The Online Photographer

Corn (and Kyle Batson's Roof With a View)

A couple of days ago I mentioned that it's tougher to see horizons around here at the end of Summer, before the corn is harvested. This year it's been especially noticeable, because we had a longish dry spell and then a week of rain, so the corn seemed to spring out of the ground all at once; first it didn't seem to be there, and now a week or three later it seems to crowd the view from every angle.

In response, David Brown wrote, "Two possible solutions to your corn problem: 1.) A car-top platform with a ladder, like the one Ansel Adams used. 2.) A step-ladder on roof racks on your car. Take it off the racks and use it on the ground. I'm not suggesting you set it up on top of the car." Bill Mitchell added, "Ansel Adams's greatest contribution to photography may have been the car platform (not the Zone System)."

I knew there a great opportunity to mention Kyle Batson was going to come around sooner or later! I love it when this happens.

I will not make any puns on the word 'corny'
But back to corn. First of all, I had been drifting through life in a state of ignorance, imagining that corn was getting taller because of genetic engineering. That might be true, or it might not, but it turns out that the world record for a cornstalk is 30 feet. Some kinds of corn are taller than others. Anyway, it seems to me that "normal" corn when I was growing up in the Midwest was 6–8 feet tall, and that more lately, around here, I've been seeing corn that's 8–12 feet tall. I guess all I can say with certainty is that a wall of 12-foot-high corn at the edge of the roadway makes a pretty formidable "fence" blocking the view. Especially when, as often seems to be the case, the road has a ditch beside it and the field on the other side of the ditch is elevated a little bit above the level of the road to begin with...as usually happens on one side of the road or the other when the road runs across a gentle hillside.

David and Bill are perfectly correct that being able to get up on top of your vehicle is a big advantage in getting a better view. Not disputing that and not criticizing their solution. Actually, in '87 when I did my one and only view camera project, I would stand on the roof of my little Mazda 323 sedan, as the "bumples" on the roof when I sold the car gave witness.

But there's a little photo-existential problem here, one that "crops up" (er, sorry) from time to time: it's the tendency we all (I mean all us photo enthusiasts) have of assuming problems are technical when in fact they're visual. Because, yes, a telescoping monopod, a stepladder, and a roof platform are all valuable for seeing over the top of the corn: but how do you know when there's a view to be seen above the corn when you can't see the view because of the corn? That is, how do you know where to stop and get up on the roof, or deploy the stepladder? The point is that you can't see the horizon. So you don't know where a good view might be because you can't see it.

Of course a lot of times you can see a little bit of it, or you can see enough to make an educated guess. But I'd say that that's the greater part of the corn problem.

You only live once
But on to Kyle. I usually try to mention when I meet readers, and I neglected to do so when Kyle came by because he wanted to clean up his website before I linked to it, and the mention got put on the back burner, which is a perilous place for anything to be where Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is concerned. Kyle and I met in Corning for lunch one day. He had quit his job, sold his house, and customized a Sprinter van into a camper! It's now his domicile. When we met he had just embarked on a circuit of the country in the van. He told me he just wanted to make sure he had some adventures as his life passed by, or words to that effect.

Kyle Batson at home

And apropos of the current topic, check this out:

Now there's a roof with a view. That'll let you see beyond the corn.

If you'd like to follow Kyle or see more of his adventure, here are his links:

http://www.kylebatsonphoto.com

http://www.desirepath.life

http://www.instagram.com/kylebatsonphoto

http://www.instagram.com/desirepathlife

Mike
(Thanks to David, Bill, and Kyle)

UPDATE: Kyle Batson writes: Hey, Mike! It was so good to be able to meet someone whose writing I admire so much. I am currently in Montana just having passed through Yellowstone. My roof perch came in handy recently to photograph some elk by the edge of the road. It’s a nice place to be, especially to gaze up at the Milky Way in the middle of a forest. I hope to meet again, and if anyone sees me driving around their neck of the woods, be sure to say hello!

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Moose: "We too travel in a converted Sprinter van, but converted at much less effort on my part by the folks at Pleasure-Way in Saskatoon. "What I want to know is how he got up on the roof. There are ladders that attach to rear doors, and which I've considered, but I don't see one on his van."

Mike replies: Here's a viewpoint that shows the ladder. But Moose, do note John's comment below. Let's be careful up there!

John Camp: "As a Midwesterner inflicted with corn and low horizons, I once had a roof rack on an SUV paired with a very compact folding stepladder that I carried in the back, with pieces of plywood that I put in the roof rack to stand on. One thing bothered me, and makes me a little queasy when I see pictures like that of Kyle standing on his Sprinter—the possibility of becoming so involved with the photo-making that you fall off backwards. I had less room on my SUV rack than Kyle has, but the problem is more one of inattention to the danger than it is of room. And if you fall off backwards, you'll most likely land on your head or neck...I solved some of the problem by buying sailing safety cables that allowed me to snap into the roof rack. I couldn't fall off, but I couldn't move much, either. In any case, roof-top photo-making has to be done with some care."

Edward Taylor: "It would appear that Kyle is quite good as a photographer, judging from the links to his site that you provided. Thank you."

Stan B.: "That van is one sweet setup—perfect size!"

Your Photo Assignment for Today

I've been spending an embarrassing amount of time on dating sites lately, because I am a.) lonely and b.) evidently unteachable via experience*. I have learned a few things, such as, things are bad for a lot of people in the Philippines.

One of my standard jokes is that I knew I was getting old when I would see a pretty young woman walking a dog and I'd find myself admiring the dog. Well, one of the ways I know I'm getting even older is that I look at profiles on dating sites and I either want to critique the person's photos, give them tips on how to do better, or offer to come do their photos for them. (This last must sound creepy, because no one's ever taken me up on it. Their loss, however, because, seriously, I would do a splendid job and I'd work for nothing. Hmm, even that sounded creepy.)

I'm sorely tempted to show some of the worst examples, but I do try hard not to show negative examples on TOP, out of respect for either the photographer or the subject or both.

One young lady made a complete hash of a selfie in a mirror. The mirror only occupied about half the frame; the phone she was holding up was blocking half her face; she was looking at the phone screen rather than at the reflection of the lens in the mirror; and everything that was reflected in the mirror was out of focus.

She was cute (what little I could see of her), but my old-guy gene kicked in and I couldn't help myself: I wrote her a note offering some tips for how to do better selfies-in-the-mirror.

Strange to say, I have not heard back from that particular woman. There's a surprise.

But then I thought, hmm, wonder how hard it actually is?

So I self-assigned myself. (Was that re-redundant?) Here's my best attempt:

But I really had to work at this. On several attempts the lighting was atrocious; a couple of other times the excessive detail of the pitiless digital sensor and lens made me look like I was desperately in need of botox, when in actuality I am only mildly in need of botox; and, of course, the client here is recalcitrant and cantankerous and has an unrealistic self-image. (As I always say, I'm 35 from inside here.) And you really can't see the screen with the phone held out of the shot. It's pretty tough getting everything to line up.

And I know I look grim, but the ones in which I attempted to smile made me look like Peter Lorre in M:

But really. If you want a tricky little challenge this week, try doing a halfway decent self-portrait in a mirror with a phone, without showing the phone in the photo. Don't expect to knock it right out, either. It looks like a lot of non-photographer types on dating sites should be able to do better than they do, but it's not as easy as it looks.

The best way to get great portraits of yourself is still to hire a good photographer! You wouldn't sell your house without a realtor, would you?

Mike

P.S. This really is the last phone-photo post for a while—I got a notification from B&H Photo that the Sony A7III has shipped and is en route.

* Actually I was just being funny with "b."—in fact I've met several truly fine people on dating sites, who I liked a great deal even if we didn't have that essential "spark." Statistically the best way to meet a future partner is through a friend, by far, but eHarmony says that "20% of those in current, committed relationships began online and 7% of marriages in 2015 were between couples that met on a dating website."

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Larry Gebhardt: "Mike, I'd try this experiment but my wife would probably catch me and wonder what the heck I was doing. Then I'd probably need to really be able take a good selfie for the dating sites."

Jim Hamstra: "Actually you know you're old when you see a pretty woman walking down the street and you think 'I bet her mom is hot.'"

Euan Forrester: "When I was Internet dating, I didn't have a good horizontal 'cover' photo and since I mentioned in my profile I was into photography I thought I'd better take a nice one. I noticed lots of peoples' cover photos were of themselves in front of pretty backdrops, so I one evening I drove up a mountain road where I knew there was an overlook that I thought would be quiet. I got there a bit late, and it was darker than I hoped, so I set up an umbrella on a light stand, gelled my flash, and put the camera on a tripod with a radio trigger. Just as I finished getting set up, the local ski hill above my overlook closed and car after car started streaming down the hill right past my location. Then someone got their car stuck right beside me and a giant crew showed up to try and get them out. All the while I'm blasting away with my ridiculous 'ultimate selfie' setup. It took me almost 300 frames to get something I didn't hate, all while trying to not look too embarrassed in my photos, and then I sheepishly packed up my gear and high-tailed it down the mountain.

"I ended up meeting my now live-in partner through the site with that as my cover photo. I eventually told her the story, feeling very proud that I persevered through my embarrassment and had managed to find someone as wonderful as her. She replied that she didn't actually like the photo very much."

David Maxwell: "I suppose that as someone who primarily enjoys writing poetry, songs, and fiction, I ought to try to avoid writing comments on blog posts! Seriously though, I have lost track of the number of times over the years that I have started writing comments on your posts only to delete and walk away. I'm not sure what your ultimate goal is with the online dating, but I met my wife of almost 3.5 years online (she gave birth to our first child last Monday). I used OkCupid, a free site with a somewhat sleazy reputation. It was pretty interesting to say the least, and I encountered a bit of wackiness, but I met some really cool women, and, as I mentioned above, married one of them."

JG: "I always promised the women I dated that, if nothing else, when they eventually broke up with me—which they invariably did—they would have some great photos of themselves to post online when they go looking for their next boyfriend. And sure enough, whenever I would stumble upon one of their dating profiles afterward, many of the photos had indeed been taken by me. Sometimes many years earlier, but that was the next boyfriend's problem, not mine...."

Mike replies: I figured I'd better feature this one because we might never get another from you.  :-)

Stephanie Luke: "Nicely lit and exposed, goes without saying—although I just did. But I am intimidated by that guy and his unwavering stare. Also, what is in your hand, just out of the picture? An axe, perhaps, to go with the outdoorsy, he-man outfit? (Yes, I know it's a camera, but still...). I bet you have a nice smile, and from this female's point of view, it would be more inviting to see it!"

Mike replies: Thanks for the input Stephanie...just FYI, this is the mirror-selfie I actually use on the dating sites:

Yup, complete with, um, toilet. Oh well.That's where the mirror is.

Labeled with the date so people know it's recent. It's actually a more characteristic look for me, too, as I am usually smiling like a happy dog. But one very intelligent woman from around here complained that she hated selfies with the phone in the picture. "They're the worst," was her verdict.

Can't please all the people all the time...and most of those people are looking at my profile. Ba-dum-PAH.

(Another Mitch Hedberg joke, modified.)

Still Life: Found vs. Constructed

Of the many, many identifiable genres of photography (I'm sure there are more than you think, and the work of some people is beyond category), the ones that most naturally appeal to me are portraiture, candids and "environmental portraiture" (meaning people in their surroundings), and still life.

Regarding the last, there are two basic kinds—constructed and found. Constructed still life ranges all the way from creating amazing ephemeral artwork just for the camera, to the happy activity of arranging objects to be photographed...a great many people get huge pleasure from this, and many people are amazingly good at it. Anything that empowers their practice is something I'm in favor of.

But what I really like is "found" still life...happening upon objects and their settings in the course of ordinary life and stopping to make a careful photograph of them, perhaps rearranging them somewhat but sometimes not. I have on my wall in the kitchen a giant print of an apple that Paul Butzi made for me. It gets a lot of comments, almost all positive, but a professional once criticized it because the background, he said, isn't perfect. True, but it happened to be a just-washed apple I saw sitting on an old army jacket in a kitchen, and I photographed it just as it was. No perfecting involved. In fact, no anything involved, except looking carefully and using the right focus and aperture.

I've never done enough still-life photography to make anything of it...no special concerns have ever emerged, no personal style. But I love it and always have. It was one of the first things I explored when I got the first camera I ever bought for myself.

If you do still life, do you prefer constructed or found?

And, do you have a go-to lens for it or do you just use whatever you have on the camera? I tend to do the latter.

Mike

P.S. To add pictures to the comments, the original must have a URL and be no more than 800 pixels wide, saved in sRGB. Then use the following code in the comment box to load the image:

If and when I find the picture I wanted to use as an illustration to this post, I'll add it.

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David Francis: "Now that I'm in my mid-seventies, I quite like the idea of subjects that don't move and don't object to being photographed, Apart from that, I like the opportunity that still life photography provides for developing my lighting skills. Most of my subjects are of the found variety—things that are interesting as a whole or that have interesting visual details. But there is almost always an element of construction in these photographs as well, largely in terms of selecting the background, setting up the object, and arranging the lighting. As for equipment, I often use my Nikon D7000 with a Tokina 100mm macro lens, but I have also used my Panasonic GX7 with a 20mm lens, and a Canon G10 in macro mode. All great fun, and every now and then you get some really interesting results."

Mike adds: David sent me a beautiful "found" still life as a printed card (along with a donation to TOP, for which many thanks, David), and it's a beautiful little print. I've left it out where I can see it since it arrived.

Dennis (partial comment): "As with other subject matter, the answer to this is that what I like to look at and what I like to do aren't necessarily the same."

Ken James: "I think that still lifes [the correct plural BTW —Mike the Ed.] are my favorite also. Just this morning walking the dogs my friend and I were talking about this very thing, even about found and constructed. I have always really been a studio photographer, so I tend to constructed, but I am working on found. My current undertaking is to find some way to make my constructed more creative and appealing. I like to do simple things, but they are of limited appeal, meaning only to me. For me, a very timely post. Thanks. You are working that wrist quite a bit seems to me." [And paying for it —M.]

The Forces of the Fall

The lower branches of the fallen oak. Some of the
broken sections are twelve inches in diameter.

I'm still experiencing significant aftereffects of the storm—power was off for 30 hours and it's been restored, but unfortunately several circuits in my house are dead, including my entire office (and that whole end of the downstairs). I assume this has something to do with the handoff between the backup generator and the power from NYSEG (pronounced "nice egg," our local power utility), but I haven't yet been able to get through to anybody who can help. 

So I'm breaking my rules and writing from the book computer, upstairs. Hopefully just for today!

They had a lot of snow in Britain and Ireland too, I hear.

Out and about
Yesterday and the day before were days to be prized here—dramatically gorgeous—and I did what was, for me, a lot of shooting. I went out several times.

Two things I noticed to mention. For one, I actually filled up a whole card. "Ran out of film."

Many of you probably do this regularly, and have long ago worked out protocols for making sure you have extra cards in reserve and handy. But I habitually shoot sparingly, normally of static subjects, so I ordinarily spend a lot more time thinking and looking than I do actually shooting, and it's been so long since I've filled up a whole card that I can't even remember the last time. So on my third jaunt out of the house...whoops. No more card space. It's also been a long time since I left the house with anything more than one clean card in the camera—I just so seldom need it. 

I think this was because, much to my surprise, I found myself shooting action. I don't usually do much of that. I'm guessing those of you who shoot action are used to shooting a lot of exposures. Or at least a lot more than I usually do. 

Something and something else
And that brings me to my second observation, which is that whenever I go out meaning to shoot something, I almost always end up shooting something else. I first learned this when I spent a year shooting with a view camera long ago (I'm not naturally a large format guy, as I wrote about years ago). Frustrated with my tendency to shoot carefully pictorial compositions, once I just swung the camera around and took a picture of what was behind me. Then I started doing that whenever I set up the camera, and found that the "behind my back" picture was better about one out of five times.

This teaches an important lesson, at least for me, which is that whenever you go out to shoot, you can find something. It just might not be what you think it's going to be. It certainly wasn't for me yesterday. (More about that later.)

That thought was expressed to me by the great Ralph Gibson when I interviewed him many years ago. Paraphrasing, he told me something like this: I've been doing this for so long, and I'm good enough at it, that whenever I head out with the camera I know I'll come back with something.

Or actually, it teaches two important lessons: the second is that while you're shooting one thing, remember to stay alert and alive to every other possibility, everything else around you. Even when you know where the pictures are you never know where the pictures are.

Documenting is different
Anyway: fun day, out an about with the X-T2. Shooting is fun and it cures all the other ills associated with the hobby of photography. 

I did some more documenting of my downed tree, too, which is an ~80-foot oak (I paced it off), about three or four feet in diameter at the base. It came up by the roots because the ground is so soft now. It was a violent event: the fall snapped many living branches, some of them eight or ten inches in diameter, raggedly in half; the corpse of the tree in the yard is a jumble of broken wood and tells a vivid tale of the forces of the fall.

I'll have some more pictures of that, too, when I get back up to speed. Documenting the felled tree, knowing it won't be there long, reminded me of another of my beliefs, which is that shooting in a documentary mode—just for information, to show the reality of a scene to someone else in a photograph—is to us photographers like scales and finger exercises are to a pianist. It keeps you in practice and cleans up your mind, clearing away all your arty and pictorial and compositional quirks and pretensions. We should all do that every now and then just to keep us healthy, even if only as an exercise. (As I think I once said, photography isn't about photography, it's about the world.)

I don't have my usual footer macro up here to add to the bottom of this post, so I'll just sign off and leave it at that. More anon. March has been quite the month so far.

Mike

[UPDATE: Got the power to the office restored about 1:30 thanks to troubleshooting help from the generator people. All is well. —MJ]

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Bryce Lee: "Running out of space on an SD card is interesting. Normally those of us who were raised in the era of 20- (later 24-) and 36-exposure rolls of film learned early on to be small 'c' conservative when deciding upon exactly what we want to photograph. I still function in film mode when out doing my photography, regardless of the capacity of the inserted SD card. An old habit difficult to break."

Stan B.: "'I don't care so much anymore about "good photography." I am gathering evidence for history.' —Gilles Peress."

Joseph Reid: "One of the best yard-care/exercise experiences I had while owning a house in Upstate NY was having a sick tree felled professionally and the trunk cut into two or three long sections. Then I took over and made firewood out of them using wedges, sledgehammer and axe. I could only do a bit at a time and it took several weekends. But it was great, exhausting stress relief. Splitting those trunk sections was a primal experience."

Joe: "Re 'Even when you know where the pictures are you never know where the pictures are.' Oh my, yes. So true. And that principle brought me to a habit that I've developed: When I'm shooting a subject, of course I always reach a point where I'm finished. I've covered all the angles, I know I've got the good shot in the camera, I've done what I came for. I'm tired, it's in the can, and I'm eager to go home and dump the images onto the computer. But for the past few years I've made it a habit to stop and take a one-minute break to walk through the location, looking up and down and behind and inside, thinking: what else is here? What did I miss? Isn't there one more shot I can take home? I swear, 50% of the time I'll frame a shot that hadn't occurred to me before, and 50% of those times my favorite shot will come from that last idea."

Mike replies: That comment says the same thing my post did but much better. Lovely.

Ann: "About 20 years ago, we lost a 30-foot oak. No storm, no soft ground. I was just sitting at home reading a magazine one night, and it fell over with a huge crash. Rotten at the base of the trunk. The interesting part was that we had just the week before finished building a six-foot-tall cedar fence. The tree fell on a section of that beautiful, sturdy, brand new fence. The posts on either side of where the tree fell were intact and standing up straight. The section that the tree hit, however...shattered. Not a single piece of wood left in between those fence posts that was longer than six inches. That falling tree was a powerful force."

Controlling Lighting

There are two primary reasons to try all different kinds of photography.

One is to improve your chops.

The other is to find out what each kind of photography is like to do and whether it's for you.

When I took studio lighting in school (from a man who would later be a good friend and who is also my son's grandfather), I wasn't very interested in it. There were several reasons for this. One is that I don't like photographing what I can't see. I disliked all my experiments with flash for this reason. Somewhere, I have a set of pairs of pictures I used as teaching tools, of different scenes or subjects, identical except that one was taken with on-camera flash and the other with available light. I didn't like taking pictures with flash, for the simple reason that I didn't know what the result was going to look like.

The other reason is that control doesn't appeal to me. The opposite—serendipity—appeals to me much more. I want to explore with a camera and be surprised by what I find—adapt on the fly to what I see.

Lots of people, however, love the control aspect of photography. There's nothing wrong with that if it appeals to you.

I mentioned recently that I once was a full-time assistant for a studio pro for six months. I learned a lot in that time. My boss was a total control freak when it came to his pictures, and for very good reason—his sets and models cost money, and hence, unpleasant surprises or technical breakdowns or delays cost money.

One little story about him (I won't name him—he was so difficult to work for that one of his former assistants had T-shirts made for all the other assistants in town that said "I Survived ____ ____.") He once had to shoot a brochure for a travel company. One of the pictures he wanted to take was an overhead view of a man and a woman in bathing suits floating on air rafts in a swimming pool. The would be facing opposite ways, holding hands in the middle, and each would be holding a drink in the other hand. He rented a scaffold, hired the models, devised his lighting scheme, found a swimming pool painted the right color of blue, etc.

To assure himself he could get the brilliant effect of sunlight on water, he rented an indoor pool and lit it with artificial light. But there was a problem—the lights couldn't reach the bottom of the pool. He threw all the watt-seconds he could at it, but the light couldn't penetrate the water with sufficient intensity. So he had to switch to an outdoor pool. But it drove him up the wall that his shoot was dependent on sunlight. Never mind the fact that it had been sunny for a month and there was nothing but sun in the forecast—he just hated having to rely on God rather than Speedotron for the lighting for his shot. Everything went fine, the day of the shoot was sunny, and he got the shot. But he complained for a long time afterwards about not having been in control.

There's nothing wrong with having ironfisted control of every aspect of the shots you want to make, including your lighting. I will freely admit that my long-ago boss, the studio photographer control freak, probably made more money from sales of photographs in one year than I have made in my entire career. His was a true Mom-and-Pop business—he did the shooting and oversaw the technical stuff, and his wife did the books and ran the business side of things. They had a 50-foot sailboat, if that's any indication of their success.

As for me...well, one of my favorite lighting situations was shooting a portrait of a friend. There was a north-facing window in the attic of a garage at my grandparents' summer cottage. There were old sheets covering disused furniture in the attic and I used one of them as a reflector. It was hot as hell and I wanted her to wear a particular sweater I thought she looked great in because its green-gray color matched her green-gray eyes. She did, but the "sweater" in this case was literal—it made her sweat! Windowlight on one side, a large sheet hung on the other side, her tanned skin glistening, and the dark rafters of the garage making the background all but black—the light was utterly gorgeous. But it was all completely improvised as I went along.

We all need to know what our own character and personality is. And it's best to go ahead and go with that.

Anyway, all I wanted to say today is that the best way to play around with lighting on a small scale are probably portraits, still life (that's the plural of "a still life"), or macro shots. Start by finding examples you might want to emulate.

The smaller the subject, the less you need a studio, or an improvised studio space, to set up your lighting in.

Triptych by Sean Tucker. Rembrandt lighting with a single Godox AD200.

If you didn't see the video Wolfgang Lonien linked the other day, you should watch it. It's good. The photographer's name is Sean Tucker. I really like the work, the lighting, the planning, the concept and all, but those aren't even the only great things about the video; Sean's seriousness and his work board are both inspiring examples to follow. Well worth the time it takes to watch—it has stuck in my mind for two days now.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Bill C: "An engaging post. I began my journey into photography with a landscape and urbex focus, and later (after I had kids) evolved into shooting events, with a particular interest and investment in learning how to shoot ballet and dance. So working with the available light has been the norm. However, I've more recently been challenged to shoot studio type work, like promotional work and headshots, that require using studio lighting. I've enjoyed the learning process, even if it is a bit frustrating at times.

"Having control over light means having the responsibility of control over the light, and that definitely adds to the workload. The additional equipment and technique required is also a steep learning curve. But it is very satisfying on those occasions where you manage to capture it! It definitely gives me significant appreciation for the experience and talent of true professional photographers. Finally, I have to say that the Sean Tucker video is one of the absolute best I've seen on YouTube. It is honest, informative, and inspirational on many levels. Thank you so much for passing it along to your readers!"

Robert Fogt: "Having worked for thirty years as a museum photographer, I have to say that lighting—without a doubt—was perhaps the most challenging and FUN part of the entire experience. My 'small parts' bag held, among many other widgets, wire plate stands and various little bits of reflective materials, and small concave cosmetics mirrors to position behind the subjects for edge light. I'd go so far as to compare it, Mike, to playing pool! After digital became the new Polaroid and offered all that detailed and immediate feedback, I would occasionally have to remind myself that it was time to just take the picture and move on to the next. You could just get sucked down the lighting rabbit hole! Fun, indeed."

Roy J Feldman: "Your first point and second don't really match up. You don't like flash because you don't know the outcome; you don't like total control. Well which is it?"

Animesh Ray: "On the one hand, you don't like to take photographs with flash because you like to see what is being photographed, on the other you like surprises. I find flash photography in near darkness, especially on the streets, is full of surprises. What you are after, I think, is control but not too much and surprises but not too much. (Smiley face!)"

Brian Taylor: "Sean Tucker's impressive video reminded me how much richer portraits can become when they emerge out of real relationship. As you probably know, the question of absent fathers, and mentoring, has surfaced regularly in discussions of men and masculinity. With good reason I think. Like many men whose fathers had been traumatised during the second world war, my younger self was unable to find, or accept, the kinds of relationship Sean evidently had with his portrait subjects, so I was pleased to see the subject being explored photographically. I was also pleased to hear Sean's cautions and reservations about street photography (in another of his videos), though much more could be said about that ethically complicated genre."

Warren Jones: "Ha! My father in law loves doing studio work with lights. He has seemingly every kind of light, light stand and light modifier imaginable. He always talks about getting the light just right. Yep you guessed it...he is a control freak!"

Michael: "Thanks for that, Mike. All of Sean Tucker's videos on YouTube are worth watching. He is serious in a way that invites us all to be serious with him, and to understand that photography is like life: it's all there, to learn, to suffer, to enjoy, and even sometimes to be enlightened."

What Is a Studio?

Two small things first: I've just added a bunch of new Featured Comments to the "Bare Bulb" post. Be sure to check 'em out.

Second, I should be done with the Baker's Dozen: Black-and-White" post in time to publish it on Friday, so I can leave it at the top of TOP for the weekend. Coming right up, at long last.

I wanted to mention that the most fun I ever had with lighting was when I shared studio space with my old friend Paul Kennedy at the Paul Kennedy Studio in Takoma Park, Maryland. We were four photographers with independent businesses and shared space; I mostly used the big, beautiful darkroom, earning most of my living as a custom B&W printer. I made exhibition prints for professional photographers, galleries, and museums, and high quality prints for reproduction. I loved darkroom work and there were many and various challenges in the jobs that came in, so it was a fun time for me.

I had a bunch of Photoflex LitePanels, which were 39 x 72" fabric sheets with elastic bands on all four corners. Here's a link to the most useful kind. Rather than buy the expensive pre-made frames for them, I made a bunch out of PVC plumbers pipe. To assemble them, they simply press-fit together; then I could knock them all down and throw the bits in a bag. What let them stand upright was just an inverted "T" shape at one end.

I used these both in the studio and on location. The diffuser panels made the same kind of light (albeit weaker in intensity) as a giant soft box (the point of a soft box is to contain the light and sent it all out the diffuse front panel, rather than waste it some of it on reflection as you do with an umbrella or with a freestanding LitePanel). The opaque panels could be used as gobos (to block light) or as backgrounds—I shot many portraits and headshots with either a black or white LitePanel (same kind—one side is black, one side is white) as my background. Of course I used the white and silver panels as generously-sized reflectors.

As every pro and almost no amateur knows, a large diffuser panel on a frame is also very useful on location in harsh midday direct sunlight...on stands at each end (have two people hold it) so that it's over the head of your subject with the sunlight falling on the top of it, and you get beautiful diffused light on your subject with no harsh shadows. Instant perfect "open shade."

These panels were highly useful on location shoots...I went into a lot of offices to do headshots and executive portraits. But the most fun was simply playing around with them in the studio. (I did lots of studio portraits, mainly of individuals and couples.) It was fun to figure out how to use the various light panels to "mimic" many lights while actually only using one or two. For example, with a single light, you could set up a diffuser panel on one side of your subject as a main light, and set the light up as such an angle that unblocked light would fall on a reflector panel on the other side of the subject. That created the same effect as two lights, one diffused and one reflected, using just one main light. The problem was intensity, which would be much less a problem with today's digital cameras.

To really have fun with lighting, of course, you need a "room-sized accessory"...a studio. And what's a studio? Basically, just a large empty room. Everything else in a studio, like built-in sweeps or seamless paper support systems and so forth, is just icing on the cake.

One thing that can help a lot is having beams or girders on the ceiling so you can clamp stuff up there. The only time I was a full-time assistant, the pro had constructed an enormous barn-sized concrete room with a huge wall in the middle on rollers. The idea was that he could have two sets going at the same time, one on each side of the wall, or, when he wanted to use the whole room, he could roll the moving wall to one side and use the whole space. He also had beams on the ceiling so he could clamp things anywhere and not have to hang lights from tall stands. The ceiling was 20 feet high, though, so getting the lights up there wasn't a picnics for us assistants.

You know what would make a great studio? A prefab garage with no center supports and a high ceiling. You'd have a lot of space for human-sized projects, a concrete floor, and those exposed ceiling joists would be great for clamping things to.

I don't work with lights any more and it's been ages since I've been in a studio. And of course, as in that nice video Wolfgang linked to yesterday, lots of photographers build portable "studios" on location. But for the right photographer, a nice big empty room to work in—a studio—is a highly desirable photographic accessory.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Dave Jenkins: "All this talk about studios makes me nostalgic for the great space I had through most of the '90s in downtown Chattanooga. The shooting room was about 20x30 feet with a 12-foot ceiling, a large darkroom with a King Concepts film processor, and a nice space for offices and client meetings. All for $600 a month. Those were good days. However, by 2000, most of my business had shifted to location work and the money I made from having a studio was just about enough to pay the overhead. So sadly, I closed it. But I still miss it. I'm mostly out of commercial photography these days, working on books and magazine articles, but I loved it while I did it."

John Camp: "I just built a studio with three sections—writing, music, painting/photography. Moved in last month. There were some constraints. I'm in an environmentally sensitive area, so I was restricted to the footprint of the previous building, which was not optimal. It is, however, the best place I've ever had to work. (We call it 'The Workshop' because 'Studio' sounds too corksniffer-y.) In fact, I never want to leave it.

"BUT: a studio is more than a big empty space. If you're serious about it, you have to think about things like electric outlets. I have way more than the code calls for, and I could still use more. In places where I had four-plug outlets put in, I could have used eight...you also have to think about exactly what you'll need for plumbing and HVAC, security and storage.

"Big open spaces are subject to bad light and cold spots, so you really have to think about those things. When your lighting guys figure out how much light you need, it's not a bad idea in my experience to greatly exceed that. I did, and I still have a desk lamp.

"If you work with models, you also have to think about privacy concerns.

"I have a big pre-fab garage at my cabin. I no longer track the prices, but I think I paid something like $45,000 for a steel pre-fab set on a concrete slab with all electric wiring and hookup included, as well as the grading needed for the slab (which was also included in that price.) Arrived in a semi-truck and put up in a week. You could park six cars in in it; we do hang stuff (like dead deer) from the cross-members. Twenty-foot peaked roof, the better to shed snow. I don't remember the exact size but it could be something like 40x40. It's not heated, and heating would be expensive in colder areas simply because the space is so large. It's also hard to keep clean, so you'd have to think about things like what kind of flooring you'd want (polished concrete is relatively cheap and great, and can be tinted.)

"I'd say after a lifetime of writing in places like the basement and the unused third bedroom, that a workshop is a terrific luxury. Every artist or craftsman should try to get one, or find one. I don't know if you're interested, but I think a 'studio' series of posts could go on for days...."

Frank Grygier: "Dean Collins comes to mind when you talk about using panels. He worked his magic using one Metz flashgun with numerous panels and mirrors to control the light. I watch his videos every so often for inspiration."

Eamon Hickey: "Your memories of experimenting with LitePanels and seeing how much you could do with a single light sparked a stone-age memory of my own. Didn't a photographer named Dean Collins become famous-among-photodawgs in the 1980s with a series of instructional VHS tapes on lighting techniques wherein he regularly mimicked six-light, 15,000 watt-second setups with not much more than a penlight and a piece of scrap foamcore? That's how I remember it anyway. The camera store where I worked had a set of his tapes that we rented out, and one of the perks for a young, very underpaid photodawg like me was the ability to take them home for free if they weren't rented out. I learned a lot about light from those tapes. Or thought I did. Since I'm evidently in a nostalgic mood, I'll throw in a shot from 1990 or so that I made under the influence of those tapes, using a Photoflex LitePanel and a single light (outdoors). I was trying to copy something I'd seen in a magazine (not such a bad way to learn)."

Gordon T Cahill: "As the other photographers in my area have been closing their studio spaces, over the last five years, I've been selectively buying their gear and improving mine. Like you I loved my darkroom but now my studio is my fun space to be. Although the market has constricted, because I'm the last studio in town my usage has increased a bit. Although a permanent space is nice it's actually easy, with the cool and cheap gear available today to have either a quick garage/room conversion or a completely portable studio. About 50% of my headshot work is on location and I can set up a reasonable studio with some flip-out panels and a pair of Godox lights in just 15 minutes."

Dennis Huff Photographs the Eclipse

[The following is the text of a private email Dennis sent to some friends. I thought it did a great job of conveying the combination of excitement and stress involved in a complicated shoot of a fast-changing one-time-only event, so I asked Dennis if I could publish it more or less as written. He agreed and here you are. —Ed.]

Words and pictures by Dennis Huff

We're home now and I can start processing a few images. Here's what I have so far.

For the eclipse, I had two cameras set up; The Sony A7RII with the Rokinon 12mm lens, shooting one image every five minutes which will be composited to show the path of the sun during the eclipse [last photo].

 The second camera was the Canon 5D Mark IV with the 600mm + 1.4 teleconverter, all mounted on a guided telescope mount. I would have manually guided the camera but the exposures during totality were calculated to be 1–2 seconds, and I feared at 840mm the sun would be blurred.

I framed the Sony using a phone app which calculated the sun's position during the eclipse.

The guided mount with the Canon has go-to so it found the sun and followed it nicely. I also had a 7" monitor mounted on the Canon to check focus and framing.

Everything went well early on but after a few minutes clouds rolled in and at times the sun was not visible, and I was constantly racking exposure to compensate for cloud cover. Even so, I was thrilled that I was getting mostly good shots.

As totality approaches one must be ready to remove the solar filter and change camera settings (on both cameras!). I had C1, C2 and C3 programmed to various settings on the Canon and with the Sony, went to aperture priority during totality. Sounded easy enough...

So now we are in totality (one minute and 50 seconds), and I have finished shooting the Canon for totality and now move to the Sony, remove the filter and before I can change settings and fire, the group I'm with begin oohing and aahing and crying out so much I looked up at the sun. Oh boy, totality. Magnificent! Astounding! Soul-stirring! Oh crap we're now starting into the diamond ring effect as the sun is uncovering...

...and I haven't shot the Sony yet and I'm so discombobulated, I don't know what to do next. I jump back to the Canon to shoot and, oh no the filter! So now the filter is on and I'm shooting the diamond ring and, oh no the filter for the Sony. Whew, I didn't melt anything! The Sony image will need some Photoshopping to make it right though.

We are now out of totality and things are proceeding well. Suddenly, the mount has stopped tracking. I futzed with it for a bit but just tracked the rest of the eclipse manually.

So that was my eclipse experience. I'm thankful the group was so vocal during totality or I probably would never have looked away from my cameras! Next total eclipse across the US is in seven years from Texas to Vermont; mark your calendars!

Dennis

Big thanks to Dennis. I could just feel the stress and "discombobulation" from his words! —MJ.

©2017 by Dennis Huff, all rights reserved

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Always in totality
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Geoff Wittig: "Wow! Beautiful photographs of the eclipse. I've screwed up more than a few potentially good wildlife photos by getting discombobulated and fumbling with camera controls I should be able to manage in my sleep. The relentless 'gotta get it right now' pressure of shooting the eclipse is a whole 'nuther level. The only thing I've done that's remotely comparable was photographing a massive controlled blast at a limestone quarry using a pair of tripod mounted D-SLR's. Everything had to be set well in advance for max frame rate JPEG captures, with exposure and focus pre-set, holding down the cable release starting a second before the blast. The whole thing was over in 5 seconds, without the option of asking 'Hey, can you do that again?'"

Ed Rosch: "Above is my eclipse picture taken with my Olympus Pen F with a 15mm lens. It’s a composite of two shots taken a few seconds apart and was at the Feather River Winery in North Platte NE."

Mike replies: Your shot makes a very interesting contrast to Dennis's pictures. You're recording the experience; he's recording the object/event. Philosophically speaking, I'd say those are different subjects. And offer a clue toward understanding different approaches to the practice of photography.

I could go on about this—but please don't consider that a threat.  :-)

Ed: "You hit the nail square on the head with your comment about my picture. I indeed was attempting to capture the feeling of experiencing the eclipse. I figured that there would be plenty of pictures of the eclipse itself and most of them would be better than anything I’d be able to do. As you point out, very different subjects neither 'superior' to the other. I’d suggest that a viewer engaging with Dennis's images and then looking at mine would have a better vicarious eclipse experience than viewing either alone.

"Delving deeper into the differing ways that photographic subjects and photography itself might be approached is hardly a threat but a very useful topic to be explored. Might I assume you’re familiar with the book Photography Changes Everything?"

Mike: I'm not, but I will add it to the list....

Elton Pinto: "Haha! I love the sense of excitement! That picture of totality is amazing. Thanks for sharing your experience. I also cannot help but think of how photographers sometimes miss experiencing the event in the process of documenting the event."

John Masters: "I felt a lesser amount of Dennis's stress on eclipse day.

"My health hasn't been great lately and I wasn't even going to attempt photographing the eclipse here in Palm Bay, Florida. We were expecting 84% sun coverage.

"I perked up about a week and a half before the eclipse and ordered a sheet of Solar Film, the stuff that knocks down the sun's brightness 100,000 times. After receiving the solar film, I had four days to make some filters for my camera lens and binoculars. I used cardboard, tape, black magic marker, etc., to create filters similar to a bajillion DIY ones on the Internet.

"I ended up sitting out in my back yard from 1 p.m. to 4:20 p.m. that day, and got the best shots of the eclipse I could personally do. I used a Fujifilm X-T20 with a Nikon AI lens adapter, a Nikon 300mm ƒ/4.5 lens, a Nikon TC-14 teleconverter, and my semi-homemade filter built into a 72mm to 77mm step up ring. All this on my trusty tripod. My wife and daughters came outside every little while and used the binoculars and the rear screen of my X-T20 to watch the changes and see our peak coverage.

"So, without the bazooka lenses many photographers have, my shots aren't going to be in National Geographic. But with careful work in Lightroom and Photoshop, I ended up with this souvenir shot of the whole eclipse as seen from the back yard of chez Masters, Palm Bay, Florida.

"Works for me."

Mike adds: Many TOP readers have sent me accounts of their eclipse experiences or links to their own posts about it or photos of it, including Gary Sutto, Mark Berman, and Gary K. Froehlich, and many others. I'm sorry I can't publish them all!

A reminder—if you want to publish a picture in a comment, the picture has to be on the Internet (with a URL) and be no more than 470 pixels wide, and the code to use is:

Of course, you need to replace "image.jpg" in that string with the URL of your image.

Sorry this isn't easier, but TypePad isn't set up to easily allow images in comments.

David: "My wife, my son, and I went to Oregon to see the eclipse. It was to be the first total eclipse any of us had ever seen. On the advice of an acquaintance I just set the camera to make a video recording of us watching it, starting a few minutes before totality. That was the best advice I ever received. The video captures the feelings that the eclipse evoked in us far better than any picture I could ever have produced."

ADDENDUM: I mentioned above that Gary K. Froehlich (who comments as GKFroehlich) was one of those who sent additional material about photographing the eclipse. I have urgent things to do this weekend, but I felt I'd be remiss if I didn't add a couple of Gary's remarkable photos to this post. For one thing, he was one of a very few photographers who managed (not at all by luck—the documentation of his methods he sent me was very involved, and his preparations were exacting) to photograph the transit of the International Space Station across the sun as the eclipse was happening. Here's a time lapse composite of the transit:

Really remarkable. Another thing Gary did was, in one of many fascinating pictures, was to superimpose a scale image of Earth on an image of the totality and the solar prominences:

Just awe-inspiring. This is just a detail of the much larger image he sent me, to allow you to see it in spite of our limitations on image size. Here's Gary and Ann:

Many thanks to Gary for sharing these with us!

How I Practiced Portraiture

I love portraits, and used to do them, both for pay and for art. I got a nice "blast from the past" last week when when I did a senior portrait for the daughter of a friend of a friend. (Or at least I think I did—they have the proofs now and so far so good.)

I can't remember now how I learned about what constituted conventional practice. But what I did was to work with the subject or subjects in several different scenes or situations, almost always using natural light and "found" backgrounds. I would take several hundred shots. From these I would edit my selections and give the client/subject small proof-prints of six or eight choices. They would then pick their favorite, and I would make the final print. (This was when I was working with B&W film and making fiber-base silver gelatin prints.)

Sounds simple, but I experienced innumerable problems.

The most basic one was "who owns the picture." Of course, you know that the photographer owns the rights to his or her work, and retains them until specifically relinquishing them. Technically, legally, the client only owns the print or prints—the physical object—and doesn't have the right to reuse or re-purpose the image in whatever way they see fit. This is difficult for clients to understand, and if they do understand they often don't respect it because it seems unreasonable to them—they paid for the picture, it's a picture of them, and they think that means they own it. ("A dog with a pullet in his mouth owns the pullet," said the redoubtable Scotsman David Hume.)

You do not own images of yourself, however. The person who made the image owns the rights to it. This seems counterintuitive to many people hearing it for the first time. That doesn't mean the owner of the rights can do anything he or she wants to without the subject's permission; but neither can the client do anything he or she wants to with the images without the photographer's permission.

I never had "big" problems where this is concerned, just little ones, although I've certainly heard of big problems. My little problems included people refusing to return the proofs, framing the proofs (which were usually 5x7 or 4x6 RC prints), or having the proofs copied and enlarged as an alternative to paying me for a finished print. I solved the framing-of-proofs problem by having a mask made that put my name and logo on the bottom of each proof. This didn't work in one case, because the client framed the proof logo and all.) Because of that last, I finally resorted to including two finished prints in the sitting price (my last sitting price was $675 in the early '90s—and I photographed some prominent people, including a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice, a U.S. Senator, a television star of the era, several members of recognizable political dynasty families, and a number of prominent citizens in and around Washington D.C.). Once, I sent a small JPEG of a portrait to a friend (of his mother) asking him if he wanted a print. I heard nothing back. Some time later, visiting his house, I found a framed inkjet print of the JPEG (which looked terrible, of course) on display! He had printed out the JPEG on his all-in-one dye inkjet printer, on bond paper. Yikes.

Framing was another headache. I was a custom printer and a recognized darkroom expert, and I put a lot of effort into making excellent fine finished prints. I included detailed framing instructions with the prints. I have no idea how many people took the next step and had them framed, but I know it wasn't everyone. For a while I would drymount the trimmed prints to heavy Rives BKF paper*; once, I visited a friend/client's house, and found my carefully-made, selenium toned, archivally washed fine print attached to their refrigerator with a magnet, among all the color snapshots and cute sayings. Yikes again!

But offering only framed prints is not an ideal solution, because peoples' homes are furnished in different styles and to different tastes, and there's no reliable one-size-fits-all framing option. People will prefer different kinds of frames.

I handled this problem in a neat way. I simply dropped off the finished prints at a framing shop (owned by a friend). Then I called the clients and told them their prints were ready and they could pick them up at their convenience at the shop. Most of them got the point and ordered framing for the prints they picked up.

Another problem, of course, which many of you (including wedding photographers) will be all too familiar with: they want to see all the shots. Editing photos is one of the hardest things about photography, even for experienced photographers. I've heard of wedding clients who complained that they "only" got 500 proofs when they "knew there were thousands of shots." Like the photographer is holding back all the good ones?

This problem probably gets down to who controls the image. The photographer thinks he or she gets to say what the best/final image is; the client thinks that's their right. The way I look at it, providing an edited selection of proofs is a compromise between these competing interests. If it were up to me, I'd just pick the best shot and the client would never see any of the others. If it were up to the client, they'd get everything (never suspecting how difficult it is to edit and choose for the simple reason that most people don't edit and choose: they just pick everything that strikes their fancy. That's why you see dozens of similar shots posted on photo sharing sites—the person who posted them "liked them all").

My experience was, the more proofs, the longer it took to get a print order. You can offer to help, but then you find you're teaching "Editing 101" to every new client.

The last problem is that most people are very picky about images of themselves, and quirky about what they want to see. Some people are sensitive to a certain perceived defect in their appearance, and they will pick a photograph of themselves that doesn't show that defect even if it's far from the best picture overall. Or they will pick a straight-on frontal picture simply because that's what they're used to seeing in the mirror.

Once, a few years ago, I will admit to making fun of an unknown woman for the picture of herself she posted on Match.com. There was only one single picture, and it showed her sitting on a porch, holding a beer, dressed in an impressively filthy T-shirt. It made her look like she had just come from spending a long period of time underneath a car. I made a joke of this to my brother, privately, but the thing is, my years as a portraitist gave me the insight to understand why she had posted that particular picture. Most likely it was that it either showed some little idiosyncratic feature of her face that she liked, or concealed some such feature that she disliked. And never mind the dirty T-shirt.

Anyway, for whatever reason, people often pick the wrong proof. You might say it's just a matter of taste, but I say no—it's my work, and I'm a better editor, and I know best. Anyway, I often made two finished final prints: one of their choice, for them, and one of the correct choice, for me.  :-)

Anyway, I always used to tell portrait clients to let their friends and families decide which one the best picture of them was, rather than doing it themselves. I'm sure that worked.

I've never worked as a portraitist in the digital age. I'm sure things are different now. I also suspect a lot of things are the same.

My portrait clients this past week were lovely people—friendly, gregarious and warm—and their confident and nice-looking daughter had the self-assurance of a well-raised child. She did a splendid job posing, and her mother acted as a stylist and did a very nice job of that! They were great to work with and I had fun doing the portrait. I do hope it suits their needs. I charged the price of a box of printing paper, and the gentleman kindly gave me a generous tip. So far I've send them un-watermarked small JPEGs as proofs with full permission to post them anywhere they want to. If/when they make a final choice, I'll send them a prepared full file for printing, and the name of a recommended printer.

The next thing I want to try is to hire a model for a portrait. I want to experiment with what it's like when I'm completely in control and the subject doesn't have any say at all. Should be an interesting experiment, and add to my lifelong learning about this kind of work.

The payoff in portraiture is when you happen to make a picture that the subject really likes. My '90s portrait of photographer Sally Mann that I showed in this post in 2015 (it's one of the few of my portraits I have in digitized form) was one of those—Sally really liked it, so much that she asked for the negative so she could print some promo pictures for her own use.

And she never returned the negative, of course. Sigh.

Mike

*This was self-defensive, mainly: it prevented framers from dry-mounting the print using too hot a temperature, which could impart the texture of the release paper to part of the surface of the print.

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John Camp: "Most people don't understand this, but they are brilliant judges of faces—most people have a forehead, two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, a chin, etc., yet we are able to instantly pick out acquaintances from the thousands of possibilities we see passing us every day. That expertise is exercised with portraits: a good photographer gives us a professional example of a subject we're interested in from birth, and because it's a portrait, rather than an actual living face, we have no inhibitions about studying it closely, every pore and freckle. And we make judgments about them too: is it possible that the woman on Match.com did just crawl out from under a car, and was perhaps interested in attracting, say, a Harley owner? The beer and t-shirt would hint at that...."

The Watkins Glen Exam

I wanted to add something to Euan's comments yesterday about Watkins Glen: namely, that Watkins Glen is a nice test for a photographer. If I taught photography in this area, an assignment to come back with three good pictures from Watkins Glen might be a good final exam. It's a test both of vision—somehow cramming the 360-degree drama of the spaces around you into a bounded rectangle, and adequately avoiding standard naturey clichés while doing it; but also a test of technique. There are so many bright, sunlit areas right next to deep shadows that it's a constant challenge to meter well and fit the subject brightness range optimally into the sensor's exposure range AKA dynamic range. People who just put the camera on go and swing it around in devil-may-care fashion letting the camera technology take care of the details are bound to lose a good number of shots to poor exposure.

It's a test of a camera's dynamic range, too. Here's an out-of-camera JPEG that gives you an idea of the basic lighting problems of the place:

I've lost the highlights rimming the pair at the top of the steps, and wouldn't want to lose any more, but you can see how dark and empty the shadows look down where Xander is.

Here's a variant I like better that required a radical amount of HDR shenanigans in Photoshop just to get it to look like a normal out-of-camera snap:

Gradients, local color correction, the works. (There's a lot of green light in the shadows down there.) And of course you have to leave in a lot of contrast, or you'll miss the light-and-shadow feel of the place.

As an example of that, here a beam of sunlight happened to hit the froth at the bottom of a waterfall:

It would be very easy to overcorrect this—but if you did you'd lose the dappled-sunlight, deep-woodsy feel of what you were looking at. The light and dark is the point, with just enough detail to imply what's in the shadows. (I don't like this picture particularly, but it's good as an example.)

Photographer at work in the upper reaches of Watkins Glen. See him up there on the bridge with his tripod? He probably didn't want me in his picture, but I wanted him in mine.

Anyway, if you ever visit Watkins Glen, take along your widest-angle lenses and your best chops, and watch yer highlights! The place well worth seeing without having a camera along at all, but it's also a fun challenge for a photographer.

 

Mike

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Look Up / Look Down / Look Everywhere

Words and photos by Jim Hughes

I was just discussing the value of "looking up" with an attorney friend, an enthusiastic photographer here in Camden. His hobby was about to become more expensive, apparently. He had just asked if I thought the new Fuji GFX, with its 50-megapixel sensor, which costs more than twice as much as my old $3,000 Miata, would make his pictures better. He was already thinking of upgrading from his new X-T2. No, I answered, it's not the camera that makes the picture, it's the eye. I showed him a print of one of my most recent photographs, taken at a worksite just across the street from his home and office, where a bridge is being replaced, fouling traffic for these past many months. He studied the print for a long time, then announced: "I would never have seen that, not in a million years." I pulled out my own camera, an X-Pro1 purchased last year for less than $500 when it was discontinued, to which I have affixed an ancient 28mm ƒ/2.8 Canon rangefinder lens, and started reviewing for him the images I'd decided not to print, showing cement being poured and bent-over workers smoothing it like glass. "A record of an event is not a picture," I said.

Here's the frame that caught my eye:

Jim Hughes, Triangulated Apparatus, 2017

That happened when I looked up. The next day, again in town, as I was about to enter the local grocery to buy a jug of cider, I happened to look down and made this photograph, which I am about to email to my friend who is still learning our mystifying craft, as of course we all are:

Jim Hughes, Apples, Pears & Skateboards, 2017

Years ago, while doing research for Shadow & Substance, my biography of W. Eugene Smith, in his files I came upon a well-read copy of Zeiss Magazine, from 1938, when he had just begun freelancing in New York City, had been offered a job at the Daily News, and turned it down. "I'd decided I was not really cut out to be a Daily News photographer," he later said.

In my book, I wrote about young Gene's quest to find himself photographically: "He walked the city's streets looking for unusual angles...then holed himself up in his darkened bathroom, often printing through the night. And when he wasn't photographing or printing, he was reading books and magazines about photography.

"He seems to have read one article over and over, practically memorizing it: 'What is Your Viewpoint?' by Leo Nejelski, one of Zeiss Magazine's stable of accomplished photographers. Following normal sight patterns and merely recording on film what one sees, the author suggested, 'has nothing in common with picture making, the expression of thoughts and emotions by means of photography.'

"In a series of carefully drawn examples, Nejelski outlined the advantages of photographing from what he called 'low-point perspective,' 'high-point perspective,' and relative to a given subject, any vertical camera position in between—or, for that matter, any horizontal position a full 360 degrees around the subject. His point was, let the mind's eye roam to set the creative spirit free."

Not too long ago, I received an email from Nejelski's daughter. My book, it turns out, had finally come to her attention, and she just wanted to thank me for remembering her father as the teacher he always had been.

Jim

For many years, Jim Hughes was the editor of Camera 35. Later, he was the founding editor of Mike J.'s all-time favorite photo magazine, the original Camera Arts. His books include the superb biography W. Eugene Smith: Shadow and Substance—The Life and Work of an American Photographer, and the monograph Ernst Haas in Black and White. Retired now, he writes occasionally for TOP (see his other articles by finding his name in the "Categories" list in the right-hand sidebar). He and his wife live in Maine.

©2017 by Jim Hughes, all rights reserved

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Featured Comments from:

David Dyer-Bennet: "Yes, work the subject, by all means. Either taking actual pictures, or just moving around and visualizing what you could get. Or even standing still, if your head does 3D modeling that well! It's not inherently better to shoot all the ideas you come up with and pick one later, it's not inherently better to figure it out and just shoot one which is wonderful. They're all equally valid (there's a continuum between those extremes of course).

"Of course, for some subjects, there is less time available to work them than others; that's a real-world constraint that cannot safely be ignored.

"These ideas, by the way, apply (in my allegedly humble opinion) throughout photography; they're just as applicable to shooting a wedding reception, grip-and-grins, wildlife, landscape, abstractions, whatever. Every level from the artiest art to the basest commercialism. (Okay, they don't actually seem very applicable to medical imaging, for one example; so not absolutely all photography.)"

Geoff Wittig responds to David: "I would argue that the same principles absolutely apply to medical imaging! Okay, not so much to MRI scans, though they can sometimes be compelling and beautiful in their own way. But (for example) photographs of surgical procedures can be dry technical illustrations, or they can be dramatic and artistically beautiful photographs without losing any teaching value. One of the nurses I work with took a cell-phone photograph (with the patient's permission!) of a cesarean section. It was perfectly composed, with the emerging infant and surgeons' hands dramatically lit by the overhead operative lights, the rapid light falloff letting the OR clutter fade into darkness. A beautiful image, even ignoring the compelling subject."

One Weird Thing About Landscape

As far as genres of photography go, we all have ones we gravitate toward and ones we leave alone. In the middle are ones we willingly dabble with but don't devote ourselves to. I'll never photograph insects, for example—don't grok bug pics—and I've always enjoyed photographing kids when I get the opportunity (not often recently). And occasionally I'll do a night scene. But I can name a number of photographers who are devoted to night scenes or have done a book of them, and David Alan Jay, my predecessor editor at Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques, couldn't stand pictures of kids. Never took them, never published one. And of course accomplished insect photographers are masters of a very difficult art—their craft takes time and effort to learn.

But no matter what you like or don't like, almost nobody spurns landscape. Almost every photographer has done at least a few. Even Cartier-Bresson shot a few straight landscapes. August Sander too. I'm sure there are well-known figures in the history who have never done a single landscape—Helmut Newton, possibly?—but I'll bet they are few and far between.

I've been shooting much more landscape since I moved here to the Finger Lakes, and I've noticed something funny about the shooting: there are times when all the shots I take are good but none of them are great.

I'll show these two random "farmland" examples, from a stint of shooting the other day:

Sauder's farm, Welker Road

Sauder's Field, Welker Road

See what I mean? Both are good. Neither is great. Not only that, but every shot I took that session was the same...all of them were okay, but nothing really truly hit.

This is different than the photography I'm used to. I wrote an essay once that got a lot of play in which I said, "To be honest, most of my pictures suck. The saving grace of that admission is that most of your pictures suck, too. How could I possibly know such a thing? Because most of everybody’s pictures suck, that’s how. I’ve seen Cartier-Bresson’s contact sheets, and most of his pictures sucked. One of my teachers said that it was an epiphany for him when he took a class from Garry Winogrand and learned that most of Winogrand’s exposures sucked. It’s the way it is."

In other words, I'm used to junk-and-gems in the unedited mass of exposures. A bunch of throwaways—pictures that suck—and that occasional great shot.

Landscape doesn't seem like it follows that rule. I feel like I can get a pretty good shot every time I shoot a landscape. But the ones I really like, that I think really work, are just as elusive as those kinds of shots always are.

What it means is that there are numerous times when I go out shooting and come back with a bunch of exposures in which every single one is good but not a single one is great.

I find this almost...confusing. When I was an editor, one of my jobs was accepting and rejecting manuscript submissions. I wasn't very good at it. There were two kinds of submissions I really liked: the ones that were really good, and the ones that were really bad. Because the decision in each case was easy. It was the ones in the middle I had a tough time with. The ones that seemed like they were almost there—too good to reject outright—but not quite worthy of an unqualified, enthusiastic, wholehearted yes. I had trouble with those decisions.

It seems like it's the same way with landscape shooting. There's just a lot of it that's "almost there," almost something, not bad at all...but just not quite good enough to earn that wholehearted yes.

I always used to wonder if students are sometimes grappling with editing and having so many problems with editing simply because not a single shot is good. It greatly complicates the editing task! But really, there's no rule or law that states that any of the exposures in a given body of shooting has to be a keeper. Maybe everything is a "no." Even when everything is an "almost."

Personally, I feel a great loyalty, a great fealty, to the the idea that every shot that makes it into your "body of work," every shot that earns the status of a "keeper," a picture to show, a picture you'll call your work, yours, your own, should be something to which you can give completely unreserved, wholehearted, enthusiastic acceptance. A yes. Everything else should be a no. Even the "not quites."

Even when everything you get is a "not quite."

A 'yes' is a relief
Here's one I like (that single light on the far shore makes it for me—hard to see at this size; you might have to click to embiggen):

I took it with the iPhone, if you can believe that. (Still working on a review of the camera in the iPhone 7.)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Land, sea, and air
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Featured Comments from:

Ken: "Re 'See what I mean? Both are good. Neither is great. Not only that, but every shot I took that session was the same...all of them were okay, but nothing really truly hit': In my limited observation, most landscapes (definitely mine, at least) benefit from having special light, whether a storm, twilight or whatever. In your examples here, two that are good but not great have kind of ordinary light. The one you like has much better light. I think that finding good light is the secret to successful landscapes, even more so than interesting subject matter. If you have both good light and interesting subject matter, you usually end up with pretty good shots. Add a good composition, and you have the recipe for great pictures. Does that oversimplify it?"

Dennis (partial comment): "Food for thought, Mike—is this really unique to landscape photography or is this more attributable to the fact that landscape photography is just something you dabble in?"

Mike replies: Good point. I don't know.

Geoff Wittig: "I think you're on to something, Mike. It's easy to take landscape photos that are pretty enough (especially here in the Finger Lakes!) but still just don't 'sing.' The same is true for landscapes anywhere. I've been taking landscape photos steadily about 25 years, and my percentage of real stinkers is now pretty low. But the fraction of shots that are really something special remains very small, no matter how hard I try. It just seems to me that the necessary intersection of good technique, compelling composition, perfect light at the right time of day and a subject that sings remains an elusive thing. And the more infrequent and casual I am about trying to take such photos, the lower my success rate. Sometimes I'll shoot for weeks without anything meaningful; and then, unexpectedly, I'll take three or four photos in a day that are all portfolio-worthy. What changed? I don't know! Maybe if I did, some of the challenge and the incentive to keep trying would be gone. Maybe it's best to consider it magic, or a random gift from the muse."

Mike replies: At least a mystery. And maybe, yes, magic.

s.wolters (partial comment): "Helmut Newton once made a series of very dark gloomy landscapes. Maybe he was just fed up with all these nudes and wanted a change. Cannot find them anywhere on the net. But there is a book called Sex & Landscapes."

Mike adds: Ah, so that's what "S&L" means.  :-)

A (SFW) spread from Helmut Newton's Sex & Landscape

eo adds: "A quote from Helmut Newton in American Photo’s July/August 2001 edition: “I had to wait until I turned 80 to see someone, finally, take an interest in my landscapes. Before that, no magazine wanted to publish them, or had even shown an interest in them! When you are locked into a photo genre, it is very difficult to get out of it.” At the time, he had recently debuted two series of landscapes, one being Sex & Landscapes and the other, an ad campaign for Absolut vodka."

Dave in NM: "I think you've hit on the reason for the current trend of hyper-realism in landscape photography. I also think that it's very difficult to elicit emotion with a landscape photograph. There's a very narrowly defined sweet spot for reverie in the natural world. That sweet spot is unique to every individual—it's tied to memory, and it's experienced with all five senses. I'm not talking about aesthetics. Beauty in and of itself does not make a worthy picture. I'm talking about involvement; that sense of being drawn into a picture and experiencing it first hand. Landscape done well is difficult. Hitting that sweet spot often seems more like a binary exercise than a matter of degrees...at least, that's how I experience it."

Stan B.: "I suspect it's because usually (usually) you have less 'moving parts' in a landscape, or at least they're moving slower and you have more time to check, assess, recheck—unlike, say, in street photography. As a result, your shots can have the exact exposure, composition and everything else you could control... except for that momentary magic, the one missing element you can't contemplate that can often make a picture, despite your best calculations. End result, a perfect picture postcard—instead of a good photograph.

"Perhaps that's why those incredible tornado landscapes are so mesmerizing—they introduce the element of the unexpected into a usually staid landscape composition."

Richard Newman: "For me, the thing that differentiates good from outstanding landscape images is the presence or absence of a focal point (or two). The farm house provides foci, but the field shot doesn't. The bottom image has two, the building and the tree. In this case it works well. The building leads to the water, and the tree to the sky. So there is no conflict. Anyway that's my point. A really good landscape needs one or two focal points.

"The Finger Lakes sure are photogenic aren't they? I've always liked that area."

Ed Hawco: "Can't help it; had to meddle. Here's a quickly processed version of the farm scene with some effects to make it pop a bit:

"I'm not calling this finished, but it's pointing down the road I'd go with the full-resolution version if it was my job to do so.

"One other note: as I was working on this scene I found myself wishing for a wider view. As it is, it's a photograph of a farm. From a 'landscape' perspective, I'd rather see a 'landscape with a farm in it.' (Wider.)"

Fred Haynes: "You know it bothers me that a picture, and one presumed to be good, or maybe better then good, is taken with a bloody phone! Its like the 'other side' is winning!"

Mike replies: I need to write a post or two about that. I've detected a few trends lately.

Dave Karp: " I think that one of the issues with landscapes is that we don't always work hard enough. If the scene itself is beautiful, with a little work we can get a good photo. By its nature, landscape photography often presents the opportunity to really 'work' the scene. Unlike the quick 'react and grab' of a street photo or sports photo, the landscape often sits there relatively unchanged. Of course, there are times when the clouds are moving quickly, or the lighting is changing rapidly, but often, the landscape allows for some real work. Changing locations, switching lenses, moving in closer, thinking about exposure, waiting for the weather or light to change, and/or switching orientation of the camera, can all make for a better photograph than the one we first envisioned. The fact that we can often get a photo that feels pretty good right away often discourages the hard work of making a really good one."

Keith Mallett (partial comment): "Since I think of myself primarily as a landscape photographer your post makes me want to elucidate, primarily to myself, exactly what and why I feel driven to illustrate my love of place with photographs (and sometimes with words). I know my main drive is an endless fascination with land: the way it has been shaped and formed by either natural process or mankind’s hand."

Dave New (partial comment): "Out of curiosity, after reading Keith Mallett's post (he and I resonate about emotional responses to the landscape), I went to his site/gallery. Highly recommended as a random excellence post. He gets what it takes to invoke an emotional response in the viewer, something I am still learning to do."

Alan Carmody: "I looked them up, and I believe Adam Sauder, the farmer, spells it 'Sauder.' 'A,' not 'O.'"

Mike replies: Thanks Alan. Fixed now.

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "One reason that your landscape images may often initially seem generally 'good' is because they’re actually mementos of a much richer sensory experience. You’re not just looking at the picture; you’re remembering the sounds, the breeze, the scents, the temperature of that moment. As time passes those other memories usually fade leaving you only with that picture which might not stand on its own."

[For the full text of "partial comments," see the full Comments Section. This might be a good place to add that "Featured Comments" are not a selection of the "best" comments, but of representative ones, for people who don't have time to read all of the comments for a given post. Often—in this case particularly—there are also some really good comments that aren't featured. —Mike the Ed.]

mike plews: "I think there are two reasons why these pictures are good but not great. First off you are a good photographer so everything you shoot will meet a certain standard. The second consideration may be that you have not yet lived in the Finger Lakes area long enough to work through the images that initially grab you. You simply may not yet have the deeper understanding of your environment necessary to make that distinctive image you are looking for. Keep shooting. I have been commuting from a farm in the Loess Hills of Iowa since 1994 and only in the last few years have I felt like I was at the point where I could 'look through it to it.' Enjoy your infatuation with your surroundings and give it some time."

Mike replies: "Look through to it"—I've felt that too. Wise words sensei Plews.

There's More than One Way to Hunt Wildlife Photos

We've covered the story of wildlife models and photography game farms before, but Quartz's authors and photographers do a thorough job of presenting the issue in a new article called "Love wildlife photos? There’s a good chance they weren’t shot in the wild." The "window-shade" illustrations are a nice touch too. Well done.

In principle I have nothing against the practice, especially considering that people do the same thing with killing animals; we've all heard the stories of big cats being chained up on "widlife preserves" so they can be safely shot as "trophies" by "big game hunters." (Scare quotes well deserved.)

Good for you, Great White Hunter

And yes, whenever humans are responsible for animals, there will be a range in the animals' treatment from ethical and humane to cruel and atrocious. I'm sure not every photo-game-farm wolf, fox, buffalo or cougar is well cared for. But it's not inherently a crime for animals to work for their keep, and all in all I'd rather have them posing to be shot with long-lensed Canons than with high-powered rifles.

As for the photographic results, well, we're learning to be skeptical, aren't we? Listen to what the human photographer says about any picture, and decide whether you want to trust what that person says about what you're looking at. Photographs don't lie; only photographers do. And then only sometimes.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, here at TOP rural HQ we're trying to be courteous to the mother robins who have built their nests under the eaves of the pavilion out back. At first, the dogs coming out the back door would scare them out of the nests and into diversionary tactics; but now they've learned that the canines down on the ground won't hurt them, and they sit there impassively, eyeing all three of us. I try to move slowly and stay out from under the pavilion roof.

My first Spring in this house I tried to dissuade the robins from building their nests on the patio, but robins are bloody-minded in their determination to build their nests where they want to build them: nothing will make them change their minds. So I figure we'll just do our best not to bother them until the hatchlings strike out on their own. It's not so bad. I feel a part of the project, in a small way.

The robins' nests with the mothers gone. It doesn't make for much of a picture, but I don't like to disturb them when they're at home egg-sitting.

Back to the photo game farms: I suppose they're harmless, all things considered. I know the subject is controversial, and any judgement I might make about about it open to challenge and criticism. But it doesn't matter what I think anyway. Different people have different feelings about animals and that's just the way it's always going to be. Check out the article and see what you think.

Mike
(Thanks to Jim Hayes)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

This photo was not staged
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Ken: "To me, as both a nature lover and an amateur photographer, the biggest thrill of photographing wildlife is the experience of encountering and seeing the animals in their natural environments. Any pictures I get are bonus."

Dennis: "I have no conceptual problem with well run game farms or with photographers using them. I'm sure many specific game farms are problematic. But to me, it isn't wildlife photography; it's closer to zoo photography—maybe somewhere along a sliding scale—and as a result, ends up being something I'm just not that interested in.

"A picture of an animal is a picture of an animal; in and of itself, rarely exceptional as a two-dimensional image. Context is everything. It's not a particular arrangement of form and color that makes us react to a mountain lion cub one way or a snarling grizzly another. Wildlife photos rarely stand on their own as art; they're usually accompanied by some text that provides context. Captions at least or maybe a whole story. Without that, they're postcard pics.

"Ctein once argued on this blog that nobody cares how hard you worked to get the picture and there's obviously truth to that, but I think that with wildlife photography, viewers appreciate knowing that they're looking at something that was difficult to get. I know that reading about how Greg DuToit obtained his 'lion at watering hole' images made me appreciate them more. I looked into a wolf preserve while vacationing in Colorado last year, but my daughter wasn't quite old enough to join us in a 'work encounter' package. Maybe on a return trip. But I had little interest in actually photographing the animals. I'll take a mediocre photograph of an animal that I legitimately encountered in the wild over an excellent photograph of a captive animal any time. (Just like I prefer shooting candids over posed portraits). They're different 'animals' and to each his own."

Miserere: "I strongly object to these wildlife farms, in the same way I object to photographers using model agencies. If you want to photograph a human, book a safari to the nearest concrete jungle and take your chances. That human beings sell themselves and allow to be photographed in exchange for money is disturbing and inhumane (I mean, have you seen the lankiness of those human models? Clearly they're not being fed enough!)."

Mike replies: What an interesting opinion. And one I've never heard before, which doesn't happen often with photographic subjects.

Dave Elden: "Re robins: I have a nest in a similar location that I can watch from my desk. I am very happy to see the birds there because of the way they chase the squirrels off—a squirrel being chased by a robin hasn't got time to chew anything it I don't want it to! Plus the entertainment value of the chases is considerable. Robins, a sign of spring here in Ottawa—although it's snowing right now on top of extensive flooding."

Daniel: "Don't really have a problem with those using handlers and game farm animals. What I do have a problem with is these photographers failing to label the images as captive/tame animals. Many of these photographers try to pass off the set up with tame animals as 'Wildlife' rather than quasi-zoo shots. At least places like Yellowstone, Ding Darling refuge and so many where photographers photograph the same semi-tame animals over and over are 'in the wild' without a handler. Animals so used to people that you can photograph with a normal lens at times—but still 'in the wild' as they are not being driven to a location and a handler helping manage the animal for the image.

"If you photograph it, label it correctly."

Hwo to Cure Perfectionism

Here are a few suggestions for curing photo-related perfectionism.

First, a few words about the words. The other day in the "Level With Me" post, I wrote, "...a fair number of photographers are meticulous or fastidious (the more pejorative words might be fussy or picky)...."

It's tough terminology all right; a lot of the available words have negative connotations. And if not connotations, associations. To be technical-sounding—and also neutral—it's become common to refer to the characteristic as "OCD" or "obsessive" or "compulsive" or those latter two words linked together. I confess I've been guilty of this me own self.

Well, wrong, wrong, and wrong. The word is perfectionism—and "control issues" and perfectionsim are not OCD. I finally got around to reading up on OCD recently—at a reader's recommendation I read Judith L. Rapoport's The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing: The Experience and Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. OCD is a serious (but curable, or at least manageable) mental disorder that manifests itself as extreme, insistent personal superstitions that the sufferer tries to cope with by means of private and personal ritual behaviors, usually concealed from others, the most common of which, in the early stages, are repeated washing (as of the hands) or repeated checking (to see if a door is locked or a stove is off, for example), but which can proliferate in all sorts of wild ways and can be extremely bizarre. It is a distinctive malady and is not in any way the same as being fastidious about level horizons or enjoying careful craftsmanship.

As an aside to my aside, In some outlier cases perfectionists deserve pejorative terms! I once helped a friend to sell a particularly superb example of a Leica M4—he had searched high and wide for it, and it was a survivor, without blemish or defect. We located a German collector who paid top dollar—er, deutsche mark—for it, and we shipped it off to Germany. A month or two later it was returned along with anxious importunings for a refund. Obviously with the use of a magnifying glass, the collector had identified a "pinhole" defect in the chrome plating of the top plate, which a.) was not visible to the naked eye at a normal eye-to-hand viewing distance, and b.) the collector admitted was very likely a factory defect—meaning, Leica made the camera that way and the pinhole was there when the camera was brand new.

Now that dude—er, der Kerl—had a problem! But it was a problem with perfectionism. Not necessarily OCD.

Anyway (a former editor of mine once said, "you do go on, don't you?"), maybe I'll try to find a different technical term.

I like persnickety.

Slider anxiety
Level horizons and rectilinear lines are hardly the only persnicketyness related to pictures. One I've written about before is "slider anxiety"—defined as the fear that you haven't pushed that slider hard enough, and that maybe a little more might help. Could that picture use just a little more sharpness/saturation/max black/vibrance/whatever? You're worried that people might think your picture isn't quite enough of something, and your anxiety and insecurity allows you gradually to creep over the edge of right reason into excess. Or, you find yourself fretting about whether your lens is sharp enough in all ways and in every situation. Maybe you replace a perfectly nice older Canon 50mm Macro with a Sigma 50mm ART and then replace the 50mm ART with a Zeiss Otus 55mm and then find yourself worrying that maybe, just maybe, the Leica SL 50mm is just a tiny bit better than your Otus.

Whatever it is, here are two ways to deal with persistent persnickety thoughts:

• Go the other way. Do the opposite. If you fret and fuss over whether your pictures are saturated enough, force yourself to shoot heavily unsaturated pictures for three weeks. If you worry over whether you have a big enough sensor in your camera, buy a 1" sensor camera and see what you can do with it. Put the Otus away and shoot with a Lensbaby for a while. Whatever it is that you find yourself anxious about, take the bull by the horns, confront the demon, and banish the angst!

Remember those Islamic mosiac-makers in the Middle Ages who would deliberately place one tile out of place because perfection was reserved for Allah.

And if you're persnickety about level horizons, be glad you're not my student. You know what your next exercise would be.  :-)

• Find a different outlet for the impulse. I learned this when I forced myself to photograph with a view camera (a beautiful Wista) for a Summer, for the experience. What I found was that my 35mm shooting suddenly got much more free and loose. I realized that I had been composing very carefully and deliberately with the 35mm camera—which I had not even been aware of before. When the view camera came into my life—a camera much more suited to careful and deliberate compositions—it relieved my 35mm shooting of satisfying those impulses.

If you recognize some photographic impulse that you know you're being persnickety about, find a way to embrace and indulge it outside of your main picturetaking or -making activities. It could very well help.

(Of course it's possible that your photography is already the outlet for some less-than-healthy impulse, as a way of diverting it from some other area of your life. In which case, carry on.)

The not always silent sufferers
I lived underneath a woman who had OCD once when Xander was a baby. I never met this unfortunate sufferer, but I gradually learned some of her habits. The first was that she had to sweep and mop all the floors in her apartment every evening, including moving all the furniture away from the walls. (The rumbling and scraping of furniture being moved every night at the same time mystified me for a good long while.) Another was that every morning she left for work with her briefcase in one hand and a large shopping bag full of clothes in the other. A neighbor who did know her told me that she dropped off the clothes at the laundromat every morning and picked them up on her way home. And this is what tortured me—although the clothes came back from the laundromat folded, every morning she re-folded each item of clothing on an ironing board in her kitchen and marched it individually into her bedroom to put it away in the drawer. Her bedroom that was directly above mine, that would be. Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp. Every morning. Back and forth and back and forth. Starting at 4:45. And me with a baby to take care of, short on sleep anyway.

Funny, with apartments hard to get in the near suburbs of Chicago at that time, the one I got happened to be sitting vacant. Coincidence? Unfortunately not.

Well, I do go on. That's enough about this—this should have been a short post. Butters is getting very antsy to go out and chase down his tennis ball...

...Which—oh, all right—he is obsessed with.  :-)

Mike

P.S. That old Canon Macro is one heck of a sharp lens.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

This post needs an illustration, but I'll try not to
obsess about it.
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Featured Comments from:

Larry Gebhardt: "Was the spelling in the title intentional?"

Mike replies: I experimented with different misspellings. I originally put the mistake in the word “perfectionism,” but then I thought that people might be searching for that word so I’d better not screw that up. No one would search for the post with the word “how.”

Had to get it just right.  ;-) .

Roy Feldman: "See last sentence: 'Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naive-the more authoritative the photograph was likely to be.' —Susan Sontag."

Mike replies: I've always thought that the best photograph is one that looks like it just fell out of the camera, no matter how hard you worked to get it. The best art looks artless, in my view.

SteveW: "This column has struck a chord with me. I avoid editing photos like the plague. I shoot JPEGs in-camera, and that is that. Once in a blue moon I will crop, but only to send out for a print. This column provided a kind of revelation for me, in that my avoidance of the sliders is to avoid anxiety brought on by indecision and uncertainty. I don't like to go there. Perhaps the best medicine would be to rock and roll with the sliders and just let it rip. Thanks Mike. P.S. I also obsess a bit regarding lens quality, but I thought that was normal, haha."

Mike replies: It's certainly common, but I don't know how normal we are.  :-)

Hans Muus: "Beautiful piece. And so recognizable. The (very) late hours in the darkroom spoiled with endlessly reprinting the same image with very small changes—changes so incremental I couldn't tell the prints apart in daylight the next morning. And then there is 'backwards perfectionism,' the urge to re-do all your earlier work in the style/technique you practice now, thus not only exerting your present energy in the wrong direction, but also denying your former self."

mike plews: "Twenty two years ago I witnessed a murder. After the initial shock wore off I was left with a pretty solid case of depression. I was sad, anxious and felt like my body was encased in cement. Just getting out of bed was a colossal challenge. And there were nightmares right out of Hieronymous Bosch. I recognized my condition for what it was and decided that if it did not pass in a reasonable period I was going to seek help. In a month I was OK but it left me with a deep respect for people dealing with chronic depression. Since that time I have never said depressed when I really meant sad or frustrated. Same for OCD. This stuff can hurt just like a broken bone."

Mike replies: Yes. Depression is an extremely serious disease; it kills a lot of people. There's a very good 52-and-a-half minute summary lecture about depression by Stanford's Robert Sapolsky on YouTube. I like the way he balances the physiological and psychological components. It takes a certain genius for reductionism to create such a comprehensive overview, and he does an excellent job. (I was originally tipped to the video by a TOP reader.)

Andy Johnson: "Re 'I lived underneath a woman'—that must have been very uncomfortable...I prefer to be on T.O.P."

Nick Hunt: "Mike—firstly, I have to correct you. It's 'pernickety'—no 's.' (Well darn me—autocorrect has just told be it has got an 's.' Wretched thing must be set to US English.) Secondly, my slider anxiety is different. I am fearful of moving the slider too far. What if I go over the top? What if my photos are thought of as (oh, horror!) gauche? Your 'aversion therapy' approach—apologies for another misappropriated and abused medical term—won't work. If I use less colour or less contrast or whatever for a week, then at the end of it I'll be...perfectly happy. Less is more. I love working in monochrome. Maybe I need to go super-saturated? But then there's the gauche thing, remember? Oooooph...."

Mike replies: Your aversion therapy would indeed be to make over-the-top, boldly gauche, crass photos for a week. But remember you only need aversion therapy if you are trying to cure yourself of a behavior that troubles or impedes you. If it doesn't bother you, then it's just the way you are. No cure needed.

Mus: "____________LEVEL HORIZON____________"

Bruce Gerencser: "I am a perfectionist. The why I am would take too long to explain. The short answer is that I spent most my life in Fundamentalist Christianity, both as a member and a pastor, and certain beliefs I held drove me towards perfectionism. This perfectionist tendency, of course, has filtered down into my photography work. There is no such thing as a perfect picture, and that poses a real problem for perfectionists. 😀 When I am editing photos, I have my definitely-not-a-perfectionist wife help with deciding which photographs I keep and which I delete. I've found she tempers my perfectionist tendencies.

"Forty plus years of walking the perfectionist trail has resulted in what my counselor calls Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD). OCPD has OCD simularities, but is not OCD. Here's a link you might find interesting."

Alberto: "Reading your articles is always a great inspiration for me and I'm so amazed from your ability to find so many interesting arguments, not only strictly related to photography. I find your 'Hwo to' article very funny to read and inspiring. I will follwo your example and I will let my photography to be more forgiving to small deffects."

alex-virt: "Another great article I can relate to! I am obsessed with sharpness and compulsively view my each picture at 100% and check sharpness in every corner. To cure this, I bought Nokia Lumia 1020, a 40MP phone whose lens is woefully unsharp in the corners. Have been shooting with it for about a month almost exclusively. I am thinking of doing a 'One Camera, One Lens, One Year' exercise with this phone.  :-)  "

Richard Skoonberg: "I like this point you made: 'Remember those Islamic mosiac-makers in the Middle Ages who would deliberately place one tile out of place because perfection was reserved for Allah.' It reminds me of beautiful Afghani carpets. When you compare these beautiful, handmade carpets to similar versions manufactured by machine in Europe, the difference is found in the imperfections created by handwork and manual looms: the borders aren't square, patterns don't repeat properly and there are flaws caused by the loom. The European versions are perfect and square. But it is the imperfections that delight the eye and reflect our humanity back to us."

Mike replies: I like your last sentence very much...well said.

Bob Rosinsky: "I have OCD. As did my mother and maternal grandfather. Unfortunately, my grandfather, a pharmacist, self-medicated. My mother spent half of her waking hours ritualizing, and I suffered from age seven up to age 35. I did not ritualize so much as suffer from intrusive thoughts (obsessions). Imagine a radio blaring horrendous words, awful sentences, and toxic content nonstop. Tourette Syndrome often accompanies OCD. I've had long bouts of Tourette; not fun.

"For me, the onset of OCD started around age seven. My first severe bout started in the fourth grade and persisted, nonstop, for a year. Eventually it receded. OCD is an anxiety disorder, so for many, it ebbs and flows.

"My intrusive thoughts were terrifying. Not until age 35, when I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, did I seek psychiatric care.

"My first visit with the psychiatrist changed my life. Within five minutes he diagnosed my condition as OCD. Furthermore, he told me about a class of drugs (SSRIs) that are effective in the treatment of OCD as well as certain other anxiety disorders.

"I was relieved to learn that there were other people who suffered from OCD and that I was not a freak, not alone. On the other hand, I was ambivalent about taking a psychotropic drug.

"After a lot of soul searching, revealing my 'secret' in gory detail to my wife, and two or three more sessions with the psychiatrist, I consented to begin drug therapy. It took a year or two, along with weekly sessions with a licensed mental health counselor, to find the correct drug and dosage and acquire coping skills.

"My quality of life skyrocketed. By my 37th birthday, my mind had quieted down and the Tourette Syndrome receded.

"I am 58 years old. I continue to visit a psychiatrist every other month. I have a weekly session with a CBT therapist.

"In graduate school, I became interested in neuroscience and sensation and perception. I am especially excited about the rapid pace of progress in brain science.

"I have always been a fastidious photographer. Many photographers, designers, engineers, chefs, craftspeople, tradesmen, and others are fastidious, and they are often held back over smallish details at the expense of losing sight of the big picture. I believe perfectionism is stifling. However, I think there are distinctions between perfectionism and paying attention to details. Perhaps perfectionism and an eye for detail fall along a spectrum. I can only speculate.

"I've read that OCD will be excluded from the next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is being reclassified as a neurological disorder rather than a psychiatric illness. Hmm."

Level With Me

So I want to talk about leveling the camera. Or the world. Well, actually, both—because when you tilt the camera, of course, you tilt the world in your picture, too.

It amused me that the Earth and the skies in this scene seem to be tilting in opposite directions.

I don't always use the leveling feature of cameras that have them. I usually leave them on, but I find it easy to ignore them. I've always been of the opinion that it's better to get the picture to feel right than it is to get it to be right. The apparent "tilt" of the clouds and the tilt of the horizon line in the shot above oppose each other, so if you corrected one till it looked more or less "level" you'd make the other look completely wrong.

This was just coincidental, of course—an accident of perspective and a gently sloping hill. In this shot, I did use the camera's leveling index—the camera was perfectly horizontal when the exposure was made.

Horizon uncertainty
Up here in the Finger Lakes, I've noticed that I've had more trouble leveling the camera than I used to have. I can't quantify that; it's just a feeling I have. It's not as easy, somehow, to get the picture to "look right" purely visually.

Here's a good example. Does this look straight to you? This was taken very late, just before twilight. I saw the clouds approaching from the top of the hill as I was driving home and drove to a hotel parking lot at the head of the East branch of the lake knowing I could get an unobstructed view from there. I wasn't out photographing and only had my iPhone. Curiously, this sky lasted for only about five minutes before it dissipated and became ordinary again.

It was dark enough that I could see the viewing screen perfectly well, but I couldn't easily figure out how to angle the device so the scene looked right. The shoreline on the right is at a steep angle to where I stood, but the shoreline to the left is more perpendicular to my sightline. In the middle of the picture we're seeing more than eight miles down the East branch of the lake to the south. The actual waterlines are all but hidden in the dark reflections of the land. Again, as in the top picture, the striations in the cloud formations look like they're slanting upwards from left to right. It looks like the whole picture needs to be tilted down at the right, doesn't it?

(Down by the water I met a nice couple from Pennsylvania who were staying at the hotel. They asked me to take a portrait of them using their phone with the dramatic skies as a background. I moved them where I wanted them and took several and then asked them to check that they liked it, offering to take another if they didn't. They looked at it and the woman exclaimed, "Ooh, look at you, all creative! You're hired!")

I was holding the phone almost perfectly level when I took this, but the reflections of those two distant lights tell me that the right side of the picture should even be a tad higher than it is...even though it already looks a little too high to me. I've played around with the picture in Photoshop and found I couldn't tilt it such that it would snap into "looking right" as often happens with all sorts of corrections.

Anyway this is just an example. With our steep hills, long, narrow lakes, and turbulent, changing skies, this sort of "horizon uncertainty" seems to happen to me a lot up here. I notice because I find myself looking at the leveling line in the camera viewfinder more often, just out of curiosity. Then I'll level the camera according to the index and think, "really? That's leveled? That doesn't look level."

A photo by Garry Winogrand from the quixotic project Women Are Beautiful

Squared and true
A number of photographers, most notably Garry Winogrand, deliberately tilted the camera as part of their compositions. Winogrand used tilt as part of his strategy to make pictures that didn't look like what people expected photographs to look like. I know from long experience that a fair number of photographers are meticulous or fastidious (the more pejorative words might be fussy or picky) about leveled horizons, and are "bothered" by camera tilt. Especially horizons on water. I'm not, although I do typically hold the camera level. How do you feel about it? There was one camera—I forget what it was—that I naturally held at a slight slant for some reason; the viewfinder wasn't right when the camera felt right. I found I often had to correct myself. It does depend on the camera you use, of course. Large format photographers, who typically set up very carefully, often use spirit levels, which are sometimes built into the camera body, to get the camera squared and true. Winogrand, on the other hand, used a Leica one-handed.

A horizon leveling index line in a camera viewfinder is one of many camera features that are new since the film era. I like 'em; it never hurts to know when you're on the level. And, lately, as I say, I find myself referring to it more than ever.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Always on the level.
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Geoff Wittig: "Hah! I find the in-viewfinder leveling feature essential. Even when I'm composing on a tripod, somehow I always manage to have the left side sloping down unless I consciously correct myself. It did help somewhat when I finally got a tripod tall enough for me.

"Here in the Finger Lakes, part of the problem is the bizarre topography. The hills around the lakes all get taller and steeper as you head south, and the shale/limestone strata are all gently tilted, so if you match your frame to (say) the rock ledges at a waterfall, it will often be a tad off for the horizon, and nothing looks right. I painfully discovered this when I proudly showed a slide of the waterfalls on our property at a critique led by the estimable John Shaw. To my dismay I saw the entire crowd tilt their heads to the left in unison in an effort to square my image with reality. In my defense, the rock strata did not match the horizon. But it still looked 'off.' Now I try to make sure the image looks true, regardless of where 'level' really is. And oddly the viewfinder level helps a lot with this."

Michael Poster: "I’ve always thought of camera angle as a way to promote an 'active' frame or a 'settled' frame. So a tilted camera (fore and aft and/or side to side) is more likely to contribute to an active picture while a level camera helps settle a picture.

"I also find 'level' removes yet another set of decisions that get in the way of the kind of pictures I want to make. As in: should I tilt? fore or aft? side to side? should I zoom in or out? Should the picture be horizontal or vertical? By the time I’m through with all those decisions, I’ve lost the image. I try to shoot level (mostly) I shoot square, I use a 35mm (equivalent) lens. But almost all my pictures are portraits in one way or another so the question of how to shoot unpeopled pictures rarely comes up."

Stan B.: "Tilting the horizon is but another valid tool, that can either make or break a particular photo compositionally—and yes, like anything else, can be overdone.

Stan Banos, Grand Canyon

"Curiously, some who proclaim someone 'anal' because they do not crop, are themselves adamant about level horizon lines. Decades after Winogrand, you still have people who furrow their eyebrows when confronted with a tilted horizon.... Egads!!!"

Craig Beyers (partial comment): "I find I mind when a clear horizon line is tilted slightly as it implies (to me) a lack of concern or carelessness—OK, laziness—quite a bit by the photographer. When it's clearly tilted by choice like the Winogrand example, I know it's an intentional compositional technique, not a mistake, carelessness, or laziness."

[The full text of partial comments can be found in the Comments section. —Ed.]

brad: "When talking to a younger photographer, who's quite good and a successful pro, the term 'horizon management' was used. I knew what he meant but had never heard the term. He's well educated, and I think it came from his East coast school's photo department. He was saying that among the prerequisites for image-making, you needed to properly master it. I agree...but never thought of it in such an academic sense. I wonder if there's a bot...scrubbing the web collecting photo data for a statistical analysis of Horizon Management Failure? A workshop will surely address this serious issue."

DavidB: "I encounter this issue photographing scenes here in the Southwest—especially the Grand Canyon. Both the North Rim and South Rim of the canyon are not level but gently rise and fall several thousand feet over the length of the canyon. Furthermore, the North Rim is over 1,000' higher than the South Rim so a photograph that includes both will look wrong. Getting the camera level results in tilting horizons—but that's just the way it is."

Michael: "The photo in Stan Banos's comment is a super example of how a tilted horizon can improve a photo's truthfulness. It conveys that feeling of vertigo that you feel (or at least I do) when I suddenly stand on the edge of that awful / awe-ful space, that stupendous drop."

Paul Van: "I have found that using a focusing screen with a grid has helped me immensely to organize both vertical and horizontal lines within the frame. Mostly, I suppose, by giving me a reference line for important elements within the composition."

On the Scene of One of the Greatest Photo Shoots in History

I had never seen this before, although you might have—it was published in 2013. A wonderful short by the Goddard Space Flight Center about the shooting of "Earthrise," undoubtedly one of the greatest photographs ever made. The video recreates the making of the shot in wonderful detail.

Gave me a lump in my throat. I'm not sure how you can be human and not be moved at least a little by that sight.

I filed this under "Shooting Techniques," but the lessons are pretty simple...know where the color film magazine is, and, of course, "be there."

Lovely.

Mike
(Thanks to Michel)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Ten, nine, eight...
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Hernan Zenteno: "Wonderful moment. 'Hurry!'  :-)  "

Tom: "250th at 11 and be there."

Todd Gustavson, George Eastman Museum: "Mike, I though this would be a nice addition to your story—an image of the Hasselblad HEC from the Museum's collection."

Mike replies: Thanks Todd! Very nice.

David Zivic: "What I liked most about one of the greatest photos ever taken: it was handheld with available light. There wasn't time to stage the shot and it was a moving target with a time-sensitive opportunity. The camera was loaded with the wrong film. It was taken through a closed window with no way to clean it on the outside. The people nearby were helpful, but still distracting. I also liked the he used the best available camera with him at the time for the shot."

'Amazon Basics' Flash Update

By Darlene Almeda

I decided I wanted to try those $28 Amazon Basic Flashes Kevin Purcell wrote about in the "Cheap As Chips Flash" post a couple of weeks ago for one of the courses I teach. Here's a quick update of our progress.

I received two of the flashes this week. Because I do not want to put these flashes on my camera hot shoe (because of circuitry malfunction concerns), I purchased a couple of Phottix Trigger Kits (link below) to get the first flash to fire. I figured that if the second flash did not fire with the onboard slave, then the second Phottix trigger should do the trick.

I also purchased a cheap softbox for the main light.

The gear after unboxing, prior to setup

Yesterday one of my classes and I tried them out. The first flash out of the box started up and fired as needed. The second flash did not; some button lights lit up, but I could not set the settings as needed—they were frozen. After leaving the flash on for about a minute, it appeared to work and its slave did fire from the first flash.

We proceeded to do the test run with a couple of students individually. Simple portrait setup with one flash on face and second behind for rim lighting/background separation.

The author setting the f-stop. Photo by Amy Connors.

All went okay (power was surprisingly good with the AA batteries), until the second student took the portrait seat. The back flash then balked again and would not fire with its onboard slave. We turned on the Phottrix trigger and it fired every time. Turn off the trigger, and no flash.

Anyhow, Amazon has a 30-day policy for returns and refunds, so the flash that faulted is headed back to Amazon.

Chelsea. First test, before the second flash stopped working

We will do this again this week when the replacement flash shows up, because my students like playing with cameras and flashes. I'll write in more detail about possible lighting setups next time.

Everything we used was purchased from Amazon, although I think I got the last two Phottix trigger kits they had in stock—here's a link to the manufacturer's website. We used a Fuji X-Pro2, Fuji 56mm APD, the two Amazon Basic Flashes, the Phottrix Ares Transmitter/Receiver Trigger Set, and an Altura Photo Softbox Flash Diffuser for shoe mount flash.

Darlene

©2017 by Darlene Almeda, all rights reserved

Darlene Almeda is a photographer and educator. Here's her website.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Under the Bridge: "Good info. I've been curious about these flashes. What do you think of the color temperature? I use some vintage Nikon flashes (SB-24/SB-28) and they play nicely in manual mode with all of my digital cameras because of their low trigger voltages. I would love to mix in a cheap flash with an optical slave, but I want the color temperature to match the Nikons. I've been contemplating an old SB-26 for a $125, but $30 is such a tempting price. Does anybody know the trigger voltage for these flashes? I haven't been able to locate that info."

The Zen of Shooting

[Shooting, verb used without object: 34. in Photography, cinematography, or videography, to photograph, film, or capture. The word "shoot" has many meanings and uses, and many don't connote violence. If you have a complaint about the word, I want to hear it, so, shoot! And if you think the use of the word related to photography is insensitive or politically incorrect, well, shoot. —Ed.]

I used to have two bad habits when shooting. One was that I tended to be too quick and undemanding. See it, shoot it reflexively, and then assume I'd gotten it. My other bad habit was almost the opposite, and sort of depended on using cameras that had good viewfinders: I liked to look at beautiful things on the viewfinder. So I'd stare at the image on the viewfinder, as if fascinated by it, occasionally taking another exposure.

I realized this second tendency was a problem when I was in school at the Corcoran. I shot a roll of 35 exposures and about 22 of them were absolutely identical shots of the same scene. Film was expensive for a student, measured in both money and time'n'effort, and I realized I was going to have to be more mindful about taking so many exposures thoughtlessly. One or two "insurance exposures" was one thing; uselessly wasting film anothe

The seductive quality of the viewfinder was at its height with my view camera. The direct image on a large ground glass can be spellbinding; I had the thought, a time or two, that sometimes I just set up the camera to stare at the ground glass, never mind exposing a photograph. That problem is largely gone these days. EVFs aren't as pretty as the world. They're good for pointing the camera but not enjoyable to look at for their own sake. (Kind of like a rangefinder that way...nobody likes just looking at things through a rangefinder window, and in fact a lot of rangefinder photographers often shot without actually looking through the viewfinder.)

I've gotten better at shooting as I get worse at shooting. That is, my mental habits seem to be improving as my physical skills deteriorate. I'm not as limber or nimble as I was when I was younger, not as practiced with the cameras or as fluent with the controls, and I no longer have the appetite to get out and explore that I once had. My eyesight isn't as good. Often, a jaded quality intrudes..."seen that before," "taken that before," "too much like work." It's sort of an old-guy pre-critique layering that's scornful of cliché or dullishness. At the same time, my concept of what's going to make a picture has gotten better, and I know more, both about photographs and about what I'm doing.

Let go
I've always felt that taking pictures requires a certain openness and iconoclasm—you've got to be willing to see what's in front of you and let go of prejudice and preconception, go with the flow, keep seeing, keep reacting. Fluidity matters. It's a constant process of finding by letting go.

(I remember when I learned that lesson too—also with the view camera. I kept trying to force the world I was seeing into view-camera-cliché terms, like I had an Ansel Adams filter on my brain. My pathetic mental pandering to the picturesque annoyed me so much that I took a radical step to correct it—every time I took a clichéd setup, I would turn the camera around and take a picture of whatever happened to be in back of me. This brief practice resulted in a good picture only once, but it worked to shatter the AA filter in my brain.)

In a strange way, you sometimes have to do the same thing when editing. My favorite picture that I've taken in the past month is this one. It's going to make a great print if I ever manage to calibrate the Epson (I'm not there yet). I'd gone out to get a picture of the new snow for the blog post I was writing. Butters was very energized by the snow, happily charging this way and that. I put the camera on Continuous High (I'll write a post about CH someday—a useful and interesting feature on the X-T1 that I have strong thoughts about) and shot a number of sequences of him running. I took a large number of exposures, maybe 150 or so. I got inside to the computer convinced that the best shot was going to be one of Butters against the snow running full out...

...Something like this (this is a throwaway). But my experience has been that you have to let go of your ideas in editing just as often as you have to let them go while shooting. When I got to the picture that turned out to be the good one, the one I had in my head sort of evaporated. You don't always get what you think you're going to get, or even what you're after. When fate clobbers you over the head with a great shot, you've got to respond by not obstinately clinging to your preconceived ideas of what you thought you were after.

Control or freedom?
That brings up another interesting wrinkle in this subject. I'm convinced that in general, photographers' shooting styles, and even their taste in subject matter, develops according to their psychological comfort with various ways of shooting, and the various possible methods of confronting or interacting with the world. One's interest in imposing control over the result is usually a description not about how photography actually works, but about what the practitioner finds most appealing. Some people like to impose control over every aspect of the process; it appeals to their nature to do so. Some people like to be loose and impressionistic—snap everything and see what works. That's what appeals to their personalities.

An example of extreme control: Gregory Crewdson builds and lights his sets like a film director does, in control of every aspect of the result.

An example of extreme looseness: Robert Frank photographs with extreme freedom, each shot like a glimpse, and takes what works.

Like styles of parenting, these opposite approaches can both work, and neither one guarantees great results (or inadequate results). But they do reflect each photographer's personal style, his or her relationship to the work—or the world.

Get past the obvious
I wouldn't have guessed this when I was young—I was essentially a classicist—but my own photography has turned out to be mostly if not entirely about process. I just like to investigate what it means to be a photographer and to photograph, and that keeps me skating around trying experiments and exploring different aspects of the actual practice of photographing, not so much for the purpose of creating good results but rather for understanding and illuminating the process. The last thing I wanted to mention was that, many moons ago, I suspected myself of thinking there were only a few photographs out there. I'm visually rather facile. I think visually. My memory certainly works visually—when I was young I could find passages in books I'd read by picturing the page where I'd read it in my mind and "reading" the page number from the memory, which then allowed me to go right to the page in the book to find what I was looking for. (I can't do that any more—I think the ability faded away in my 40s.) So I would approach a scene and take the obvious photographs and then mentally move on, thinking I'd "exhausted" what was there.

It's important to shake yourself of this notion, if indeed you have it in your head (I'm sure some people don't).What I did, characteristically, was a deliberate experiment—when my mother was traveling and I was house-sitting at her Georgetown house, I enclosed myself in her tiny garden-level dining room (the 1800s row house on O Street, though deep and four stories high, was only 11 feet wide), and forced myself to spend six hours there shooting six rolls of film (maybe eight—I don't remember now). I quickly took all the obvious pictures, then somewhat less quickly exhausted all the less-obvious ones, and by the end of the exercise was looking underneath the furniture and at the soles of my feet. I then made gorgeous prints (if I do say) of some of the strangest of the results. In the next class critique, both teachers and fellow students liked the work, although everyone commented on how different it was from my normal work. But I had convinced myself of what I had intended to explore: there is an infinite number of photographs, not only in the world, but even in a small room.

I know I've heard from many TOP readers over the years who have made extended projects by shooting repeatedly in the same areas. They've learned the same lesson, to wit: the number of possible photographs is only limited by you. There are always new things to see and new ways to see them—if you're creative, and interested, and remain open.

"If an artist doesn't take risks, then it's not worth it." —Robert Frank

Mike

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Patrick Dodds: "Apropos your O Street experience: 'If you'd locked Van Gogh in the dullest hotel room in America for a week, with some paints and canvasses, he'd have come out with astonishing paintings and drawings of a rundown bathroom or a frayed curtain...I think Van Gogh could draw anything and make it enthralling.' David Hockney in A Bigger Message."

Omer (partial comment): "I've not used 'shoot' for over 35 years because of the association with violence. And now that photography is getting sullied from a number of sides, I wonder if the facile way that 'shoot' has replaced 'photograph' (verb), whether it might serve photographers to regain some good perception by more often saying 'photograph.' Anyway, I like the words 'photograph, photographer, photography.' I'm not a shooter but a photographer, and I don't shoot, I do photography."

[For the full text of partial Featured Comments, see the main Comments Section by clicking on "Comments" in the post footer. —Ed.]

Herman: "Oh shoot! I screwed up the photo."

Gerard Kingma: "For years I 'planned' pictures based on ideas about locations, scenes and subjects I wanted to shoot. I already had the image in my head, it only needed to get made. The end result: I 'made' the same pictures over and over again and missed out on opportunities that were thrown before my feet, because they didn't fit the plan. I refreshed my photography by not planning so much. I accepted that I got more interesting stuff by trusting my gut feeling. Usually the first, most intuitive shots are technically not the best, but do represent the freshest ideas. The more I work a scene, the more the images I make start to look like things I've done before. Then it's time to move on.

"During a workshop in 2014 Jay Maisel said words to this effect: If you plan to go out shooting a woman in a red dress with a green umbrella, chances are you'll be sorely disappointed, because what are the odds that you'll see exactly that? Go out and shoot what's there and don't think about it so much."

tex andrews: "How much do I work a scene, location, idea? A whole helluva a lot, these days. I've been working on a series/body of work for the past 10 years now, and have returned again and again to the same places, year after year. Some of these places are no longer 'there' in the sense that they were, which is not so good for me. In that time I have applied five cameras, from sub-4/3 up to digital medium format, to better get what I wanted, and over this time period I have learned so much from going back to the same subjects over and over (it's seasonal, odd sort of landscape thing, not especially scenic...). This is what you see in many of the great painters: a devotion to a process and exploration of a subject matter and content ad infinitum. The work is richer for it, and so is the maker."

Eamon Hickey: "'EVFs aren't as pretty as the world.' True, true. But after using a Leica SL for a few weeks recently, I think the gap is rapidly narrowing. The 'EyeRes' EVF in that camera is pretty remarkable—in some kinds of light, it was even sort of lovely.

"Switching to the topic of interacting with the world, with a camera in your hand: most times, I also don't really do it for the primary purpose of creating good results. Unlike you, however, I'm not seeking to understand the process. I just enjoy the process. I like the walking. I like the fiddling. I like the click of the shutter. Most especially, I like the quiet looking. It gets me much more mentally (psychically?) present in my surroundings, and I think that has an effect similar to meditation for me. I like it when I make a good picture, but if I get home with nothing but crappy pictures that doesn't particularly bother me. The process makes me happy."

Gary responds to Eamon: "Amen, Mr. Hickey. There are few things as pleasurable as a solo photowalk. A good picture captured on the walk is just a bonus."

Tuomas: "Another classic post, thank you Mike! I especially enjoyed "...mostly if not entirely about process. I just like to investigate what it means to be a photographer and to photograph," because that's a big part of what I am as a musician. I'm a music teacher, but I'm fascinated by idea of Musicianship and what it means to be an artist, in any field."

Mike replies: I know a lot of people like us. Not necessarily centrally practitioners, but the keepers of the flame or the custodians of an art or sport or activity or practice. Some journalists qualify. Some educators do too, as you mention. Deep enthusiasts, I guess you might call us ("enthusiast" being the least loaded word I can think of and the one I use most—all the other terms seem to be too specific or carry too many connotations...especially "hobbyist," not that there's anything wrong with being a hobbyist). I've long been aware that my strongest allegiance is to practitioners—the people who are photographers—enabling them, being part of their audience, recruiting new people coming up or coming in, admiring their accomplishments, championing the best of the art.

Miserere: "Only one person has commented on the Butters photo, so let me be the second, and to agree with c.d.embrey in saying the inline photo with Butters in the top-left corner is the winner of the two. The photo you chose as the winner is a fine photo of a white dog walking in snow. The other one is a great shot (oops!, photograph?) of a dog having a hell of a lot of fun in the snow, in a framing that is off-balance, and lovely for it. It's also unpredictable; where's Butters going to run to now? He's got the whole frame available!

"I'd make a lovely B&W print of this one and hang it up proudly, if Butters were my dog.

"Just my dos centimos. :-) "

Mike replies: Thanks, but no. That does bring up a very interesting point, though, one which I could write another long(ish) essay about...which is that editing is part of the creative process. And not a trifling part, either. After photographing for years, our sense of what works for us and what doesn't work for us becomes well developed, and is very personal. It's quite possible that I would look at your raw assets and pick different shots as "best" than you have, as you have done with me here. But ultimately that's not valid for personal artwork. I have come to believe that the personal creativity of photography is partly in the camerawork, i.e., the "shooting" as I've been calling it here; partly in the selection of which shots succeed or resonate for us personally; and partly in the processing of the selection to render it in final form (which includes our choice of a final form).  All three of those things are ultimately the photographer's personal responsibility, even if he or she decides to delegate some parts of the process to others.

In seeming contradiction to what I just said, we can often learn a lot from showing our unedited work to others to get their help with editing. That can be helpful in certain situations, especially if we're really stuck ourselves. My friend Pam West once picked a shot from my contact sheets that I had passed over, and all but insisted that I print it. I did, and eventually realized that she was right about it. So I'm not saying that other peoples' input can't be valuable. Especially if one person is a student or the other person has a lot more experience in one area or another (many people are poor editors, for example, because they don't do it enough).

Ultimately however we have to be assertive about what moves us personally, what expresses our concerns, what resonates for us, and take command of and responsibility for our own creative choices. We have to respect what we personally are happiest with. It used to bother me that other people would throw away shots of theirs that I personally would treasure, if I got to be their editor (editors often think they know best, I suppose). Not any more. Now I realize that their editing of their raw shooting is part of the creative process...it's a continuation of the choices that start with what to shoot and how to shoot it. It's not up to someone else, and it shouldn't be.

Dave Van de Mark (partial comment): "I really have to strongly second your comments about going ahead and producing images that 'resonate' within you. The excitement I feel about my own work is, frankly, almost the most rewarding and heartfelt aspect of my life. So I mount to sell what I like, and if no one else wants it, my soul isn't wounded!"

And Here's David Carson

Reader Steven Healy found this nice video of St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographer David Carson explaining his process as he figured out how to take his picture of the Supermoon (technically the perigee-syzygy of the Earth/Moon/Sun system) with the Gateway Arch and how he went about it. (Note that as with many famous photographs, he wasn't the only guy there getting the shot.)

Nice work to David, and thanks for the video, and thanks to Steve for the tip!

Mike

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Random Excellence: David Carson's Supermoon

Photo by David Carson. There's a nice vertical version at his website.

This past weekend was the "supermoon," so called—the time at which the moon comes closest to the Earth, and is at its largest and brightest—and the National Geographic collected 11 photographs of it by photojournalists. This shot by David Carson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is particularly excellent, although I think Tom Fox's shot is original and all of them are enjoyable to see.

I tried to photograph the supermoon too, being a lunatic. (That is, the moon is one of those "trigger subjects" for me—every time I see a nice moon scene I reflexively think it's an opportunity for a photograph. Which is lunacy, of course.) The full moon rising through the trees behind my house is a lovely sight. Unfortunately it's way beyond the DR abilities of any of my digital devices, because there's a steep ridge behind the house and the moon is already high above the horizon by the time it rises into view from here.

Here's the scene exposed for the moon...

And here it is exposed for the scene...

Those two shots are a whopping 13 stops away from each other, if I counted 'em up right. Way beyond the capacity of the aging Sony A900 to record. The top file has no information in the dark areas—it's pure noise—and the highlights in the file on the bottom are thoroughly blown.

HDR is a wonderful tool—I use it all the time—but with this camera, no exposure in between these two extremes has acceptable detail in both the moon and the trees. Even though I want only slight information in the trees, that is, black on dark gray in a B&W print.

How to?
So what's the solution? Well, the way to photograph this scene would be to do a multi-exposure HDR merge, which is beyond my capability (because in general it's beyond my interests—with photo technique you learn to do what you want to do, and the rest you let go).

And the way to shoot very bright subjects in general is to balance the lighting. That is, with the moon, catch it when there's still light in the sky, so the brightness range of the whole subject—called, not surprisingly, the subject brightness range or SBR—is within the range of the sensor or film to record. It's possible, of course, to "shoot* the moon" when the brightness of the moon and the sky are nearly the same (here's an example of that; photo by Becky Anderson).

What I ended up doing was driving out to the countryside, stopping on a lonely abandoned road, killing** the car engine and the lights, and just enjoying the sight of the moonlight on the fields and farms and distant hills. The cold night wind in the telephone wires made an eerie hum like a distant keening. 

Getting back to the original subject: nice work David Carson!

Mike
(Thanks to Charles Heuer)

*Not with a gun.

**Not murdering or assassinating. I turned it off.

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Over the moon
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Tom Walton: "I admire Mr Carson's editorial discipline. I would want, with every fiber of my being, to nudge that moon ever so slightly to the right. On the other hand, the slight lack of symmetry adds a little tension to the image."

MJFerron: "See that photo by David Carson? This is why I did not attempt to shoot the moon. (Nice job David.)"

JG: "One doesn't need to photograph the supermoon itself in order to take advantage of the photographic opportunities it presents. For example, I photograph mostly at night and the additional light provided by the moon over the past few days has made it possible for me to photograph scenes I otherwise couldn't or wouldn't, by raising the shadows and reducing the exposure range my camera is required to capture. Here is an example...without a brighter-than-average moon overhead illuminating this scene, the highlights would blow out and the shadows plug up, making a single-exposure photo impossible to take. (I know this for a fact, because I've tried to photograph it many times before, always without any success.)

"So rather than fret about not having the proper equipment, think outside the box a bit and before it's too late, get yourself outdoors tonight and take some photos! A little sleep is all you stand to lose....  8^) "

Geoffrey Heard: "I don't want to mention that I have trouble sleeping at the full moon! Supermoon? Perigee full moon is the term you are actually reaching for—which caused no photographic hysteria back in the day when it was called that before someone labelled a slight increase in visual size (about 7% above normal) 'super.' Here in paradise, where natural phenomena really count, life just went on as normal. Your supermoon did not affect the crops we live on. Or fishing."

Get the Heck Out!

The "Photography and Procrastination" post the other day was popular and got a lot of attention. I was elaborating on Jay Maisel's idea of "shoot it now."

But there's a parallel or complementary idea that goes along with this, and it's this: get out there, and good things will happen. When you get equipped for going out photographing, and go put yourself in one of the situations that tend to make you happy when you've got a camera in your hand, you'll get something.

Even if you don't know what it's going to be.

You don't necessarily need a plan. Your don't need an idea. Just get out.

There's an idea afoot recently that creativity benefits from being treated like work. I have a couple of quotes taped to my computer: "A man may write at any time if he will set himself doggedly to it," which is Dr. Johnson quoted by Boswell; and the characteristically more pithy "Do your work," which is a quote from David Vestal. Sometimes, just slogging along and grinding it out will lead to creativity and positive accomplishment. The only essay that I ever read that was worth a damn as guidance for writers is a thing called "The Getaway Car" in the book This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett. In it, she points out that if you want to be a writer, the very first thing you need to be able to do, the essential requirement, is to sit down and write for an hour a day for thirty days straight. If you can't do that, you're not going to get there. No matter how much you study and prepare.

These things translate to: get going. Get out there even when you don't feel like it.

Do your work.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Ralph Gibson for Camera and Darkroom many years ago, in Manhattan. Ralph might need an introduction to younger photographers, but probably not to older ones. He's a fine (I mean outstanding) art photographer with a distinctive high-contrast B&W 35mm style ("I like a negative that fights back," he told me), so identified with Leica that Leica put out a special-edition camera as a tribute to him. In his darkroom he printed with an old Leitz enlarger that happened to be the very same enlarger on which Robert Frank, a mentor and friend of Ralph's, printed the original repro prints for the book The Americans.

Photographer unknown—self portrait, maybe?—Ralph Gibson
in his younger years

Later we went out, and I accompanied him to lunch. Ralph took along a Leica M6 that had a braided leather lanyard as a strap, and only a 90mm Elmarit. As we ate lunch—baskets of steamed vegetables at a café called the NoHo Star—can you tell this visit made an impression on me?—I asked Ralph what he was planning to shoot.

Alas, I cannot remember exact quotes; my mind doesn't work that way and I never trained it to, more's the pity. But he said something like, "I've been doing this long enough that I know that whenever I get out and start looking around, I'll get something. I don't know what, but I'll come back with some good pictures."

(Sorry to paraphrase. That was the gist.)

By the way, I made no impression on Ralph. The next time I ran into him, he didn't remember me.

Anyway, I used to say that photography was like jogging. There's no such thing as "quality time" with jogging. It's more like just...time. Get out and put in the miles and it'll give back. You'll get benefit back out of it. (The trouble with the analogy is that it provokes runners to start arguing the fine points of training, and believe me, it's better to not go there.)

Photographing is like that, though. Get out of the house with a camera. Be playful; be open-minded; look around; try stuff. You'll find something.

Always a caveat
I suppose I ought to add that you still have to be perceptive about what situations work for you. I like to photograph people and animals best—something happening—and I'm happiest doing portraits. I'm always aware that when I just go for a walk and photograph found scenes that it gives me a sort of nagging dissatisfaction. It's because I'm not shooting what I really want to shoot. I'm only shooting what's available to me. To me, lots of photographs of landscapes and streetscapes feel like settings—that is, they're like a stage with no actors on it. I yearn to see people there somehow. I have a friend who feels the opposite. He likes arrangements of objects and static scenes, and the presence of humans "ruins" pictures for him. I'll wait for a person to appear in a shot; he'll wait for the people to leave.

We're all different, and respond differently to different shooting opportunities. Nobody will tell you what you respond to and what makes you happy when you're photographing. You have to figure that out for yourself. Get out of the house, yes, but you do have to be smart, too, and put yourself in situations that are amenable to your vision. Target-rich environments, in the jargon of the Gulf War.

We can't always do that. But in general the rule holds—the more you get out there, the more likely you are to find good photographs. So get the heck out there!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Stan B.: "It really is like fishing, you go out where you hope they're biting with no guarantee whatsoever. And often, you just end up buying a burger on your way home (i.e., you sit yourself down and peruse someone else's work to fill the void of coming home empty-handed). Fate doesn't care how well prepared you are, how well studied, well equipped, or sincere you are—sometimes the moment comes on your way to get a coffee on the corner during break. Did you get it? Or did you think it would happen only when you deemed it to? Sometimes the stars align, everything checks and you get your prize; it's an intermittent gambler's high, the most addictive there is."

Ed Kirkpatrick: "I am like your friend; I wait for the scene to revert to its natural state with no human sign. I am uncomfortable photographing people for some reason. I would like to do it more but it just doesn't come naturally to me. Landscapes, those I see by the dozens every day. As I travel around the country in my RV I get a chance to shoot most days. I don't even think about it any more, it just happens. I have learned that the best shots happen when you left your camera home so I always have mine with me. It's true, get out and do it."

Mike replies: As a coda to today's post, today I walked my two miles along my lakefront road—it is a wild, blustery Fall day, with roiling clouds and gusting winds and kaleidoscopic shafts of sunlight. Of course I saw an absolutely wonderful picture...created just for a few minutes by the shifting light on the far side of the lake. Not only did I not have a camera with me, but I don't even own a lens of the right focal length (about 135mm-e, I would estimate) to have shot it. Serves me right for not taking my own advice? I stood there and stared for as long as it lasted.

Jim Richardson: "Certainly there is much virtue in trusting to serendipity, which is also a kind of deeper faith, that the world has wonders waiting for you if you just go looking for them. (And that you will never know they exist if you don't go.) But there is danger there, too, that you'll be contented to just take whatever comes along, either in the way of the subjects that present themselves or (more perilously) in your willingness to settle for your first impressions. Too many of the stories photographers tell me about their pictures are shaggy-dog tales of lucky moments with a camera or curious twists of photographic fate.

"In the end I find myself more drawn to photographers who treat their craft like a great string quartet treats a work by Mozart, going back to it over and over again until the first flush of virtuosity gives way (perhaps after many years) to deep insight. It is not a relaxing way to work; it is fraught with anxiety. I don't recommend it to anyone who want their photography to be relaxing. But if you seek the satisfaction of building a body of work over decades, then I think you have to consider it."

James Weekes: "A friend of mine, when he was young, was assigned jobs around the house by his father. One day he complained, as young boys do, about the onerous tasks and how hard they were. His father answered, 'Just do it until you get used to it.' That quote is up in my office and reminds me to go photograph."

Struan: "If I go for a walk with the main aim of taking photographs I usually end up reinforcing my worst bad habits. My photographs, especially those more creative, break-a-mental-block photographs, benefit more from an open, empirical bent and an emphasis on the walk itself rather than how it may or may not be a productive investment. Forcing myself to take photographs is the worst way I know of getting out of a photographic rut. Art galleries, books, conversation, or going for a walk without a camera are usually better ways of reminding myself why I take photographs and why it is worth persevering even when things don't look promising."

Mike replies: Point taken, but I'm not necessarily advocating just taking a walk. If you have a plan, you still have to work it ("plan your work and work your plan"). Whatever it is you do, whatever your plan is, you still have to get out there and get to it. Your suggestions are good too, but I believe if you're stuck, the best way to oil the gears and unstick the machinery is to go work. Whatever that means for each of us.

Stephen Scharf: "While I wholeheartedly agree with the 'Get the heck out' sensibility, I don't agree with not needing a plan. All my best work resulted when I got the heck with a plan."

Gary Nylander: "As a daily newspaper photographer, I am often tasked with finding a picture or two for the next day's paper, sometimes for the front page. I call them enterprise photos. I don't have a real plan, but I have found the best pictures come from walking around somewhere, street, park or whatever. With my personal work, sometimes I just get out of the house and get in may car and drive and go and photograph what I can see. Usually I have a place in mind which I often return to time after time, seeing it under different lighting and seasonal conditions."

Wesley Liebenberg-Walker: "I have been using (or trying to use) those words—'Get Out There'—as a sort of mantra lately. I apply them to the act of shooting something, but also to the act of being outside, in the real world, rather than inside, on the couch, in the virtual one. It works, mostly. Now if only I could get off the computer...."

Joe Holmes: "My favorite quote along these lines is from Chuck Close: 'Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.'

"The full context: 'I always thought that inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. You sign onto a process and see where it takes you. You don't have to invent the wheel every day. Today you'll do what you did yesterday and tomorrow you'll do what you did today. Eventually you'll get somewhere. Every great idea I ever had grew out of work itself. If you’re going to wait a around for the clouds to open up and lightning to strike you in the brain you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.'"