PixelatedImage Blog

Monument Valley, 2011

With the advent of digital photography, and even more importantly, the internet, our ability to share and experience photographs has changed dramatically. The wet darkroom, once so necessary for creating prints we could touch and feel, is much less common than it once was, and if I were a betting man I’d wager that the majority of digital photographers out there have never printed their own work, and never had the joy of seeing their work large and framed, never felt the richness of a rag paper with their art on it. That impoverishes all of us. High tech, but low touch.

I have always printed my work, though there have been notable hiatuses in my printing, the last 2 years among them. Sometimes I’ve done it myself, to varying degrees of success, and at other times I’ve had anyone from mPix.com to professional printers do my prints. But no matter what, sharing photographs on paper is a beautiful experience. That alone is why I print, and have returned to printing as a student. But there’s more.

I think photographers, and this is something my girlfriend taught me, need to live with their work. Not just on an iPad or laptop, but printed. Large. You need to feel it. Need to live with the lines and tones and moments. Feel the colours. Doing so reveals the flaws (dust spots on the sensor, anyone?), and the weaknesses. Could those lines be stronger? Could there be more tension? Are the colours right? In short, it can return us to craft. It can focus us on more than the momentary experience of seeing a photograph on Facebook, and give the image the dignity of being created in the real world.

For me, this return to printing has pushed me back from the edge of laziness. To see, in 17×22 inch detail, the flaws in my work, has pushed me to become more diligent. Not because I want perfection, but because my art deserves better than to be treated with the flippancy that digital can encourage me towards. And because, like the rest of this past year, it slows me down. It forces me to pay attention. It opens me to renewed receptivity. And, perhaps this is the real reason, the prints are simply more beautiful in my hands and on walls than they will ever be on my screens.

I encourage you, even if you never print at home, to print your work. The artist’s life is about creating and sharing, not creating and hording. If you don’t have a printer, look into mPix.com or WHCC.com and do some test prints with them, or go to your local Costco and try them out. But print your work. Do one a month and at the year’s end you’ll have 12 beautiful prints. Do two of each and at the year’s end you’ll have 12 to keep and 12 to sign and give away as gifts. The ability to see and experience the world, and express that experience through your work, is a gift; keep it moving.

If you’ve not read it, and printing your work yourself intimidates or frustrates you, take a look at Martin Bailey’s ebook, MAKING THE PRINT. It’s $5 and worth every penny. I wish I’d had it 5 years ago.

Cabot Trail, 2012. No Polarizer.

Cabot Trail, 2012. Singh Ray Warming Polarizer.

I put a note out on Twitter last night that I loved my Singh Ray warming polarizer so much I might never take it off my lens. I was asked some questions, so I thought I’d drop a line at the same time. Our time on the Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia was amazing, and though it made for a long day, I had lots of time to trudge around with tripod and snowshoes and take in the beauty. The shot above was one of my sketch images, but I’m showing it here because I have identical frames that differ only in my use of the polarizer. I’ve developed them the same, which is very little, and with no dodging or burning. The differences you see are entirely the result of the polarizer.

Polarizers can make skies really blue (blue skies, not grey and cloudy ones, they stay just grey and cloudy ). Most people know that, but if you only use a polarizer for that you’re missing out and you might as well just use Photoshop or Lightroom to do the same thing. What polarizers do that Lightroom and Photoshop can’t, is get rid of reflections on surfaces like water, leaves, wet streets. It’s an aesthetic affect, and as I’ve said before, the look of the photograph is everything, so anything that changes the look, is a potential tool in the visual toolbox. In the case of the image above, the loss of reflection on the water (in this case, the reflected sky) significantly darkens the water, making it a stronger ribbon of darkness (10 points if you get that Canadian reference) and allowing the rocks under the surface of the water to show more strongly, revealing underwater texture. Like any tool, it’s not a cure-all for a bad photograph, and it won’t make every photograph better, but wielded well, it’s indispensable.

A couple more days in Nova Scotia, then we begin driving towards Vancouver, about 7500 kilometers.

Me. Shooting in the driving rain in Iceland. Cold. Wet. Deliriously happy.

I’ve never shot in the rain, drizzle, dew, fog, and general “water coming out of the sky in every possible form” as much as I did in Iceland the last couple weeks. There were days my boots were so wet I thought they’d never recover – they were soaked right through, and they’re the expensive GoreTex ones. But as wet and, at times, miserable as I was, there were also times I could have stayed out for hours. See the shot above? Wetter than I’ve ever been outside of a lake or swimming pool, but I was shooting images I was excited about, one which particularly captivates me, and if I’d not got out of the truck, thrown my rain gear on and braved the elements, I’d still be dry and wouldn’t have those images. I didn’t go to Iceland to be dry, but to make photographs.

No one likes shooting in the rain. OK, some do, but they’re unreasonable and suspicious. I’m closer to the “I might have rabies, that’s how much I dislike water” end of the spectrum. But I’d rather make beautiful photographs than stay dry and since the worst weather makes for some amazing environments to make beautiful images, we can either suck it up or find a way to tolerate it.

Worried about shooting in the rain? Scared your $3000 camera will die the moment the first drop of water hits it? It’s a genuine concern, but most cameras these days are pretty resilient. The only failures I’ve had have happened out of the blue on a sunny day, not when covered in water, so statistically I’m probably better shooting in the rain. So my first recommendation is this – stop freaking out about it. Bring a small towel or bandana and wipe the camera off as you can. I use Buffs, a brandname bandana/tube thingy that you can wear on your head (but I put them on my cameras). Protects from elements like dust and rain, comes off fast, and dries the water nicely. I always have one or two of these. Very handy.

I carry a small trekking umbrella in my bag, and that’s come very much in handy for keeping the rain of the lens while shooting, as has the pocket of large lens cloths I always carry. The big worry for me is not my camera dying – because it hasn’t yet – it’s the worry that I’ll get a great photograph only to later notice big rain drops on the lens are noticeable in the image.

I also carry a Think Tank Photo Hydrophobia – and while it’s meant for a camera with a 70-200 lens, it works well with some fussing around for almost any lens shorter than that as well, and while I loathe rain covers, this is the best one I’ve found, far better than the fussy, pain in the butt Kata one I also own and never use. Make sure your camera bag has a good rain cover too – all the Think Tank Photo bags come with one, and my Kiboko bag also has a built in cover as well.

Lastly, a pair of good rain pants and a good rain jacket. Well, I thought they were good until I spent so much time in the driving rain. Now I’m thinking a yellow rubber rain slicker, pants, and wellington boots wouldn’t be such a bad idea. if you wear glasses, a baseball hat works well to keep the drizzle of the lenses in a light drizzle. If the wind picks up, ain’t nothing keeping those specs dry.

Don’t be reckless with your gear, but if you’re wanting to get out and shoot in some really great light and weather, there’s more mood on a rainy day than ten sunny days put together. Stop freaking out, bring an umbrella, put a bag over the camera if you have to, but my tactic for shooting in the rain is to stop fussing, keep the lens dry, and wipe the camera when I can, and go make some photographs.

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.

While in New York I went out with a brand new 24/3.5 Tilt/Shift lens to see what kind of damage I could do. I’m preparing to take this lens as one of my primary lenses for the Iceland trip and wanted to start the learning curve now. I had some fun photographing this busker in Central Park and thought I’d share my process with you through a video podcast.

In the video linked below I show you every one of the 49 frames I shot in the series with nothing deleted, and discuss the why and how of getting where I did. If seeing the crap is helpful, that’s in there too.

This is a long and rambling video in the spirit of the Within The Frame Podcast series (and by “long and rambling” I mean just under 20 minutes of bandwidth-sucking viewing pleasure. Enjoy!) Click the screenshot below and it’ll take you to Vimeo so y’all don’t crash my puny little servers.

Comments? Questions? Feel free to have some discussion on this. I’m around all week and rather than a tonne of posts I’ll be hanging out, working, and checking in here to have some good ol’fashionned conversation.

Last January I spent 10 days on safari in Kenya. The second in our series, The Print & The Process, this Safari monograph is the work that came out of that trip. Like the first Print & Process book, VENICE, this one is split between the images themselves and then a long discussion about the lessons learned, gear used, and techniques I played with, including the duo-tone settings I used to create the toned images. I’ve also included a link so you can download the Lightroom preset for that split-tone look.

SAFARI is not really a book about how to shoot a safari, though you’ll certainly learn that kind of thing as well. It’s more like a “Here’s what I learned about photography while shooting a safari.” Every discipline has something to teach others, and my photography improved by having this experience. Join me as I unpack these images and the process that got me to making them.

We created this series as a way to show work and to have an honest discussion about the issues connected to the creation of that work. Some, like VENICE, will be more introspective, and some, like SAFARI, have a more balanced mix of the artsy fartsy stuff as well as a discussion of the gear I used and why.

SAFARI, A Monograph is a 62-page PDF available now for $5 on the Craft & Vision store but if you buy it now, or before 11:59pm PST on July 11th, you can get it for $4 if you use this coupon code on checkout: SAFARI4. Want more of the collection? Use coupon code: SAFARI20 when you buy 5 or more Craft & Vision titles and you’ll get them for 20% off. Just our way of sharing the love and thanking you for being on board. You can buy SAFARI now with the button below or head over to the Craft & Vision library for more.

I know I’ve been cranking these out like a mad man, but it won’t be long before I’m off to Iceland then Maui, and on to India, Thailand, Nepal,  New Zealand and possibly Africa all before December, so I’m making hay while the sun shines. We’ve still got a great line-up coming, including the 3rd in Andrew Gibson’s fantastic The Magic of Black & White series and Eli Reinholdtsen’s Chasing Reflections which is likely to become my own personal favourite in the whole collection. And we’ve got the new website to launch soon, and an iPad giveaway to celebrate, so stay tuned!

Genoa, Italy. I took a spot reading off the pavement in the beam of light. It happens to be pretty close to 18% grey, so I exposed manually at those settings, prefocused on the spot, and waited until someone came. It’s usually worth the wait.

We talk a lot about isolating elements within the frame. We do it with our choices of angle, optics, and aperture, but one of the techniques that often slips my own mind is to use the limited dynamic range of our sensors to our advantage. To heck with HDR images (High Dynamic Range), I want LDR images (Low Dynamic Range)! When the light is right and the range exceeds our sensor’s ability to capture detail in both the highlights and the shadows, choosing to favour the highlights and plunge the rest into shadow can have a dramatic effect.

I spent time in Italy working on this with some of our Italy Within The Frame students this May, and had a blast. It’s easy, and it’s a good way to turn the hard light of mid-day to your advantage. I look for areas where there is a large differential in the light. I manually expose for subjects in the brightest area, and let the left side of histogram shout and scream all it wants about lost details because that’s what I’m going for.  The shadows obscure everything else, allowing the brightest areas to be properly exposed and turning your exposure into another isolation tool in your visual toolbox.

What makes this hard, I think, is not the technique but the seeing itself. The eye/mind sees things in a much greater range than the camera will so what you record will look much more dramatic than what your eye sees, making it necessary to remain conscious of these dramatic light differentials because your eye won’t necessarily immediately see them. This is one of those cases where being familiar with the technique enough that you know it when you see it, is important, in much the same way as developing an eye for longer exposures when we can’t actually see the resulting blur with our eyes.

For those of you looking for something new to shoot in the summer light, give this a try. I’d love to see what you come up with on this – drop a link to your images into the comments if you’re feeling like sharing. Here’s another photograph made last year in Delhi, India, using the same technique. My evil twin, Ami Vitale showed me this technique. She rocks it.

My goal for Craft & Vision, apart from providing exceptional photographic education and inspiration at ridiculous prices, was to get a new eBook out to you once a month, sometimes my own, sometimes one from a photographer I respect. I was planning my own book about black and white photography when Andrew S. Gibson suggested he do not one, but two of them. Seeing a chance to avoid writing yet another book while I have deadlines of my own to deal with I jumped at it, and I’m glad I did. Andrew’s black and white images are fantastic, full of beautiful tone I find hard to get in my own work.  We’re releasing Andrew’s book this morning and I’m really excited about it. Here’s the description from the Craft & Vision site:

Black and white photographs are a different medium than colour and require an ability to see in monochrome. Becoming aware of the differences between black and white and colour images, in both how they are seen and what makes a great black and white image, is the first step to capturing images that will work powerfully in monochrome.

The first in a planned two-volume set, Part One discusses what makes a great black and white photograph, what to look for when learning to see in monochrome, elements of a black and white image, and potential subjects for black and white photographs. Part Two will examine the means of creating the black and white image in the digital darkroom.

At 58 pages, The Magic of Black & White – Part One, Vision -  is a little longer than most of the Craft&Vision ebooks, we just didn’t want to short-change the book on great images. We’re giving you discount codes too. Past codes have been limited time only, as these two are, but they’re slightly less limited so more of you can get in on it.

Use code GIBSON4 until the end of March 2010 to get The Magic of Black and White, Part One for $4 instead of $5. Use GIBSON20 until the end of March 2010 to get 20% off all Craft&Vision books when you buy 4 or more. You can buy the book now using the buttons below or just click HERE to go to the full collection at the Craft & Vision site.

The fourth in my series of ebooks is now out. CHASING THE LOOK, 10 Ways To Improve The Aesthetics of Your Photographs is a little longer than the last few. I think of this one as a companion to DRAWING THE EYE, as both titles are about improving our images through a better understanding of the visual language of photography. CHASING THE LOOK is about making intentional choices about the use of our gear and the settings on our cameras based on their affect on the aesthetic of the image. It begins to answer the question we all ask at some point while looking at the images of others – “How come my photographs don’t look like that?”

This one accidentally got to 48 pages. I’m not known for brevity. But I like to think that’s a good thing. It’s broken into ten sections, and like the previous ebooks, there are creative exercises, though not for every topic. It’s still gorgeously laid out, and at only $5 I like to think these eBooks are still one of the best values out there.

Chasing The Look is a downloadable PDF file. You can get your hot little virtual hands on it right now by clicking the Add To Cart button below, or by going to the bookstore.

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.