Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Art

The Color Is…
Color is one of the major considerations in our photo processing. And it can be hard. Have you ever considered how many tools and settings there are to control color in Lightroom and Photoshop?
But where are you on the color concern spectrum? For you, is color:
1. Critical. It must exactly match
2. Important
3. An annoyance
4. Just a design variable
5. Don’t care
Why do we need to change it?
Despite all of the great technology we have, color is still an imprecise and slippery thing to deal with. Different camera manufacturers often create their own unique ‘look”. Fuji, for instance, has profiles built in for some of their famous films (remember Velvia?). But because of different technology and processing tradeoffs, there are subtle differences between, say, Nikon and Canon. There are even small variations between samples of the same camera model,
The color variations are magnified as we move further along the processing chain. What we see is greatly influenced by the decision to shoot RAW or JPEG, and if JPEG, what color balance is chosen. And is our monitor calibrated to ensure it correctly represents the colors in the digital file?
Finally, when we make a print everything can change drastically. The print is strongly influenced by the paper we choose and the printer’s ink set. Using good profiles for the printer and paper combination helps to produce an output that is “similar” to what we edited on screen, but it will never be the same. Just the move from illuminated pixels in RGB space to reflected light from a paper substrate in CMYK space means they can never be exactly the same. The physics is completely different.
The variations along the way are the process of color correcting the image.
Most of us do not see or pay much attention to these differences. The importance to us depends on our application.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Tools
The color correction tool chain starts back in our camera. Specifically, the color balance setting.
The color of the light on our scene varies greatly in different conditions. Bright sunlight is completely different from open shade, as is a cloudy, overcast day. Indoors under tungsten or fluorescent lighting and. even LED’s give different color casts.
Out eye/brain automatically adjusts for most of these differences, but the camera does not. The color balance setting in the camera is a means to dial out the color casts. But this is only useful for JPEG images and the preview we see in camera. Color balance has no effect on RAW images. Those compensations are made in our image editing software.
My camera stays set to Auto White Balance. I only shoot RAW, so it has little effect on my processing or results.
Lightroom
When I say “Lightroom” that is a shorthand for “Lightroom Classic”. That is the only version I care about. But I”m pretty sure everything I say about it applies to both applications. There are differences in color representations in other RAW image processors like Capture One, but I do not have enough experience with them to say much.
Lightroom is packed full of ways to change the color of our image. In the Develop module you are never far from something that can modify color.
Some of the controls change color globally, that is, for the whole image. Just scanning down from top to bottom (I think my controls are still in the default order), we start with profile. This can be a simple selection of default balance or you can set any of the many provided color effects, including black & white toning.
Next there is the white balance adjustment to allow us to adapt the image to a color that should be neutral. Next to that is the color balance selection to partially compensate for lighting conditions.
Right under them is the Temp and Tint sliders. Vibrance and saturation do not actually alter colors much, but they have a strong effect on the look of colors.
Then there is the Tone Curve, where we can adjust red, green, and blue channel properties directly, followed by Color Mixer and Color Grading. Finally there is the Calibration group where we can control hue and saturation of each channel.
All of these are only the control that affect the whole image. We have many of the same controls to perform selective adjust color in regions (like a linear gradient) or spots (e.g the brush tool).
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Partly driven by the application
Hopefully, you get the impression that Lightroom gives us a lot of control of color. It must be important. I won’t even go into Photoshop with its many adjustments. I trust the point is made. This is not a “how to”.
Color adjustment is a large part of what we may deal with in post processing.
Maybe.
It depends on our application and needs.
If you are doing product photography, the customer is very concerned that the color of their logo or product absolutely matches their specification. Portrait customers have a fairly narrow tolerance for off colors in people’s faces. Or you may have a self-imposed rule that the final color must exactly match the original scene.
In these cases you are probably using gray cards or Color Checker swatches to ensure you faithfully match the original. You may even be calibrating your camera to minimize discrepancies. You will probably be using many of these Lightroom controls to adjust the colors to balance out shifts or color casts.
I’m a Fine Art Photographer
But I’m a Fine Art Photographer. I dislike that term and I’m not completely sure what it means, but I do know that what I create is art. Art is not tied to a real scene. Maybe someday I will get into a discussion on indexicality, but not today. By my definition, anything I want to do as art is acceptable.
I may not care at all about the color of the original scene. I’m certainly not fanatical about matching it or balancing color casts. My consideration is how the resulting image looks (to me) and what effect it has for the viewers.
Yet I do use most of the color controls I listed earlier. Except I very rarely use Calibrarion to adjust color, but that’s just me and my thought process. All the other controls, in global and regional and spots, are tools I use frequently.
Color is a subtle thing. Almost imperceptible shifts can create large perceived changes. It can be tricky, or impossible, to achieve an effect I have in mind. But I try.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Not an absolute
Breaking the assumption that my image must look like the original was difficult for me. Coming from a very technical, engineering background made me think in absolutes. Precision was important. But now that the assumption is broken, it is freeing. The realities I started with no longer hinder my vision (as much).
Even so, I do not usually create comic book-like pop art. Unless I want to for some reason. But, on the other hand, I do often enjoy making images that are so extreme you will think I modified them too much, even if I did little at all.
Sometimes color is the subject. Sometimes an image “needs” to be a different color than the original. An extreme use of color modification is black & white. Yes, taking away all color and just leaving tonality is extreme color manipulation.
In the questions I posed at the start, I’m usually operating at about 4 or 5. It is a tool I can apply to accomplish my vision. Not something I am stuck with because that’s what the original was.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Do what you need to do
Color perception is one aspect of a visual image. But it is a powerful one. With our technology, we are blessed with extreme ability to control or modify color. Don’t be afraid to use it creatively.
Unless you are working in an application that demands absolute fidelity to the original, color becomes just another design element to be used for art.
Make your art. The color is… what you need it to be.
Today’s feature image
Is this the “right” color? I don’t know. First, I didn’t have a gray card with me. Second, even if I did, I couldn’t have held it out the window at 40,000 ft. Third and most important, I don’t care.
This is what I remember seeing at the time. It is the way I chose to make the image look. It is art. I like it like that.
March 26, 2025
The Magic of Silhouettes
We’re all familiar with silhouettes. Do you ever think about why they are interesting? I believe there is a kind of magic of silhouettes.
What silhouettes are
“A silhouette is the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single colour, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette is featureless, and the silhouette is usually presented on a light background, usually white, or none at all.”
You are familiar with them. You see them often. A featureless black form in a picture. Have you ever thought how something that shows no detail can be interesting?
We know from experience that they happen when a foreground object has a bright light behind it. A simple explanation and they are easy to generate, but that by itself does not explain their impact.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Origin
I love history and finding out how things came to be. I assumed silhouettes have been an artistic technique for centuries. Not exactly. It mainly dates from the 18th century. Cutting portraits out of black paper became a popular and inexpensive art form. It was especially popular for miniatures, small images on lockets and things like that.
You can argue the technique was used by Greeks and others as far back as 7 to 8 centuries BC on some of their pottery. Perhaps it is possible to include some even older cave art. But as far as I could find, there was no name given to it back then and the technique seems to have fallen mostly out of practice until the 18th century.
Here is a piece of nerd interest that will be of absolutely no use to you, but is an intriguing part of our history. The word “silhouette” is not an artistic or technical term. In 1759 Étienne de Silhouette was the French Finance Minister during the Seven Years War. The country’s finances were hard pressed and he had to institute a lot of unpopular austerity measures. So much so that people began to use the term “silhouette” to refer to things done cheaply.
This was the same time period (18th century) when paper cutouts were becoming popular for portraits and the name transferred and stuck. Silhouettes were an inexpensive art form. It fascinates me that no one remembers Étienne de Silhouette, but we use his name all the time without realizing it.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Why are they interesting
But that still leave open the question of why they are interesting. Just being black does not make it interesting. Being featureless would seem to make them less interesting, not more. Why do they catch our interest?
They are somewhat different from what we normally see, but that should not in itself be enough to make them special. There are a lot of “gimmick” techniques that photographers and other artists use to try to catch our interest. Generally these fads do not have staying power and fade out as quickly as they appear.
I believe there is something fundamentally important and intriguing about silhouettes that catches our attention and has lasting power. There seems to be something about them that captures the essence of a subject.
Less is more
Less really is more sometimes. This is particularly true in photography, where our super megapixel sensors capture lots of information and detail. We can confuse our viewers with too much detail. I generally love lots of detail, but the subjective experience we want to present is more important than technical details.
A silhouette is an exercise in simplicity. We remove all information about a subject except its outer form. The way our marvelous brain works, this is usually sufficient for us to recognize the object.
But even though we recognize it, it is presented in a completely different form. With no interior detail we only have its outline. We are left to guess what is in the big, black, featureless area in the middle of it.
And we do. We fill in the blanks. Based on our experience, we “know” what is in that shape. But still, the mystery remains and we perceive it different. We see it in a new way.
It is an exercise in simplicity and minimalization. Absolutely nothing except the information about its shape.
Similar to black & white
In some respects silhouettes are related to black & white photographs. They often are presented in black & white. I believe there is a reason for this beyond just the big black area.
The beauty of black & white is that it removes all color from the image. Color is the most powerful visual sense. We tend to see it first. It can overpower everything else.
But when the color is removed, we more fully perceive the shapes and tonal relationships that are there. The image is transformed into a different art form, giving us an altered way to see it.
Silhouettes are like that, but with an emphasis on just the shape of the isolated black forms. The shapes become the subject of the image. There is generally no tonal range in the silhouetted object, just form.
So, although silhouettes are often made as black & white images, that is not required. It is often preferable to leave the color information in the rest of the image to emphasize the difference of the silhouetted objects and to draw more attention to them.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
The featured image
The image featured at the top of this article illustrates some of these points. This was taken in a field on a tiny, nameless back road in northeast Oklahoma. I doubt if I could find it again.
I chose to make both the foreground and mid ground black. Everything that is black is featureless black silhouettes. But there is no problem at all knowing what they are. Adding interior detail would not have improved the image. I could argue that it would have weakened it. It is the exterior shapes we see.
And this is a case where I felt that preserving the color of the background helps set the context and emphasize the shapes of the foreground. I believe the color adds to the mood.
March 5, 2025
Do You Take Pictures?
Do you take pictures? Well, of course. We all do. I suggest if we are serious about making art that may not be the best attitude.
Take pictures
It is estimated that about 2 Trillion pictures are taken a year. That is several hundred pictures for every person on the planet. Probably 99.999% of those are shot on cell phones. Nothing wrong with that. Cell phones have gotten amazing. But realistically, most of the shots taken are selfies or predictable tourist pictures. Again, nothing wrong with that. If the picture makes them happy, it is good.
Everybody takes pictures. Do you know anyone who has never taken one? I don’t.
But I am writing to an audience who admires photographic images and probably aspires to make much better ones themselves. What makes a picture good?
There are obvious qualifiers like being sharp, well lit, subject easy to see, things like that. Those are things that, if you do not do them, it probably will make the picture bad (unless you did it deliberately). But, as you have figured out from experience, eliminating the problems does not mean your pictures become “good”.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Taken by pictures
The concept of being taken by pictures is one I picked up from John Barclay. It resonates with me, because I have seen it working in my art.
What I have seen in my photo shoots is that sometimes something special happens. We no longer are looking for pictures. We have found a subject or place that captivates us. It releases some kind of creative energy within up. We are not just trying to take a picture, we are trying to capture the magic we are feeling. We have to shoot this. There is no choice not to.
It may be very easy or it may be hard. That is, the scene may present itself to us complete. We have found a treasure. We just have to compose it, set the camera, and take the picture. It is already perfect. Don’t mess it up;
Sometimes it teases us. We know there is something great hiding there, just out of reach. Maybe we have to walk around to look for the right angle. Perhaps it is zooming in on the right piece. Or waiting for the right light, Maybe it is a matter of thinking about it to figure out what is calling to us. Whatever it is, we usually know it when we see it. The inner voice guiding us says “Yes!”. Then we know we have captured the essence we are searching for.
When this happens it is very rewarding. We know we have glimpsed something great and good and we feel like we have captured a view of it.
What is the difference?
The difference is taking a picture vs making art. Taking vs giving.
When you’re at the Eiffel Tower and you think “I like that and I should shoot it”, you probably know how to make a good record of it. You and 50,000 other people that day. When anyone sees it they say “yep, that’s the Eiffel Tower”. No passion. It is just a fact. You might even want to hang a print of it on your wall. But you could get the same thing from any print on demand web site.
But when we are taken by a scene, there is an intensity and passion invoked in us. It is a personal experience. With luck and skill on our part, some of the feeling might be shared by some of our viewers.
We did not take the picture to show it to you. We had to take it for us. It was something we were drawn to. It is like it was a gift given to us.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
If it does not captivate you
I use a recent trip to France as an example a lot lately. It is recent and fresh in my mind.
I was unashamedly a tourist. That means I shot a lot of pictures because I felt I needed to record where we were and what we were seeing. Just like everyone else with their smart phones. Even though I was using a nice mirrorless camera, they were still mostly tourist shots.
Some of these are nice. That is, they are sharp, well composed, and show what I want of the scene. I will keep too many of them, but just for my own private memories.
But a few were moments where something spoke to me and drew me into an image. These times were meaningful to me. As far as images go, these were the Wow moments of the trip for me. Whether anyone else ever sees them or appreciates them doesn’t matter. They are special to me. When I go back and look at them I remember the feelings of the moment.
It’s about emotion
A common theme that recurs is that it is about passion, emotion. Did I feel anything deep or special about this, or was it a record shot? Record shots are pretty and a few will go into a slide show or book of the trip.
The really meaningful images weren’t shot to a plan and were not shot primarily to record the event or place. They may be random occurrences. But these are special to me. Times when I was truly engaged and excited by what was there.
If I wasn’t excited about what I saw, why should you be?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Don’t settle for just taking pictures
So take pictures. But don’t settle for just taking pictures. Let’s turn up our sensitivity to hear when something is calling to us. If we are not actively listening, we will probably miss it. We know something great is there. Now we have to find it. Work the scene. Peal away the clutter. Follow your instinct. Let yourself be taken by pictures. It is worth it.
When we get caught up in a situation like this, it doesn’t really matter if all we have if a cell phone. Use what you have. But follow you passion. Figure out what is really there and get the shot. Take the gift. Appreciate it.
January 15, 2025
En Plein Air
This is a big buzz with my colleagues who manually put pigment on a substrate (e.g. they paint). There is an aura that makes it something exotic about creating “en plein air”. Actually, plein air is what I do, too.
Plein air
In itself, plein air art is not a new concept, or even an artistic concept. It has been done commonly by painters since the 1800’s.
It is sometimes spoken like an advanced technical term. Something your have to be an insider to truly appreciate. But it is just an everyday French phrase. I have been studying French recently (another story) and was surprised to find this in normal use. It literally means “plain air”, or outdoors. Nothing fancy or hidden there. If you go to a “plein air” concert it just means you are going to an outdoor concert.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
In painting
So if you are a painter and you gather up all your stuff and take it outside to paint scenes from nature or whatever is in front of you, you are painting “en plein air”. Does that make it different or special? Maybe. Monet thought so. I”ll talk about that in a minute.
But to give the painters credit, it required some technical and workflow innovations for this to happen. We forget history sometimes.
It used to be (pre-1800) that artists had to find or buy their own pigments. Then they had to purify them and laboriously grind them into an extremely fine powder and mix them in a binder, usually a type of oil. By the way, you know those beautiful warm, rust toned palettes favored by Renaissance artists in Italy? Ochre pigment was a common, naturally occurring mineral there. Coincidence?
But then, sometime in the early 1800’s, the technology for producing and selling pigments already ground and mixed and in tubes was developed. This allowed the artists two things: first, they could get any colors they wanted. But second, and more important for this discussion, it became much easier to take your oils with you. As the desire to move about grew, enterprising vendors also developed smaller, portable easels and pre-stretched prepared canvases. Artists were not tethered to a studio nearly so much.
Now artists could pack their gear into a relatively small bundle and go where they wanted. One of the places they moved was outside.
Monet
I find I use Monet as an example a lot. I like his work, but another thing is that he was an innovator and revolutionary. He fought the entrenched art establishment and helped establish a whole new style. Something photography is still struggling to some extent to do.
Monet was one of the early practitioners of the plein air movement. One of the motivations of the whole Impressionist movement was his and others desire to paint outdoor scenes in the light of the moment. As Guy Tal put it in his marvelous book The Interior Landscape, (I get no incentives for promoting it) “Monet famously credited the success of his work to the emotions he felt when working out in nature … As Monet himself put it, ‘My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects.’ “
Working outside and observing fleeting effects. That’s what I like to do, too!
©Ed Schlotzhauer
I work outdoors
The same impulse motivates me, even though the technology I use is very different. I find and capture my images almost exclusively outdoors. Shooting in a studio does not motivate me.
Seeing things most other people do not see excites me. Finding those things, even if they are little, seemingly insignificant things, that I can show you in a new way gives me joy. Especially if I can show you something and you share my joy and excitement.
I admit I do not have the patience for painting. It’s too slow for me. Spending a few hours or days capturing a scene would be so frustrating to me that I would quickly give up. Seeing something, visualizing what this could be and what to do with it is hard and takes lots of experience. That is one of the fun and creative parts of photography to me. And it is fast enough to not bog me down or interrupt my creative flow. The process of capturing and producing the artifact doesn’t need to be so difficult.
Other than post processing work on my computer, my images come from outdoors, en plain air.
A new genre?
Have I created a new genre of art? Should I trademark the term “plein air photography”? Sign up for my workshop!
Well, I probably can’t do that. Photography has always been strongly associated with the outdoors. I think the first surviving photograph was an outdoor scene. Admittedly early photographs were outdoors because that’s where a good light source was available. Flash had not yet been invented. Even when it first was, it was difficult and dangerous to use (and smoky).
But those are technical considerations. The fact remains that photography has always had a strong connection to the outdoors. Especially for crazy people like me who photograph outside year around in a place like Colorado.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
It’s the outdoors that motivates me. I’m a hunter. That’s where I find most of my prey. And my inspiration. It is not an uncommon obsession. Look at publications like Luminous Landscape, Nature Photographer’s Network, Outdoor Photographer magazine and many others.
To the painters, if working outside motivates you, excellent. We share a common bond. I hope the outdoors inspires us both to do our best work. But working outdoors is not a new concept or unique to painting. Plein air just means “outside”.
I’ll be looking for you outside. But we will just pass each other. I’ll be moving about a lot discovering and shooting a lot of things while you are painting. Not to say one is better or worse, just very different art forms. Both en plein air. Let’s wave to each other.
December 11, 2024
Have an Opinion
I spent most of my photographic career just recording scenes. But now I think you probably won’t make a compelling image unless you have an opinion and express it in your art.
Just the facts
I started mostly focusing on just the facts. My goal was literal representation of scenes. I wanted to capture what was actually there, with no interpretation. I regret that.
Being an engineer didn’t help. It is very easy to get caught up in technical details of resolution and depth of field. My excuse is that I grew up in Texas and moved to Colorado in my early 20’s. The mountains were new to me and I wanted to record everything I could. I was basically running around saying “Wow, look at this! I never knew this existed!”.
If I had an opinion about it, it was something like awe and excitement about the new landscape. I took a lot of accurate, factual representational pictures back then, but very few are in any of my current collections. Beautiful images some of them, but little depth. Not compelling.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
What makes it special?
What makes an image special or worth lingering over? That is a hard question. Great photographers have been wrestling with that for 150 years. Painters have been agonizing over it for hundreds of years. There are no rules or definitive answers (despite all the rubbish you may find on the internet).
I am not in a position to give you a definitive answer either. If I could it would make my art a lot easier to do.
I think we can agree that some images jump out at us or hold us to linger over them. If we can agree on that then we can agree that there must be some quality or qualities that distinguish one from others.
It could simply be the composition or lighting or the precision of the execution or the decisive moment or something in the scene that grabs our interest. Maybe some combination of all of that.
I am drawn to believe it is all that but more. We see far too many well executed images of beautiful scenes that seem soulless, flat, uninspired. So there must be an unidentified quality that some get but others do not.
It is probably oversimplified, but I speculate that part of it could simply be whether the photographer was excited about it. We tend to be drawn to excitement in others. When someone is telling us a story that happened to them, their excitement has a lot to do with our engagement. If it is just a “I went to the grocery store and got some oranges”, well, we quickly drift away. But if it is “I went to the grocery store and the most amazing thing happened…” then, if they can keep the story going, we will follow.
Could it be that simple with our pictures?
Express yourself
I said when I started my photography I believed mainly in literal representation. It seemed wrong to try to project my feelings or opinion on them. Now I think I was totally wrong. That is why most of those early images were completely forgetable. I wasn’t truly being authentic because I was keeping my feelings to myself.
One thing the great and very quotable Jay Maisel said was “What you’re shooting at doesn’t matter, the real question is: ‘Does it give you joy?’”.
Now I believe that unless I am feeling something strong, it is useless to press the shutter. I want to believe that my excitement will carry through in some of my images. The good ones.
Another quote that guides me is “if it doesn’t excite you, why should it excite anyone else?” I think that is a Jay Maisel too, but I can’t find it. If not, maybe I’ll claim it. 🙂 Either way, I believe it. Why should you care about any of my images unless they came from something inside of me? Not just pressing the shutter button and capturing what is there.
So it is not enough for me to just capture an image of something. I want you to know what I was feeling, how I perceived it. I may have loved it or hated it, but you be able to sense it and participate in it.
It is not only OK for me to express my feelings, I think it is completely necessary to make something good.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Nobody has to agree
But there is a dark side to human nature: when we express our feelings, some people will not agree. I know now that that is fine. When I took the attitude that everybody does not have to like what I did, it was tremendously liberating.
So now when someone says “I like that” or “I don’t like that” I basically ignore the comment. It is no use to me without more discussion. Actually, if someone does not like a picture I love to get into a conversation with them to find our why they felt that way. I will not change my image and I do not try to change their mind, but I am always curious about the reasons for negative reactions.
One of my goals is to create a reaction in you. I’m generally a positive and upbeat person and that is more often the type of reaction I aim for. But I would rather cause you to hate my work than to be indifferent to it. If you are indifferent I failed to move you at all.
I encourage you to fall in love with your subjects. Or find the subjects that revolt you and you want to have changed. Either way, feel something. Strongly. Your audience needs it and deserves it.
Today’s image
This was a quick “grab” shot, but that was because I did not want to disturb or upset the guy looking at me. I was more shy then. This has a lot of feeling for me. I was suffering and I’m sure they were, too. It was in a village in central Italy and it was about 100_^°F that afternoon. We were dying and the only people stupid enough to be out sightseeing. This old couple seemed to have found a relatively shady spot in the narrow street. Hopefully with some breeze. I’m sure that other neighbors would soon gather for their daily ritual.
I fell in love with the area and the way of life. They seemed to have contentment in their circumstances and the pace and traditions of their life. I came away with great respect for them. I wish I would have visited with this gentleman, but the heat was about to take me down and I don’t speak Italian. I’m pretty sure he did not speak English. So I let it go be. I’m sorry for that.
November 27, 2024