by successfulbob | photography, photography - art quote, photography creativity, photography education
Sunday Photo/Art Quote
I’m reminded of a song.
Paraphrasing here but you’ll get the idea. The lyrics go something like this,
“I want it all, I want it all, AND I WANT IT NOW!!’
We live in a very now society. Information is almost instantaneous. Look at the web. I just typed the search term photography into my browser and had access to About 1,020,000,000 results (0.66 seconds) from Google. Holy Crap! The reason I bring this up is that technology has spoiled us in many ways. This quick access to information has spread to the ability of cameras to give us a quick result that’s good enough. AKA in focus and a decent exposure.
This leads to two things I’ve noticed. The lament that a photographer isn’t creating ‘enough’. Enough new or exciting or different images. Or worse. A photographer thinking that they are creating wonderful images and not receiving the just kudos.
Let us now move on to today’s quote.
“If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography.” Edward Weston
Granted that when Weston shared this quote the processes for attaining images was more difficult than we have at our disposal today. But the abiltiy to see, and bring that vision, to our final images still takes knowledge and time.
Practice. Experimentation. Study. Making mistakes. Education. And, more practice. Push the limits of the new tech.
Rinse and repeat.
Don’t do the same thing over and over and expect different results. That’s someone’s definition of insanity often attributed to Einstein.
That is what ultimately leads to creating compelling imagery.
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
PS – What are you doing daily, or weekly, to take your image creation skills to the next level?
PPS – Esoterica – Weston was pushing the material he had at hand. For example, in his iconic studio photographs of the peppers and nautilus shells did you know that the low rated ISO of the sheet film used made it necessary for very long exposures? Some as long as 4½ hours!!
by successfulbob | art books, photography, photography books, photography marketing
Barry Lopez – Learning to See
I saw this chapter posted on another web site and I am looking forward to getting a copy of this to read the rest of this National Bestseller
Barry Lopez book About This Life – Journeys on the Threshold of Memory
“The… event occurred around the first serious choice I made as a photographer to concentrate on a limited subject. The subject was always light, but I wanted to explore a single form, which turned out to be the flow of water in creeks and rivers near my home. I photographed in every season, when the water was high in February and March, when it was low in August, when it was transparent in July, when it was an opaque jade in December. In 1980 I began to photograph moving water in moonlight, exposures of twenty-five or thirty minutes. These images suffered from reciprocity failure – the color balance in them collapsed – but they also recorded something extraordinary, a pattern of flow we cannot actually see. They revealed the organizing principle logicians would one day call a strange attractor.
The streaming of water around a rock is one of the most complex motions of which human beings are aware. The change from a laminar, more or less uniform flow to turbulent flow around a single rock is so abstruse a transition mathematically that even the most sophisticated Cray computer cannot make it through to a satisfactory description.
Aesthetically, of course, no such difficulty exists. The eye dotes on the shift, delights in the scintillating sheeting, the roll-off of light around a rock, like hair responding to the stroke of a brush. Sometimes I photographed the flow of water in sunshine at 1/2000 of a second and then later I’d photograph the same rock in moonlight. Putting the photos side by side, I could see something hidden beneath the dazzle of the high-speed image that compared with our renderings of the Milky Way from space: the random pin-dot infernos of our own and every other sun form a spiraling, geometrical shape motionless to our eyes. In the moonlit photographs, the stray streaks from errant water splashes were eliminated (in light that weak, they occur too quickly to be recorded); what was etched on the film instead were orderly, fundamental lines of flow, created by particle after illuminated particle of gleaming water, as if each were a tracer bullet.
(Years later, reading Chaos, James Gleick’s lucid report on chaos theory, I would sit bolt upright in my chair. What I’d photographed was the deep pattern in turbulence, the clothing, as it were, of the strange attractor.)
“
– Barry Lopez, “Learning to See,” chapter 13 in About This Life
by successfulbob | photography - art quote, photography education
Photo Art Quote for Sunday Thinking
Writing this Photo Art Quote post for the blog used to be a bit of a chore… But I find more and more, this time of thinking about art and how it works for our business, and health, and state of mind for creating has been quite interesting. It has forced me to think about the creation process in all areas of art, not just photography. How all artists including photographers become and stay creative.
Which brings us to today’s conversation. The quote is from New York writer Michael Kanin who won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay and wrote comedy material for comics, actors and movies. Obviously successful but seems to have found the day-to-day part of the job a chore…
“I don’t like to write, but I love to have written.” Michael Kanin
This quote caught my attention because there are times when working on a photo project I just want to toss it out and go on to something new. It usually turns out that these become the finished images that show the most depth and of which I am most proud to have completed. Don’t get me wrong. I love photography! But there are occasions when the work that’s necessary to bring a project to fruition seems like it will go on forever. Of course, there are times when you have yo know when to quit when enough is enough. But when is that?
Our society has become a ‘I want it now!’ creature. Things come to us at the speed of the Internet. (which is really, really FAST! A search on the word ‘photography’ gave this result – About 979,000,000 results (0.66 seconds) ) We have access to more information than ever before and I find that to be a blessing and a curse. A blessing because the access to material and the ability to learn new things is incredible and I embrace it. And, I believe it to be a curse for the exact same reason. It can be difficult to concentrate on a single project when so many ideas are clamoring for attention.
Digital has made it easier than ever to create. The question becomes is it just ‘good enough’ and it’s time to move on? Or can we delve deeper to create something of more lasting value?
I suppose it’s a question for the ages and one we should probably revisit with regularity.
So do you labor enough to take your images to the next level? Or is an image ‘good enough’?
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
by successfulbob | black & white, HDR photography, landscape photography, photography
HDR Imaging
It’s pretty amazing how far the new HDR software from Macphun called AuroraHDR has come. Layers are now available within. An interface that’s pretty straightforward but with lots of control available in many different areas of manipulation.
One of the things I find I really like is the ability to get the most out of the dynamic range in the scene… and still have a very realistic image rather than one that screams HDR!!!!! And, even better presets that will get you close to the final look you want.
I pulled a set of three images from Butchart Gardens in Victoria British Columbia near Vancouver, Canada and thought I’d see how the software worked with these older files from the Leica D-Lux 4 point and shoot camera.
Natural preset.
A bit more ‘tooth’ in this preset. I like what it did to the greenery but not so much the sky. Could be combined with the image above or processed with layers in Aurora to clean up sky area.
Black and white preset… Not bad. No extra processing.
You can be as subtle or as outrageous in your processing as you would like. Shooting multiple images to expand your density range? Try out the program. I think you’ll like it.
Yours in creative Photography, Bob
PS – Get some extra goodies if you buy before February is over 99 bucks for the program and 90 bucks in bonuses. And always a 30 day money back guarantee… Click on the banner for more info.
by successfulbob | Lumix GH4, Lumix GX8, Lumix Lounge, musician photography, photographer of musicians, photography education
Miller and the Other Sinners Band
Take an electric guitar. Acoustic guitar. A bass guitar. A small sax… and a large one. Throw in someone who knows how to play the drums. Add in a voice that is pure magic and the namesake of the band. And what do you get?
A really good time listening to Southern Soul!
What is SOUTHERN SOUL?
A sweet blend of blues/gospel/americana/r&b with a splash a cayenne pepper.
Saturday night Miller and the Other Sinners performed at Sound Bites Grill and I had the fun job of photographing them for the ‘SBG Wall of Fame’. This group really rocked the house with a bluesy sound that had everyone bouncing in their seats.
Sound Bites Grill Wall of Fame image for Miller and the Other Sinners
I used two cameras for the event.
I used the Lumix GH4 with a 35-100mm Vario f2.8 lens for the individual band member captures. I generally shoot at ISO 3200 in aperture priority with a minus 2/3rds of a stop exposure compensation in RAW. This will generally get me an exposure between 1/60th & 1/100 of a second. Taking the images into Adobe Camera Raw with just a little push up of the shadows slider and a reduction of the highlights I am able to get the entire dynamic range of the scene.
The second camera is the Lumix GX8 with a wide f2.8 12-35mm Vario zoom. These images are of the whole band and used for press releases and marketing. Same basic settings on the camera. A great feature of shooting with these cameras is the Live View function as you are seeing the image as it is being captured so it’s easy to make tweaks to the settings before firing the shutter.
Marketing images are created in color but I specifically do the BW conversion myself so the best quality will be printed rather than someone at the publication just pushing the greyscale button. NIK Silver FX Pro 2 is the go-to software plug-in.
Knowing how the images are going to be used dictates how images are processed. I always try to create the best image file for the job at hand. Remember to ask questions in order to be able to provide the best product.
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
