking landscapes are really fun to make because most of us have to leave home and travel a long way to arrive at the place where those breathtaking landscapes live. How many photographers have photographed in their homes, their backyard gardens and scenes from their everyday life and made great photographs? Ansel Adams lived in Yosemite Valley and Edward Weston lived almost next door to Point Lobos and they made some great photographs in their respective backyards. Gee, maybe I picked two really bad examples to illustrate my point. We can’t all live in photogenic places, so what can we do in our own backyards?

There are a number of great photographers that made wonderful photographs in their hometowns. Josef Sudek made great photographs in his yard. Late in his life, Paul Strand spent many hours in his garden photographing. Eugene Atget never stopped photographing the back streets and out of way spots in Paris.

What can you find within a couple of miles your house that is just waiting to be photographed? We are so used to where we live we take it all for granted and are so focused on what we are doing we fail to see what is around us. Suppose you decided to make your next photographic trip a local one? Approach the exploration of your town as if it was Yosemite, or Death Valley or some other American Landscape destination. What would you see differently?

Your world is ready for you. All you have to do is bring your camera and powers of observation.

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This lovely landscape was made with an iPhone on the Keith Hills Golf Course in Buies Creek, North Carolina. 

994 I’m Really Happy With This Except…

Got caught with a rookie mistake. This is absolute proof that experience and hubris are no match for the laws of physics. I was assembling a project for a recent issue of The Lipka Journal. The project contained landscape photographs with a rare combination of weather, light and location. I was fascinated by this and instead of calling out to stop for photo opportunities, I just opened the window and fired away. “Ha,” I thought, “even though we are speeding down the highway, a fast shutter speed will freeze the motion.”

Apparently not.

All the foregrounds were not as sharp as the backgrounds. I did not notice this huge flaw in the excitement of the editing process. Once the full frame images were displayed full size the flaws were obviously apparent. I solved the problem by cropping out quite a bit of the foreground and not using some other images. The project became much smaller because there is no reason to show work that is introduced with, “I’m really happy with this except…”

993 Another Year of Blogging

I forget a special day. The special day was January 3rd, 2010,the twelfth 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.

992 A Simple Guide to Writing the Artist Statement

We are all faced with the task of creating an Artist Statement as part of an exhibition, a submission or as a capstone to a project we have created. Being visual artists, we are not really keen on creating something with words. I felt this way for a long time. Then I developed a method for creating an artist statement. Here it is:

To write a great Artist Statement one must first write a whole bunch of really bad Artist Statements.

This is not a joke, or humor or anything of the like. It is a simple fact that one cannot do something great on the first try. No golfer’s first shot is a hole in one. No baseball player hits a home run on their first pitch ever. Writing Artist Statements is a skill, and it must be practiced. Practice means doing something wrong, figuring out what is wrong, correct that mistake and do it over… and over and over and over until the result is the best that can be done.

False starts, missteps, writing oneself into a corner, running up against a dead end and unsound premises are just part of the process. Keep writing and persevere.

Then you will have an excellent artist statement.

Simple, but not easy.