PixelatedImage Blog

iPhone shot of dolphins swimming under the bow of the zodiac. Maui.

A quick note to say hello. Kind of feeling guilty for being here and not dropping a line. We’ve been having an amazing time here -yesterday I spent the day in a zodiac off the coast of Lanai, a small island itself just off the coast of Maui. Snorkelling, underwater sea caves, incredible weather, and – most amazing of all a chance to swim, unexpectedly, among a pod of hundreds of spinner dolphins. Can’t begin to describe the magic of it. I’m paying for my indiscretions today, though. Clearly I the sunscreen I thought I was applying liberally wasn’t as liberal – or effective – as I thought.

The festival kicked off last night with a reception, and this morning with a keynote. I spoke about Vision-Driven Photography and the need to discover and express our vision. Before that I spent three days relaxing, and chewing through Seth Godin’s book Linchpin which you should read. Run, don’t walk, to your local library or bookstore and get this book.

My friend Sabrina Henry told me I needed to read Linchpin and I resisted because while Seth Godin is a scary-smart guy he kind of writes like a grade 12 student and I find it hard getting past his writing to the wisdom beneath. Not so with Linchpin; it’s still not particularly brilliant writing as far as craft goes but the content is incredible. It’s been a long time since a book got so much of my attention, marginalia, and circles and arrows.

At it’s core, Linchpin is a discussion of the value of the artist in our culture, and the necessity of being an artist in this economy. It’s got lots of brain food in it, and it connected some dots for me, but it’s also profoundly pragmatic – especially for those in the creative arts who think they have to be less unique, and blend into the crowd, to be a commodity rather than a brand, in order to make it. It also, and here’s a difference, has a deeply human side to it. Anyways, Linchpin really inspired me and with it Seth Godin moved in my thinking from marketing guy to join the likes of Hugh MacLeod (Ignore Everybody),  Steven Pressfield (The War of Art), and writers like Anne Lamott whose combined voices all say that the hard work of art matters, that creation has value and that making a life and a living at this stuff is more likely the less we sell out.

Anyways, love it here. If you’re here in Maui at the festival, please do introduce yourself to me. Corwin and I return to the mainland Monday morning and then the sprint to get ready for 6 weeks in Asia begins.

There are two organizations I am particularly excited to be involved with right now – one is Focus For Humanity which is an incredible initiative aimed at providing grants to photographers to partner with NGO’s, the other is the International Guild of Visual Peacemakers, an initiative aimed at breaking down stereotypes and opening dialogue between cultures. Both are a little counter-intuitive, both are willfully breaking previous molds of how these kinds of things have always been done, and both have some amazing people with big hearts and sizable brains behind them.

The IGVP has finally launched their website and I’d encourage you to head over to VISUALPEACEMAKERS.ORG and take a look, see if it’s something you’d like to get behind and be involved with. Focus For Humanity Foundation is HERE and you should make that your next stop. The IGVP and Focus For Humanity play nicely with each other and I like to think of them as a left hand and a right hand working together to similar ends. Huge kudos to Mario and Marco, and their respective teams, for putting their hearts and souls into these groups.

Craft & Vision is proud to be a supporter to both, and in the coming months we’ll look for new ways to partner together to build the community of photographers and visual storytellers who seek to use their talents and time for good (and not for evil.)

Wow, for a country just off the coast of Canada, it sure seemed to take a while to get back from Iceland. 24 hours of traveling, 2 border crossings, three airlines, and a couple hours of sleep later, and I’m home. What an amazing trip. This trip was a chance for me to do some creative exercises, get some down time (and by that I mean, working like a dog to keep up with Dave Delnea), and create a small body of work that I could add to my portfolio. I also wanted to come out of it with enough images to show, and lessons learned that I could teach and though I don’t know when it’ll release, the next Craft & Vision eBook out of me personally will be in The Print & The Process series and it’ll be about the Iceland trip. I’ve been chipping away at it, and I’m really excited to work on it, as these books are themselves part of the creative process for me. I’ll keep you posted, but don’t hold your breath, it’ won’t be for a little while.

On July 16th I posted a thing about the new book, Vision & Voice. A bunch of y’all put your names in the magic hat for signed copies and I’ve just drawn three names – the numbers that came up were #49, #166, and #273 – so congrats to Susan, Jennifer, and Noel. Emails have been sent, when you get me your shipping addresses I’ll fire these babies off to you!

While we’re on the topic of Vision & Voice, I’ve got what I hope is an appropriate and understated request. If you’ve read the book and enjoyed it, and can recommend it, would you leave a review on Amazon.com? I’m not asking for anything more than your enthusiasm and your honesty, but as it turns out this kind of thing makes a big difference in the world of books.

OK, more later. I have bags to unpack, a tent to dry out, sensors to clean, and a mound of “I’ve been away from the office for almost two weeks” to get through. Nice to be back, I missed y’all.

This weekend’s free online CreativeLIVE class on Vision Driven Photography was a lot of fun. And exhausting. And a real stretch for me. I find events like that, and teaching that kind of subject matter, very challenging. Which is why I did it (instead of staying at home and watching endless DVDs of HOUSE M.D. or something). I mentioned in the class that those things you are most scared of doing are usually the very things you most need to do, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t go into this weekend with a mix of excitement and fear. Anyways, it’s done now – huge thanks to all who sat in, who participated, and who came in person to be part of things.

I hope those of you that took the time to watch, and overcame some of the troubling technical issues, got some bang for your buck in terms of time invested. I hope you came out seeing something a little differently, or a little more free to embrace the frustrations, fears, doubts, and chaos of the artistic process. Remember there is nothing wrong with a messy process, that a sterile process most often results in sterile art, and the world doesn’t need more of that.

I’m about to hit the road, so I’ll be on the blog a couple more times this week and then mostly absent until I get home from Iceland on the 10th.

Again, thank you so much for being part of things this weekend. You can still get the course as a download HERE, though the early-bird discount is over.

Good morning, folks. It’s 9:50am on Friday the 23rd here in Seattle. We’re almost an hour away from going live on the CreativeLIVE VisionDriven Photography weekend. I’d tell you I’m excited – which I am – but I think the overriding emotion right now is something more like terror. Lots of deep yogic breathing going on over here.

Anyways, this is going to be a blast and I’d love to have you there. So – find us HERE at the CreativeLIVE site. You can join us there, sign up to be part of the course, pre-purchase the downloads, even get in on the twitter contest/giveaways for some Think Tank Photo gear, copies of the Vision Trilogy, OnOne Software Plug In suites, and a GIGANTIC canvas of your work from Artistic Photo Canvas.

For those joining us, you can post images to the Flickr group HERE.

You can tweet your questions on Twitter with #AskDavid

The Craft & Vision eBooks discount is 20% off a purchase of 5 or more PDF eBooks at the Craft & Vision site HERE with the discount code: VISIONDRIVEN – This discount is valid until midnight on Sunday the 25th.

OK, I gotta run, but join us! Because #1 It’s free to watch and participate and if it’s a great workshop, then HEY! FREE WORKSHOP! And if it all falls apart, then HEY! FREE TRAINWRECK!   See you soon!

I’m really – REALLY – excited to announce that the new Craft & Vision website just went up. There will be a tweak here and there in the coming days but it’s live and functional and I think it’s going to make the process of buying and enjoying the Craft & Vision eBooks that much better. What does it mean to you?

A cleaner site with a little more ease of use, as well as a home for comments and reviews – In the past the only way to leave a review has been on my blog. You can now leave your reviews where they belong, and to encourage you to do so we’re giving away an iPad! Whether you read the PDFs or buy the Apps, Craft & Vision eBooks and the Apple iPad go together like Peanut Butter and Jelly, so we’re giving one away.

What we’re hoping for are some honest (hopefully honestly enthusiastic ) reviews for the individual books. We aren’t looking for empty praise and we aren’t looking for anyone to pad the site with fluff. If you’ve bought the books, read them and love them, we welcome you to write a short review for the book. If you’ve read’em all, feel free to pick a couple favourites. If you’ve already left those comments on the blog here, feel free to copy and paste them onto the new site. We could do that but it kind of feels like it lacks integrity and would rather leave that up to you. Leave a review and you’ll have a chance to win. Leave a couple reviews, and you’ll have a couple chances to win. Note: This is something we’re doing as a service to future buyers, not to pad our egos, so if we feel you’re just dropping lame comments in order to win, we’ll pull the comments. Be enthusiastic, be honest, and don’t even think about being anonymous if you hope to win the iPad.

You’ll notice a couple other things too. We’ve added a link to buy all the books at once, and there will be a permanent 20% discount for those that do. Makes life easier, especially if you’re an affiliate referring people to the site for the first time. We’ve also added links to buy the iPad apps. Same price, same content, different format. And while we’re talking Apps, there is a free App coming that will function as a one-stop iPad shop for the books – download it once and you’ll be able to access the books easily, get some free wallpapers, and stay up to date on all things Craft & Vision.

When I began Craft & Vision a year ago I had no idea it would become what it has. And we’re only just beginning. It’s been an incredible ride. All along we’ve been grateful for your support and your feedback. Thank you so much. I do this, and now the rest of my team – Corwin, Justin, Sabrina, Susanna – do this, because we share your passion for photography and we believe we can create amazing resources to help you improve your craft without buying gear. And at $5 each they cost less than a Starbucks latte, last longer, and won’t make you gassy and bloated. They’ll also get you into great education resources with less ads, and leave you budget left over for that new piece of gear you’re going to buy anyways.

Thank you so much for being part of this. We’re releasing Eli Reinholdtsen’s book, Chasing Reflections, next week. I’ll be in Iceland at the time but the launch will go ahead as it always does, with discounts, on Thursday the 29th.

In the meantime, leave a review or two on the new Craft & Vision site, each book has a spot for reviews so put’em there. Be sure to leave your name and email. On August 31st we’ll randomly draw from all the reviews and send a 16GB WiFi iPad to one lucky winner. This is open to everyone, so international readers can finally get some loving!

See the new Craft&Vision website at it’s usual address on the internet – www.CraftAndVision.com- Special thanks to Stuart Sipahigil (@digitalstew) and his team at Outside Source Design for working with us on this.

Good news for all my friends and students who have been eagerly chomping at the bit to get their hands on the Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue Polarizing filter: they’re back in stock. Now I know y’all don’t like these things, and I’m as guilty as anyone of struggling to learn to use this filter a little more judiciously. I also know not everyone is on board with the use of filters at all – last time I posted about this kind of thing someone accused me of lacking integrity – oddly not something I’ve been indicted for when using a 17mm lens or duo-tone treatment on the print. I know, Galen Rowell wouldn’t have done it this way, but then I’m not Galen Rowell. So I’m putting my armour on and cutting/pasting an article that Singh-Ray just released on their blog that has some of my thoughts on the creative use of filters in digital photography. Feel free to disagree if this is one of your weird little hobby horses, but let’s keep the ethical assertions to a minimum. This is art and if you can’t be an anarchist as an artist, you may as well get a job making motivational posters. You do things your way, I’ll do things mine

From his home in Vancouver, Canada, international assignment photographer David DuChemin roams the world specializing in humanitarian projects and travel workshops. He’s also the author of Within the Frame, a noteworthy book on his images and the thought process behind them. Here’s a brief example of that process as applied to his Singh-Ray filters. “I just got back from teaching workshops in Italy on the beautiful Ligurian coast, and then later in Venice. These workshops, whether in Italy or further abroad in India or Nepal, are often the times I learn the most myself. Nothing galvanizes what I’m learning faster than teaching it to others — and one of the things I am consistently asked about is my use of filters. I think the digital world continues to labour under the delusion that optical filters are a thing of the past and that most of the effects once possible with filters can now be done as easily in Photoshop. The more I show my students the filters I use and give them a chance to try them, the more certain I become that filters still have an essential role in digital capture.

“Photography, for most of us is not merely a technical pursuit, but an aesthetic one. If that is true then what truly matters is what our images look and feel like. Filters still enable an aesthetic that’s not possible through simple post-production, and in some cases not possible at all, even in Photoshop. The aesthetic they enable may be forcing a slower shutter speed to blur motion, or polarizing light to reduce glare, or knocking part of the frame down a couple stops to darken a sky or lighten a foreground — in each case the filter remains a mainstay in the photographer’s kit.

“The images that accompany this article were shot in Italy this spring. So much of my time is spent in the so-called ‘Third World’ that being in a place like the Italian Riviera and Italy was magical — so different from what I usually photograph — and with that difference came a different experience. When I looked for tools to help me express how I felt about the magical light in these places, the Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue, complete with un-corrected colour cast, was what I settled on for these images. Did it look like that? I’m not sure that’s the point. It felt like that and I’m more interested as a photographer in communicating my own very subjective response to places and moments than I am in pretending at objectivity.

“What the digital world at large has at times failed to recognize are two important understandings. The first is that every technical decision at the point of capture has an aesthetic implication and that means filters will allow you a significantly different look than a mere adjustment layer in Photoshop can replicate. The second is the importance of the creative process itself. Most photographers I know struggle to find a balance between the Artist and the Geek. Optical filters, used well, can meet the needs of both.

“When I made the transition to digital I sold my film gear and a box of filters, most of which I’d never use again even if I had them now. At the time I was told that, ‘you don’t need filters when you shoot digitally.’ I believed it for a long time until I began looking at the work of photographers I really admired – particularly those working in fine art and landscape disciplines. What I saw was a noticeable difference in the aesthetics of their photographs, and it pushed me into what is now nearing the end of a year spent learning about and playing with filters.

“I now carry 2- and 3-stop graduated ND filters (both soft transition and hard transition), a Gold-N-Blue and an LB Warming Polarizer. It’s a small set of filters, and it doesn’t take much room in my bag, but I no longer leave home without them. Together they allow me to capture a broader dynamic range of light, turn mundane light into spectacular light, take longer exposures, and deal with reflections on water. All of that without hours in Photoshop. In fact my images captured with the use of filters consistently need less work in post-production than others. But the biggest benefit my filters have brought me is in service of my creative side, the Artist.

“We all work differently but many of us seem to work dialectically. In other words we begin with A, we react to B, we get C. While this thought process can and does happen in the darkroom, it is much more powerful when used at the point of capture. When you put a filter on the lens you see the results immediately, you react to it, it gives you an idea, helps you see in new ways, and then you change what you’re doing, follow the muse. In my workshops, I’ve seen this process over and over again in my students. They’re shooting a scene, they look at what I’m shooting and exclaim, ‘Wait! How come that looks so different from mine?’ I explain, hand out my filters for them to play with, and watch them run off giggling. The key word in there is ‘play.’ Creativity is one big ‘what if,’ and the more we engage our craft with a sense of play, the more creative and unique our results. Engaging that sense of play is an important step in the creative process, allowing the filters to not only change the way the image looks but to change the very process, making these simple tools a catalyst to in-camera creativity — something Photoshop, for all its marvels, can’t do.”

The Singh-Ray blog is an excellent source of inspiration and information about the use of filters. Find them HERE. As an aside, the year I have spent learning filters has been an interesting one and I’ve waded through a number of frustrations about the differences in sizes and mount-options and it can be confusing at times. Not sure why there can’t be a little more clarity on all this, nor am I sure why some of the best lenses have 82mm threads while Singh-Ray’s screw mounts are sometimes only as large as 77mm. Anyways, I plan to address this kind of thing in an upcoming eBook when I return from Iceland and have a chance to shoot some images to illustrate.  Questions about filters – leave ‘em here.

On July 23-25 I will be leading a CreativeLIVE workshop called Vision-Driven Photography. The concept is simple; we do a workshop and stream it live to the internet so you can join in and participate – and it’s free. If you’re not able to be there, or want the content to review later, you can buy a copy but the actual workshop is free, no catches. Very cool concept.  If you want more info and want to enroll – check it out HERE on the CreativeLive site.

But wait, there’s more! We want 6 of you to be there LIVE and IN PERSON! See how excited I am? I’m using ALL CAPS! Hit the video screenshot above and it’ll give you the details. But basically, it’s this: shoot a 60 second video and tell us who you are and why you want to be there in Seattle with us. You need to be able to be there for the full days, 23rd through 25th, but other than that there really aren’t any requirments. We just need 6 folks to hang out with, provide some energy and some interaction on behalf of the rest of the world who can’t be there in person. Cool? We make decisions on July 09th, so there’s no time to lose, get on it!

The workshop itself is a three-day exploration of what it means to discover our vision and create photographs that best express that intention, both in-camera and in post-production. It’s about visual language and using the tools in our visual toolbox. Seriously, can’t wait for this one.

Get on board folks, either with a video submission so we can have you there in person, or by enrolling and being there virtually.

Earlier this month we announced a random draw for a canvas from Artistic Photo Canvas. The deal was simple. Put your name in the hat, and as long as you have a Canadian or U.S. mailing address you’d be eligible to win a chance at getting a 16×24 canvas of your own work, as well as one of mine. I’m going to announce the winner in a moment but first I want to pass along an offer APC is giving to everyone.

When I talked to Lew at APC about this, he was really excited to give away the canvases, and frankly this is a pretty generous giveaway; Lew and his crew at APC are like that. But he wanted to sweeten the deal for everyone that didn’t win. So if you order a 16×24, or larger, canvas before midnight PST on July 6th, Lew will also give you a free 8×12 of the same Venice print I’m giving to the winner.  There are two catches. The first, and I’m sorry to do it to my international friends, is that this offer is only for Canadian and U.S. customers. Sorry. The second is that there’s only one free canvas per customer.

I love my work on canvas and APC is my choice. I was struck by the percentage of people that commented on this blog post with comments like, “I’m not worthy” or “My work isn’t good enough.”  All I can say is that your work doesn’t have to be perfect to print it. How can you really develop your craft without printing your work? By all means, only print the stuff you love, but if I waited for my work to be perfect I’d never print anything.

APC is an eco-friendly lab; the first and only major online lab to exclusively use only OBA-free and fluorescent whitening agent-free canvas, and that means a lot to me. It also means your photographs last longer without going yellow. They only print on canvas and I really believe they’re the best in the business. I love these guys. They are personal and professional and everything they’ve done for me has been amazing. Anyways, I’ll stop gushing. If you want to see how good your photographs can look, put one on big canvas.

Here’s what you need to know about placing an order to get the free Venice print. Go to the website, place your order and use coupon code: ONEOFYOURS. Easy-peasy. They’ll send you an 8×12 canvas of my work, along with the 16×24, or larger, of yours.

Now, without further ado…the winner of this month’s giveaway is Meryl Alcabes! Congratulations, Meryl! Lew will be touching base with you to get your prizes to you. We’d love to see what the canvases look like so feel free to take a picture once they’re safe and hung with care in your home.

Last week I had a great interview with Jeffrey Saddoris from the Faded & Blurred community. I do a lot of interviews, many of which kind of ask the same old questions. This is not that interview. The Faded & Blurred community is a great place filled with some super people. If it’s been a while since your teeth were set on edge by nails on a chalkboard or you’re missing the sultry but nasal sound of my voice, you’re in luck! That interview is live now and you can check it out HERE.