“…a wonderful story.”
This is Part Two of a blog I started yesterday (It is the final image…that counts) based on a quote by Tom Millea (p13 of Photo Technique magazine):
It is the final image standing alone that counts.
How we go there is simply a wonderful story.
— Tom Millea, Photographic Artist
It’s his second sentence that opens the way for all the photographic techno-literature that we spend many pleasurable hours reading. Unfortunately, that means excruciatingly little of the photographic literature deals with the final image. It’s all about “how we go there”. Yet, both are part of “the journey”.
This is not a bad thing entirely. For many “it’s the journey that counts, not the final destination” and photographers seem to have taken this thought to an extreme with respect to equipment. Is there another art form out there that has as many websites, blogs and magazines dedicated to pixel peeping? No, although those making crafts may come close. And, certainly, as hobbyists, our fishing friends, computer geeks car enthusiasts and gamers have perhaps as much, if not more written about equipment than photographers. To be fair, though, I think it speaks to photography’s popularity as a hobby – a popularity that seems to be growing with digital photography. It may be more like fishing or golf than”art” (however one wishes to define it), but it is popular and with every new photographer there is a learning curve that needs to be met.
Let’s face it, talking about the journey (equipment and mechanical/chemical processes) sells ad space. There is a carrot for talking about equipment ad infinitum; there is no similar carrot for discussions of technique. I’ve even noticed that there is very little discussion of photographic approach, method or “seeing”. Equipment aside, much of the “technique” discussions revolve around pushing buttons (for the digital camera user), film and paper combinations, ink and paper combinations, darkroom chemistry combinations, etc. These, too, are helpful discussions for those learning the craft and all of us are always learning.
But where’s the discussion of approach, vision, mindset, creative process and, beyond publication and earning money, motivation?It’s an area of discussion that is far more nebulous. In lacking the concrete it is far more difficult for that average person to “get into” and it doesn’t sell equipment. But from my perspective, that’s where I would like to see the discussion of photography go.
In this latest issue, Photo Technique has done an admirable job of continuing this discussion with a few quite different portfolios. However, another magazine photographers should be looking at is LensWork. It is devoted entirely to looking at images and learning about the motivation behind those images. And, the photographs are all reproduced in beautiful duotone black-and-white.
It is this part of the journey that we, as photographers, need to explore further. Why do we photograph? What is it that catches our eye and captivates our imagination? What motivates us to point the camera in one direction and not another; to portray our subject with wideangle rather than telephoto? Stay tuned…
“It is the final image…that counts”
If you are serious about photography and you don’t read Photo Techniques magazine, you should. It’s not the only magazine you should be reading, but it is an excellent summary of what’s happening in a community of serious photographers who strive to improve their technique and vision on both the capture and processing sides. Here is a quote from the Jan/Feb 2010 issue (p13):
It is the final image standing alone that counts.
How we go there is simply a wonderful story.
— Tom Millea, Photographic Artist
This quote sums up everything I believe in photography far better than any of the thousands of pages of photographic information in books, journals and periodicals and on websites that I have read in my three decades of photography. Many photographers have said it before and I constantly repeat it in my workshops – it’s the photograph that counts, not how you made it, not the conditions you had to endure or the miles you had to hike; not the equipment or the process you used. All of that is technical, chemical and digital – not artistic.
As a simple example, I remember being frustrated in England at the excellent camera club I belonged to in Chelmsford. I always felt that titles were and should always be superfluous to the image and should never – ever – be needed to explain the photograph. Yet, there were photographs whose judgement was clearly skewed because they were made cute by or only made sense with the title. That’s ludicrous.
If the photograph can’t stand on its own then it’s value should not be increased with the nature of its title or, in the case of Tom Millea’s reference, its process. Far too many photographers place far too high a value on the equipment or process used to make an image. It doesn’t matter if the image was shot with Canon or Nikon or Olympus, 4×5, 35mm or 4:3s, negative, slides or digital; gelatin silver, platinum or archival pigment – as long as the image conveys fully the intent of the photographer and as long as it is archival, all the rest shouldn’t matter.
Howard Bond made a similar statement in a recent issue of the same magazine. He was recounting his incredulity at how his older editions of prints sell at much higher prices than his newer editions. The older editions were more poorly made, yet they were more valuable because they were older, that’s all.
It is well-known that the art world goes through this trend and that trend often linked more to personalities than to substance. This is a serious flaw and it is why many people do not really take the art-types and the art world too seriously. It seems that once a name is made, it doesn’t matter how good or bad the image is, they will sell like hotcakes at least for a while. The same is true with processes. Platinum prints would instantly command a higher price just because they are platinum no matter what was on the front of them.
The art world is fickle. If “they” are rubbed the right way they will respond. If galleries can make money then that is the path they will take irrespective of artistic value. To serious photographers (and other artists) who have always recognized this, we will still create images that convey our intent as artists in the best way we know how and will need to be content in that.
Image-A-Week #2
Over on dpReview there was a challenge entitled “What’s in Your Fridge“. Submissions had to be captured after the announcement of the Challenge so I put on my thinking cap and opened the fridge, camera in hand.
I like images with strong visual design elements and am constantly on the look out in my nature and outdoor photography for shapes, contrasts, textures and lines. I’m a bit obsessive about it, really, i that I will forego images that others might shoot and be successful at if they lack a certain harmony of design. My goal is to capture and recreate in prints the art of nature and without visual design elements, to me the art is lacking. Perhaps nature’s art is in its inherent beauty without the human constructs of design, but if I am communicating the people, then they need nature interpreted into a language they have a chance of understanding.
Anyway, what immediately popped out at me were the eggs. Their naturally pure lines, stark contrast and beautiful shape made them the obvious target for my forays into the art found in my fridge. I used only the light available from the kitchen light and the fridge light, so i had to increase the ISO to 800!
I began with a few photo sketches, watching how the light played on the shapes and how the shapes related to each other, keeping a close eye on the background elements. I quickly moved towards a simply design of just two eggs. After about 15 minutes of shooting I had what I wanted. I had visualized this image in black-and-white so I processed the image through ACR and submitted it to dpReview. Yesterday I awarded 5th place.
My thoughts, eggsactly!
Rivers Challenge Open
I host one of the challenges on dpReview called Art of Earth. The most recent iteration of that is “Rivers” which is open now for submissions. You’d better hurray, though – there are already 118 of 200 submissions.
Image-A-Week – 1
December Squall, Wellington County, Ontario
Here is the first in a series of Image-A-Week.
I made this photograph this morning during a driving snow squall. I had taken my camera along on the drive from Guelph to Cambrdige hoping to capture something of this snowy weather we are all of a sudden in midst of. It’s not unheard of to have snow like this in December here in Southern Ontario -in fact it’s common. It’s just that November was such a mild month with only a few dustings (Toronto had the first snow-free November since the 1930s!) that we were becoming complacent.
There are two tricks tp photographing in the snow:
- have a cotton handkerchief with you to wipe the front element of your lens. It will get snow on it, so be prepared.
- When using Auto Exposure, set the exposure compensation dial to somewhere between +1 and +2. Remember, all light meters try to make the brightness of your image average out to middle grey. You need to brighten that up to the original snowy white of the day by purposefully overexposing. Digital shooters can check the histogram – the peak should be over towards the right (highlight) side
Histogram change from Normal to +2 stops in exposure compensation
I shot about 8 frames at this location at different focal lengths and framing (tree on left, tree on right, etc.) In this case, there is no one image that captures the feeling any better than the others. Having a few different versions gives me some choices when it comes to decisions about layout and design when the image is used.
This is just the start of what I hope is a great winter season of photography.
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