Postcards from the Creative Journey

889 There’s Always Something New

A reclaimed salvage store has that tag line as part of its advertising. Your Lightroom Catalog has the same tag line. There are always new images in store for you. All you have to do is spend some time looking through the Catalog. We can now create hundreds of digital images every time we go out to photograph. We can’t possibly remember each one. In prehistoric times (when I was using my view camera), I could visualize every image and remember each sheet of film exposed. That was easy to do when you made eight or ten images a day. We can’t do that anymore. Between the massive quantities of images we make and our (my) aging brain, it’s information overload.

The other day I was going back to find one of “those” images, (one that I remembered making but not when or where) and I stumbled into several projects I had no idea I started. I discovered a couple of memes I could build into projects and eventually found the image I was looking for.

This image was a not included in the “Little Creek” project in The Lipka Journal this month (April, 2022). It got me remembering similar images from photo safaris. This and the other ones like it will show up in a future issue of The Lipka Journal.

888 - Cycle of Acceptance, First Published 4/18/2021

We copy the latest photoshop tricks to make our photos look like the ones we see on the web. Adobe has made great strides in photoshop and there are huge new numbers of features and capabilities for the many types of people that use photoshop. We create based on the features available and ignore the aesthetic and emotional aspects of the image. We accept the accolades of multiple thumbs up and move on to learning the next photoshop trick.

In doing this we create a cycle of acceptance of bad images. That does not make me enthusiastic about the future.

887 Text and Image (Part Two) - The Six Word Project

He left home a young man.

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Six Word Stories are a literary sub-genre. The alleged source of the genre is a wager in a bar between Ernst Hemingway and another writer. The wager was based on Hemingway writing a short story using six words. Hemingway’s response was: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”

This story probably isn’t true, except for the part about Hemingway being in a bar.

I like the idea because it is a wonderful literary game (and challenge). I am not a writer (as evidenced by this blog), but a photographer. Suppose, I thought, I could combine the six-word story with one of my images. The measure of success (for my way of thinking, at least) is to have the picture amplify the words and the words make the image come alive. The combination of Test and Image is much more than either component.

886 - Jump Off Joes (A One Image Project), First published 7/7/2019

The water rushes and rumbles and tumbles noisily down a steep canyon until it reaches this pool. The water quiets for a few brief moments in the headlong rush to the Pacific Ocean. Here the water is quiet and peaceful. I can smell the water and the scent of the evergreen trees overhanging the canyon.

I meditate on the clear deep water in front of me and this small space becomes my entire universe.

I am at peace.

I put down my coffee, hit CTRL+Tab and go back to work.

885 Text and Image (Part One) - The One Image Project

It was my first day on my first job. Mister Waddell explained my new responsibilities and what I was supposed to do. He said the first thing I had to learn about were brooms. There they were; straight straw brooms, angle brooms and push brooms. Then there is the hand brush and the dust pan.

He put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye and told me I was going to really clean up on my new job. He laughed and walked away. 

My career had just begun.

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I first started playing with Text and Image with Postcards from the Creative Journey. I started by publishing an image and sharing my ideas on the creative process. Sometimes the images and the text matched up well and other times (most times if I’m honest) there wasn’t a real connection between the two. As I thought about this more, the concept of linking text and image made a lot of sense. I began to look for text and images that worked well together to illustrate the point of the blog post. As the thoughts evolved, I considered the possibility of creating text to compliment an image.

The idea of a photographic fiction intrigued me. I could take photographic facts (as recorded by the camera), and then create a set of circumstances that were not necessarily an actual representation of the image. The text accompanying the image would contain some facts, some fancies, some speculation, a memory or two, and a little bit of fiction to make both the image and words work together to bring to life something the audience could appreciate.

Here are a few examples of some One Image Projects.

Amber's Princess Dreams

My Old Golf Group

Finding a Lost Cloud

More on Text and Image later this week!

884 - Well, That Was Quick, First Published 9/11/2016

I was inspired to begin a project. There was no dreaming, planning and no consideration of plausible alternatives. It’s going to be plain work; straight up. No frills, nothing fancy, just a task to be completed.

This realization was puzzling. Normally my projects go through several stages before they reduce themselves to just plain work. My projects all pass through the following stages: anticipation, planning, uniformed optimism, the thrill of partial completion and the realization that all that stands between you and completion are details and hard work.

This one just started out, “You need to make photographs here.” I immediately understood why I needed to do the project. I know where and when I shall do this project. It is all execution from this point forward. I went through all the stages in about five seconds and quickly arrived at the details and hard work. Maybe it will come full circle and be a lot of fun when it is finished.

Here’s an image from that project, “I Raise My Eyes”

883 Old Habits Are Tough to Give Up

In reviewing images for projects, blog posts and other uses I have noticed I tend to compose images corner to corner with little or no “room for error” in my compositions. After thinking about this for a bit I have concluded this apparent flaw is a hold-over from my days of using a view camera. I haven’t used a view camera in almost twenty years, so this is kind of puzzling. First in that I continue to compose my images in the manner of a view camera photographer (that would be using absolutely every square inch (now, maybe square millimeter?) because film was so expensive) and secondly (and most importantly) why has it taken me so long to figure this out?

Now, I must remember when “working the corners” on my EVF to leave myself a little bit extra all the way around the frame. That way I have some room to keep the verticals from converging in photos such as today’s image of the Cathedral in Cologne.

882 - The Path Not Taken, First Published 8/28/2016

Have you ever thought about what you would do if you didn’t spend your time on photography?

Me neither.

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Shortly after these words were originally posted, a friend gave me a good-natured ribbing about coming up with one of the shortest blog posts in the history of the blogosphere. Maybe it’s time to add a few more words.

I can’t imagine a life without photography. It has been a part of my life for over fifty years. It has, does and will be a major influence on the way I see things and how I respond to the world around me. Photography has allowed me to meet wonderful people, travel to beautiful places and record my vision and feelings about these places. It has been the catalyst that has made my life richer, varied and more fulfilling than I can imagine it would have been without a camera by my side.

I hope photography does the same for you.

881 - Ars Longa, Vita Breves

Life is short, art is eternal as translated from Hippocrates’  Greek aphorism.

I took an online ancient history course because my engineering education was quite lacking in the humanities and liberal arts. Better late than never. At least when learning is voluntary it is a bit more enjoyable. But I digress.

In the old days we used to worry about archival processing. The quest was to get materials that would preserve our vision in perpetuity. Last year I went back to boxes of my early work and sent them to Wake County’s waste depository. Sometime, in the far distant future an archeologist will uncover my archivally processed prints and wonder, “What the hell is that?”

Today’s digital files have achieved the archival permanence we sought in the last century. Sadly, so much of what will be preserved may be of interest only to anthropologists interested in the photographs of food saved by a culture obsessed with themselves and their food.

We have the method to insure the immortality of our artistic efforts. Now, we need to double down on our efforts to create art worthy of being immortal.

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We don't know who created this art, but petroglyphs do live up to the motto and are still mystifying and beautiful thousands of years after they were created. 

880 - Writing for Your Audience, First Published 9/16/2012

The message is not communicated unless the audience understands it. If you have trouble writing about your photographs, it will make it tougher for your audience to understand what you are trying to express with your art. I find writing about my photographs a very difficult thing to do. It’s easy to talk about f/stops (hey, does anyone talk about f/stops anymore? With auto-everything almost mandatory on every camera today are f/stops a topic of discussion? Pardon my digression.) and other technical data and where I was when I took this photograph.

This is the toughest part of me creating my photographic projects. The photography part is pretty easy to do for me. The processing skills are pretty much automatic thanks to Lightroom and batch operations in Photoshop, so that part happens quickly. What takes time and slows down the entire production is writing about the photographs. Not how I made them, how I processed them, but what they mean to me and what the viewers should see when they see them. I try not take refuge in artistic double speak, but communicate directly and clearly what I see.

879 - Professionals Avoid Surprises, Artists Welcome Surprises

Surprises should abound in the artistic life. Doing the unexpected or using something definitely not for the intended purpose should be high on the list of things for artists to do. Decades ago I needed a storage device for my 4x5 sheet film negatives. I had no idea what I could use to safely store my precious negatives. The answer came from my wife’s Tupperware catalog. The Tupperware bread storage container was the perfect size for those negatives. My 4x5 negatives are still there today, fresh as they day they made it into the Tupperware bread box.

One of the stumbling blocks to making large platinum prints was enlarging negatives. Dan Burkholder came up with a method to make digital negatives using overhead projection sheets and an inkjet printer. Once the printer technology caught up with Dan’s ideas, it was relatively easy to make digital negatives.

Trying something different, abusing materials, taking clues from other fields is being an artist.

Do something to surprise yourself.

878 - Silence IS Golden, First Published 5/29/2016

Have you ever noticed that when you find yourself looking at a truly great photograph you really can’t say anything much more than “Yup” while nodding your head? Photographs that are less than perfect give you the opportunity to talk about them. But when you look at a great image you are speechless. You can offer no comment because there are none to offer.

Perfection is worshipped in respectful silence.

Please talk about the photograph posted above. It’s worthy of extensive conversation.