Abstract & Concrete

Old cars are such a fine subject in Cuba

It seems like a long time ago I returned from Cuba to breath fresh northern air again.  But I have to admit that new visual experiences always make me want to be creative with my camera:  I’ve posted a few images in flickr for you.

 And we have certainly had a lot of new students join us this month.  Although I normally like to welcome everyone, the list would go on and on.

So let me just say welcome to the newcomers — we all look forward to seeing your creative contributions to our community. 

Abstract & Not-So-Abstract

One of the most important things you can learn in a study of photography is that  the artistic elements of design can greatly improve the visual impact of your photographs.

Some photographers reduce their images to include only the artistic or abstract elements: they are no longer a picture of anything but line, shape, rhythm etc.

It's always about the light: Havana by night

Here is a selection from National Geographic that illustrates the point better than words.  It would harm no one’s photography to attempt to copy these images in their own work.  Notice how “simplification” plays such a role in making these images “pop.” 

HINT:  For practice in simplifying images and incorporating the elements of design, flowers are a satisfying subject.

I suppose one of the key points I want to make here is that you can combine the elements of design into your daily photography to create images that really catch the eye.

Wonderful Nature Photography

A photographer I’d like to feature in this entry is Carr Clifton.  One of the continent’s best nature photographers, he spent months in BC’s “SacredHeadwaters” in the north of the province near Spatsizi Park.  Those of you who live in the north will find his images resonate — and those of you who don’t will maybe feel a new interest in visiting the area. 

Downtown Havana

A Few Other Photographic sites

I have earlier introduced people to photo.net.   This is a highly professional and moderated site, with wonderful features: all free.  If you need inspiration, just head there for some really compelling images.

And if all you need is some inspiration to keep going — check out 35 BeautifulPhotography Websites.  Scrolling down the page, you’ll find something you love.

 “Hey!  You’re taking a photo course.  What camera should I buy?”

When you hear those words visit Ken Rockwell.  He is bull-headed, opinionated and extraordinarily self-satisfied.  This all makes him entertaining.  He also has some pretty good information – and great tips on choosing a camera.

The Man With The Blue Guitar

Well the new year is upon us, and if much of the province (and territory) has been like the north coast, then it has not been a time entirely conducive to outdoor photography. 

 

That is one reason I am going to Cuba for three weeks where I am hoping to see enough clear sky to throw some interesting light onto things.

It was as I was preparing for the upcoming trip and realizing I had to alert students that two things fell together to give me some substance for this post: travel and the blue guitar.

One thing I always do to prepare for a photographic adventure is write out – longhand – Wallace Stevens’s poem, The Man with theBlue Guitar in the front page of the journal I will be taking with me.

I have a whole lesson — a self-indulgent essay, really — on this topic, but in brief the notion is that there is no more “realistic” rendition of a visual composition by a photographer than there is a “realistic” rendition of a musical composition by a musician on a guitar.

The only thing really interesting about listening to a virtuoso musician is to hear how he or she renders the composition.  The same applies to the photographer: how does he or she compose an image incorporating the elements of design.  It is my hope that by keeping this in mind, I can bend my mind to creativity with the camera.

Again, here is Wallace Steven’s poem.  Maybe it can provide you with the same photographic inspiration.

BTW:

This will take some of the pressure off you students who feel the need to wrap up quickly.  As usual, I will take a small netbook with me, but I have been warned that internet connections in Cuba are few, far-between, slow and unreliable.  So feedback might wait.  Go ahead.  Submit work.  Just know that it might be a few weeks before you hear from me.

A few photographic thoughts:

Texture:

Another thing you can do to keep yourself visually interested in subtle light is look for texture.   Here Reiny Dusdal combines a variety of visual design tools – texture, pattern and a golden monochromatic colour – with a sensitivity to light itself to capture a fleeting moment of nature’s beauty.

Remembering that the subject is not as important as composition and keeping the elements of design in mind can turn dull days into opportunities for creativity.

What is chimping:

Not an actual chimp, but an orangutan

Chimping is looking down at your camera display as soon as you take a photo.

I have long wondered where “chimping” got its name from.

Here is a short youtube explaining the origin of the word as well as encouraging your to stop doing it!

Rule of Thirds:

I have a lesson on this “rule” (or as Captain Jack Sparrow would say, “It’s more like a guideline.”) in the course.  But for an oddly disturbing reinforcement of the notion here is a video example from the Iraq War accompanied by a bouncy rap.  More sophisticated viewers might hear social commentary about the way media frames our understanding of historical events.

Here is a slightly more “standard” tutorial using Las Vegas gives some more technical ideas for you:

As always I look forward to seeing your creative efforts, but you might have to wait a little longer than usual for feedback.

October's Here

I have to apologize for being slow to blog.  Since I last wrote, we’ve had lots of students join us, and I’d like to welcome Ruby, Tanya, Autumn, Mildred, Marilyn, Margaret, Dominique and Keisha all to our group.

With autumn here we are enjoying some spectacular colours, and I hope you are getting opportunities to get out with your camera and capture them.

Composition and Minimalism

Les Flynn's photo of a wall

Any really good photograph makes the viewer pause.  Very often your eye will linger on an image because it tells a story.  And most often the story is told by the composition: what elements have been included in the image, and how they are arranged.

And just as sometimes the simplest stories are the most fascinating, so sometimes the simplest images are the most compelling.

Minimalism is the approach that capitalizes on the notion that “less is more.” It takes the approach of “simplification” to the limit, eliminating almost all detail, stripping the composition down to its most fundamental features.

Image by Heather Blish

These kind of images exert powerful visual appeal; they have very strong commercial value (lots of room for the publishers message), and yet despite of their apparent simplicity, they are not simple to create.

Go ahead – try to make a minimalist image.  As always, you can submit one of these in place of another assignment.  If you want a brief outline of exactly how to create a minimalist image, there is a fine tutorial here.

Heather Blish (AKA “drawerist”) is a successful graphic artist who works from her home designing websites, logos and print graphics.  Her minimalist photography is a tribute to her fine eye for design, and underlies some of her other graphic designs.

You can see her work in flickr here.

 

Welcome Back

Well, welcome back to a new school year.  And, in particular, let’s welcome some of our new students.   In the last week we’ve had Candice, Rebecca, Brenda, Cassy, Kathryn, Megan, April, and  Emily all join our community. 

I’m sure everyone looks forward to greeting them in flickr!

Matt Laur's Evening Stroll on Piazza Bra (photo.net)

 Speaking of communities, if you are interested in a fine photographic community, you will not go far wrong with photo.net.  They have a quality photo gallery, highly-informative forums, and a wealth of easy-to-read articles on various techniques.

Featured Photographer: Jerry Uelsmann  Old School Manipulation

How often have you heard the comment, “Yeah.  But it’s been photoshopped.”

As if using the digital darkroom suddenly made photographic images less valuable. 

Of course, since you did the lesson on The Digital Sensor, you can tell your friends that digital sensors respond to about 70% of incident light while film only captures about 2%, making digital photography awesomely more powerful than chemical-based film. 

Photoshopped?  Not at all.

But Jerry Uelsmann makes an even more interesting argument on that front -- that the simple combination of representational images can create haunting new images with emotional and allegorical power.

So let me introduce you to a man who made compound images long before anyone even dreamed of Photoshop.

Like you, Jerry Uelsmann became interested in photography in high school.  And over time his wonderful graphic imagination and his passion for sharing his images led him to achieve advanced university degrees and a teaching job at the University of Florida!

These images (and you can look at his other work here) were all composed of multiple negatives, stacked then manipulated in the “wet” darkroom with as many as ten enlargers at once.  There is nothing faintly digital about these images – except that they’ve been scanned to get them here.

Uelsmann’s art has been called allegorical and it has been said he turns his subjects into symbols of something else entirely.

Uelsmann made composite images before Photoshop.

The woman looking from the reflection of the mountain scene almost forces us to re-think the image and ponder it.  Such intriguing power!

Next time someone says, “Yeah, but it’s Photoshopped,” you might be able to help them look to the full meaning of the image.

Images & Art

As the school year draws to a close, you might very well be finding more time to indulge your photographic hobby.

Erik Johansson's imagination

That will be a good thing for those of you hoping to gain school credit for completing the program. I will be marking your work over the summer and submitting results to your DE school.

But I might also be taking some time off now and then to enjoy the outdoors (and my own photographic pursuits!) So please do not be dismayed if I am a little slower with feedback.

To lighten your day and give you some fascinating images to contemplate, here are a few compositions by the bright young (25-year-old) Swedish photographer (and computer engineering graduate student), Erik Johansson.

Here is a very brief interview with Erik. Though it is a small interview, it has several of his images.

Re-defining "pre-visualization"

And here is a much better interview, with fewer images.

This, of course, brings up the old grumble about post-production. At the dawn of photography, George Bernard Shaw insisted that photographs should ONLY portray “reality” in the same way your eyes captured it.

It was said of Shaw’s photography that “He is as able a photographer as he is motorcar driver. Though considerably less dangerous.”

Digital captures become raw material

Of course many photographers discuss and value the technique of "pre-visualization," whereby you create in your own mind the image you wish to create with your camera.

If you are using only the camera as a tool, triggering the shutter is the final step in a process that involves a great deal of thought as you marshal exposure, depth of field, composition and the elements of design and style to create a fresh image.

Since the digital age, however, many artists have come to think of digital images as raw material for compositions that carry a message that goes beyond ordinary perceptions.

You can make up your own mind on that issue — but please enjoy Erik's work!

Guest Blogger

Folks:

It’s been a while since I’ve made a blog entry, so I thought this had better be a good one!

First of all, though, an exhortation to all those students who are wrapping this course up for graduation credit:  work hard!  (Exhortation complete).

The reason this is going to be a better-than-usual blog entry is that I have asked nature photographer Reiny Dusdal to explain how he has used spot metering to produce images that use light so very effectively.

But two things first:  For your viewing pleasure, the website of Irina Werning, who has a wry sense of humour in her portraiture – you can steal this idea and have great fun.

And a man possessing huge technical skill with high-speed photography identifying himself only as “Frans” makes amazing images of insects in flight and water drops. 

But here is the main event: Reiny Dusdal whose images demonstrate (among many other qualities) precision in exposure and a profound love of nature, telling us how he does it.

Reiny on exposure:

Thanks, Warren, 'a love of nature' sounds a lot better than 'getting soft in your old age'!

Anyway, I use spot metering whenever I have a scene with a high degree of contrast...very dark areas and very bright areas in the same scene.

Like this hibiscus...

 The sun is shining through the flower, and the background is in the shade.  If I meter for the whole scene, my camera would try to expose the background as well as the flower and the result would, at the very least, be a very overexposed, washed out flower...leading to the dreaded post production time spent looking at a  computer screen instead of a camera viewfinder.  

And even more likely, the flower would be blown out to the extent that all you would see in your picture would be a glowing white blob in the shape of a flower. 

So I set my metering to spot meter, meter off the bright part of the flower, and my exposure will be close to what I want.  I then check my histogram and if I want to tweak the exposure, I'll use the exposure compensation dial.

This picture needed a little more effort, but not much.

I spot meter ANY white object due to the very limited dynamic range of my camera. 

Here, I would move my camera closer to the spider (or zoom in) to make sure my spot metering 'takes'. Then I'll meter on  the spider and lock in the exposure.

(Just as an aside, I have to use the centre focusing point on my camera to make the spot metering work.  

The other focusing points automatically meter for the whole frame.)

Move the camera back, (or zoom out), compose my picture, focus on the spider, and take the picture.

Check the histogram, and adjust the exposure compensation, if needed. 

That's it!

Spot metering...great for backlit flowers, sunset silhouettes, and blond grandchildren playing outside on sunny days.

(I told Warren I would keep this referring to spot metering, but another thing I found helpful is to compare my histogram to my setting. 

Because the camera would like to make everything midtone, I often compensate if I am in a darker or brighter than average setting.  

In a dark forest, I will use the exposure compensation to push the histogram to the left to give the darker feel to the photo.  

On  a bright, sunny beach, I will push the histogram to the right to give  the picture a brighter feel.  

I know you could do this at home on your computer, but for me it's easier to do it right away in camera and I get a better feel for how things really looked.)

The Hunt is On

We can call this our virtual field trip -- but I like the notion of a Distributed Scavenger Hunt:

On your marks, get set . . .  GO!

Place your five photos in YDIP 12 -- identifying which is which (i.e. Scavenger -- character) and if you wish, add a caption to enrich our viewing experience!

Since I had little feedback suggestiong chaged categories, we'll go with the following:

• a photo that says "spring" (or "mud season," depending where you live)
• a photo that takes advantage of the longer days (morning or evening)
• a creative shot of an old building
• a low-light shot of something in your area
• a portrait of a local character

And I'd suggest you upload them as you go, rather than waiting until you have a full set.  Whoever gets the first full set will earn great respect for their efficiency.  Whoever submits fun creative images -- at any time -- will have our undying admiration.