Category: photography

The way the Nature meant to be

Sometimes you can find inspiration where you least expected. My inspiration today was coming from my four year old son. On his third birthday we gave him a point-n-shoot camera as a present. Since then he has been photographing his day-to-day life – people and things that surround him.

Today was a beautiful warm spring day. I offered him to go to botanical garden to photograph flowers. He happily agreed. On the way there he was photographing all kind of ordinary things that we got used to: “Lake!” – click, click, click, “Boat!” – click, click, click, “Puffy cloud!” – click, click, click.

Then we walked the paths of botanical garden taking photographs of flowers. He saw a mom with a son about his age and asked me:

– Why they were not photographing trees and flowers.

– Maybe they did not know how. – I told him.

– It can’t be. – He said and I asked him why.

His answer was:

– Because that’s the way the Nature meant to be.

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I envy him, I envy his ability to see extraordinary in ordinary, I envy the voyage of discovery he is going thru. He teaches me to see the world around, see thru his eyes, see it in an awe inspiring way.

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Here is today thru my son’s eyes:

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Spring

It is spring outside. It is time of renewal and inspiration. And it is time to wake up from a winter hibernation.

I find it hard to push myself out of warm comfortable home into windy, rainy, cold winter. That’s probably the reason I have so few winter photographs.

Now it is time to wake up. I’m already planning a few photo trips this year. The first one is beginning of April.

Also this year I’m going to try selling my finished work at art fairs. I’ll share more details about this once I have them.

Hand Waving

Photographer’s hand is a very useful tool. And it is useful not only for pressing a shutter button. It can also be used to create a shade for lenses to avoid lens flare. Or it can be used to block out sun that gets into a corner of a frame.

It can also be used as a gradient neutral density filter. With a long expose you can simply block out part of the frame for some time to reduce amount of light that gets into the frame. That’s exactly what I did when I took the photo below. While composing it I put my hand in front of a lens to cover sky down to horizon and took a note of how “deep” my hand should go to cover the sky. I pressed the shutter and started waving my hand in front of the lens, so my hand is not recorded but it blocked out enough light to produce dark moody sky.

Sure I could actually use gradient neutral density filter but it would not be so much fun. At some point I understood that photographer is a human and can carry only so much weight on his back. I started lightening up my backpack, gradient neutral density filters were one of the things that went away. In some way it actually made photography more interesting to me as I would spend less time unpacking my gadgets and preparing for a shot and spend more time seeing and connecting with a scene.

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Close to Home

Lots of things are waiting to be discovered right around the corner. You just need to make the first step toward them.

I adore photograph made in fog. At the same time there have not been much fog where I live. At some point I share my fog obsession with another local photographer and she suggested me to go to Carnation Valley in fall.

It is only about 10 minutes drive from where I live. To my surprise even when it is clear sky and sunshine outside the valley, the valley itself is filled with thick thick fog. This is likely because there are a lot of marshes there. Driving downhill into the valley is like diving into the fog.

From that point on I always go to Carnation in fall. Here are some photos I’ve made this year:

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Dad and Photographer

I have not had much time doing anything photographic last week and won’t have this week either. We’re getting ready for my son’s fourth birthday.

Being dad and photographer at the same time can be both challenging and rewarding. Here is how it is challenging carrying bag full of gear, tripod and my two year son after photographing sunrise:

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And here is how it can be rewarding. My son – now almost four year old – copying his dad:

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Image vs. Print

This question bugged me for a while: is an image an ultimate goal and result of creativity or execution and presentation are important as well? And I came to conclusion that execution and presentation are important.

Let’s talk about paintings for example. I think of paintings not only as two dimensional images. There is a third dimension – brush strokes. They capture artist hand motion and his emotions as much as color, composition or subject. When I look at those strokes I can imagine how the artist hand was moving, and that passes artist emotions to me. The brush strokes can be powerful, forceful, angry or they can be casual, light and soft. A reproduction of a painting can have accurate representation of an image but does not capture the brush strokes as well and in some sense erasing that third dimension.

I grew up in a fairly provincial town seeing only reproductions of paintings in books. Seeing them later in museums changed my perception of them completely. I remember how seeing one of van Gogh’s self-portraits in Seattle Art Museum (in a temporary exhibition) made unforgettable impression on me. Much of van Gogh’s face was not painted. Either skin-toned paper was used or paper was covered with skin-toned paint. And then on top of that van Gogh painted his beard, eyes, hair. It was like the face was already in that skin-toned paper, van Gogh just helped me to see it in a few brush strokes. No reproduction has been able to show that.

Now the paintbrush strokes can be meaningless too. For example, I have some cheap painting hanging in my house. It may have been produced by printing on canvas first and then laying paint on top to make it look like painting, the paintbrush strokes just random and “don’t fit”. That’s kind of example of good image bad painting. Another example of good image and good painting but where strokes don’t mean much [to me] is Pointillism which branched off Impressionism. In paintings that I’ve seen in museum executed with this technique application of dots looks very mechanical. While technique is interesting it did not give enough freedom to artist hand.

Same goes to photography but in photography it is a matter of technology and not directly related to us. Platinum-palladium print has incredible tonal range and looks like the image is in paper, where print from inkjet printer looks like image is coated on top of paper, like a polaroid emulsion transfer (in some sense). All that is left to us is to choose what matches what we want the best. And don’t get me even started on paper, I have ton of paper samples at home and I just enjoy looking at them and feeling their texture.

Is this important to most of people? No. Paintings are not much of importance either. And even famous ones. Have you been to Musée du Louvre and saw Mona Lisa? Have you looked at the crowd? How many people were looking at the painting and how many were actually with their backs toward the painting taking infamous “hey, I’m 10 feet from Mona Lisa painting” photo? And using flash despite all “no flash” signs? I like this statistic from Wikipedia: “Visitors generally spend about 15 seconds viewing the Mona Lisa.” Is it really worth only 15 seconds? (Granted it may have lost its value as painting and has become something else. Sadly.)

So what can we photographers do? We can do our best explaining this and teaching everyone to see this. Even if the rest think we are a bit crazy.

Demilitarization of Photography

I find it a bit disturbing the amount of military words used by photographers. Shoot instead of take picture. Shot instead of a photograph. Weapon of my choice instead of camera and lenses. Just today I’ve read interview of one photographer where while talking about his street photography he said “I keep my weapon close [referring to camera] ready to fire”. Why so much aggression? Aren’t we supposed to make our world better with our art?

I avoid those word in my language and use real photographic words when talking about photography. For me photography is a peaceful experience. Let’s declare photography a demilitarized zone. Are you with me?

I am an Amateur photographer!

History sometimes yields interesting facts. One of such is that a while back Amateur would be a compliment to a photographer. From French amateur "lover of", this meant a photographer who does photography for the love of it (as opposed to professional who does it for the money).

Henri Cartier-Bresson in his famous essay “The Decisive Moment” writes: “I still regard myself as an amateur: but a dilettante I certainly am not." Somehow over time amateur has become an equivalent of dilettante. So let’s restore its original meaning. And I’ll do it first by stating:

I’m an Amateur photographer because I’m doing photography for no other reason but the love of it.

1000, 2000, 2500000000, …

With so many photos produced every second is there any room left for photographers?

Facebook is the biggest photo sharing website with 2.5 billion photos uploaded monthly according to Facebook blog. That translates into roughly 1000 photos per second. Can you imagine that? 1 second – 1000 new photos uploaded, 2 seconds – 2000 new photos uploaded, …

Should photographers be worrying that soon any possible photograph will be captured and published? At first I thought it could be then I recalled the old theorem about monkey writing all plays by Shakespeare and an actual test. When University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts setup an experiment with real monkeys, the most they got was 3 pages of letter S.

The same happens in photography. With almost everyone possessing a camera we get a lot of me in front of something and here is something famous photos. In some sense most of 1000 photos uploaded every second are very repetitive kind of like printing the same letter with some variations. At the same time there are still very few photographs like this that is very much different kind of photography.

I hope I did not offend anyone with such comparison. That was not my point. I myself have a lot of family photographs in famous places. I very much enjoy sharing them with my family. My only point is that there is another kind of photography that is worth sharing with the world.

Being Yourself

I was learning photography from books. And a lot of what I did at the beginning I was decomposing photographs that were inspiring me, trying to repeat them and leaning from my mistake. This was extremely valuable and I have no problem suggesting this to anyone else. There is of cause a danger of getting stuck in repeating others.

At some point I felt a need to find my style and I got into a trap of trying to be different. I guess I had too much external influence telling me that to find my style I had to differentiate myself from others. I was continuously chasing after finding something that has not been done yet. All that produced to was a bunch of random photographs. All that was depressing as I was trying to photographs that could be different but not necessarily interested me.

It took me a while to figure out that the most important thing in photography – as probably in any other art – is to be true to yourself. You can try to be like someone else, you can try to be like nobody else or your can try to be yourself – the choice is yours. I prefer to be myself and it does not matter to me if what I photograph has been photographed before, if my image looks like something someone else did, or if it does not look like anything else (which is very unlikely given how many good photographers are out there in the world).