PixelatedImage Blog

Is it that hard, Canon? I love your cameras. I love your optics and their sexy red collars. But your service? It is hard to imagine how it could be worse. I’ve yet to hear a good service story - from anyone - anywhere in the world. Sure, you can get CPS in some places. And it’s free. And time and time again I hear about working professionals who trust you to do right by them, fix the gear their livelihood depends upon, and do it in a timely fashion. What I do not hear is stories of how you blew them out of the water with your excellent service. Only how you blew them off.

I bought an EF 85/1.2L lens recently. It cost $2000. Not a cheap investment. But when I found - 3 weeks after my purchase -  an artifact the size of a corn flake had worked its way loose (ok, it only looked like a corn flake) - the service I got was nothing but a maybe. Maybe it’s warrantee-able. Maybe we’ll get it to you in a couple weeks. My local vendor went to bat for me, and they got the blow off too.

Nikon makes exceptional cameras. They make damn good optics. Their strobes are better. All you’d have to do, Canon, is step up to the plate and honour your customers. You know how when we were all in high school and we wanted to make a break-up easier? How we used to say, “It’s not you, it’s me…”? Well, it’s not me, it’s you. And you’re on thin-ice baby.

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I almost called in sick today and didn’t post, but why waste a chance to vent, right? I love my gear, and I love my optics - when it all works. But a fan boy for Canon? I just lost my innocence. Where are the consumer advocates? And why in the tight-run race between Nikon and Canon does the Canon Mothership not see a chance to score some serious points with professionals? Maybe I don’t even want to hear the answers…

Thus endeth the rant.

I’m giving you another well-deserved break from my rants - not all of which, it seems, have been appreciated by others. I was accused, of all things, this week, of exhibiting sour grapes towards the very people for whom I freely labour by writing this blog.

My rant about gear being paramount to vision rubbed some the wrong way. Alas, the internet is a tough place to express an opinion, unless you clarify everything and put italicized caveats on every thought, you’re bound to be read out of the current context by someone. If I’ve been sour to to anyone out there, let me know and I’ll happily apologize. But if you think gear is a substitute for vision or having something to say, we’ll just have to happily disagree.

To be great, art must point at something. To be a good artist, one must have something to point at. The better your craft, the more clearly and powerful your pointing can be. Gear only makes it a little easier, a little faster. The hardest work is creative, getting what’s inside, out.

In an effort to give you all a break from my soapbox, and point you in the direction of another one - here’s an inspiring lecture by David Griffin of National Geographic on the power of the photograph. Follow THIS LINK to the TED page to watch it. Thanks to my friend Wes for pointing it out.

In response to my post last Friday, Craig Beyers left this comment:

As I’ve already said–and you so eloquently state–if it was easy, everyone would to it. Robert Heinlein said it better: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. You guys–the pro’s and amateurs–who have mastered the craft make it look so easy that the many of the rest of us will grab *any* tool/gadget that might give us the capability to think we’ve mastered the craft, if only for one photo . Must be time to buy another lens…’cuz I don’t have/make enough time to shoot .

I think Craig has tapped something here. Photographers who are new to the craft look to photographers who’ve been doing it for over twenty years and they only see the results of those twenty years. They do not see the years’ worth of crappy images, the number of mistakes made, the books we’ve read, the lectures we’ve been to, the stupidity we ourselves have engaged in when buying gear and hoping it turns out to be the magic wand. You do not see the contact sheets of current shoots, either. What you see is the best foot forward and assume that it is effortless, a result of being hit on the head by the mythical Talent Fairy when we were young and being raised by artsy parents who put a Leica into our crib as an infant instead of a teddy bear.

You don’t see the thousands and thousands of frames of garbage we’ve shot, the visual experiments that we’ve tried and failed at, the stages we’ve gone through to find our vision and master our craft. But this can be your path too - and because time both speeds by too fast and seems to take forever to get there, I can confidently say, “be patient, you’ll get there.” If you study your craft. If you shoot and shoot and shoot some more. If you give up trusting your gear to create great images and start trusting your vision instead. And most importantly, if you love putting the world into a frame for the sheer sake of it, for your love of expression.

But there’s something else you need to know. You’ll probably never get where you think you’re going. I know, I said you would and now I’m backtracking. You might well get to where your photographic heroes are, it just won’t be where you think it is. If you think that great photographers wake up in the morning, wash their face with genius-soap, and then confidently make great images one after the other, I can tell you I’ve yet to meet one. I’m not claiming to be anything more than a what I am - a photographer struggling to express his vision - but any photographer that is looked up to by any other, well we’re always looking forward, wishing we could more perfectly express ourselves. Those photographers that look up to us see that we’ve arrived, while we ourselves are looking up to others , conscious that we’ve not arrived, that there are better stories to tell in stronger ways, that there is no destination. Only a journey. Each day you embark, you move forward, and each night you go to bed knowing, not that you’ve arrived, but that tomorrow is a new day to move ahead, to creep forward. It’s the moving, the creeping, that matters. Like a pilgrimage - it’s the journey itself that changes you, not the destination.

Tomorrow I’ll return without the Jack Kerouac-meets-Jack Handey deep-thoughts/sermon and soapbox, I promise. I just had to get it out.

Be patient. Chase your vision, learn your craft. Twenty years from now you’ll look back and see how far you’ve come. But you’ll also look forward and see how much further there is to go - a thrill and a joy if it’s the journey you love, a heartbreak if all you want to do is “get there.”

It’s been a gear-intensive week for me personally, as well as on the blog. So in the interest of balance and getting this sermon out before I burst, here’s a change of direction to close out the week.

We keep getting told by the camera-makers and gadget-mongers that you just need a great (new! shiny!) camera and the rest is easy. Shoot like a pro, they say, all you need is this new camera. It used to be hard, but not now. Now the camera has face-detection and auto-focus and light-meters that Stephen Hawking made with pixie dust and the help of VooDoo.

Rubbish. It’s NOT easy. It’s hard to master a craft - it takes a lifetime. It’s a journey of many small steps. Companies flogging their gear under the spell of this nonsense ought to be ashamed of themselves. Why? Because we keep believing them and buying their latest gear and latest program, and of course we need it to be better (we do, don’t we?!) - but it doesn’t make us better and countless amateurs who passionately loved photography when they first picked up a camera are now giving up in frustration. Or worse, resigning themselves to being mediocre.

Just once I want to hear a manufacturer say, you know what, this new camera will make a really tough craft just a little easier - it’ll give you a fighting chance - but in the end it’s just that, a craft. It takes a lifetime to master and while that will make the impatient ones discouraged it ought to give the rest of us hope - this stuff isn’t cloaked in secrecy, it doesn’t take a secret handshake - it just takes time, and the kind of work you’d put in if you wanted to play the violin. No violin plays itself, no camera makes photographs by itself. All it takes is time, and in the meantime there’s the thrill of discovery and self-expression for the sake of it.

So if you’re discouraged and wonder why it’s so hard sometimes, know this: it’s tough - in varying degrees - for all of us, for anyone that wants to be good at something. We’re in this together. So settle in, you’ve got a long way to go but a long time to do it in. We all do. Now, let’s all take a breath, stop buying new gear and get to work learning our craft.

Repeat after me, Gear is Good. Vision is Better…

Go shoot something you love. Have a great weekend.

I wrote this more as a confession than anything else. Like a meditation. If you’re allergic to the stream-of-consciousness, touchy-feely stuff, move along. There is nothing for you here and you’re likely to break into a rash. The rest of you might resonate with this. Or not…

I used to love the darkroom. The actual, physical, red-lights and chemicals type of darkroom. I never progressed much beyond being able to create a mediocre black and white print. But it was my mediocre b&w print - one that I’d been able to make exactly the way I wanted (so long as that way was within the rather tight confines of my abilities. Somewhere along the way it no longer became possible to maintain or access a darkroom and my film went the way of so many rolls of film before and since - to a commercial lab. My prints came back and I’d order a few enlargements, but for the most part the negs and slides got filed, the prints got boxed, and the images never made it much further than their conception.

When I finally got a digital camera, a PowerBook, and a copy of Photoshop all that changed. I went back into the darkroom and spent hours there - this time without the red light and the mind-numbing effect of the chemicals. It was a return to what I loved about photography - creating images - and I finally had control back - no, I had more control. The renewed power to realize my vision, expand on it, and take it places it never imagined, was incredible.

But, like so many photographers, I became drunk with power, seduced to the darkside by the near limitless possibilities presented by curves and adjustment layers, layer masks and filters. Soon I was shooting carelessly, confident that the most ill-conceived image could be rescued in Photoshop. I wasn’t shooting with vision I was just gathering raw materials for future experiments in Photoshop. I wasn’t learning to express my vision, I was learning how to make poor photographs suck less.

And then came Lightroom. To me it’s become, as it has to others, the antidote to Photoshop. It’s forced me to shoot better, to more carefully conceive my work, to make vision a more important part of what I do, why I do it, and how. I can’t fully explain it, I just know that once I put a photograph into Photoshop and pick up my tablet pen, I am opening the door to endless tweaking that happens, not because I envision those refinements, or even because they add to the expression of my vision, but solely because I can.

I still love Photoshop, but I’m a bit of a recovering addict so I tread lightly with it. It taught me so much about the possibilities, and pushed me to pursue finding those possibilities with the camera. After years of using PS time and time again, for the same purpose, to make my photographs “suck less” I began to see a trend, noticed a handful of things I was routinely un-sucking, and went off in search of better captures.

I’m full circle now, I feel like I’m finally comfortable with my tools enough not to use them. I’m falling in love with the photographs again and not merely the clever ways in which I created them. Man I love photography.

In 1952, celebrated photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote Une Decisive Moment, a book filled with both his photographs and philosophy. One concept, the titular “decisive moment” has become so well-known as to become cliche and then suffer the same fate most thoughts and theories suffer when their commentators and quoters drift too far from the source material. Here, then is the context for that phrase, and the definition given it by HCB himself:

“the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression.”

Lately when I hear the decisive moment concept mentioned, it is frequently invoked to imply a moment when a person smiled just right or when a motion is frozen at its apex, and while these might be, generally speaking, decisive moments, I think HCB meant much more. In fact, it’s fashionable of late to criticize the concept with a dismissive “yeah, but every moment is a decisive moment.” Maybe, but that has nothing to do with what Cartier-Bresson was saying.

Yes, in life there may be many, many decisive moments, but I believe HCB was being specific to the frame. Within the strict geometry of the frame not all moments are equal.

According to HCB each scene at one particular time would have a moment where the gesture and geometry come together to express the nature of that scene in the most aesthetically meaningful way. Likely, it can only be judged in hindsight that this moment was in fact decisive, and it doesn’t entirely exclude the possibility of other decisive moments within that scene.

Remember, HCB was talking about the two-dimensional frame , not the near-infinite views and perspectives of our real-life perceptions. So yes, experientially life offers many decisive moments, but when you’ve translated a scene to two dimensions and are looking at them on the light-table, a few of them are likely to be stronger than others - and learning to see that decisive moment before you squeeze the shutter rather than afterwards, is the point.

I think we can all agree that within a frame certain compositions exist that express our vision of a scene better than others. Certain geometries exist at one moment that make an image more powerful than they would be had we waited a moment later. HCB was not saying some moments were good and some not worth photographing - he was saying that composition and the placement of elements within a scene was important and that the timing of the capture had a significant role to play.

When we say, “yeah but every moment is decisive” we’re really saying that we either misunderstand Cartier-Bresson, or that composition is unimportant. It’s a little like those schools where kids don’t get graded for fear of wounding their self esteem. It may do the kids fragile little ego a world of temporary good but his math skills are going to suck by the time he’s in grade 4. Dismissing every moment as decisive won’t improve anyone’s composition skills. It’s the image you capture that matters, not the ones you miss, decisive or not.

*The strong possibility exists that (1) HCB needs no defending, least of all by me, (2) some people understand HCB’s decisive moment concept better than I do, and simply disagree with him, and/or (3) I’m the one who misunderstands. I’m OK with all three, really. But my opinion stands. Until I change it. So if you get bent way out of shape by this, feel free to leave a comment, but don’t look for a fight. I’m a lover, not a fighter, man. Rabbinic though suggests that the questions are often more important than the answers, but that doesn’t mean yeshivas aren’t full of heated discussions. Feel free to weigh in.

Spend any time with photographers talking about the work of other photographers and the words “he’s got a really unique style” will tumble out of someone’s mouth faster than hands off a greased pig.

We value style, forms of expression so unique to shooters that you can identify their work immediately. Show me a Jill Greenberg photograph, or an Annie Liebovitz cover and their name comes to mind without a conscious thought, much less looking for the photo credit.

So valued is the notion of style that it won’t be long before someone writes a Dummies book about it and cashes in on our hunger for it. But like anything we value, we value it for its scarcity or its difficulty in attaining it. If it’s so easily achieved that it could be found between the yellow covers of a Dummies book, it’s nowhere as valuable as we thought.

Style is a by-product. It is the end and not the means, and there are no short-cuts. Truly authentic style is not something you can conjure or fabricate. It’s a result of shooting thousands of images that express your unique thoughts, feelings, opinions with increasing faithfulness. It’s something that comes as you refine the means by which you express your vision.

There’s nothing wrong with seeking to do things in a unique form, but seek to be different for the sake of being different and you won’t have images that express your vision, you’ll have photographs that are merely different. You can get that in a million ways that have nothing to do with good photography. Shoot nothing but the overexposed nostrils of a meercat and you’ll no doubt get a grant or kudos for innovation but the rest of us will snicker openly. You yourself are unique – you have ways of seeing your world that are unlike those of anyone else – so find ways of more faithfully expressing that and your style will emerge.

Perhaps it’s helpful to think of this through the lens of a different medium, like films. A good film that bears the style signature of a great director is not uniquely identifiable because someone like Coppola poured his efforts into being different. He pours his efforts into creating a film that, as closely as possible, tells the story in accord with his unique vision. Creating films that are faithful to your vision is the goal, finding over time that your body of work reflects a style unique to you is a by-product.

Of course, there’s room to be intentional about refining the expression of your vision. The more you study and understand the visual language tools available to the photographic storyteller, the more consciously you can chose one set of tools over another. The danger lies in thinking that one set of tools, chosen for stylistic reasons, will always be the best choice of tools for every image. If McLuhan was right about the medium being the message, then we need to be conscious that our choice of tools always has implications on the message itself. Choosing tools based only on stylistic criteria can result in highly-stylized images that say precisely nothing.

Thus endeth the rant. Comments are open, feel free to add to this, or push back. Additionally, for something on the same topic with more meat and less pontificating, be sure to read this excellent article at Luminous Landscape.

This one’s a rant. Sorry. If you came here for plucky comic relief, move along.

I’m not gonna lie to you folks, the more time I spend online reading the interactions of some of the photographers out there, the more disappointed I get. Some of the arguing going on is enough to make Jesus drink gin from a cat bowl, and I’m not far behind.

Yesterday I read a thread that got downright vituperative about whether images shot with digital cameras were “photographs.” The week previously I read a thread about Joe McNally’s use of multiple strobes on an ad hoc photo shoot in the desert, and the amount of petty dissent I read in that column was staggering.

So I’m working on this theory and it goes thusly: Arrogance and receptivity are mutually exclusive. Receptivity is key to both creating great photographs and appreciating them. And so in the resulting absence of great photography or the ability to appreciate the images of others, we’re left with one thing only - technique and the endless opinions about it. Hence the in-fighting. You don’t find the humble there. You don’t find the artists with vision there.

That is the only explanation I can come up with for how a handful of people with considerably less talent, experience, and expertise can bone-pick about Joe McNally’s choices. Joe is no god, but he makes his choices as an artist and he creates gorgeous photographs - that alone ought to be enough to convert anyone to a posture of humility. And from that posture would flow learning, and better photographs, even if your choices of technique would be different. They should be different. You are you, and Joe is Joe. The technique you need to express your unique vision will be different from the technique of another - but it makes yours no better, his no less valid.

So, can I say something - photographer to photographer? Let it go. Spend less time posturing - this is not a contest. For the love of Ansel Adams, just get out there and shoot something you love. Is it art? Is it photography? Is it pure? Should you use a flash? Is film better than a digital sensor? These are all smokescreens and discussing them ad nauseum is nothing more than a counterfeit. Don’t mistake talking about photography for the act of capturing your vision. One makes you a photographer, the other makes you a talker. And if you must talk, precede it with good old-fashioned listening and some humility. Pretty please.

Thus endeth the rant. I’m going to dig out the cat bowl.