Postcards from the Creative Journey

571 Write First, Then Photograph

I have written several times about creating artist statements. Here are a couple of more thoughts on that topic. The words don't have to be the last thing you create. Those pesky artist’s statements can be created most any time. You don’t have to wait until all the photographs are completed and impatiently waiting for you to write about them. Why not create the artist statement first and then go out and make photographs to align with your artist’s statement? Think of this as responding to a call for work. Juried exhibitions almost always have a specific theme or topic as a requirement for entries. You look for, or create images to meet the entry requirements, so you've already done this before. 

Why not do this for yourself? Create your artist statement first and then make (or find) the photographs to meet those requirements.

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Near St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna are some confusing signs. It's obvious you can't enter that way, but at least there's a helpful hand to point you in the right direction. 

570 Ah, the Sorrows of Old Technology

Some of the projects from my old website did not migrate to the new site, falling victim to the advance of Technology. Many images had a long side of 500 pixels at 72dpi. With high resolution monitors and smartphones, such small images would not look good. The world of digital imaging is very susceptible to advances in technology. I have film negatives and slides five decades old that can still be printed and shared with the audience, but a digital image that is only a decade or two old is so technologically obsolete it is not usable other than as a curiosity. Well, that and providing an example about how fast technology is progressing.

It was not the first time I've run into this problem. When I was working with the Town of Cary archives for the After the Memories projects the Town had a lot of important images, but they were scanned at the aforementioned 500 pixel width at 72 dpi, or they were of such poor quality they could not be digitized.

Here's one other observation on the woes of "old" technology. While assembling my new website several early projects left me quite puzzled. I had the raw files and unprocessed scans for the project. I also had the finished project as an acrobat file, but no intermediary work product. I have no idea where the missing files are located. It was like having an Oreo with no “stuff.” 

I will probably go back and make some new “stuff” and re-do those few early folios. I would anticipate these revisited projects will look significantly better based on the advances made in Adobe software and there might be small improvement added by a more experienced user. I'll let you know when some of these revisited projects are loaded on my website. 

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OK, the last one from Williamsburg - for now at least. The Governor's Palace also doubled as an armory for the colony's militia. The entry hall walls are jam packed with muskets and swords. But the winter light was so lovely, how could a photographer resist?

569 Ah, the Joys of Aging

In rebuilding my website, I had to locate “hero” images, something to entice my readers to download a project. In this search for images, I discovered a project I cannot remember creating.  I guess this just might be another sign of getting older. 

The amazing find was a pdf publication of A Sense of the Seasons, about the Heckman Farm and environs in Divide County, North Dakota. I combined all four projects into one document, published on a CD, sent it out to about thirty people (at least that’s what the mailing labels said). I even preserved the complimentary responses from the recipients. 

If you would like to take a look at the four folios from Divide County, North Dakota, they are in the The Archives of my website. You will have to scroll down about two thirds of The Archive Page to see these folios. 

I can’t remember creating a book project from the Divide County photographs. It really looks great, so I must have done it. The search also went from hero to zero. I did find some projects on my computer that made my eyes hurt. The images were poorly scanned, the photoshop editing was lacking, the project design flawed and the execution amateurish. How could they have been my work? Sadly, I did remember doing them.

Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

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Another photograph from Williamsburg, Virginia, one of the gunsmiths tapping a musket barrel. While in Williamsburg I continued the Made by Hand  project I began at Hart Square two years ago. 

568 Now About That Path to Knowledge

After I completed last week’s post, I thought a bit more about the Path to Knowledge.  (You could scroll down a bit and read last week's post first. I'll wait until you do that.) I made it sound like it was a linear journey to a destination. I assure you, it is far from linear. The journey is filled with dead ends, detours, construction delays, pit stops and manifold impediments along the way.  And loops; detours that take you off in an unexpected direction and then return you right to where you started. A recent experience illustrates that path.

I recently completely re-envisioned my website. As the primary method for distributing photographs and stories my website looked a little bit dated. (Actually my daughter said, "Daddy, the nineties called and they want their web site back.")

The biggest task was figuring out what my web site should do, what it should look like and how the audience should experience it. I really didn’t want to re-learn HTML to code the site, so I downloaded Adobe Muse and used it to layout the design and experiment with the functionality of the site. It took me about a week to figure out how to use this very clever piece of software. Then I was off and creating with a product that allowed me to quickly evaluate various designs and features of my web site. I did this right up until Adobe announced it was ending support for the product. Oh, well.

After a lot of whining, pouting and mental foot dragging, I buckled down and re-learned enough CSS and HTML5 and hand coded my website using the concepts I created in Muse. Now the website sports a responsive design and looks great on an iPad. The creative journey is definitely not linear and far from over.

I’ll keep in touch by sending you additional postcards along the way.

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The Apothecary Shop on Duke of Gloucester Street in Colonial Williamsburg.

On another note, if you haven't arrived here from my website, I have a new project on the home page. Here's a link to get there. 

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.

562 There Is No Perfection In Addition; More From Harvey Penick.

Another thought from Mr. Penick that has stayed with me for decades. It’s the title; perfection is achieved by subtraction, not addition. Removing the superfluous is the route to perfection. I guess in the most elemental form, a stone sculptor personifies this. Stone is removed until the sculpture is revealed. Haiku uses only seventeen syllables. There is no room for clutter there, too. Only the essential words to convey the poet’s message.

So the same should be for a photograph. Simple is always better. Visual clutter gets in the way of the message you are sending. Strive for simplicity in composition, restraint in editing and brevity in writing.

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Another partial wreath from Duke of Gloucester Street, in Williamsburg, Virginia. In keeping with the blog theme, this is only a quarter wreath. 

561 Concentrating or Thinking?

When I go out to photograph there is no other motivation than to capture the beauty that appears before me. There is incredible joy and happiness that comes from finding something beautiful and capturing its image with my camera.

There is no deep, thoughtful preparation and mystical revelation in this act. It is purely satisfaction of the desire to be in the presence of and record my reaction to this situation.

There is no intellectual rigor in this activity. In fact, nothing could be further from that. It is strictly instinctual, moving around, setting the edges of the photograph and making sure I don’t “muck it up.”

A long time ago I read Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book of Golf Instruction. A sage bit of advice from Harvey was that while on the golf course, “concentration is good, thinking is disastrous.” The same goes for photography. Think about what you want to do before you pick up the camera, once you pick up the camera, concentrate on what is in front of you.

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Christmas decorations on Duke of Gloucester Street in Colonial Williamsburg. No neon, lasers, on giant snow globes. Natural items that would have been available in the 1770s.

560 How Quickly We Acclimate

As part of a photo workshop I used my iPad mini’s camera as a teaching aid to illustrate suggested compositions during field sessions. That part worked very well.

Well, here’s what didn’t work well. Some of my teaching examples were actually recorded on the iPad’s camera roll. Holy Moley did those exposures get deleted quickly once I got home. I don’t think I ever saw as much camera shake, blurs and out of focus images since I had my Kodak Instamatic almost fifty years ago. It was readily apparent I have become dependent on my Panasonic’s dual image stabilization.

Something I didn’t have a few years ago is now a necessity. We acclimate quickly to the new technology and the changing looks of photographs. Earlier this year, the Ansel Adams gelatin silver prints at the NCMA looked soft and flat because we are now used to the sharpness and contrast of digital prints. Now I have to have dual image stabilization to keep my hand held photographs sharp.

I’m now a participant in a battle between advancing technology and aging. As long as the technology can advance faster than my aging I should be OK.

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Cloud Chamber, NCMA Museum Park. This is a functioning camera obscura created in the NCMA Museum Park, created by artist Chris Drury.