PixelatedImage Blog

In 1984 Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita changed cinematic history with the greatest movie of all time. If you do not think The Karate Kid is brilliant cinema, we cannot be friends. Who could not love the simple philosophy espoused in the line on the poster: He taught him the secret to Karate lies in the mind and the heart. Not in the hands. I feel a tear coming on even as I write this.

Of all the memorable bits in the movie - I have a point that I’m building to so sit tight - is when Miyage-san begins teaching Daniel, not Karate but home renovations and car-washing with zen-like admonitions to “Paint-up, paint-down. Wax-on, wax-off.” I loved that. I immediately subscribed to Better Homes and Gardens in hopes that I too could learn Karate. It didn’t work.

Back to the point. I learned three things from The Karate Kid, two of which are immediately applicable to the photographic journey.

1. The Crane is a formidable Karate technique if you don’t see it coming. But it’s hard to do with camera in hand and has no immediate photographic application.

2. When you learn the fundamentals so well that they become instinctive, you will never have to think about them and technique itself steps out of the way when you are (a) being bullied by a guy with a mullet or (b) expressing your vision with your camera. I’ll come back to this.

3. The secret to Photography, like Karate, lies more in the mind and the heart than in the tools of our craft. It is primarily an art of expression and everything is derivative of your vision - for which you must have a mind and heart. Time spent exploring the things about which you are passionate is time spent working on your craft, whether you have a camera in hand or not.

Back to #2, the fundamentals. The photographic journey is not one taken in one step or in one day. The camera is deceptively simple and while you can certainly - to extend the Karate metaphor - start flailing and kicking immediately, it will no more make you a black belt than picking up a camera and pointing it helter skelter makes you a photographer.

There is great value in a wax-on, wax-off type of repetitive exercise. Moving your fingers over your camera and lens so often that you know each button by touch gives puts you in a place where you can think, not about the technology, but about the scene in front of you. The same is true of composition - the more familiar you are with a repertoire of compositional possibilities, the sooner you have a starting point with less wasted time and effort. This is a journey that took me nearly twenty years. And it was only then that I finally had a vision I felt passionately enough about that I would pursue this as a career.

Whether your journey ever takes you to a place of vocation, take some comfort in knowing that every frame you shoot - even the junk - takes you closer to getting the geek stuff out of the way and allowing the artist to do his thing without distraction.

If you want to speed up the process, then thank Mr Miyage for the hint, pick up your camera and work it. Blind-fold yourself and identify each button by touch. Can you change ISO or your focus point without looking, without thinking? Can you adjust your EV compensation with little more than a glance? The more unconsciously you can wield your tools, the more you can spend your time looking, reacting, and creating.

“If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowledge of it is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an “artless art” growing out of the unconscious”
- Daisetz Susuki, quoted in Freeman’s The Photographer’s Eye

I suspect the democratic nature of photography - the fact that anyone can pick up a camera and begin making photographs without the kind of talent or training needed to be, say, a painter - is what is responsible for some of the best and worst of this art. The best because it puts it into the hands of children and absolute amateurs and allows nearly immediate intuitive expression. The worst because that same quality also encourages the notion that no training is needed. With the accessibility of excellent digital cameras suddenly everyone is a photographer.

And there’s the rub. Photography, for all its accessibility remains a visual means of expression - a language - and without the knowledge of the alphabet, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, we’re wildly babbling away. Oh, we’re talking alright, we just aren’t saying anything.

I’ve preached on this before, the need for visual literacy, but this time I want to point you to two books that are exceptional guides to even the professional. Some of us would rather lick the dust off our sensor with a wet tongue than read a book, I get that. But until there’s a way to absorb this by osmosis, we may just have to suck it up.

The first book is one I’ve pointed to before. Freeman Patterson’s Photography and the Art of Seeing.

The second is Michael Freeman’s The Photographer’s Eye. When I first mentionned Freeman’s book I got a number of comments/emails confirming my suspicions - this is a truly excellent book. The premise of The Photographer’s Eye is that the way you compose a photograph influences how someone sees it, and from that premise Freeman digs into the hows and whys of composition in a substantial way. This is a meaty book and you’ll probably have to read it with pen and highlighter in hand. Some pages I’ve had to read twice just to get the gist. But at the end of the day, if we’re looking to hone our craft, this will take us closer to powerful images than all the gear reviews and pithy little blog articles we spend so much time amusing ourselves with.

You owe it to your craft to read - and study - this book. Highly recommended. I’ll be re-reading this again over the coming weeks, once just wasn’t enough.

One of the pitfalls of photography is that by necessity we are reducing three dimensions into two. The moment the shutter is pressed and the image is created we can no longer walk around the scene and see it from different angles. The moment is frozen but so is the perspective. Once the image is made, the angle from which we view the scene is fixed, so it had better be the best angle for what you are trying to say. (more after the jump. Sorry, you RSSers are gonna have to launch a browser for this - but there’re illustrations, so hurray!)

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Gavin Gough and I are trading posts today. You can find my post HERE on Gavin’s blog and his post below. Please extend a warm Pixelated Image welcome to Gavin Gough.

Inspiration – A Beginner’s Guide

“Photographic technique is no secret and, provided the interest is there, easily assimilated. But inspiration comes from the soul and when the muse isn’t around even the best exposure meter is very little help. In the biographies, artists like Michaelangelo, Da Vinci and Bach said that their most valuable technique was their ability to inspire themselves, This is true of all artists, the moment there is something to say there becomes a way to say it.” Ralph Gibson

You know when you’re feeling inspired. Whether or not we’re photographers, we’ve probably all enjoyed that feeling of having a definite purpose combined with the energy to pursue it. It’s a great feeling, the mind is cleared of distractions, obstacles shrink to nothing, the path ahead becomes obvious and, very quickly, there’s nothing easier than taking steps towards achieving your goal, your vision. We are inspired! (More after the jump.)

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When I was in the throes of falling in love with photography, a young man looking for something to be good at, some way to express myself, my mother gave me two great gifts. The first was the Pentax Spotmatic, and not the camera I thought I wanted/needed to begin my illustrious journey in imaging. The second was a copy of Freeman Patterson’s Photography and the Art of Seeing. That Spotmatic is long retired, though I have another sitting on my desk as a reminder of my roots and my first-love. The book is long gone, probably disappeared in the chaos of one of many moves during college years, but yesterday I bought another copy and it’s sitting here now, not far from my Spotmatic. You know you’re getting older when you get nostalgic about these things.

I’m not writing this as a trip down memory lane; I’m pretty sure you don’t care that much. I wanted to encourage you to consider two things.

1. Go back to the beginning and recall what drew you to this art to begin with - what was it that you loved so much about photography that you’d commit to spending so much money on glass, metal, film, or all the digital detritus that litters the path to imaging these days? Do you still feel it? If not, it’s time to grope your way back to that, to rediscover the joy of seeing in new ways, expressing yourself in new forms.

2. Read Patterson’s book. It’s on it’s way to becoming a classic and many of us wouldn’t give it a second look. There are no pictures of shiny gear. There is not a single discussion of which camera or lens is better. The photographs in it do not move me the way they once did. But the exercises Patterson discusses, the concepts surrounding learning to see, are not just theory - they are absolutely critical.

Re-reading this book has been more than sentimentality, it’s been a reminder of the very first lessons I ever had in photography. If you read here often I assume it’s for more than just the cute little buttons at the head of each post (in fact, more than likely it’s despite the buttons! Deal with it.) I assume you get something from what I write. In some ways you’re reading the 20-year distillation of my original experience with this book. It’s what started me on the path of nurturing the artist and not just allowing the geek to run amok. If you have a chance, go to the source material and read, absorb, Patterson’s Photography and The Art of Seeing.

One of the basic principles of my teaching goes thusly:

Three images make the final photograph - the image you envision, the image you shoot, and the image you refine or process in the (digital) darkroom. The better you are at the second two, the closer you are able to come to the first, namely your vision.

This is important because it gives you the ground from which to make the right decisions in accomplishing your vision. I go into my shoots with a clear vision of what I want.

In this case the shoot was a weekend with yogis for a self-promotional shoot. I went in with a clear sense of the look and feel of my images. I had already created a list of adjectives that I wanted my images to evoke when finished. I wanted them full of personality, real people with luminous expressions, in a light, luminous environment. I wanted images that felt lit up on the inside because that’s my experience of many of the yogis I know. I knew from there what kind of models I wanted - genuine yogis who make a difference in the Vancouver yoga scene, and we contacted them.

I also knew what kind of look I wanted and that informed our decisions about wardrobe, back drops, lighting, and eventually, the post-process - all of which was decided ahead of time to create the best possible process that served the initial vision. We wanted clothes with texture, favourite comfortable garments that the yogis themselves wear and like and feel are expressions of their personality. We gave them guidance on the colours, using words like organic, earthy, soft, textured, and loose to further describe the look we wanted. Without exception they showed up ready to shoot with exactly the kind of extensions of their personailities - including props, which in this case included beads, jewelry, children (ok, not really props!) and a surf board.

We catered the shoot with vegetables, organic foods, and water, and made the studio as peaceful as we could knowing the more we helped our subjects feel at ease, the more “yogic” they’d look when the cameras came out.

Lighting was all Elinchrome, 2 strobes blown through a large Chimera softbox on camera left, and a medium Elinchrom Octabank on camera right. Behind the models lighting the seamless and providing some backlight were two more elinchrom strobes, bare bulbs shot into large white panels and bounced back at the paper and the models. This was chosen to give us the most etherial-feeling light, knowing we’d further punch it in Lightroom after the shoot. Here’s a lighting diagram

(click to make it bigger, or go here to get a layered psd file to make your own, courtesy of Kevin Kertz)

In Adobe Lightroom we used a number of techniques to further blow out the background and either punch the contrast, or lower it depending on the look. For some subjects - particularly those shots including children- we wanted more contrast, more playfulness (kids are wonderful, but they’re more playful than they are serene, and there’s plenty of playfulness in yoga). For the shots where we knew we wanted softer, more serene or organic colours, we chose settings that allowed some desaturation or hue adjustments to suit.

What is important is to remember this was all done pro-actively and intentionally. We didn’t just shoot hoping to “get something that doesn’t suck.” We shot with a vision for the communication of the final images and then chose the most expedient combination of techniques - some in camera, some in post - to accomplish that. Vision matters because it’s the destination that determines the choice of road map.

My most recent article, Reconciling The Poet and The Geek: A Means To Achieving Your Vision, has been published now on Lexar.com. I posted it last week in the articles section here, and if you’re a regular you’ve read many of these thoughts before, but give it a read all the same if you’re so inclined. I’ve put a few of the thoughts all in the same place and worded them a little differently. Find it, along with many of my other articles, on Lexar.com at this link

Also, if you go to the Pro Photographer page and scroll down to find me - I’m next door neighbors with James Nachtwey! This is as close to famous as it gets, folks. (How James Nachtwey didn’t make the cut for the Elite photographers I have no idea. Travesty of justice, etc.)

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.

There is a common misconception that tells us the more lenses we have, the better spec’d our cameras, the more software we own, the faster our computers, the less constraints we will have and the more our creativity will flourish. “Just think,” we tell ourselves, our spouses, our loan manager, “with this new gear I could really create! I could finally serve my vision! ”

Rubbish. If you’re lucky someone will call your bluff. This is where the Artist and the Geek need to sit down, shut up, and get some serious counseling.

Creativity does not flourish in the absence of constraints, it flounders. Constraints not only aid creativity, they are essential to it. Consider Frank Lloyd Wright, no slouch when it comes to creativity, who said, “Man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest.”

As photographers we begin with the constraint of the frame, and the limits of our technology, but the forces that limit our choices, and therefore force creativity, are numerous. The more you see them as a catalyst to creativity and not a problem to be overcome, the more creative you will become and the less fruitless trips to the camera store you might make. If you’re feeling your creativity stagnating and wishing for a return to that feeling of flourishing creative photography, try getting counter-intuitive and start playing with your constraints. This kind of thinking is rampant on sites like David Hobby’s Strobist - where shoestring budgets force the hand of creativity and remarkable solutions emerge.

Looking to strong-arm your muse back into action? Here’s a couple suggestions.

Pick a focal length and stick with it. Not one lens, but one focal length. Anyone caught using the 28-200mm will be disqualified. Now go shoot.

Determine ahead of time not to use Photoshop. Or determine to use only black and white or your sepia presets in Lightroom.

Shoot faster. Give yourself an assignment and go fast. I mean really fast. Ludicrously fast. The faster you go the more you short-circuit the logical/analytical and force your intuitive side to kick in.

Pick a theme and shoot it. Green. Round. Wet. Texture. Horizon. Sign. Anchored. Free. I don’t know, make something up. The point is not the the theme itself but the constraint it forces upon you, helping you to find new ways to see, prohibiting you from looking in other ways. It focuses you.

Shoot out of focus for a day to help you concentrate on general shapes, light, and colour, rather than specific subjects.

Spend a day shooting anything but the Rule of Thirds.

For every image you make, turn around, 180 degrees, and make another one. Introduce the constraint of serendipity.

Come up with another one all by yourself and share it in the comments. Share the love.

When I was 16 I wanted to be a professional photographer, shoot for the yellow rectangle, all that. I think in part because I felt like I wouldn’t be a real photographer unless I was making a living from it. Then something clicked and I think one of the reasons I dodged doing this professionally for many years was because I didn’t want the demands of vocation to steal the joy from something I loved so much. But I was still dogged by words like “amateur” and “hobbyist,” if only because it felt like I was being defined by what I wasn’t - a “professional.”

Pursuing your vision and loving your craft has precisely nothing to do with how you make your living. The real photographer is the one who shoots what she loves and is committed to learning her craft well. Money often just makes it unnecessarily complicated.

In fact, abstaining from career photography can have advantages, and as a follow-up to yesterday’s post about “going pro,” I wanted to add a little perspective to the would-be converts. Abstaining from career photography:

Can mean having a day job to fund the gear you want. Pros are often forced to spend their money on necessities: marketing materials instead of the 14/2.8L lens they want. The hobbyist gets the cool lens, the pro gets postcards.

Can mean the flexibility to shoot what you want to shoot without the demands of clients hemming in your artistic impulses.

Can mean being free of the pressure to create on demand.

Can mean the freedom to pursue the art of your vision without commercial concerns or distractions. Ideally a working photographer finds/makes the time for personal projects she is passionate about; it just doesn’t always work out that way.

Can mean the freedom to love your images without feeling like they’re only truly good photographs if someone buys them. Allowing your vision to be validated only by dollars is a terrible trap.

In the best-case scenario, doing this for a living is as good as doing it as a hobby. Sometimes more so. Doing this for a living can mean doing it more, pressing deeper into the art simply from necessity, and being able to write off some cool gear. I love doing this and making a living at it, right now I wouldn’t change that for anything. But the notion that you aren’t a real photographer until people are paying you is rubbish. Vincent Van Gogh didn’t sell any of his work during his lifetime. Sure, he went crazy and lopped an ear off, but he was incontrovertibly an artist.

So if “going pro” allows you to both make a living and pursue your vision - go for it. If remaining a hobbyist allows you to pursue your vision without the pitfalls of making it your trade, go for it. Either way, serve your vision with passion. Shoot what you love, even if it costs you (and it will!), that’s when you’re a real photographer.