Postcards from the Creative Journey

646 Film?

My oldest daughter has two of my gelatin silver prints hanging in her dining room. At a grandson’s birthday party I was telling my grandchildren about the photographs I made with film. My grandson looked at me and said, “What’s film?”

Despite the innocent reminder of my advancing age and the distance between generations, it was a reasonable question because he’s probably the second or third generation of people to grow up without knowing film. While I’m thinking about it, he’s probably the first generation to grow up without a single purpose camera. Most photographs are now made with smart phones and the family camera is thing of generations past. Everybody is a photographer these days; it’s just that they are not using film.

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This is a digital version of the image that prompted the question from my grandson. It was made in the olden days when wooden cameras ruled the landscape. (Much like dinosaurs, you know.) This creek is somewhere near John Day, Oregon near as I can remember. 

645 - Silence IS Golden First Published 5/29/16

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 worshiped in respectful silence.

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

644 Digitally Remastered Photographs

Remember thirty (?) years ago when CDs were “new?” Old albums were re-released as digitally remastered. Yeah, I’m old. I’m going to borrow that term for my next couple of photographic projects. The two projects are “The Fifty Project” and “Hong Kong Bird and Flower Markets.” The Fifty Project was created for my fiftieth birthday and was a collection of my fifty best photographs as a pdf book on a CD. The images were scanned from gelatin silver prints at relatively low resolution. While it was a great project at that time, the presentation has not aged well because of advances in technology. We now have better (and bigger) monitors, faster internet connections and large capacity hard drives. Everything that constrained us to small file sizes is gone. It is possible to remake an old project match our original vision.

It may be apocryphal, but Ansel Adams made negatives he knew he couldn’t print at the time he made the exposure because the papers and developers weren’t capable of producing the results he visualized. He needed the technical world to catch up with his vision. Apparently, the opposite is now true. I’m trying to catch up to the advances in technology.

After working on my process to digitally remaster these selected film negatives, I’m kind of wondering what will happen when I start to dig into all my film negatives. I know I will find great memories, but the question is will the photographs be as great as the memories?

 

643 - Alkabo, North Dakota, 2004 First Published 06/20/2010

Making do with what’s on hand, re-using, re-purposing and generally making sure nothing goes to waste. A skill widely practiced on the small farms of North Dakota in building construction. The windows are obviously re-used from buildings that were probably dismantled. The siding is obviously recycled not even trimmed to fit. I think this is how photographs are made, too. Think about it; most photographs are made of “found objects.” The photographer looks at something already in front of him and makes two decisions before he makes the photograph. The two decisions are where to stand and when to press the button. After forty years of making photographs I am more and more convinced those are the only two things that matter. And that is what I did. Found the right place to stand and the right time of day to make this photograph.

642 That’s Cecil’s Chair

We saw the old man sitting in a dilapidated camp chair, cigarette in one hand and an old coffee mug in the other. We thought he looked like he would tell you some stories about the old days if you bought him a cup of coffee. We exchanged silent greeting nods as we walked by. Inside the store we asked what type of coffee the old man liked.

The clerk replied, “Well, Cecil used to drink his coffee the way he got it in the Navy, strong and black.”

Used to drink? I said.

“Yeah, Cecil’s passed on about three years now. Emphysema and then finally, the pneumonia got him.”

But we just saw him sitting in the camp chair.

“I know,” the clerk said, “He really liked sitting in that chair by the road, drinking his coffee and smoking.” As we were walking out, the clerk called out to us, “Hey, if Cecil left the screen door open, could you please shut it as you walk by?”

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Today is an important day. Sixteen years ago today, the first iteration of my web site went live. Some twenty plus revisions later, my web site is as good as it has ever been, but probably not as good as the next version will be. As we progress on our Creative Journey shouldn't we be striving for something different and better every day?

New content is loaded to the home page every month. This month I am trying a new presentation format with multiple projects rather than just one project. That way you will have more different images to look at.

Come on by and see what's new.  The link to The Personal Journal is at the top of the page. 

But wait, there's more! Some of my photographs from the After the Memories (Part II) were selected for publication in the "Past/Future" issue of F Stop Magazine. 

641 - Hell’s Half Acre, Wyoming First Published 11/28/10

One of the things that both digital and analog photography have in common is you have to be able to find the originals (negatives or files) before you can do anything with them. Most folks don’t want to spend the time organizing their files and it can come back to make life a bit more complicated. As Brooks Jensen says, time spent organizing files is time well spent. My analog files were impeccably organized, but somehow, in the transition to a digital world, my organizing skills have fallen off. The Hell’s Half Acre project is almost five years old, so I had to go looking for the original files. I checked both auxiliary (external) hard drives and they weren’t there. I was beginning to sweat. I did find them on a set of CDs that I had burned to preserve these files.

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I’m not getting any smarter, actually. In fact, I might be getting more stupid. Almost ten years ago I recognized that organizing digital files was a worthy activity. I did organize my files several different ways, with several types of nomenclature which causes me more problems as I go back to search old files.

Remember when hard drives were expensive? We burned our files on to CDs because we couldn’t afford hard drives. Well, that’s changed hasn’t it? I spent a lot of time last year going through the old CDs and importing old files to my hard drives. This just added to the confusion in nomenclature and file naming. When I purchased my second Panasonic Camera I didn’t even consider that both cameras use the same file naming convention. I have several thousand digital files with the same name made from two different cameras.

I don’t even want to talk about the state of my LightRoom Catalog.

640 There is Good News and Bad News

The Good News is that your photographic exhibits on the web are on permanent display, available to people all over the world at any time; and forever. It’s truly a powerful medium for sharing your images with the entire world. If you don’t like something, find it embarrassing; or have evolved beyond what you once thought was good, I have some Bad News for you. The internet never forgets. Even if you “take them down,” your images are still out there. The photographs are on permanent display. It’s one of the interesting things about life online. It’s permanent. It will always be there. Something to think about before you post something on the internet.

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Known formally as "La Cuesta Encantada" (The Enchanted Hill), everyone knows it as the "Hearst Castle." A few years ago I toured the castle and found it to be enchanted. We selected a late afternoon tour and we left with the last bus. But not before we experienced the "golden hour" from atop the hill.

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639 The Siren’s Song First Published on 7/5/2015

As long as we’re talking about sometimes you have just let that project go, I always remember this story:

Being asked to present your photographs at a workshop is a pretty high honor for the non-professional artist/photographer. This type of invitation is a real boost to the ego and the experience can needlessly boost your self-esteem to great heights. And so it was with me. I presented my photographs at a workshop and greatly impressed the participants. They hung on every word I spoke, pored over my photographs and discussed among themselves in hushed, respectful tones my artist’s statement.

After my presentation was completed, one of the participants came to me and quietly said, “We all noticed a spelling error in your statement.” I thought I wrote, “I heeded its siren song.” My fingers typed an extra letter at the beginning of the word “its.” The consonant added at the beginning of the word “its” is already in the word - and it is not the letter “s.”

This is why I no longer rely on spell check. Proofread, proofread, proofread and then let that project go.

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This photo is one of my favorites from the Academy Street folios. It appears in the "Walk Down Academy Street" project.

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638 But It Is Not Ready Yet

Here is another thought or two on Procrastinating Perfectionism to help you get by 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. Come back on Thursday for a vintage blog post about what can happen when you do let that project go.

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637 What Type of Vision Do You Have? First Published 3/10/2013

I would suggest there are two basic types of photographic vision. One type is a vision that is based on what your eyes see. The other type of vision is based on what your mind sees. The question is, do you photograph what your eye sees or do you photograph what your mind sees? I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when Brooks Jensen interviewed me about a Minor White photograph for the LensWork web site. Minor White created photographs that were the equivalent of a thought or feeling. Because his photographs originated in his mind and moved out into the world, it really didn’t matter too much where he photographed because he could always find a photographic subject that he could present as an equivalent to his thoughts or feelings.

And the rest of us?

Our photographs start out there in front of the camera and hope that in going through the camera (and maybe a whole bunch of other processes) we can conjure up an image to communicate our thoughts or feelings to our viewers. It’s a much different approach, moving from the physical to the emotional/mental than going in the opposite direction. This method of creating photographs does allow viewers to appreciate the image based purely on aesthetics while not “getting” any of the deeper emotional or philosophical aspects of the image’s intent.

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Chapel Stairs, Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England.

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636 The Fear of Finishing or Postponing the Inevitable

Boy, that’s not a real encouraging introduction, is it? But it’s something we have to deal with as artists. We can get really comfortable with a project or image or most any activity we need to complete. You know there will be joy and happiness when you complete your porject, but there are two words waiting at the end of the project. The two words: “Now What?”

We postpone the end of the project because those two words are among the most fearsome facing a creative person. I imagine those words are responsible for more half-finished projects than just about anything else.

The only answer I have to that question is another project planned to start immediately after you finish the current project.

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Old shacks in Bodie, California. Bodie is a California State Park with lots of restrictions that keep the populace from "loving it to death." Just means we have to work harder to make great images in that place. Check out my project "The Only Open Doors" on my web site. 

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635 Neither Occupied Nor Abandoned, First Published 10/7/2012

My “abandoned building photographs” are buildings not occupied. The difference between empty and abandoned is a loss of hope. Someone once wrote that my images are devoid of people, but not of their influence. There are no people in my photographs, but there is the promise of their return. I have seen lots of photographs of empty places, abandoned buildings and ruined city blocks where you were pretty certain the people were gone and there was no hope that anyone would return. I try to show that even if the buildings are empty, there is enough inherent beauty in the place to entice someone to return and attempt to improve upon what is there.

I think it’s important to try to maintain a positive view of the world and try to show my audience the beauty and artful arrangement of things that they would normally not see. This could happen because they have not been to a place I have been or they have not taken the time to look carefully at the world around them. I feel my role as an artist is show the world in a way to inspire or expand the audience’s view of the world.

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