Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Artist

Photography is Human
Photography is a human activity. It is by humans and for humans. Why else would anything you call art be done?
By humans
Photography is a uniquely human product, as is all art. Humans have an innate desire to record and to express. We preserve memories or pour out what we feel or even just want to make something “pretty” or significant.
No other creature feels a need to produce lasting works of visual art.
I do not believe it is just because we have opposable thumbs or have mastered tool making. It is much deeper than that.There is something we feel and have to express. We want to leave some record of our passage through this life.
And this is a near universal, spontaneous need. It just comes out because we are human.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
For humans
Who do we create art for? Isn’t it always and only for humans?
There is no need to make a large landscape mural for your dog. He will not appreciate it. He may be your best friend, even almost a surrogate child, but he won’t even notice the art you created for him.
But don’t assume quantity of views is a valid measure of worth, or that we have failed unless we have public showings attracting large numbers of people. I am an example of that. I have had showings, but I am clear that my main audience is myself. That is, ultimately, I am the one who gets to approve my art. But, then, I am a human. My art is for humans.
I believe you can have a rewarding satisfaction of being an artist even if you only show your work to a select set of friends. The value of our art should not be measured in the amount of publicity we get or the number of collectors holding our work.
I love it when other people see my work. Some are even kind enough to make encouraging comments. That is a kind of connection and validation. It feels good since it comes from humans.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Uniquely human
Humans create art for other humans. We are the only creatures who can value or even recognize it. Unlike your dog, people can be touched by an image. Viewing it can translate to multiple feelings and emotions in another human.
Animals don’t create art. Fish don’t either. Only humans. We have a need to create.
If we visited some tribes making cave art in France 20,000 years ago and asked them why they did it, what do you think they would say? I doubt they would say they were decorating the cave so that when they moved out and a bear moved in, it would be happier. No, they would probably just say they felt a need to create and to record events and to establish aspirational goals for younger people to follow. And because they liked it. That is human.
Whenever we live and wherever we go we feel the need to paint on our walls.
The largest AI model might, with good prompts, make a picture that would be acceptable for some uses. But it could never step back and look at it with satisfaction and think “Wow, i like that”.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Not just taking pictures
To be clear, I am only talking about photography intended to be art. What is often called fine art photography. There are other kinds.
I guess that most of the photographic images captured daily are taken by machines. Try to picture the vast amount of automatically captured imagery. Police surveillance cameras on every corner, speed cameras, security cameras on every business and house, dash cams, body cams, Google Street View captures. More than we can probably imagine.
There must be millions of hours of video and millions of still images captured by robots every day. However, none of those robots are emotionally attached to the images. The machines did not feel excitement or sadness or awe when they “looked” at any of the frames. They did not feel anything. And the machines did not take the images with the goal of causing happiness or warmth or longing or any other emotion in human viewers.
Those automatically captured images are not art, and they are not for humans, really. Some may be used by humans for a particular purpose, but none of it is printed and framed and hung on their wall to be called art.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
First, live life
Before we are artists, we are humans. In life we experience joy and success and sadness and loss. We grow from these experiences. Our values and life views develop. It gives us a point of view. Sharing this point of view is called art.
Don’t photograph just to be technically perfect. That is shallow and dead. Photography is a beautifully technical craft. Technical skill is required to make an interesting image, but it does not by itself make an image great. Machines can do technical perfection.
Don’t photograph to “make art”. That is a false goal. Photography is a perfectly valid art form. However, if we don’t have anything to say, we will say that. Make images that are art because you are an artist and have feelings or a view that you want to share with your viewers.
Photography that is art comes from life. Living and experiencing is something only a human can do. Don’t give up your humanity to machines or algorithms. Live the life only you can live. Be who only you can be. Let it come through in your images.
It’s not about metrics or hits or any other numbers. It is about you seeing and expressing something and being able to help other people to see and feel it too.
Postscript
Steven Levy of Wired Magazine recently gave the Commencement talk at Temple University. A topic on graduates minds is will they lose their jobs to AI. Steven addressed this and had what I consider an insightful observation.
In his conclusion he said “The lords of AI are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make their models think LIKE accomplished humans. You have just spent four years at Temple University learning to think AS accomplished humans. The difference is immeasurable.”
You are a human. Art is a human activity. Only you can make art.
April 30, 2025
Be The 1%
We can choose to be the 1% of photographers. Those who make prints. A print is a special thing with it’s own life.
The 1%
I’m not talking about that 1% we hear talked about – the richest people in the world or the country. The latest data I could find for the USA says that, on average across the country, to be in the 1% you need a salary of about $600,000 or a net worth of $11 Million. Another article said that 1% of the people in the world own over 50% of the total household wealth.
I am not bringing this up to get into any discussion of income inequality, investing practices, demographics, or anything related to that.
No, I am referring to a group of photographers we can easily choose to join. Peter Eastway speculates that only about 1% of photographers make prints. Why do you think we don’t print more?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
What is a print?
First, what do I mean by a print? This may seem obvious, but I want to make sure we are on the same page, so to speak.
By a print I am referring to an image presented in a physical medium. A print is an object with weight and space and presence. We can hold it and touch it. We perceive it with our physical senses. And it is “permanent”. That is, it persists unchanged over time.
A print is an enduring expression of the artist’s intent at the time. I say at the time, because it is quite possible for my intent to change with time. Today’s print may be quite different from one of the same image file 10 years ago. I can come to see it different. That is natural. I am the artist.
What is a print not? It is not an image on a screen. Not your computer monitor or a iPad or your phone. It is not a fleeting image scrolled by on social media.
Screens are important in the production of our art, but they should not be the goal. Psychologically, we know that what we see on a screen is ephemeral. It has no permanence. We discount it easily.
Why a print?
A print is tangible and persistent. It is an artifact in its own right. That is, it is physical. It is an object. We can hand it off to a client who buys it and it becomes their possession.
By giving the print this life of its own, we are creating a new piece of art. It is no longer under the control of the artist. Kind of like a child growing up and going out on their own. They are your family, but they have their own life now.
As the artist, I can no longer “huddle over it” and protect and explain it. It is on its own. Now it is hanging on a wall. Maybe in someone’s home. Maybe in a gallery. But no matter where, it is now perceived for itself in isolation. It has to explain itself, fend for itself.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
What does it do to our thought process?
Deciding to make a print changes our perception of what we are doing.
For one thing, we have to commit our interpretation of what we see or feel in the image. Once we make the print, we can’t come back next week and change it. If we do, it becomes a different piece of art.
And we will go through a more stringent selection process to pick it. Out of my thousands of good images, why print this one? Does it do a better job of representing my view on the subject? Is it a more perceptive representation of something I feel? Will this give my viewers more insight than the thousands of other images I could have picked? Is this an image I will hand to the world and say “this is me?”
And making a print involves new creative decisions. What size should it be? Some images seem to call to be large while others seem to prefer being small. Should this be a paper print or canvas or metal or acrylic? Will it look best as glossy or matte? Sure, some of the decisions will be dictated by the intended application. But many are purely artistic.
And there are technical considerations that come in now. Can I print it and mount it myself or must I send it out to a service bureau to be done? The selected media imposes constraints on the image itself. If the desired effect is soft and ethereal then a matte finish may be best. But if the image relies on sharp detail a glossy substrate will make that pop more.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Technical considerations
Creating a good print is a specialized process that requires some detailed knowledge. The fundamental problem is one of basic physics. Screens generate light and emit it. It is an RGB mix and it is additive. That is, red + green makes orange.
We see prints by reflected light. Light hits the surface of the print and what bounces back is what we see. It is a subtractive process. The ink absorbs some colors. We see the reflected light that is not absorbed. To make less red you add cyan. Cyan is the opposite of red. More cyan absorbing red means less red reflected.
This fundamental difference means that a print will never look exactly like the image on screen. How close we can come is one of the challenges. How close we need to come is an artistic judgment.
One barrier I hit a lot is color gamut limitations. Print media generally has a smaller color range than our computer monitors. It probably has a smaller range than the color space we are working in. No physical media can print the whole ProPhoto RGB space, for instance.
Editing the image for printing is a task on it’s own. We load profiles for the media and printer and inks that we are using. A special profiling view is switched on so we see a simulation of what the final print will look like. This is, at best, a fair but not exact model. The reality is it may require several rounds of test prints and re-edits to get to a final print we like.
It can be a lot of work, but it is part of the artistic process. This is work we have to do to “birth” the print as its own entity.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Viewing it
We have gone through all of this work and expense to create a print. Why? Was it worth it?
This is a personal evaluation.
Sometimes you are disappointed with the result. Some images just do not seem to print well. That could mean we did not choose the best medium or size.
But most of the time you will feel the satisfaction of creating something new. Because the print is a new work of art. It is a distinct physical object with a life of its own. It lives in the world and is evaluated by viewers.
We did our best job of composition and subject selection and lighting and a host of other things. We edited it carefully and prepared it for printing. Now it passes into another realm. We have tried to guide the viewers to see what we saw, but now they are on their own to discover it.
The child leaves home and starts its own life. We are proud of it, but we cannot control it. It is not ours anymore. The viewers evaluate it on its own independently.
Something tugged their interest enough to take a look at it. Maybe we can draw them in and take them on a journey they did not anticipate. That is joy for the artist and the viewer.
Take the leap. Be one of the 1% of photographers who make prints. It can change your art. And it can be a legacy.
April 9, 2025
Too Many Photographs?
Do you shoot too many photographs? Can we shoot too many? I think this is a question we can only answer individually. A lot of it depends on why we are shooting.
Easy to do
We are blessed with amazing digital technology that allows us to frame and compose and take photos rapidly. And some of our cameras can vacuum up 20 or more images a second if we want to. Memory cards are so large now that we can keep stuffing images into them for days and days.
This is one of the things I love about photography compared to other arts. The way I shoot is usually spontaneous. See it – take it. Maybe think about it some and try some alternate compositions. Maybe.
Working like this fits my personality. I have shot for so many years that much of the thought process of composition, exposure, etc. is subconscious.
But a downside of this is that it is easy to shoot a lot of frames. Sometimes more than I ever intended.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Travel
One of those times when we take many more images than usual is when we travel. Everything seems new and different and special. We are compelled to shoot. And we do.
On a recent 3 week trip to France I shot over 4000 images. And I think I am rather disciplined. I know people who take many thousands more images than me on a trip.
This is not a problem, unless it becomes one for us. It is fun and exciting. A benefit of traveling as a photographer is to take new and interesting images. We reward ourselves by putting our self in a “target rich” environment with our photography equipment.
We seem to give ourselves permission to take more pictures when traveling. I don’t know why. We should feel total permission all the time.
Projects
Another thing that seems to generate a lot of images is a project. Assigning our self a theme or topic to focus on for a time can be energizing. Directing our attention can stimulate new energy and creativity.
But it takes a lot of great candidate images to put together a story line and a few excellent selects for the final portfolio. When we focus on a project we suddenly see opportunities in places we never dreamed. That can lead to a lot of shots.
There aren’t any metrics that matter for something like this. But for something to discuss, I figure that to get to a final set of 20 images for a project I need maybe 100-200 strong images that do a great job of representing the theme. To get to those strong selects may require hundreds of attempts. And this is for 1 short term project.
I have some long term projects that I have accumulated a thousand or more candidate images for. And counting.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Arguments against
It seems to me that the arguments against shooting a lot of images come down to 2 things: cost and time.
It is said that shooting digital images is free. This is not true. If you care about treating your images as an important asset, they have to be managed and curated. This is an overhead expense we have to consider.
Cost
Disk space is getting pretty cheap, but that is offset by the quantity we require. I have an obscene amount of disk space. My main image storage is a 20TByte RAID disk. It is roughly half full. In addition, I am a fanatic about backup. A Time Machine backup runs every hour incrementally backing up to an external hard disk. In addition, I have another large network RAID disk for backup plus yet another external drive. These get complete backups of my images and Lightroom catalog every night.
And once a week I run a backup that I keep offsite for more safety.
Rotating magnetic drives wear out and have to be replaced. I have a stack of bad ones waiting for me to get into a mood to smash with a sledge hammer. I almost got there this week.
This setup is definitely not cheap and has to be managed.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Time
But that is “just” money. There is another hidden cost that sneaks up on us.
It takes a tremendous amount of time to load, examine, cull, sort, tag, and file all these images. And then the promising ones require a lot of editing. This can add up to a major time investment.
Without a disciplined approach to managing our images, we basically end up with a “shoe box” full of pictures. A very large shoe box where is is almost impossible to locate an image we have in mind. How do we search for candidates for a project if we have 10’s of thousands of random files on the computer but no organization system?
I spend more time selecting and filing and editing than I do shooting. And I shoot almost every day.
I consider this a major unaccounted cost of shooting. The cost is in time. Time that we cannot apply to more creative parts of our art.
Learning/growing
Have I convinced you to shoot less? I hope not. That is not my goal.
I believe the benefits of shooting a lot outweigh the costs. I just believe in being upfront about the costs so we can make an informed decision.
For one thing, improving requires a lot of practice to hone and refine our skills. Our vision will only develop over time as we come to understand what we like and are drawn to.
Cartier-Bresson said your first 10,000 photos are the worst. I think that is true, but it does not mean your next 10,000 photos will be great. Just better. It takes a lot of practice.
Photography is a combination of art and craft. Both of those improve with practice. but only if we are honestly evaluating our work. Be your own worst critic.
Linus Pauling said “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.” I think this applies to photography as well. Are all of your shots keepers? I hope not. If they are, you are not out on the edge pushing yourself to try new things.
Shoot a lot, experiment, do foolish things that probably will not work. Who knows? That is one way discoveries are made. And it can be a lot of fun.
Why
But most fundamentally, why are you shooting? Is it to make money? Is it to get likes on social media?
Know what your goals are. I cannot criticize your goals. That is your personal choice.
I can say I have come to understand that in my life, my goal in making pictures is the joy of creating something that gives me pleasure. The satisfaction of being creative and creating something I consider beautiful or interesting. Selling prints is welcome and a pleasant validation, but not my driving motivation.
I am my main audience. If other people like my work, that is nice and it makes me feel good. But if they hate it, I will still create for myself. If I like my images, I am still being successful, even if everybody else dislikes them.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
No
So no, I’m not shooting too many photographs. They are for me. You will see few of them, so you do not care how many I shoot.
I shoot when I travel. I shoot for projects. Just walking around my hometown gives me all the reason I need to shoot something interesting. Something that no one else was likely to see in the same way.
My art is an important creative outlet in my life. It keeps me young (relatively). Art makes me think and keep a mindful attitude in the world around me. It feeds my curiosity.
This is worth it to me despite the cost and time involved in keeping up with it. Whether I shoot many or few images does not matter. What matters to me is the art I am able to create and the satisfaction I get from it.
I sincerely hope you are able to get as much joy from your work.
April 2, 2025
Choose Your Style
Many photographers wonder if they have a style, especially if they are fairly new to the game. Do you ever look at the wonderful work other photographers are publishing and think it would best to choose your style to be like them? Don’t.
What is considered a style?
There is no hard and fast rule that defines what a “style” is. To some, it is the type of subjects you shoot. That is, they see little or no difference between style and genre. Here is another list, longer almost to the point of being absurd, but still talking mostly about what the subject is.
Others refer to photographic style as the effects you use to make your final picture. Our phones have an abundance of them. You can find many sets of “styles” available to purchase for use in LIghtroom Classic or Photoshop. They are mostly shortcuts for making your picture look a lot like another artist’s work.
More advanced authors extend the concept to include not only what you shoot, but how you shoot it..This is starting to get to the point.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
My view
When you look at some famous photographer’s work, can you make a good guess who made the image? That is because they have an established and recognizable style.
In my view, style is not as much about what you shoot as it is about what the final image looks like. This final image is not only a function of what the subject is and how you “treat” it to get the look you want, but how you were thinking about it, and the lens you choose and how you frame and compose and expose it. In other words, your own viewpoint on it.
You have a point of view, the way you see the world around you that is different from anyone else. This determines your style. It comes naturally.
That is why, when you see a print of a grand landscape with superb detail and the blue sky printed almost to black, there is a good chance that is Ansel Adams. When you see another black & white image, but blurred in a long time exposure and overall very dark, it may well be a Cole Thompson. Those things are not certain, but they have a defined style.
Can you copy one?
One of the ways we learn is to copy. It is instructive, and can be fun, to try on the style of famous artists to see if it “fits” us. We may find bits and pieces that we adopt.
But most of the time we will decide soon that that was instructive, but I’m done with it. Maybe we’ll go off to copy someone else for a while.
Ask yourself why you are copying someone else’s style. Is it because you admire their work and want to explore it in more depth? Are you really searching and trying to figure out what your style is? Is it because one is “popular” and you think it will help you to sell more?
I can’t question your motives, but I can predict that you will eventually give up trying to copy a style and settle down to doing your own work. It is hard to just copy. You are faking it. Besides, in a new situation, how would you copy someone if you haven’t seen any similar work they have done?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
How do you develop yours?
In most cases, you don’t. What you do is shoot a lot. Cartier-Bresson said your first 10,000 photos are the worst. I think one of the things he was telling us is that we have to experiment a lot to find out who we are.
Yes, we can copy other people’s styles to see if we can learn anything from them. If we are lucky, we might have good mentor to give us honest feedback. But ultimately, it is up to each of us to figure out who we are as artists.
I believe a style is something we look back on and discover. It is not something we plan to get to someday.
Look in your image catalog
How do we know if we have a style and understand what it is? A good start is examining your image catalog. I am using Lightroom terminology, but it applies to whatever sorting and filing system you use.
I assume you have a system for grading your images. You know which you consider your best. Have you put together portfolios? Small collections of your very best work organized by subject or project or location, for instance. If not, pick out, say, your 50 best images. Be brutal. This is important and you do not have to show them to anyone else.
Now go through them carefully and examine them from the point of view of what they can tell you about your artistic likes and beliefs. Are most of them landscapes? Are they predominantly square cropped or black & white or low key? Can you see that your favorite pictures are typically shot with a certain lens?
What about the subject matter? Are your favorites more likely to be a rusty truck than a portrait? Do you favor highly detailed or very simple? Sharp or intentional camera movement (ICM)? Travel locations or mostly close to home?
There are too many questions to enumerate. The idea is to look at this body of work and figure out who you are as an artist. This is you. This is your style. It certainly does not mean this is all you can do. It is just what you naturally gravitate to.
Now you can stop trying to be someone else and concentrate on developing yourself.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Be who you are
This is a very enlightening exercise. You will probably come away thinking “wow, I have a style!” It can be very hard for us to think about and accept our style. That is just something that other people have. People who are real artists.
But yes, you do have a style. It is unique to you, so there is no need to try to copy someone else’s. Your point of view and values will come through in your images, if you are being honest with yourself.
Here is a recent personal example. I was watching a video by a photographer talking about his style. It wasn’t very interesting to me and I was about to turn it off when he said something that caught me. He said he understands his style to be very simple. He is a portrait photographer and he uses simple lighting, plain backgrounds, and basic head shot poses.
That lit up something in me. I hadn’t considered something like simplicity a dimension of style.
I did the exercise I recommended above and saw clearly for the first time that I like complexity, detail, extremes of color and contrast and action. That is a common thread through many of my favorite images.
What does it mean? Nothing in itself. It is just some insight on my work. But I understand myself a little better now. I will be less surprised when I see I am being drawn to these.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Choose your style
I started with the notion of whether or not we should choose our style. I hope I have established that you don’t really choose your style. Your style chooses you. You can imitate someone else’s style for a while for the education and experience, but ultimately we find ourselves drawn back to what comes naturally to us.
Don’t fight it. Don’t worry about it. Relax. Be yourself.
But to be yourself, you have to continually learn and practice and improve. It is a lifelong quest.
March 12, 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