Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Art

Hunting the Image
Certain types of photography have a lot in common with hunting. At least some types of hunting. This can heighten the experience for many artists.
Some of the ideas for this article come from Michael Freeman’s excellent book The Photograper’s Eye. I encourage you to read it. It is part of a series, all excellent. And no, I get nothing from recommending this. I seem to base a lot of ideas on Freeman’s writing. He is one of the most articulate and insightful photography authors I know.
Street photography, wildlife photography, even portrait photography have the characteristics of having a “decisive moment”, as the great Cartier-Bresson said.
He also said: “Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. ” He also said “once missed, the opportunity is gone forever“.
In my opinion, street photography is perhaps the highest form of this art. It is done in the chaos of busy, uncontrolled scenes. The photographer does not influence or position the subject or typically even ask for their cooperation. He has little control over lighting or crowds passing by. All the many decisions of recognition of an interesting scene, composition, exposure, framing, and the trigger of the decisive moment must take place in the artist’s mind in an instant. One second is a luxury in this field.
And when the moment passes, it is gone forever. Forget it and go on the the next opportunity.
Preparation
The artist can do some important things to prepare for street photography. One of the simplest is to become so familiar with your equipment that it is an extension of your mind. Adjustments must be instantaneous, automatic. If your camera requires traversing through menus to adjust required settings, that will probably not work. You should be able to set up your camera in the dark.
Another thing to do to learn to be good at this is developing an enhanced ability to observe and be aware. In flying this is called “situational awareness”. It really just means you are constantly attentive and alert. The US Marines would say your “head is on a swivel”. You have to be aware of everything going on around you. The more quickly you can recognize a developing scene, the better chance you have of capturing it.
Hunting
This brings me to the hunting analogy. I used to really enjoy bow hunting. Stalking through the woods tracking a quarry really focuses you and heightens your senses. I was successful in never actually shooting an animal. Eventually I realized I enjoyed the process of hunting much more than I wanted to kill something and I would be much happier hunting with my camera than with a bow or a rifle.
Cartier-Bresson also said, in an uncharacteristically Zen-like statement, “In whatever one does, there must be a relationship between eye and heart. One must come to one’s subject in a pure spirit.” I choose to interpret is as meaning that when you go out seeking images, you must focus your whole mind and attention on what you are seeing. You must have all your skill and concentration turned up full. All your spidey senses tingling and ready to pounce.
It is best to go out empty, as the great Jay Maisel says. He means do not bring preconceived ideas of what you want, because that is all you will see. Instead you must be completely open to what is going on all around you. It may be totally different from what you thought would be happening, but that’s OK. Embrace what is there and make the best images possible.
In case you hadn’t guessed, I love street photography. It takes me out of my comfort zone. It gives me intense practice in mental focus, fast reaction, decisiveness. I may not be great at it, but I enjoy it and I think it helps improve my other photography.
This awareness and tension and flow becomes almost a spiritual state. Hours can pass without you being conscious of the time. Like with any state of flow, it can be euphoric We are called by instinct and intuition to be intensely aware of those peak moments that define our subjects.
The hunt is on!
Let me know what you think!
January 15, 2020
Night Photography
Most people put away their cameras when the sun goes down. But night photography can be a wonderland of visual interest. It does require some new disciplines and knowledge, though. It’s a different world at night.
What’s to know? My camera has excellent exposure metering. I just point it at the subject and take a picture. Right?
Well, your mileage may vary. If you are taking pictures with your phone or taking jpg images, you will get pretty good results sometimes. That is because the jpg processor is making many creative decisions for you to try to render an image it thinks you wanted. If it guessed right it might do an OK job.
With night photography, more than many other types of image making, you really need to be the decision maker in charge of your images. Your intent determines how you approach each scene. The type of subject, the type of light available, whether or not movement is desired, the mood desired, weather conditions, etc. all factor in to the strategy. And most of these factors are interrelated.
Type of image
A portrait at night will (probably) require a well lit subject. This may involve external lights and/or reflectors. A star field scene, on the other hand, may have just a vague or silhouetted foreground. No lights, but you need to know good techniques for capturing the stars as crisp points. A cityscape at night may require very long exposures to streak car lights.
Movement
A big decision is if movement is desired or not. Some possibilities: a street scene with everything crisp and frozen, a street scene with car lights and people streaked, a star field with crisp points of light, a long exposure star field with obvious streaks from rotation of the sky, a portrait with a crisp subject but blurred background motion. Each of these requires a different exposure approach and different planning and preparation.
Motion is often one of the signature characteristics that distinguish night images. It is something you completely control by your exposure settings.
Mood of image
The time of day, the subject matter, and your desired treatment establish the mood of an image. Time of day? We’re talking about night. Well, “night” starts at different times. There is sunset, twilight, dusk, blue hour, and full darkness. I don’t have space here to discuss each one, but I love all of them and enjoy making images in each. Probably blue hour and full dark are my favorites, except I can seldom resist a beautiful sunset.
Blue hour probably deserves some discussion. This is the time after the sun is completely gone and the orange glow is gone from the sky. The sky is a rich, dark blue and still light enough to set off a foreground like city lights. It is a beautiful time of day. Blue hour is perfect for some city skylines and for some landscapes.
Full dark is required if you want to see the stars. It is probably necessary if you want long exposures like smoothly streaked car lights.
But all of this is modulated by the desired result. Do you want dark and gritty or more cheerful and upbeat? Is it a realistic image of architecture or an abstract?
Full manual control
You will usually need to override the auto exposure of your camera. The poor exposure system with fail miserably trying to determine what you want if you point it at an almost totally black sky. So a camera with full manual control is required. You will need to determine and set the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed yourself.
This is not as bad as it seems. You will learn some guidelines for initial settings for the scenes you most commonly shoot. And with digital, it doesn’t cost much to shoot some test shots. Since you can get immediate feedback you will quickly zero in on the correct settings.
Technology and technique
Night photography is an extension of normal daylight photography. Some new techniques must be learned. They are specialized, but most are pretty straightforward.
Night photography generally implies longer exposures. This implies keeping the camera rigidly positioned. Therefore a good tripod is almost a necessity. And a shutter release to minimize camera shake when you press the release button. And if your camera is an SLR with a mirror, you need to know how to lock the mirror up to eliminate shutter slap motion.
Let me emphasize again, a good tripod is necessary. Don’t scrimp on this. Get the best you can afford and use it all the time. I generally use Really Right Stuff tripods and heads (I get no compensation for this), but I know that Gitso is also very good. There are many good tripod manufacturers, I just don’t have first hand experience to allow me to recommend others.
Unless you are going for really long exposures, you will often need to use a high ISO at night. Many modern digital cameras have excellent high ISO performance. If you go back to film days or early digital cameras, you probably think of ISO 800 as a really fast and grainy setting. Not anymore. On the Nikon Z7 I use now, noise is hardly detectable at 3200!
Another example of a specialized night photography technique is the “rule of 500”. Like all photography “rules” it is a guideline. It can be a helpful starting point for setting up a night sky shot. For a full frame camera, set the ISO to 3200 and the shutter speed to 500 / [focal length] seconds. So using a 24mm lens, that is 500/24 or approximately 20 seconds. This is a great guideline to memorize for when you are out in a really dark place at night trying to get the night sky exposure tweaked in.
Noise
Noise during the image capture is a potential problem unique to digital sensors. At least we do not have to try to estimate reciprocity failure as we did with film. Noise in electronics is a function of temperature. Long exposures power the sensor much longer than usual, which can heat it up and increase noise (it looks kind of like grain).
Most camera manufacturers provide a setting to have the camera take a dark frame immediately following an exposure. This gives a noise sample which is automatically subtracted form the image you just took. This does a pretty good job of compensating for the sensor noise. Sometimes you will want to use it and sometime not. I usually do not, because it is often cold when I am out, which minimizes noise. The main cost of the noise cancelling is doubling the exposure time. If you set a 20 seconds exposure it will immediately follow it with a 20 second noise sample.
Post processing
Post processing is almost always required, in night images or any others. It is common to want to reduce luminance and/or color noise, to make the blacks deep and full, to sharpen, and, for some scenes, increase saturation or contrast.
I mention it here, not because night photography necessarily needs it more, but to emphasize that you need to shoot RAW and always post process.
After the sun goes down
A whole new world opens up when the sun goes down. Don’t put your camera away as soon as sunset fades! Get out and experiment. Try some different things. You don’t have to go to Moab and shoot grand night sky shots of the Milky Way with arches in the foreground. Experiment in your city. Learn to be confident manually setting exposures. Practice until you regularly get the results you want.
Try it! Don’t worry about failing. It can be fun and instructive! I ended up loving some of my failures.
January 8, 2020
Inertia
Inertia is a principle of physics that says a body in motion tends to stay in motion and a body at rest tends to stay at rest. This is a fundamental physical property of the world. Inertia is also, I believe, a mental attitude.
Some of this harkens back to one of my favorite blog posts called “A Road Less Traveled“, but with a different slant.
Most of us stay very busy “doing” our lives. We have job, family, bills to pay, Facebook posts to read and reply to, clothes to wash, etc. It’s full time trying to keep up with all the demands and expectations. There never seem to be time to kick back and do the things we wish we could do.
Is that really true or are we our own worst enemies sometimes?
Safe and comfortable
It is always easier to keep on doing the same things the same way. It seems safe and comfortable. The familiar ruts are easy to travel. Following the ruts means we don’t have to make hard decisions or examine ourselves. We don’t bring up uncomfortable questions.
It takes a rather large injection of energy to change. But we’re so busy and tired we don’t have the energy. Inertia. It keeps us doing the same things over and over. Ooh, that sounds like the famous quote Insanity: Doing the same things but expecting different results.
No, I’m not saying any of us are insane (I don’t know you and I wouldn’t admit about myself). But many of us have this characteristic of insanity: repeating the same unsatisfying patterns over and over without questioning why. It’s the easy way.
The reality is few of us are as helpless as we think. If you are feeling ground down by your job, increase your skills and get a better job. If you don’t like your environment or don’t feel safe, move. Stop watching the news, that will make anybody less depressed. Take 24 hour breaks from Facebook (or your drug of choice) at least once a week. The world will not come to an end. You don’t need to check your phone every 10 minutes. Put it on airplane mode for hours at a time. Take more charge of your life. Stop assuming you are powerless.
And then you can start controlling more of your life, start adding in things that are more meaningful to you. Reading, meditation, spending more time with friends, playing with your kids, learning new skills, doing art. It’s not making sweeping changes in your life; it’s taking small but deliberate steps toward your values and beliefs.
Bump, bump, bump
I love this quote from Winnie-the-Poo:
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.
A.A Milne
Most of us are bumping down the stairs with a vague idea that there should be another way. We are not really helpless. But change takes determination, energy, conscious effort, and a vision of where we want to go. It is uncomfortable at first. It can be scary. Start small and build your confidence. Small successes lead to larger ones.
What about “creatives”?
This blog is ostensibly about art and my artistic journey. Does this idea of inertia apply?
Oh, yes. Definitely. It is the old saying that when you point a finger at somebody, you have 3 fingers pointing back at you.
I have to consciously fight this all the time. It is too easy to keep taking the same path, to create the same images over and over. I have to constantly ask myself “Why am I doing this? What am I trying to say here? Do I still really resonate with this subject or style? Do I have a better idea I feel like I should try, but it seems risky? What if I fail?”
Artists can easily get stuck in a rut. Then they stop growing and developing and exploring their creativity. It is an humbling self-examination I have to go through all the time. For an artist, maybe more than most people, “no risk, no reward” seems to apply.
Call to action
I am not a believer in “New Year’s Resolutions”. I am not throwing out another suggestion of something to make a half-hearted attempt to do and then give up in 3 weeks. I am suggesting you take one thing you are not satisfied with and decide to change it.
Please, start recognizing some of your frustrations as inertia. This is something you can do something about. Force yourself to take action to change a few things. Start taking control of your life.
And check my gallery at photos.schlotzcreate.com. You may find images that bring you peace or help focus your energy.
As always, I welcome your comments.
January 1, 2020
Prolific Creation
Two schools of thought involve creating fast and frequently vs. being slow and deliberate. I argue that creating prolifically is the best path.
Is creativity a limited resource? Do you have to be concerned about using it up? My belief is, no, it is unlimited, but it is not always ready to flow.
But I have heard about artists who are burnt out, dried up creatively. Doesn’t that argue that creativity is limited? No, an anecdote doesn’t make a proof. I don’t know these people and I can’t and wouldn’t make any judgements about why their creative springs dried up. But I believe that is a personal problem, not the nature of creativity.
Slow and deliberate
Some types of art is slow by its nature. Sculpture is an example. Some painting techniques take weeks to produce a work. Some large installations take months or years to create.
Well, then, these artists have no option except to create on a slow cycle, right? I suspect they do not wait long periods of time. Most artists are sketching and experimenting with ideas all the time. They may spend 6 months working on a sculpture, but many other ideas are bubbling with them at the same time.
My friend Kevin Caron, is an excellent sculptor based in Phoenix. He is a multi-talented 3 dimensional artist. Some of his large sculptures take months to complete. But at the same time he makes jewelry and 3D printed works. I believe these smaller items serve at least 2 purposes: provide works of his at a lower price point that more people can afford, and serve as a creative outlet to help fill in the drought between big projects.
Prolific
Prolific just means doing a lot. It does not describe the quality or finish of any piece.
Most artists I know are always working. They are sketching, even doodling. I am a photographer, so most (not all) of my sketching is done with a camera or the computer.
Sketch with a camera? Yes. If I see something interesting I may take some frames of it, knowing that these will be thrown away because they are not quality. When looking at them later I may decide there really is something there. I will go back and “work” the scene to develop the real image. This often involves sketches from different angles and at different times. When I figure out the personality or gesture I think is interesting then I go for it.
This is something I have the luxury of doing on my home turf. I can return to a subject at will. It is different when I am traveling. It’s now or never. It is a different creative process to try to sum up a scene and optimize it in a second.
And sketching with a computer? Sure. I often go into Photoshop and play “what if” games. What if I take this subject and this texture and this color palette? What kind of results can I create? I am sometimes pleased with the results.
Why be prolific?
I believe creativity is a combination of the skill to do the work combined with some unidentifiable, unmeasurable thing we usually call the “muse”. This, supposedly, is the spirit of creativity that animates us.
I believe there is a muse. I have no idea what it really is, but I believe creativity ebbs and surges unpredictably. If the muse is gone, you can barely do anything creatively. If the muse is with you it seem. like creative ideas are bubbling all the time.
But I don’t believe we are helpless slaves of this spirit. Creativity is also something we develop as a skill. The more we practice it the more easily we can do it.
Creativity favors the prepared mind. – Roy Rowan
The harder you work, the luckier you get. – Anon
You weren’t any good at driving a car until you put in hundreds of hours behind the wheel. You were not a star at any sport you ever played until you had practiced for hundreds of hours. You couldn’t even write until you had practiced it a lot. And as for people learning to play the violin – well that’s a special subject.
A limited resource?
Is creativity a zero sum game? Once we use it up is it all gone? No, I think that’s the wrong way to look at it.
Creativity is like love: the more you give away the more you have. Don’t worry about running out. Your creativity may wax and wane, but you can’t use it up. I believe the more you use it the easier it flows.
Conclusion
If you want to be creative then practice. If you are a painter, go crazy sketching. Most will be junk. That’s not a problem. Try every way you can think of to put paint on a canvas. You will get more skilled with time. If you are a photographer, always have your camera and give yourself permission to use it. Take a lot of pictures. They don’t cost much to throw away. Make the camera an extension of your eye. Learn to use it without thinking. Make sure you can always get the result you wanted.
Be a prolific creator. Do it more and more. Put in the reps. Practice, practice, practice. Then, when the muse shows up, she will find you prepared. It will make her happy and she will lead you to great things.
December 25, 2019
Get Your Head Out
Shame on you. That’s not what I meant. I am suggesting that you need to get your head out of the day-to-day FOMO rat trap most of us are caught up in and reconnect with the amazing world around us.
How much time have you spent on social media this week? How many times did you check your phone in the last 24. hours? Is Facebook where your face is more than with the people around you? Did you successfully keep up with today’s trending happenings? Did Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) keep you glued to your screens because you’re, well, afraid of missing out? How many hours of TV did you watch yesterday?
Isn’t that … Oooh, look at this!
If you identified with this assessment, congratulations! You are exactly what the American tech giants have trained you to be. Or remember that great line in Men In Black “Gentlemen, congratulations. You’re everything we’ve come to expect from years of government training.“
Yes, I’m being harsh for emphasis. But this heads-down, isolated, tech-centric phenomena is recent. It has mostly happened in about the last 10 years. We have allowed ourselves to be deluded. Social media should not be the center of our world. Several other things are much more important. I won’t go into my list, because they represent my values and I am not attempting to sell you on mine. There is, though, one I want to discuss here.
Reconnect
I believe it is more important now than it ever has been to reconnect with the world around us. When did you last take actual time to look at things around you? Have you turned off the radio on your commute and looked out the window? Have you turned off your music and listened to things? When did you last stop to be amazed by a sunset?
Well who am I and what do I have to say about this? I’m nobody important. But I have started doing just what I am recommending. And I am an artist. As an artist, I am in a position to observe the world with a different eye, a different point of view. At this time, my point of view is strongly driven by the theme of reconnecting. I hope to help people along this path.
Addiction?
How do you reconnect with the beautiful world around you? It’s not easy. Just like it is not easy to quit smoking or drinking if you are addicted to those things. Yes, I believe social media and entertainment has become an addiction for many of us. First step is realizing your state. You might actually have to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning and say “Hi. I’m _____, and I’m a Facebook addict”.
If you say that to yourself it will help you start to see the situation in a different light. You might look at yourself and realize you just spent another 2 hours on Facebook (or whatever). Now the kids have gone to bed and you didn’t spend time with them or even interact with them much. Lost opportunity, again. But for what? What about that social media was more important than your family?
I recommend a little book by Svend Brinkmann, “The Joy of Missing Out“. Or a similarly named book “The Joy of Missing Out: Live More by Doing Less“, by Tanya Dalton. (I do not receive any compensation from these). They have the time to express it in much more depth.
What can I offer?
But I’m just an artist. What can I offer you? I can offer images of the amazing world around us. Not vacation shots or selfies at the beach. Rather, thoughtful views of life going on all around us that you do not see unless you slow down and look. Things that help us to remember who we are and where we live.
This kind of art is not just about pretty pictures, although the things we want to reconnect with will typically be pretty. It is something that gives us a shiver. Art like this can cause us to think and remember. It makes us stop and quietly say “wow”. It reminds us of what brings us peace and rest.
Note, I’m not a happiness guru. I am not selling a formula for being happy. I am trying to help you reconnect with the world.
If you surround yourself with images like this it will remind you, every day, what is out there. It will remind you to look and listen, to reconnect with the world.
Check out my images at photos.schlotzcreate.com. Perhaps some of them will resonate with you.
December 11, 2019