PixelatedImage Blog

Running dry? Looking for inspiration? Here’s a simple solution: increase the inputs. Watch something inspiring or educational. Read something you wouldn’t otherwise read. Attend a workshop. Go to Borders or Barnes and Noble and pick up a photography book by someone you’ve never heard of who shoots in a style you’d never shoot.

Here’s some suggestions:

Western Canadians who haven’t taken a NAPP seminar have a chance to see Ben Wilmore (left) in Vancouver and Calgary on June 9, and 10 as he presents his Photoshop CS3 for Photographers seminar. Details on the NAPP website here: Vancouver – Calgary (Oops, looks like there’s one in Ottawa -June 06 – and Toronto – June 16 - as well. Follow the links for details)

If you’re in or around Ft. Erie, Ontario on June 07, I will be presenting my Know Your Stuff workshop and would love to see you. More info HERE.

There’s a great video of David Tejada shooting a commercial assignment on oil rigs in Colorado – if you’re interested in seeing how he works and why he does what he does, his videos – all of them – are worth the time. The video is on the Strobist site HERE.

George Jardine has an interview/podcats with Steve McCurry on his site HERE. While there be sure to check out his conversation with Jay Maisel, Seth Resnick, and Greg Gorman HERE as well.

Finally, if you want some solid learnin’ in your own living room – Kelby Training is having a Memorial Day sale and selected DVD’s are 50% off. Follow THIS LINK for details.

I’m shooting a commercial assignment out of town for the next two days, so I’m writing this on Thursday, see you next week. For my American readers, enjoy your long weekend. Go shoot something you love.

“To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer’s craft. His central problem is a simple one: what shall he include, what shall he reject? The line of decision between in and out is the picture’s edge. While the draughtsman starts with the middle of the sheet, the photographer starts with the frame.

The photograph’s edge defines context. It isolates unexpected juxtapositions. By surrounding two facts it creates a relationship. The edge of the photograph dissects familiar forms, and shows their unfamiliar fragment. It creates the shapes that surround objects.

The photographer edits the meanings and patterns of the world through an imaginary frame. This frame is the beginning of his picture’s geometry.”

from The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski

This is a beautiful book that distills things down to the elementals. It’s not so much a teaching book, as it is a meditation on 5 choices a photographer makes in the process of creating a photograph: The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, and The Vantage Point. MOMA has a 2007 re-print of the 1966 original. Amazon.com has it HERE.

In fact in searching for this title I stumbled on some others that look like a refreshing break from the one-step, two-step books we so often tend to spend our time and money on. Here’s the ones that caught my eye:

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Scrapbook

The Nature of Photographs, Stephen Shore

The Photographer’s Eye, Michael Freeman (different book, same title as the above – but I have R.C. Concepcion’s recommendation on this one. I believe he called it “awesome.” So there you go.)

Perception and Imaging, Richard D. Zakia

I haven’t read any of the last 4 books, but they’re highly rated and they have pretty covers – so how bad can they be? Just kidding. Give them some consideration if learning to see in new ways is a priority for you right now. I’ve just ordered a few books, so I’m cut off for now. But these ones are now on my list.

Scott Kelby has finally come to his senses and abandoned his No Blog Wednesday policy in favour of Guest Blog Wednesdays. It’s clear the man needs a break, but why make us suffer, right? (Totally kidding, Scott!) – Head over to Photoshop Insider for the first guest post by Vincent Versace. If  you’ve been enjoying my recent rants on the geek:artist ratio and the HOW vs. WHY stuff, you’re going to love what Versace has to say about being taken by your photographs.

Brave enough to stare the future of digital imaging in the eye and not flinch? Head over to Red.com and look at the Red Cameras – the 5K Epic, the 4K Red One, the 3K Scarlet. Very cool.

It looks like we’ve now filled what we thought was our last space for the Lumen Dei Photographic Workshop and Tour in Kashmir this September, but we’ve been talking and if we hear from you in the next week we can make room for one more – it’s just how the logistics are working out. So – if you’re kicking yourself for not applying, these are literally the final hours. But this is REALLY the last spot, no more joking around.

While we’re talking about travel photography, the website for the Travel Photographer of The Year 2008 competition is now open. As always, the prizes are sweet, and you need to do your due diligence about the rules. If nothing else, look through the galleries of winners from years past – some inspiring stuff in there.

And some reminders:

Have you checked and/or updated the firmware for your camera recently? I just upgraded my 5D bodies today after ignoring it for too long. For some reason it scares the heck outta me.

Have you done your data backups today? This week? If your primary harddrives died right now, how catastrophic would it be? Does the whole thing keep you up at night or make you break into a cold sweat? Consider DROBO.

Calibrate your monitor. It’s even less fun than flossing, but your images will look better.

This one’s not very newsy, sorry. Totally uninspired, I wracked my brain for something to give you, feverishly surfed the web, and in the end decided it was a toss-up between not posting at all, posting a few rubbishy little details about coming products, or giving you something to chew on related to your craft. Chewing won out, so here’s some reflections along the lines of why technique alone (the HOW of photography) can’t get you all the way to where you want to go. I know, I’m a one-sermon guy these days.

When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond between yourself and the people you photograph, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and tears, you will know you are on the right track.
- Arthur Fellig

Some of the great pictures, you just look at them and you marvel at them, for the subject matter and somehow they struck a chord in you. But it’s rarely about the technique. It’s not about the lens, or the film, or the light necessarily. It’s really just some story in that picture. Some emotional element which you connect with.
- Steve McCurry

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term – selectivity.
-Berenice Abbott

Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.
-Don McCullin

When I was about 14 or 15 I wanted a new camera desperately. Christmas was coming and I was hoping for a shiny new Pentax. A Super ME as I recall, but it’s been a while. Instead my mother found me a bag of dusty old gear left to a colleague when her father died. Indirectly I inherited a battered leather bag, a gigantic Linhoff tripod that caught my fingers when I closed it and a very manual Pentax Spotmatic with a 55/1.8 lens. The one I now own, shown above, is an SPII, my original body was an SP – similar but no hotshoe. I look back now and laugh at how much I wanted a hotshoe on my camera. That would have been LUXURY!

What I got, without knowing it, was one of the best cameras of the century. A solid, bomb-proof camera that took the ludicrously abundant M42 mount lenses available cheap, cheap at used stores everywhere. It had what was claimed to be the world’s first TTL metering -a simple needle that, when centered, indicated proper exposure. The first one hit the market in 1964, so by the time it landed in my hands it was already well-used for twenty years, and woefully obsolete. What did I care, it still made photographs and that’s all I wanted – to order things within the discipline of the frame.

So simple was this camera that I recall my shutter jumping the rails while I was shooting hummingbirds in Ontario, and I field repaired it with my Swiss Army knife ( I also recall being so initially upset that my mother had to give me schnapps to calm me down. I was young, apparently didn’t handle things well, but have used the “I’m upset, please bring me a scotch” approach successfully many times since.)

I spent hours with this camera knee deep in mud shooting ducks with a 400/5.6 lens and a 2x extender on it. I recall the viewfinder being awefully dark with this rig! And I had to shoot pretty fast film. But at age 16 I had one of the most extensive collections of blurry Blue Wing Teals in Canada.

My Spotmatic was good to me. I can still pick up this camera and operate it instinctively, like we’d never been separated by the new technology and my eventual need for something newer and shinier. This camera taught me to love the craft of framing an image, without the technology clamoring for my attention. This camera was my gateway drug. It led to darkrooms and more cameras and bigger lenses – it’s where this whole thing started for me, and for that, I will always love her and be grateful that I had the chance to learn this craft without the camera I thought I wanted

This is likely not the first time you’ve heard about Mpix.com but I need to add my voice to the chorus praising their service and quality.

While I was down at NAPP HQ last month, Scott Kelby was showing me some of the prints he’d had done by Mpix on the Kodak Metallic paper and folks, I was blown away.

One of the things I want most in many of my images is a feeling of luminescence and this paper, combined with the right image and processing, does that. Will it work for all images, no, but then no paper ever really has. Some images work best in matte, some in high gloss. Mpix offers printing on traditional Kodak Professional Portra Endura papers, Kodak Professional Endura Metallic, and Ilford Professional Black and White papers, as well as canvas.

I placed my order late on May 12 and received it today on May 18 – a Sunday. Bear in mind, I live in Canada and I’ve been told US orders arrive much faster. My prints – large 16×24 metallics mounted on double-weight matboard – arrived perfectly packaged and in perfect condition.

As to the quality – it’s gorgeous. I can’t stop staring at these. My photographs have never looked so luminous and perfect. No colour shifts, no plugged-up midtones, no weirdness of any kind. Just big, gorgeous, prints. For the price and the ease, and the fact that Mpix goes to 20×30 starting at $32.00, my Epson R2400 may start seeing even less action than it ever has.

I’ve been putting this experiment off for a while because frankly I just didn’t want to be disappointed. Nothing could be further from it. AND as a bonus – Mpix is running a promotion – join NAPP before June 30, and pay $89 instead of $99. And they’re tossing in a Dave Cross DVD for free. There’s nothing in it for current NAPP members, which kind of rubs me the wrong way (Scott, you’re on this one, right?) but if it gets a few more of you hold-outs into the fold, then more’s the merrier. Click here for the details on the NAPP thing.

Check out the Mpix website to see the whole range of products and pricing.

Northern Ethiopia, January 2006

I’m tempted to tell you this photograph has nearly nothing to do with me. It was shot, one of three frames, from the window of our beat-up Land Cruiser without slowing down. I saw the scene, knew there was no way I could get it, but tried all the same because I’m sometimes stubborn that way. Rightly, a great many of my images ought to be credited to a fast shutter and serendipity. In fact, I’d probably have a good deal more shots like this if I just got out of the way more often.

Trouble is, I think too much. I can give you twenty reasons a shot won’t work before I get the camera to my eye, and in so doing I lose out on moments like this that “would never work.” Often my thinking is a help – it works hand-in-hand with my intuition and complements the touch-feely or artsy-fartsy side. It’s helpful when dealing with technical things, like removing the lenscap. But give it a little room to move, give it too much license to control the process and suddenly there’s a hundred un-shot frames and my inspiration never gets a word in edge-wise. Think too much and the decisive moment is gone before you can react. And then the analytical side and the emotional side (the geek and the artist) are both unhappy with you and they take off for a bar and some single malt scotch to try to forget about you for a while.

I think as we grow up as photographers, as we “mature,” we lose a childlike willingness to experiment, to fail wildly, to try something for the sake of seeing what happens. I used to lie on my tummy with my old Pentax Spotmatic and a bellows unit and shoot out-of-focus raindrops on grass just to see what it looked like. And that was back when I paid for every precious frame of film.

Still, I’m glad it turned out as it did. We spent so much time in that Land Cruiser, saw so many children smiling, waving, running after us yelling “You, You, You, Youyouyouyouyou…” that this scene is as much about Ethiopia to me as some of the images I worked much harder for. More so because the two figures are children, and girls at that. Dotted all over the countryside you’ll see them carrying their jerry cans of water, large loads of twigs and firewood making them ant-like in proportion. More than 50% of the population of Ethiopia, like most sub-Saharan countries in Africa, are children. Many of them orphans. Still they smile, still they wave.

God, I miss Ethiopia.

Exif: Canon 20D, 17-40/4.0L @17mm, 1/1600 sec at f/5.6, ISO 400. Probably needs me to open it again in Lightroom and re-process it for better midtones.

So you’ve started rehab and you’re recovering from your addiction to HOW and need a shot of WHY? Looking to stand on the shoulders of giants this weekend?

Check out PixChannel.com which features a collection of video interviews with legendary photographers.

My Self Promotion for Photographers series (start here) has been one of the most popular series I’ve published here. Many photographers dream of joining the ranks of people who making a living at this. To do that you need an excellent product (you, your images) and an excellent way of promoting that product. Eventually Flickr won’t cut it anymore and you’ll be moving on for greener pastures.

Building on that, here’s some resources particular to building your portfolio – either the book or the online presentation.

Articles Related to Building Your Portfolio

Freelance Switch – 9 Insane Portfolio Designs to Make You Drool – Link here
Freelance Switch – 5 Tips for a Better Online Portfolio – - Link here
Digital Web – The Perfect Portfolio – Link here
Photopreneur – Creating the Perfect Portfolio – Link here
Photopreneur – 3 Steps for a Better Photography Portfolio – Link here
Digital Photography School – 99 Remarkable Photographers Portfolios – Link here

Great Portfolio Suppliers

Lost Luggage – Link here – Want books that look awesome? These are them. Want more coolness from the same folks – Case Envy – Link here
Evrium – Link here
Clickbooq – Link here
BigBlackBag – Link here

A Couple More

BrandEnvy Blog – Link here – This one’s a must-read about branding for photographers.
Brand Envy Branding Presentation Notes (pdf) – Link here
Portfolios The Sell, Selina Oppenhein – Link here

Travel Photographer Gavin Gough and I are switch hitting today. We’ve chosen a topic – Inspiration: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants – and are exchanging blogs for today. You can read my take on this subject on Gavin’s blog HERE. But before you head off there, take some time to read Gavin’s take on the subject.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Photographers! We’re a lucky bunch. Not only do we have a rewarding occupation or satisfying pastime, we’re able to learn from those who have gone before us for free.

Other photographers’ work is readily available and close examination of it allows us to stand on the shoulders of those photographers we admire and to see much further than we would from ground-level. It’s a tricky balancing act, no doubt, but if you are willing to put in the effort, you’ll be rewarded.

And if you’re prepared to stand on a giant’s shoulders then the view will amaze, engage and inspire you. I want to tell you about one or two giants whose shoulders I have hitched a ride on in the past.

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