Postcards from the Creative Journey

Photo Safari XXXII Day 3, He drives, He shoots…

We took a long leisurely drive from Madras to Lakeview, Oregon. Stops along the way inlcuded Smith Rocks, with an amazing number of people taking a leisurely climb up the vertical faces of the Smith Rocks. We had visited the Rocks many years ago but I don’t remember them being as crowded as they were yesterday. But, it was a weekend and the weather was crisp and clear.

From there we drove over to Paulina Lakes and the Big Obsidian Flow. Most of the resorts and campgrounds are closed for the season, but it does not diminish from the splendor of the area. The Big Obsidian Flow is a mountain sized pile of obsidian rock. There are designated trails to climb to the top and ones does stay on the trail because another name for obsidian is glass. It is hard and the edges are sharp. The view from the top is very nice. Brooks tried to photograph the obsidian many years ago in the age of film. Film could not capture the rock surfaces to fulfill his artistic intent. But today, with digital cameras and editing the results were truly spectacular.

We passed by Fort Rock and took some obligatory photographs of the old volcano cone and passed by Silver Lake in the “golden hour” of the afternoon.

We did discover than the golden hour varies widely by location because of the hills and mountains between the sun and the photographic subject. We noted the time and figured out how to make that part of our schedule while we stay in Lakeview for a few days.We got into Lakeview around dinner time and were fortunate enough to get one of the last rooms at our hotel. Evidently there is some government project going on in the area and the hotels in this very small town are full all week. We are ensconced in a two room ADA suite with a refrigerator and kitchen sink. The only bad news is that wi-fi and internet are really poor. I guess you have to expect that in a small, remote town, so I am posting using my iPhone as a hot spot. I haven’t figured out yet how I am going to post the photos to the blog, but that should take a little time to figure out. We have time to do it, too. This morning the outside temperature is 23F. This boy from North Carolina is really cold. It might be a while before we get outdoors.

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Techno Geek update on how the pictures were posted to the blog. To avoid the super slow internet speed at the local hotel, I changed the settings on my Lumix G85 to create a small jpg to accompany the RAW file when I make a capture. I then uploaded the file from the camera to the chromebook and edited the photos with native chromebook technology. I was amazed that the chromebook read the RAW files and then converted them to jpg after I made the changes. 

Adapt. Improvise. Overcome.

Photo Safari XXXII Day 2, An Airplane Collection

Air Intake, Messerschmidt Bf-109

One the way into town Friday, we passed by a sign declaring the Madras airport as the home of the Erickson Airplane Collection. We decided that it would be the first thing we would photograph on Day 2. Some people collect stamps. Others books. Some might even collect photographs. It does take a certain amount of resources to collect airplanes. The Erickson collection comprises twenty some WWII vintage aircraft which are, save two, airworthy.

The airplanes are parked very close together in a large hangar and it was a challenge to get around them to create good compositions. Most of them I recognized because these were the planes I assembled from kits when I was young. I was sadly disappointed to find out the Boeing B-17 was touring airshows and was not in Madras.

We spent the better part of the day photographing the details on many of the planes. I have no idea what I am going to do with these images, but I had an absolutely great time being surrounded by these incredible flying machines.

Along the Road to Ashwood

Later in the afternoon, we hit the road in search of an old dirt road Brooks remembered from thirty or so years ago. Amazingly enough, we found the road (now paved!) and there was the opportunity a few nice landscape photographs along the way.

539 On The End Of A Project - (Part II)

Please don’t get me wrong about finishing projects. Projects do have to end. The tough part is to be able to recognize a stopping point for what you have just completed and recognizing the actual completion of some work. One of my favorite movies is Tom Hanks’ “That Thing You Do,” a fictional account of a one hit wonder band in the early 1960’s. People asked for sequel, but Hanks said the movie about a one hit wonder band should not have a sequel. It was completed, finished and ended right there.

Knowing when to stop is definitely a judgement call. You have to bring that project to some form of completion whether it is just a stopping point or you just know that the project is done for good. This is important because you must complete a project by tying up the loose ends and bringing the project to some form of conclusion. Sometimes we pick projects that start with great promise and fail to meet the initial expectations of success. Even if the project is a complete failure you don’t give up on the project. Complete the project. You can learn a lot from a failure. The most important thing you can learn is that projects have endings and reaching a project end in itself is a worthy goal.

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Basketball is important in North Carolina. The Cary High School Women's Basketball team from 1917 was included in the school yearbook. The High School athletic field is now a parking lot, but the Jones Cottage, seen in the background of both historic and contemporary photographs is still standing. The cottage is one of my favorite structures in Cary. I have photographed it as long as I have been living in Cary. It is the subject of my folio Victorian Lady. 

Photo Safari XXXII* Day 1, Transitions

Day 1 was a day of transitions. From southeast to northwest (a couple of thousand miles) and in elevation (more than a couple of thousand feet). Don’t forget the time zone transition, from East Coast to West Coast. I probably should mention humidity, too. In Eastern Oregon humidity is a rare thing, unlike the Carolinas where it is a way of life.

The big thing that impressed me yesterday was the transition to autumn. Summer weather is still in full force back home (hurricanes included) and on the trip from Portland to Madras, Oregon the leaves have begun to change color and the weather is decidedly cooler.

Some Autumn color from the east side of Mount Hood.

The trip to Madras was not without photography, but there are some technical issues I have to solve (buy a card reader with the right cable connection for my chromebook) before I can upload some pictures to the blog. (Brooks had a cable with the proper plugs and we directly loaded from the camera to the computer.) The important thing for yesterday is we did begin to make photographs the “ice has been broken” and we will soon be in full blown Photo Safari mode.

 

We were hoping for some clouds on the drive to Madras and were almost excited, but they weren't clouds, it was a grass fire. 

*Photo Safaris are enumerated with Roman Numerals because only things of great significance are given Roman Numerals. Things like World Wars, Popes and movies by Sylvester Stallone.

538 On The End Of A Project - (Part I)

We all know projects are temporary and have endings. But sometimes, the projects themselves don’t understand that and what started out as a project just doesn’t want to end. I used to think this was bad and fought the projects to make them end. But then I started thinking about non-photographic artistic projects.

Let’s look at writers and movie makers. Writers have characters that move through multiple books. James Bond, Jack Reacher, Harry Bosch and many other literary characters appear in sequential books. Books are complete works of art, but these characters survive the book endings and go off on another adventure. Mulder and Scully have been investigating X Files for decades. These examples start as projects and when successful, they become franchises. This taught me an important lesson.

The lesson is projects do not have to end. If the project wants to continue, grab hold tight and hang on for the ride. Use the experience from these franchise projects in your other works. Maybe the franchise will help your other projects and the other projects can help your franchise.

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Well, projects may not want to end, but the After the Memories exhibit will be coming down later this week. This combination image is the Page Walker Arts and History Center, photographed in 1988 or so in black and white and in 2018 in color. The location of the exhibit is on the second floor between the two doors. The Page Walker suffered years of neglect before being rescued by a local conservation group. The restored building is an integral part of the cultural life of Cary, North Carolina. 
 

537 And Then It All Became Clear

 

A couple of months ago I was busily trying to get myself out of the comfortably incomplete stage of the “After the Memories” project when I finally figured out what it was all about. I had prepared all my statements about a sense of loss when historic buildings are destroyed and the finality of destruction.  But the meaning of the photographs was elusive.

What finally struck me is the project is about change. I can’t point to a specific thought process that led me to this conclusion, but at one point this thought burst through to my conscious mind. Creativity is like that. We have the answers to the artistic questions we pose to ourselves and sometimes the answer magically appears. We have obviously thought through the appropriate solution deep in our mind and it does take some time for thoughts to come bubbling up to the surface for us to find.  

If we look at the results of a change, there are three likely outcomes. The first outcome is failure; what we set out to do was not achieved. The positive things we thought would happen did not happen. In fact, after the change, we might be worse off than when we started. It happens. We don’t like to think about it, but things don’t always turn out as planned. The second option is no change. After spending much, time, talent and treasure, we are no better off than when we started. A lot of effort gained nothing. Finally, the third likely option is that of success. The changes we wanted to happen actually do happen. We are better off than before and we can call that change a success.

It was all there in front of me. The photographs of change and each of three possible outcomes were shown in the photographs; failure, no change and success. It was truly a revelation to me, especially at such a late stage of the project.

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Chatham Street, 1927 - 2018, still photographing from just about the same spot as last week's photograph. This time, I had to move to the middle of the street to make the photograph. Chatham and Academy Streets are still  busy streets and it turns out the best time to photograph was early on a Sunday morning. The morning was overcast so there were no long shadows in the picture.

Everybody's Store (last week seen as a white building with "Shopping Center" painted near the roof) as the key element to base the blending of the historical and contemporary image. 

The exhibit is coming down this coming week and then it's back to normalcy for a day or two and then it's off to the Oregon Desert with Brooks Jensen for this year's Photo Safari. I will be sharing blogs and images from the road as Brooks and I pretend to be Fine Art Photographers for about a week or two. 

536 Changes Along the Way

As I was creating the photographs for the “After the Memories” exhibit, I was concerned if I had enough of my vintage images to fill the gallery at the Page Walker Arts and History Center. That concern was resolved when I remembered how I selected images for the second version of the Labyrinth project. Labyrinth 1.0 was made up of single images, Labyrinth 2.0 was triptychs. The selection criteria were different for both projects. Some single images were in both projects, some images were only in one project and some images made neither project.

This change in selecting images was made much easier by giving me a broader set of criteria from which to work.

And then another change. As I was creating the images for this show, I wondered about the changes over a much longer period of time. I began to look at the historical images in Cary’s town archives. As I went through the historical images I knew I had the images to make the re-photographic project I originally envisioned. I decided I would place the historical images within a contemporary panorama to provide a modern context for the historical image. This became the second part of the project.

Keeping a mind open for inspiration as the project continued through its “work and detail” phase allowed me to bring my original vision to light.

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Chatham Street 1953 and 2018. The fun part about these blended images is the humor of seeing the old and new coexisting in the same frame. The "Shopping Center" building has been standing there since at least 1927 and is still being used today. 

Creating the layered images combining the historic and contemporary images was a fun part of the project. The historic images were adjusted for contrast in Light Room  and I applied a platinum toning to the historic images. Then, I made a series of exposures at the location of the historic photograph. From there it was back to Light Room to make the panorama. I exported the panoramic and the adjusted historic photograph. I layered the historic image on top of the panorama in PhotoShop. There was a lot of skewing, free transforming and stretching to make the historic images line up with the new images. Once the layers were aligned I added some "gradient reveal all" to soften the transition between the historic image and the contemporary panorama. It turned out that not all the current locations and the historic photographs were compatible. I only wound up with about ten or twelve layered images that “worked.” I wanted to give the audience a view of Cary that was both historic and contemporary. A view where both the past and present were displayed in the same frame. 

535 Off the Wall Photography

 

 

We photographers have been hoodwinked into believing the best way to exhibit our photography is hanging them on a gallery wall. If my photography is going to hang on a gallery wall, I really would like be there all the time and tell everyone who walks by about my photographs. Clearly this is not possible and creates a problem for those of us that would like to talk about what our photographs mean.

“After the Memories” contains my second attempt at a solution to this problem. The first attempt was a web site that accompanied my “Winter Day, Summer Morning” exhibit providing more information to the audience. That didn’t work well because I didn’t have a close connection between the exhibit space and the web site. I did leave a notebook with the same information as on the web site, but I had no idea how many people read the notebook during the exhibit.

“After the Memories” has two improvements on that effort. One is creating some short (approximately thirty second) videos made at the location of selected photographs. The second is assigning a QR code to each video and including the QR code on the gallery wall near its companion photograph. With the prevalence of smartphones I hope people will take advantage of the QR codes and see several short videos about the exhibition. Now I can be in the gallery whenever it is open.

Creating videos and assigning them QR codes were the other problem that did not live up to their anticipated difficulty (for which I am grateful). I created a single video a few years ago for another project and learned some basic editing skills in Adobe Premiere. For “After the Memories” I took a few hours of refresher instruction on the Adobe web site and then I completed that phase of the project is fairly short order. I had so much fun with the videos, I am wondering how I can include videos in future projects.

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This is one pair of photographs of 208 Academy Street. The house and yard that used to be there was bulldozed out of existence a few years ago. There was no warning or announcement of the impending demolition. The bulldozers showed up one morning and a day later there was nothing left.  The first image was made in 2001 and the second was made earlier this year.  The QR Code below links to a short video I made about this particular series of photographs. (And yes, I do know that I made a mistake on the address that I didn't discover until I was in post-production.) 

 

534 Reading Before Looking

 

In an earlier post (Interpreting Photographs) I mentioned I have gone to photographic exhibits and bypassed the introductory text to get started looking at photographs. In my current exhibition I had to figure out how to lay out the show to make sure the viewers read the artist statement as well as looking at the photographs. Rather than having a single introductory statement, I included short statements on each of the pairs of photographs. By making the text an integral part of the exhibit the comments are specific to each situation are more relevant than an overall artists statement. I hope the synergy with words and pictures helps the viewers understand the relationship between photographs.

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I will hang thirteen of these groups of text and images in my exhibit. These pieces incorporate a background layer of a 1920's era map of Academy street, showing not only the location of the houses, but names of the residents. Two of my images, one vintage and one contemporary image are placed on top of the map. The text relating to the content and importance of the two images is placed near the image. All three elements are necessary to show the story of how change has affected Academy Street. By placing all elements together, I hope the viewers will be engaged in the total experience. 

533 Disconnecting Time and Space

 

 

There are many different ways to approach a project and most of mine tend to be of a single place at a specific time. I know this because I often head out to a specific location (as part of my annual photo safari) and return with photographs of a specific place and time.

This seems to fall into a type of documentary/artistic effort creating stories about an experience which closely couples time and place. What if that link were broken? Suppose I photographed the same place at different times? Or, suppose that I gathered photographs together of different things at different times with the same meaning. By breaking this link between time and space, I can create a different type of project.

I’m in the final phases of completing a project that will be exhibited at the Page Walker Arts and History Center this week. It is an attempt on my part to break the specific time and place connection to create a different look and feel to this project. The project will be addressing the changes in a specific place over time. 

I’ve been photographing Academy Street in Cary, North Carolina for the past thirty years or so. Each of the folios I created was at specific time and a specific place. After thirty years of photographing, I thought I needed to break the cycle and show photographs of change made in the same neighborhood.

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The top photograph is the home located at 204 Academy Street in 2001. A few years ago, the house was cut in pieces and relocated down the street and around the corner. It was then supposed to be renovated. As plainly shown, the planned renewal has yet to happen. Photographing physical changes is easy to show, but the more difficult part of the project is to represent how the changes affect the community and the neighborhood. This takes a little bit more than photographs. 

532 On Getting to the End of a Project

I have written before on the various stages of my project. They are; anticipation, planning, uniformed optimism, the thrill of partial completion, the realization that all that stands between you and completion are hard work and details and finally grinding out those nasty details and finally, sadness the project is over. The temptation for all is remaining in the “thrill of partial completion” stage because it is so comfortable. We talk about the progress we made, how well we’re doing and yet, we have really nothing to show for the work we’ve done so far. We have a lot of half-finished work that is “not quite ready” to show. Sometimes the reason we don’t want to go on is because we fear something new between us and completion. Sometimes it’s just that we don’t want to face down the “hard work and details” part of the project.

On my current project, one of the feared problems was flush mounting my prints on self-adhesive foam board. I put that task off for quite a while and then buckled down to get it done. It was a case of the fear being much, much greater than the actual task at hand.

I found that to be a pretty consistent thread throughout this project; the expected difficulties are not overly difficult to overcome. With even a minimal amount of preparation and study, I have learned several new skills preparing artwork for this exhibit. It’s just a question of knowing that you have to leave that comfortable world of partial completion and face down the hard work that makes it difficult to leave the comfort of partial completion.

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This photograph is from my upcoming exhibition, "After the Memories" soon to be hung in the Page Walker Arts and History Center in Cary, North Carolina. I wanted to show the changes in our town and I was able to do that by combining historical images from the Town archive with images made today. For the next few weeks I will be blogging on how this exhibit came together. 

531 The Value of Authenticity

I think authenticity is the ultimate goal of any photographic artist. So what is the goal we are to achieve? When you get to the point where people (well, at least your fellow photographers) can identify your photographs without looking at the signature, then you have an authentic photograph. In other words, the goal is to create a photographic style that makes your photographs unique. It might be a personal favorite subject matter. It might be something that many can photograph, but done in a way no one else has photographed. It might be the way you light a scene, artificially or through clever use of natural light. What do you have that makes your photographs unique? Exploit that uniqueness and make it yours.

Can you do that immediately? Maybe, if you’re lucky, but it will probably take a lot of work on your part. We all spend time learning how to mimic the look of other great photographers that have created their own look. Build on the work of others to find what is yours.

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Here’s an authentic Joe Lipka photograph. (Well, all of the photos on my blog are authentic, but…) I have a penchant for (1) strongly composed black and white photographs, (2) doors and doorways and (3) photographing on Academy Street, in Cary, North Carolina. This door from the Victorian Lady folio shows all three components of an "authentic Joe Lipka" photograph.