PixelatedImage Blog

Nearly missed the timing on this one. Here’s the November wallpapers in both 2560×1600 and 1280×853, shot in the Nubra Valley, India, not far from the Pakistan border this September. This dog showed up and if I’ve ever been tempted to bring an animal home with me, it was this morning. We named her Siberia.

Click the image above to get the small wallpaper, and HERE to get the large one. Enjoy!

My buddy Chris Orwig, a man who combines the poet & geek with grace.

A few quick quotes this morning to bring us all back to thinking about the uneasy – but necessary – connection between the artistic and technical sides of ourselves, or our craft. It seems everywhere I look as I study creativity and the creative process, I see reminders that it’s those who give not 50% of their attention & pursuit to skill, and 50% to creativity, but those that give 100% to each, however mathematically improbable that sounds.

“The separation of talent and skill is one of the greatest misunderstood concepts for people who are trying to excel, who have dreams, who want to do things. Talent you have naturally; skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft.”
- Will Smith

“You’re only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft. Craft is where our best efforts begin. You should not worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative.”
-Twyla Tharp

“Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.”
-Twyla Tharp

Next week I’m going to announce a giveaway related to the launch of VisionMongers, Making a Life and a Living in Photography. Until then, have a great weekend. Get out there and shoot something you love.

Reading through Vincent Versace’s book, Welcome To Oz, was both a liberating and educating experience for me. While other voices were telling me that should do things one way, Vincent’s book came along at the right time and told me I was free to do it another way. Of course, that’s not how he put it at all, but he does things in a way that felt intuitive to me, and so gave me permission to do things “my way.” That’s the long way of saying that I like what Vincent teaches and I like how he teaches it. So when I started watching his new DVDs it was a little like coming home. I haven’t watched nearly all of them because Vincent puts a lot on these things, and the stuff he teaches isn’t remedial – it’s solid stuff that takes active learning to absorb and adapt – but I wanted to point you to them before the pre-order pricing of 59.95 per title expires.

So rather than go over the whole thing, I want to point you to Vincent’s DVD’s here. The new ones are Welcome To Oz 2.0, Lesson One and Lesson Four, and you can find them HERE along with pre-order pricing. You also get a free copy of OnOne’s fantastic selective focus plug-in FocalPoint, along with some other plug-ins.

I’ll let you go to Vincent’s site to read the descriptions. What I love about what Vincent teaches is that he takes the notion of serving your vision to the logical extreme. The man is a master craftsman with a profound respect for the print and the techniques that get you there. If you’re looking for a masterclass in post-production work that touches heavily on some of the stuff I talked about in Drawing The Eye, Vincent’s the man. Like I said, it’s not remedial, and it’s not fluffy, but it’s huge bang for the buck in terms of education, and the free software takes it over the top.

While we’re on that subject, OnOne software just announced Plug In Suite 5 which won’t ship until next month but that can – like Vincent’s DVDs – be got on discount if you pre-order. More information is HERE on the OnOne site. I have only recently started using this suite and am loving the possibilities it brings to my work. Even the frames, which I didn’t think I’d have much use for, are truly fantastic, and FocalPoint rocks. Photographers with consumer clients will get tons of bang-for-buck out of Plug In Suite 5, which you can demo or purchase on the OnOne site HERE

Every week, without fail, I get an email from an inquisitive mind about the EXIF data in Within The Frame, specifically the question goes like this, and I quote from yesterday morning’s email on the matter:

I noticed that in quite a lot of your photos you use high ISO even though there seems no reason to do so, for instance using ISO 800 and 1/5000 sec exposure. Wouldn’t ISO 200 and exposure 1/1250 sec give better results ? That is, less noise and higher dynamic range. Isn’t 1/1250 fast enough ? Of course the case may be that you had no special reason for this setting at a specific photo but it seems to be quite a consistent feature.

It’s a good question. Every photographer has different priorities, different ways of shooting, etc. If I were in a consistent lighting situation I’d put my camera on ISO 400 or lower, probably starting the day at ISO 200. But the thing is, I do so much shooting in mosques, temples, and dark little workshops that it’s not long before my ISO gets cranked up to 11. And by 11, of course, I mean ISO 800. And then – here’s the dirty little secret you’ve all been waiting for – I get distracted shooting, walk outside and spend an hour at ISO 800, and the resulting high shutter speeds, before I notice. Why? Because my top priorities are the settings that affect the aesthetics of the image in the way that I am most concerned about – in my case usually the aperture and resulting depth of field.

I know, I know, the ISO affects the aesthetic, but it just doesn’t affect it ways I notice or care about most of the time. My 5D and 5D/2 bodies create great looking files if you expose the image for the most amount of data and don’t try to pull much detail out of underexposed shadows, which is why I expose the way I do (HERE’s an article on that). I don’t use Noise Ninja, never have. I’d probably benefit from it once in a blue moon, but i generally don’t have issues with noise. Nail the exposure and even at 800 the files look great to me. But like I said, we all focus on different things and some people get fixated on noise.

So the short answer – I get distracted, see something I’m excited about and chase it. Sometimes the ISO takes a while to catch up. You have to know what’s important to you. I’d rather follow my eye and my heart and get the shot than fiddle with ISO, but usually it’s not even conscious. I wish I could give you a better answer, something about string theory and reciprocity failure and the muted tones of a lower dynamic range…but mostly I just get distracted easily.

Too much time on my hands last night, playing with OnOne’s Plug-In Suite. Too much like play, not enough like work, and that’s always dangerous. This is me in Douz, Tunisia, enjoying some downtime, a cup of mint tea and a shisha with my buddy, the Legendary H who also gets the photo credit. I was chillin’ too much to take a photograph. No, the image has nothing to do with the post. But there are advantages to being your own publisher – freedom to be as random as I like, for one. And yes, I felt a little self-conscious wearing a turban but after a couple days you ease into it and start thinking about buying a used camel.

Thanks so much for the comments left yesterday. Some very encouraging things said, some very good ideas left. I always get nervous doing this kind of thing because I know some well-meaning lunatic’s going to encourage me to do something like more videos that I know are a great idea but I also know that admitting that is going to mean getting off my butt and actually  doing it. Anyways, no promises, but I do file these ideas away and they’re helpful to me as I create content for you. So, thanks. But most of all thanks for being awesome.

Ok, so get to the giveaway already, right? You bet!

Wacom has ponied up a fantastic Inutous 4, and I am sharing the love with the international crowd with 3 signed copies of my new book, VisionMongers – which I willl ship to you -by ludicrously expensive airmail -  when I get my first box of them. So, here’s the winners…

Intuous 4 Tablet, Medium
Marcus Taylor – invisiblegreen.com
Signed Copies of VisionMongers
Gerdez from Romania (#347)
Gordon Cahill from Australia(#341)
Gerrard Williams from the UK (#47)

Congrats to the winners! Please email me through the contact button at the top of the blog and give me your full name and mailing address and we’ll get you your stuff as soon as Canada Post and other involved parties can do so.

I’m really excited about getting these prizes to you. The Wacom tablet is really a step up and putting a little time into getting used to it, and customizing it for your workflow, can be a huge time saver. Not to mention the gains in image editing ability. I wish I could have given one to everyone. If you don’t have a Wacom tablet, find someone who does and spend some time with it – you’ll be amazed you waited so long.

Thanks too for the readers that jumped to my aid yesterday when I put out the call for some beta-readers for the fourth in my series of eBooks – you significantly reduced the moron-factor on this book by catching some really dumb mistakes, and a few quirks about transparencies in InDesign not exporting to PDF perfectly. So HUGE thank you to you!

I’ll announce a new giveaway soon, but I have to space these things out. In the meantime, go shoot something you love.

On Thursday the 22nd I attended a conference called Creative Mix Vancouver. It was the brainchild of my manager, Corwin Hiebert, and it was incredibly inspiring to me to see a room packed with creatives from an incredible cross-section of disciplines. We had writers and publishers, ad executives and musicians, video-game creators, film-makers, photographers, and a chef. Not to mention the fashion world, illustrators, and architects. And all of them talking about their process. It was incredible.

I tell you that for two reasons. One, to explain my unexpected absence here on Friday. I didn’t plan for that to happen, I just plain forgot. I get distracted easily and I think I thought I had something in the can and ready to go for Friday and I didn’t. Oops. Two, one of the recurrent themes at the conference was collaboration, and the notion of letting ideas into the world and into the hands and minds of other people to evolve and grow. You’ll see where I’m heading with that at the end of this post.

This is going to be a longer post. I want to update you on where things are at and where they’re going on the Pixelated Image Blog and I want to invite your participation in being part of its growth, because you’re a part of this community, even if you’re a lurker and never comment, and it’s fitting that you have a chance to be part of the growth of this thing.

So. As far as I can see from here, and it’s not far or clearly, I assure you, here’s where I think I’m heading with all this over the coming year.

As many of you have noticed, I’ve been busy. I have two passions that I bring to this blog; creating photographs and teaching others about the same. In an effort to learn InDesign I created my first eBook, TEN, two months ago and the response has blown me away. I decided to push my luck with another, TEN MORE, and it too has had an incredible reception. DRAWING THE EYE was released last week and I accidentally began working on a fourth and am almost finished it. I accidentally discovered that I love creating these. If no one ever bought these things I’d probably keep creating them because I enjoy the process and the creation of something new. The incredible response was never anticipated. So I have plans to do more. The comments I keep getting tell me the content is valuable. So while I’m making no promises, I’ve talked to a couple other photographers I love and respect, and we’ve got at least three potential collaborations in the pot right now.  I’m hoping to release those after the release of my fourth eBook, CHASING  THE LOOK, 10 Ways To Improve The Aesthetics of Your Photographs (left). I’ll give you some time to digest DRAWING THE EYE before I release this next one, then after CHASING THE LOOK I’m going to introduce you to Kevin Clark and Dave Delnea and do some collaborations with them. If the eBooks were songs, these would be duets. But I’ll space them out, I promise.

In the midst of all that my second print book will come out. VISIONMONGERS, Making a Life and Living in Photography (left) is at the printers now and should be out November 16, which means that’s when it ships from the publisher to Amazon. If you pre-ordered with Peachpit, you’re likely to get yours about the same time I see mine for the first time. If you pre-ordered with Amazon.com, you’ll see yours shortly after that. If you pre-ordered with Amazon.ca, or God-forbid Amazon.co.uk, well, you might as well find a comfy chair and put the kettle on, it’ll be a longer wait for you. But when VisionMongers comes out you’ll see some posts here about the business end of things. I won’t stop writing about creating photographs, but I’ll also be talking about the issues raised in the book, doing some related give-aways, and in general picking up a thread that I’ve discussed here in the past but neglected while I was writing this book so I wouldn’t get confused.

And speaking of Giveaways, I’ve got a few more in the pipe that I’m excited about. I do these because I love to give stuff away and because I like my readers. When I get a sponsor I always make a deal with them – if I get something, so does at least one of my readers. Be on the look out for some goodies from OnOne software soon. I just talked them into forking over some stuff, so I’ll announce that after I draw for the Wacom Intuos4 tablet. I’ve also got signed copies of VisionMongers, and signed copies of Steven Pressfield’s War of Art. In fact I think I’ll give away a 3-set that includes a signed copy of War of Art, a signed copy of VisionMongers, and a copy of Within The Frame signed by me, Joe McNally who wrote the foreword and Vincent Versace who wrote the afterword. Call me crazy. I’ll announce those later but I wanted you to know what’s coming down the pipe.

And that brings me to the last thing. The books, electronic or paper, are not replacing the content here on the blog. This is where I connect with you, share my latest thoughts and (mis)adventures, and enjoy the pleasure of a growing community- I wouldn’t trade it for anything. So this is where I open it to you. This is an invitation for you to collaborate with me and throw your best ideas at me and see what sticks. If you’ve got an idea about something you’d like me to write about or teach, an issue you’d like me to address, or a question you’ve been dying to ask – now’s a chance to get it out and make it known. If you’ve got an idea about the design of the blog, a feature you don’t see, or a photographer you’d love to see me interview, let me know. Basically I’m telling you I want you to have a hand in the direction of this blog. I’m not guaranteeing I’ll do all – or any – of what gets suggested, but the more voices I hear the more able I am to know why you come here, what you get out of it, and what you’d like to see more of.

And to encourage the participation of less vocal members of this community, I’m going to put a prize into the mix. I don’t even know what it is, but if I fail to come up with something more clever I’ll just sign a couple books and look through my closet and send something – anything – to keep you happy. I’ll pick one contributor to this conversation, might be a random choice, might be someone with a great idea, I’m not sure. But you deserve a shot at something for reading this far and contributing.

Thanks again. To all of you, from the more vocal people whom I now call my friends, to the lurkers who just come and listen quietly in the corners. It’s truly rare for an internet community – either a blog or a forum – to be so consistently blessed with such kind, fun, people, and somehow avoid the crazies. Thanks for being a part of all this. And for reading this whole post. Lord, this was long.

DRAWING THE EYE – Creating Stronger Images Through Visual Mass is the third eBook in the series. It’s about understanding and using the ways in which the eye reads a photograph in order to create more powerful images, and it’ll change the way you look at your craft. Broken into 4 parts, Drawing The Eye looks at this concept of visual mass, or visual pull, in concept, in camera, in post-processing, and then through creative exercises related to each of these sections.

Don’t let the egghead title fool you, this is not academia; it’s a real-world discussion about making images that are more powerful because they’re made with a fuller understanding of where the eye moves in an image, and how that understanding can change the way you shoot and process your images.

Like TEN and TEN MORE, DRAWING THE EYE is a 32-page downloadable eBook, in PDF format, and it’s available now for $5. We began selling these for $5 as introductory pricing, and were planning to make the usual pricing $10 but as long as you keep giving me such positive feedback and telling the world about them, I think we’ll just keep them at $5, if that’s cool with you.We’ve switched e-commerce engines too. So many people experienced issues with Lulu that we’re now using the much more reliable E-Junkie, so the whole experience ought to be easy.

You can order it right here, right now with the buttons below, or head over to the bookstore section of the site.

This one is an unabashed, shameless, Gear Is Good but Vision Is Better post. You’ve been warned.

There have been a lot of quiet, but enthusiastic ripples about the new Elinchrom Ranger Quadra system, and I finally caved in. I called B&H and talked it through, then placed my order. I’d been tempted before Photoshop World and then I got to play with them, hold them in my hot little hands, and they amazed me. The picture above doesn’t give any sense of scale, but this is a tiny (no, I mean, really tiny) system. The battery and pack is about 8inches tall and weighs 3kgs, or just over 6.5lbs. The head fits in my hand and cranks out 400w seconds – which means it’s WAY more powerful than my Canon 58Os. And with built-in Skyport it’s ready to use wirelessly very quickly. Am I excited about this? Absolutely. Why? Because one of the reasons I don’t do as much work with my Canon flashes as I’d like is that – excuse my language – I find them to be a right pain in the ass. I’m still wrestling with my new Pocket Wizards, which work well when they work. And I find, after brief experiments with it, that the ETT-L stuff is more work than it’s worth. I would actually take a small unit like this on assignment where larger kits are just too large, heavy, and prohibitive.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Strobist movement, and in the right setting I like my 580s well enough. But to have more power in such a simple, portable package, with a modelling lamp and built-in Skyport? I’m in love. I’ll let you know just how deep that love goes and if it’s going to last or just be some brief fling powered by gear-lust and infatuation once I’ve had it  a while.You can see more info on the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra HERE.

A couple other housekeeping items I wanted to mention and won’t have time later this week.

1. Matt Brandon’s got a 2010 Calendar for sale over at The Digital Trekker. I haven’t had a printed calendar for years but word on the streets is some people still use these nutty contraptions. If you’re one of those people, you don’t have to admit it here, but check out Matt’s calendar HERE.

2. I was contacted recently by a Vancouver-based photographer, Andy Cotton, who has developed a really cool way of carrying your cameras. It’s called the Cotton Carrier and for outdoor lifestyle and adventure photographers I imagine this will have early adoption – it’s pretty darn cool. Other will want to use them but might have to get over the fact that it makes you look like some kind of Commando/Ninja. But it’s super cool. I’ve played with mine, like the idea and the execution a ton and am just looking for a chance to try it out. Seriously, go take a look at the Cotton Carrier HERE.

3. I got my Gura Gear Kiboko bag last week. You know I love my Think Tank bags, but if there’s one bag they don’t make it’s what I’d call an adventure bag. I wanted something for safaris and more rugged adventures, something that still fit into a tiny overhead bin (like the Embraer or Canada Regional Jets) but still be built to take abuse, haul a ton of gear, and – this was the kicker – have an excellent backpack harness that I could see myself carrying heavy loads over tougher terrain. So when I ordered my bag from the maker, Andy Biggs, himself an accomplished photographer and safari guide, I had high hopes. Man were they ever exceeded. I’ll do a review later, probably after my safari in January, but the Kiboko is incredible. Weighs less than 4lbs, carries a mountain of gear, and is clearly made by someone with control issues and an eye for details. Like I said, review to come, but if you’re looking for a great adventure bag, take a good long look at the GuraGear Kiboko bag (pictured below.)

4. Lastly, how in the world has it taken me so long to get turned out to OnOne Software and their suite of plug-ins for Photoshop and Lightroom? I knew they were out there. I glanced at the site. I kept thinking, I really need to look into this more. And I never did. And then at Photoshop World (PSW is an evil temptress) I saw a live demo that convinced me I needed to look at them more closely. I’ve played with the tools on and off since yesterday, so this isn’t a review, just a reaction – this stuff rocks. If you do any commercial works directly for clients, especially wedding or portraits, or you like to get a little more artistic with your work, the OnOne Plug-in Suite has some cool tools – I especially love the Focal Point 1 and Photo Tools 2 plug ins. Anyways, take a look at them – in Lightroom they act as an external editor in conjunction with Photoshop, but it’s pretty seemless – it goes out, you do the adjustment, it returns to Lightroom. Love it. OnOne has free demos and videos of all their stuff – find more info about them HERE.

OK, enough gear-freaking, get out there and shoot something you love.

When I wrote the first two eBooks – TEN and TEN MORE – the subtitles suggested that they were ways to improve your photography without buying gear. I’ve been amused, to say the least, to see the reaction to this by several others (including the prolific Scott Bourne, who’s written two posts inspired by the concept – HERE and HERE) who’ve written blog posts using the concept as a spring board to their own thoughts.  It all gives me hope for the Coming Revolution I trumpeted on Scott Kelby’s blog a while ago. In that guest post I said,

I believe we’re at a turning point in the way we, as an industry, approach our craft. Thanks to the internet, information moves faster and faster, filling our brains to bustin’ with everything any of us could ever hope to know about off-camera flash, HDR techniques, hyperfocal distances, and the effect of aperture shape on bokeh. We have learned more and more, and if we have not it’s not for lack of information. And at the end of day we’re still hungry; full up on HOW and still wondering WHY.

And as nature abhors a vacuum (cats also abhor a vacuum) we’re beginning to show signs of coming back to centre. It’s encouraging. Lord knows we won’t stay at centre for long, we always seem to swing too far the other other way – from Artist to Geek and back again – but we do learn from the swing and from our brief time in the centre. Anyways, this is not about that. This is about smiling, and I bring it up because it has nothing to do with gear or technology.

I read in Annie Leibovitz At Work that her heart broke when her kids began smiling intentionally for the camera. I understood what she meant and I’ve since heard others talk about this same thing – we put the camera up, ask for a forced smile, and often record nothing but the awkwardness of a disingenuous moment. It’s sad. But I love making people smile, even asking them to. My friend Kevin Clark goes to all lengths to make his subjects smile. But the smile isn’t the point. The point is the moment after the smile. The smile is not the end, it’s the means. As a comedian I studied laughter. Laughter is a release of tension, not unlike crying. When real and unforced, laughter is a genuine unguarded thing. The greater the tension, the greater the laughter when that tension is released. So when I force a smile, when I get them to interact with the camera in ways they’ve done countless times, it’s not on the smile I press the shutter, I’m waiting for the moments after, when the release comes, when they lapse into a state of genuine reaction before the wall goes up again. That may be a more genuine smile, it might not, but it’ll be real.

Making portraits of people is not easy, the camera is always there, intrusive, looming. The camera brings with it, in so many cases, a heightened self-awareness to the subject. But get your subjects to break that tension, whether through laughter or in the denouement of a smile, and there’s often a moment in there, one that in another place Steve McCurry called “the soul coming up into view.” A smile can be fake but the moment after it is often very genuine, honest, and unguarded. So don’t look at the LCD the moment you photograph a smile. Be aware that your most honest moment may be yet to come.

And you can do that with an iPhone, a pinhole camera, or a 20-year old Pentax K-1000.

Speaking of improving your photography without buying gear, I’m doing the big announcement of my third eBook on Friday, but in my enthusiasm, and my fear of screwing up the coding (first time I’ve done it myself, the Legendary H usually does it) I accidentally went live with it just before the weekend. So if you’re really anxious, head over to the Pixelated Image Bookstore – Drawing The Eye is there now. Still 32 pages of pdf goodness, still only $5. I’ve said it before but thank you so much for the support you’ve given these things, through purchasing them, reviewing them, tweeting and facebooking – I’m truly grateful. OK, see you tomorrow!

On Thursday I’ll be spending the day with a chunk of Vancouver’s creative community. The conference is called Creative Mix and unlike so many other conferences where you learn skills and hang out in a ghetto of your industry peers (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), this one’s different. Music executives, people from the advertising world, performance artisits, visual artists, and more are getting together to discuss not their skills but the thing that we share in common – Creativity itself. If this were a bunch of photographers we might use the word Vision to describe this foundational asset – the thing from which your craft springs. We’re talking about how the process of creating, coming up with ideas, and living a life of creativity happens.

There will be speakers (I’m speaking about Creativity & Constraint), an after-event Think&Drink, a small short film installation, and more. More information about Creative Mix Vancouver is HERE, but the short strokes: Thursday Oct. 22nd.  at the Roundhouse. Cost is $159, $129 for students. Come, join me there, and invest in the one thing that you actually make a life and a living with – your inspiration.