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What this photograph is about? It is about light. Sometimes the light is so visible and interesting that this is all what we see and photograph.
Sunlight Breaking thru the Clouds
Photographing Light
25 Sunday Jul 2010
Tag Archives: Photograph
Low contrast
23 Friday Jul 2010
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Contrast, Landscape, Palouse, Photograph, Photography, Storm
I’m always drawn to photographs with low contrast. They don’t immediately “pop” into your eyes. They slowly draw you in and ask to explore. This one from the last trip to Palouse drew me in:
Anticipation of Storm
It did not pop, I skipped it at first, but then I stepped back because there was something in it. As I looked at it more I got a feeling of storm anticipation. A huge storm cloud was coming on, while viewer cannot see the cloud, he can see a shadow of it moving in. You almost sense heavy humidity that condenses right before the storm.
If a photograph communicates feelings in my mind it is a good photograph. I tried to make it pop by increasing contrast, vibrancy, saturation and it was ruining that feeling. The image was too static and too obvious.
Dust Storm
20 Tuesday Jul 2010
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The first day of the trip I’ve experienced a dust storm for the first time. I’ve never been in a dust storm before. At some point of the driving to Palouse I had to stop completely because there was no visibility at all. Then I started moving slowly ahead hoping there is nobody ahead and nobody will smash into me from behind.
When there was visibility it looked like this:
While visually dust storm was as interesting a fog, it was practically impossible to photograph. Strong wind was knocking off my camera on a tripod. I was trying to shoot handheld but I could not stand still because of the wind. Dust was getting everywhere – into my ears, nose, eyes and, worse of all, into my gear. I had to give up.
Photo Archive
16 Friday Jul 2010
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It is nice to have a photo archive. Mine just crossed 100,000 photos mark. Do I visit my archive often? No. It is practically impossible to find a photograph of a particular subject or even a place there. But I still keep all the originals – raw or jpeg files. As technology develops I might want to revisit some of the photographs that I’ve picked long time ago.
Just today I recalled that there is a photo posted on my website and mentioned in one of my blog post – http://blog.vitphoto.com/2010/03/26/to-shoot-or-not-to-shoot/ – that had strong vignette. I remember I spent lots of time trying to correct it as much as possible. Now we finally have ability to automatically correct vignette in Photoshop for some specific lenses. In no time I was able to re-develop the image and get much better result. The change might look subtle for some, for me the difference is big – it opened up the image:
While there – I mean while being in photo archive to pull original raw file for this photograph – I’ve discovered a couple of other photographs which I found interesting. Both are taken at the same place and same sunset.
Quality vs. Quantity
02 Friday Jul 2010
Posted in Art, Photography
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Why are we chasing after making more and more photographs?
A famous Russian artist – Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov – spent 20 years on one painting which turned to be his whole artistic life. The painting is absolutely breathtaking.
We, photographers, on the other hand seem to want to produce more photographs per minute than ever. I’m not sure if industry is encouraging us or industry just meets our demand by producing faster shot per second cameras, faster cards, software to go thru photo-editing faster.
Do we produce something great or just visual noise? Is it time to slow down and think about what we trying to get to by doing this? I used to be inspired by single photographs of the past and I still am. Nowadays I’m subscribed to all kinds of digital photography feeds but for the most part all I get is one stream of noise. It seems that photography has become more about inventing something new rather than about creating something beautiful. Now single photograph is not enough, today it is all about folios. Is a folio just a way to unload more photographs into the market?
I wonder what would be an equivalent of spending twenty years on a single painting in photography? How would one work on one photograph their whole life? And what that photograph would be? Maybe a folio is an equivalent of that painting? And it is all about polishing that set of photographs: substituting some of them with other, reshooting some of them, redoing post-processing, etc. That seems to make sense, just don’t make me look at a folio of a thousand photographs.
Art?
22 Tuesday Jun 2010
Posted in Art, Photography
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Is a photograph of an art an art? Is a photograph of a sculpture an art? Is a photograph of a painting an art?
What is important in a photograph – an image or how it was made? Similarly for paintings: if we have two visually undistinguishable copies would we value the one that is proven to be original thru chemical analysis higher? Does it mean it is more important how something was made than its purpose?
I don’t have answers to either of the questions. It is just something I find interesting to think about.
Sunset at Highlands Blvd
06 Sunday Jun 2010
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Great things happen when you least expect them. Like tonight on my way home I saw this gorgeous sunset. I just had to stop and take some photographs.
How long have I been photographing? How did I start?
04 Tuesday May 2010
Posted in Equipment, Interview, Photography
This is a series of posts with translation of my interview published in Russian at http://landscapists.info/vitaly-prokopenko.
It depends on what point to start count from. I was fascinated with photography on some subconscious level. Back in school I had an old rangefinder camera. Completely mechanical with manual exposure – no electronics at all. I developed film by myself, I made prints by myself. I still remember the scent of chemicals.
I remember my experiment with enlarging a photograph to a really big size. I put my enlarge on a side and projected the image from one end of 7 meter hall to the wall on the other end. On the wall I put letter size sheets of photo paper. The hardest thing was to develop those sheets exactly the same time to keep the same tonality. And I did not succeed on that. Different sheets ended up being darker or lighter. Despite that I enjoyed experimenting.
Later, in high school, my parents bought me more advanced camera – film SLR. It had electronic exposure metering! That was when I learnt my first lesson: not to trust tools. Since I started relying on exposure metering I did not get a single shot with a good exposure.
Still I would not say I did fine art photography in the school. After I entered a university I abandoned photography completely. There was no way I could setup a dark room in a dorm.
After post-graduation school I moved across an ocean to the US. I did not immediately started doing photography again. I traveled a lot, bought a simple digital camera and was taking some random snapshots which I have not even bothered to look at since then.
After a few years living in the US I noticed that I spent too much time working. I needed something that would take me away from work. I tried several hobbies and could not stop on anything.
At the same time my wife got into photography. She was the first we got a DSLR for. I thought about trying myself in landscape photography. I bought a tripod, started reading books and explore landscapes around. And I really like it. Photography has become part of my life that I cannot live without.
Random Stops
30 Friday Apr 2010
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When we go on a photo trip we typically set for ourselves a final destination – a place we plan to spend the most time photographing on a trip. While driving there it is easy to get into “get to the destination” mode. Landscapes pass by largely ignored. They don’t seem to be important or interesting comparing to what waits for us at a destination. It is like I’m in a tunnel with a light at the end being destination of my trip.
On my last trip I decided to break out of the tunnel. As we were passing some hills that appeared to be empty – there were no subject to stop an eye on – we just turned from a highway to a random dirt road just to stop and look around. And it is just amazing how much interesting we found. Hills were covered in tiny flowers and occasionally some large flowers. The dirt road was nicely zigzagging to the top of the hill. There was a tree on the top of the hill. And great view opened up from the top of the hill. We’ve spent quite a while photographing there.
Now I’m wondering if I could do great photographs at any random points along the way? In some sense it is not a great place that I’m going to that helps me to do photography, it is the state of mind that opens up the possibilities. I’m sure going to try to do more random stops on my trips and see what’s around me along my way.
Here is one of the picture made at one of such random stops:
First rule of shooting video for photographers
06 Tuesday Apr 2010
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Do not turn camera vertically while shooting video even if the shot would be best composed vertically.
