Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Craft

Blessing of Technology
I admit to starting to become a Luddite in some ways. I spent a long career developing and working with advanced technology, but I am starting to object to its misuse, especially by giant corporations and the government who spy and track and infringe our rights. But on the other hand, I occasionally step back and look at where technology has taken the art of photography and have to say “wow”. We live in the best of times for digital imaging. Technology can also be a blessing.
Old books
I think what precipitated this is that I have been going back re-reading my library of photography books. Many of these are by well-known experts of their day. It has been an amazing realization that many of the images in some of them would not be exceptional or even noticed today. And in some, the author’s discussion of the images was mostly about exposure and technical problems. Exposure used to be an overriding concern. We have come a very long way.
In particular, I based this on going back over the following books. This is just a fraction of my library that I have looked at recently.
- The Fine Print, by Fred Picker, 1975
- Taking Great Photographs, by John Hedgecoe, 1983
- The Photograph: Composition and Color Design, by Harald Mante, 2010
- Learning to See Creatively, by Bryan Peterson, 1988
- Photography of Natural Things, by Freeman Patterson, 1982
- The Making of Landscape Photographs, by Charlie Waite, 1992
Film
Most of these books were based on film photography. It amazes me the degree of technical sophistication and planning that was required. For instance, in The Fine Print, most of the discussion about each image was about the film choice, adjusting the camera tilt/shift settings, exposure considerations, development chemistry, and printing tricks.
Do you remember reciprocity failure and how to compensate for exposure degradation on long exposures? Do you know exposure chemistries and how to push process a negative to increase contrast? How about dodging and burning during printing? Or making an unsharp mask?
I skipped this whole generation by shooting slide film during those days. This complex process of color or black & white developing and printing was not for me. And I’m an Engineer. I generally like complexity.
I would say that many of the results I notice in these old books are “thoughtful”. They have to be. It was generally a slow process. It could take an hour to set up for a shot and determine the exposure and anticipate the printing that would have to be done.
I am very thankful I was able to skip this. I am able to be much more spontaneous and intuitive in my shooting. My standards have become very different.
Early digital
Did you know Kodak invented digital photography? I bet they wish they didn’t. It put them out of business.
The first prototype in 1975 was an 8 pound monster the size of a toaster. It took 23 seconds to record a blurry black & white image that had to be read by a separate, larger box.
But unfortunately, for them, Kodak suffered the classic problem of large corporations with entrenched technology: they did not aggressively pursue the new technology for fear of cannibalizing their existing products. They could not convince management that they are going to be cannibalized, and they would be better off doing it themselves. This has put a lot of companies out of business. Who is your buggy whip provider?
Many years of technology improvements and innovation were required before we got an actual digital camera, the Dycam Model 1 in 1990. The first practical digital camera, in my opinion, was the Nikon N8008s in 1992. It had a whopping 1.5 million pixels and could do color!
Collecting pixels is not much benefit unless we can do something with them. Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 on the new Macintosh computer from Apple. Hard to believe there was a time before Photoshop. Or Apple 🙂
Engineering improvements
As a note on something I have observed over a long career: don’t underestimate the power of engineering. The early digital components were just toys, but they gave a hint of what was possible. Most people dismissed them as impractical, predicting they would never be at parity with film. Now even the most die hard film enthusiasts would be hard pressed to make a good argument that film is better.
Engineers and scientists and manufacturers and marketers can do amazing things when there is a market to support them.
An anecdote will illustrate. A friend of mine at HP developed the ink jet printer technology. It was black and white and pretty crude and slow. Not too long after the first one was made, he told me that someday I would take an 8×10 print out of one of these printers, in full color, and it would look every bit as good as a Kodak print. I politely told him he was crazy. But now, here in my studio, I have a 17″x22″ ink jet printer that makes color and black & white prints far better than commercial prints of a few years ago. Much larger printers exist, too. It stretches belief.
State of the art
Look at where we are now (mid 2022 when this was written). I shoot a 47MPix mirrorless camera. The lenses have better optical properties than ever before. They support the full resolving power of the camera sensor.
I can shoot great quality at much higher ISO speeds than has ever been possible.
This camera has abandoned the optical viewfinder and has gone to a marvelous little video display instead. It shows a wealth of information that photographers in the 1990s and before would never have dreamed of. Or I could chose to see the information on the camera back instead.
Since the camera is mirrorless, the sensor is live all the time, continually measuring exposure across the entire frame. No more 18% gray reflected light meter to interpret. And this exposure information is real time displayed for me as a live histogram, focus tracking, etc. Whatever I choose to see.
Exposure is a minor consideration most of the time. I am usually in Aperture Priority mode and the camera’s internal computers do a wonderful job of accurately determining exposure from the data it can see from the whole sensor. Plus I have the histogram to look at to check for abnormal conditions. And the sensor has such an exceptional dynamic range (range of light capture ability from darkest tones, to brightest) that even if I miss the exposure by a stop or 2, I probably have sufficient data to correct it in the computer. Besides, I can immediately review any image to double-check it.
An embarrassment of riches
I am almost embarrassed to have all this power at hand. Compared to image making of a few years ago it is like going from Morse Code to an iPhone.
I don’t worry much about exposure now. I can see what I am about to capture. Even before shooting I know from the histogram that it will be well exposed. I can immediately review any images to verify them. No doubts. No anxiously waiting for the developed film to come back to see if I got the shot.
This technology frees me from most of the mundane technical concerns and lets me concentrate on composition and creativity. The resolution and tonal detail in my images is the best in history. The computer processing power and tools are the best in history. Printing or display of images has never been better. The ability to transfer even huge files anywhere in the world in seconds is amazing and unprecedented.
Thank you, technology! It is a golden age of imaging. We have a blessing of technology.
July 27, 2022
Out of Gamut
That seems like a strange thing to say. It’s not a phrase you hear in normal conversation. What can it mean? I have written some about how sensors capture color, but I realize I have not mentioned the gnarly problem of color gamut. Unfortunately, I have been bumping into the problem lately, so I had to re-familiarize myself with it. Some of my new work is seriously out of gamut.
What does gamut mean
Most writers avoid this or give overly simplified descriptions. I’m going to treat you as adults, though. If you really are someone who is completely afraid of technology you might want to skip to the end – or ignore the whole subject.
The concept of gamut is really pretty simple, but you need some specialized knowledge and you have to learn some new things about the world.
I have mentioned the CIE-1931 Chromaticity Diagram before. That sounds scary, but you have probably seen the familiar “horseshoe” diagram of colors. I recommend you watch this video to understand how it was derived and what it means. This is the diagram:
CIE-1931 Chromaticity Diagram
After a lot of research and a lot of measurement, scientists determined that this represents all possible colors a typical human can see. Just the hue – color – not the brightness.
Very simply, a gamut is just a representation of what part of this spectrum a particular device can reproduce or capture.
Show me
The next figure shows the horseshoe with some regions overlayed on it.
There are 3 triangular regions labeled: sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB. They are called color spaces. The diagram is indicating all possible colors that each color space can represent. The smallest one, sRGB, is typical of a computer monitor. It is what will be used when you share a jpg image with someone. It is small but “safe”. We lose a lot of possible colors, but everyone sees roughly the same thing on all their monitors.
Let’s jump to ProPhoto RGB. You can see that it covers the largest part of the horseshoe. In other words, ProPhoto RGB has the largest gamut. It is the best we have for representing image color and most professional photographers use this now. Unless they are doing weddings. That is a different world.
They’re not ideal?
Unfortunately, these color spaces are an ideal. The ProPhoto color space is a model for editing images. No actual devices or printers can give us the entire ProPhoto RBG gamut. Not even close. Most can barely do sRGB.
Here is a diagram of the color space a Canon pro printer can do.
The small horseshoe, labeled 4, is the printer gamut. It is larger then sRGB (3) and, overall, a lot like AdobeRGB (2). Smaller than ProPhoto RGB, which is not listed here.
It looks pretty good, and in general it is. I use one of these printers. But look at what it does not do. Most greens and extremes of cyan and blue and purple and red and orange and yellow cannot be printed. Actually, almost no extremely saturated colors can be printed.
And it is not just printers. Most monitors, even very good ones, are somewhere between sRGB and AdobeRGB spaces. This cannot really be considered a fault of the monitors or printers. The physics and engineering and cost considerations prohibit them from covering the full ideal range.
Any of these colors that I use in an image, that can’t be created by the device I am using, are referred to as “out of gamut”. Outside of the color space the device can produce. This is what I have been running in to lately.
What happens
So what happens when I try to print an image with out of gamut colors? Well, it is not like it blows up or leaves a hole in the page instead of printing anything. Printers and monitors do the best they can. They “remap” the out of gamut colors to the closest they can do. As artists, we have some control over that process, as we will see in the next section.
But the reality is that these out of gamut colors will lose detail, be washed out and without tonal contrast. When we get to looking at the print, we will say “yech, that is terrible”. Then we need to do something about it.
What can we do about it
There are things to do to mitigate the problem. Here is where we need to understand enough about the technology to know what to do.
First, we have tools to help visualize the problem. Both Lightroom Classic and Photoshop have a Soft Proof view. It will simulate the actual output for a particular printer and paper. You can also view gamut clipping for the monitor. Yes, because of gamut problems you may not be seeing the image’s real color information on your monitor.
Both Lightroom and Photoshop have versions of saturation adjustments and hue adjustment. These can help bring the out of control colors back into a printable or viewable range. With practice we can learn to tweak these settings to balance what is possible with what we want to see.
But even if we give up and decide to print images with out of gamut colors, there are options. the print settings have a great feature called “rendering intent”. They are a way to give guidance to the print engine on how we want it to handle these wild colors. Several different rendering intents are available, but the 2 that are most commonly used are Relative and Perceptual.
Rendering Intents
I use Perceptual intent most often, at least in situations where the are significant out of gamut colors. Using the Perceptual directive signifies to the print driver that I am willing to give up complete tonal accuracy for a result that “looks right”. The driver is free to “squish” the color and tone range in proportional amounts to scale the whole image into a printable range. I don’t do product photography or portraits, so I am usually not fanatical about absolute accuracy. How they work this magic is usually kept as a trade secret. But secret or not, it often does a respectable job of producing a good output.
The other common intent is Relative. This basically prints the data without modification, except that it clips out of gamut colors. That sounds severe, but the reality is that most natural scenes will not have any significant gamut problems, so no clipping will occur.
This is a great intent for most types of scenes, because no tonal compression will take place.
The answer
The answer is “your mileage may vary”. Most images of landscapes and people will not have serious out of gamut problems. When you do, this information may help you get the results you want. When you have a problem, turn on the soft proofing and try the Relative and Perceptual rendering intents. Look at the screen to see if one is acceptable. If not, go back and play with saturation and colors .
Why do I have problems? Well, I’m weird. I have been gravitating to extremely vibrant, highly saturated images. I like the look I am trying to get, but it can be hard to get it onto a print. The image at the top of this article is a slice of an image I am working with now. It is seriously out of gamut. I need to work on it a lot more to be able to print it without loss of color detail. Ah, technical limitations.
July 20, 2022
I Don’t Know
How did it get to where we think we are supposed to know everything? Why is it wrong to say “I don’t know“? I think it would be horrible to believe I knew everything. Where would be the opportunity for discovery? To be able to let my curiosity run free? I am quick to tell anyone I don’t know, if I don’t.
Fallacy of certainty
Believing we have to know everything is a trap. It will doom us to failure and disappointment. I would say there are 3 general classes of knowledge:
1. Our values.
2. The things we interact with on a regular basis.
3. Everything else “out there”.
As a person you have to know your values. Those things you will not bend. At what point will you fight for what you believe? These are the bedrock principles we build our lives on.
In the next circle, we all do our jobs and use a lot of technology every the day. We probably drive a car or use a computer for various tasks or bank or shop online. It is important to being able to function in society that we understand enough about these things to be able to use them. That doesn’t mean we have to have a deep understanding. I was an engineer in the technology/computer industry for a career, and I absolutely know I do not fully understand all aspects of everything I use. In most cases it is OK to just understand enough to efficiently get the task done and minimize surprises. Maybe just to know enough to know how to not be stupid.
Then there is everything else. The world is so big and interconnected and complex that no one knows how or why most of it works. I don’t understand micro or macro economics, and I’m not sure anyone else does, either. NFTs still seems like a Ponzi scheme to me. I don’t understand why people become zombies when they enter politics. Why do bad things happen to good people? I don’t know and I will never figure it all out. Nor do I have to.
No one knows even most of everything
We listen to the talking heads on the news spouting meaningless information with full confidence. We know they are probably wrong, but they speak with authority. Therefore, we distrust ourselves. And after a while we realize they don’t know anything, either. When neither side of the debate or the “experts” can be trusted, we tend to check out, become cynical and angry. Don’t forget, though, that they have an off button.
There is a saying called Sturgeon’s Law that says “90% of everything is crap”. I have my own corollary to that: Sturgeon was an optimist.
If most of the information you get is bad, what do you do? Hopefully you start to trust yourself. Learn to research things that are important to you. Research means even listening to people whose opinions you don’t like. You can’t just listen to your favorite guru who says things you like to hear. Make your own decisions. Build enough knowledge to trust your instincts and decisions. Don’t believe anything you hear until you check it out.
Curiosity
Too much ranting about heavy stuff. Let’s talk about art!
After a long time of working up to being an artist, I have concluded that I have to follow my curiosity and trust my instincts. Sounds simple, but it is sometimes hard.
I have spent time at times doing things in a way that they would be accepted by other people. It wasn’t entirely wasted, but is seemed kind of phony, and it was. I realized I was making someone else’s art. I don’t do that now.
But do we follow the fashion of the day? Do whatever we have to do to be accepted by the ones who style themselves as the opinion leaders? Who anointed them with this divine authority? They are just people with opinions.
I find that most of my best work happens when my inspiration is to ask “what if?” or when I say “I have never seen this like this before”. And do something with it.
Adventure
Do you lead a boring, monotonous life? Or is every day a new adventure? Much of the choice is ours. It depends on our attitude.
I believe that artists have the opportunity to lead lives of adventure and excitement and personal growth all the time. Even if we never leave our town.
Adventure is exploring and finding new things that excite us. We don’t have to go to exotic locations to find that. Our point of view determines our adventure.
Nearly every day I go walking in the areas around my studio. I always take my camera. It is covering the same ground. Occasionally I create a new route, but there are only so many variations. Sometimes I get bored with it. But I am coming to realize that when I am bored I am not letting my curiosity roam free. If my attitude is better I am likely to discover new things or appreciate something for the first time. The same with driving through Kansas. It can be a nice adventure.
Artists are on a journey of discovery
As artists, we should be explorers. Not discovering unknown lands, but finding new things about ourselves and the world we live in. These discoveries could be as close as our back yard.
To do that, we need to be always asking questions: What is this? What else is it? Can I see it different? What if this was combined with that? What if …?
At the root, all of these questions are based on the assumption that I don’t know – but I will explore it to see where I can take it. Not knowing is fundamental to being creative. When we don’t know, it should excite and inspire us.
Forget about the rest of the world that is pressing in and telling us what we should see and believe. We are capable of deciding for our self. Being an artist means being comfortable with high levels of ambiguity. And the accompanying joy of finding new answers or showing the world something they have never seen.
Be yourself. Trust yourself.
June 29, 2022
The Making of “Nothing Is Quite What It Seems”
Today I’m going to discuss the making of this image. I created this abstract image titled “Nothing Is Quite What It Seems” from disparate elements put together to achieve the surreal landscape effect I wanted.
But as the title suggests, nothing is what it seems to be.
Base, Idea
When i saw the thing creating the basic silhouette shapes I knew it needed to be a scene of dead trees in a barren landscape. In reality, though, these shapes are actually cracks in ice on a frozen lake in Colorado.
I framed the scene up to isolate these 2 cracks that looked the most to me like dead trees. The “brush” in the foreground is the near edge of the ice, looking through to some rocks close under the surface.
The processing required some touch-up editing and some dodge and burn and contrast enhancement. There was a little hue-saturation enhancement to bring out more of the yellow rocks.
All of this was done as a smart object in Photoshop. Because I wanted to keep my options open I use smart objects a lot. They give me the freedom to come back and continue editing later. I don’t like to commit permanent changes.
Texture
With the basic form set, I started building texture. Tone adjustments in the smart object of the base layer helped. Bringing up the contrast brought forward more of the texture of the ice. This is the dimples and spots all over the image.
To abstract it a little more I used the oil paint filter in Photoshop to soften the edges and give it a more painterly and abstract look.
Color treatment
I knew I wanted to change the color palette and make it look like it could be in an abandoned homestead on the Colorado plains. But I also wanted to layer on more interesting texture. After trying many overlays I settled on a beautiful rusty truck panel. The image I used is part of a 1948 Coleman Truck. Pretty rare, and it was aging beautifully.
The truck had large rust patterns and also areas of old yellow and green paint. Using this to establish the colors across the image worked for me. This truck overlay is also handled as a smart object. Careful blending achieved the look I wanted without it looking like a rusty truck.
Finishing
The final polishing and tweaking takes a lot of time, even though it doesn’t make sweeping changes. As we used to say in software development, the first 90% of the project takes 100% of the schedule. The last 10% takes the other 100% of the schedule.
There was final dodging and burning to do, bits of masking and retouching. Of course, there was a little bit of final color tweaking to my satisfaction. One of the reasons I use a flexible workflow is that I am prone to tweak things after I have looked at them a while.
Process
A comment on my workflow. Although this is a fairly complex image, nothing is permanently locked down or committed. While writing this I was able to open up all the layers and smart objects and see everything about how they were processed. I could still go in and change or modify anything in the image. And I did make some tweaks. I told you I can’t leave images alone.
And as a very experienced Photoshop user I know new tools will be developed and I will learn new ways of doing things. These will lead to new ways to process images that I will want to take advantage of in the future.
This is the way I choose to work this way on most of my images. It doesn’t take longer and it preserves total flexibility. I need that. I change my mind often!
Summary
I like the finished image. It seems to be a surreal Colorado landscape of dead trees, but it contains no trees or plains or anything else that it appears to be. It is truly not quite what it seems. Is this more interesting than a straight shot of the ice?
Lightroom and Photoshop are powerful and addictive tools. Know when to use them and know when to stop. Otherwise you may never stop. It’s a great time to be doing imaging.
May 18, 2022
It’s Messy
Despite the image some artists try to present, the artistic process is messy. At least, for me. It is not a clear, linear path from inspiration to end result. Sometimes things don’t work. We hit dead ends. We change our minds. Even after arriving at what I thought was the end product, I may decide I don’t like it. When people look at the result, they cannot see the messy way we got there.
Vague goals
I can’t speak for other artists, only myself. Most of the time I only have a vague notion of what I intend to achieve when I start an image. Sure, I may have a general idea, or a theme, or I may be thinking of a project I am working on. But that is a kind of an idea, not a plan. It is definitely not precise.
I hear artists describe having a definite plan from the beginning, with everything sketched out in detail. I sometimes envy them. But most of the time I think that sounds like a boring process. There is no room for inspiration on the spot. When I start pulling a final image together I often let what I see on the screen guide and inspire me to the end. I am glad I work in a medium that is very malleable.
So I guess I’m a bad artist because I don’t know for sure where I am going when I start a work. Or maybe this is the process that works for me. I like to be flexible and adaptive.
Evolving ideas
Another side of my adaptive process is that I am open to exploring new ideas as I go. Ideas tend to build on each other, spawning new ones or modifying what I was thinking. I often end up seeing an image in a completely different way from where I started.
For this to happen, I have to be open and receptive. Being locked into a rigid plan blocks this exploration and learning. I seldom hesitate to change my vision part way through the process. Even to discard an image because it no longer is shaping up the way I now see it.
You could argue that I would be more efficient to do my experimenting and work out my vision before starting to refine an image. Perhaps you are right, but that is what I had to do when I was designing major software projects as an Engineer. The reality is that I am too visual to do that now as an artist. I have to see it, then make modifications.
Mistakes
I freely admit I make mistakes. I don’t plan them, but I don’t necessarily see them as failures.
An “oops” is often followed by a “huh, that’s interesting; I wonder if I could use that?” Sometimes a mistake will open up a new view or thought process. It can make me see new possibilities.
These are often happy accidents. They can lead to a creative new end and maybe even a modification of my “style”. The result of a mistake is often a realization of something I could do but I’ve never thought of it before. It is unlikely the mistake creates a finished work that I love, but it informs a new direction I could explore. It is a growth opportunity.
Seeing new opportunities
Opportunity is a key word in this process. My background is a long history of realism. So it can be hard for me to “loosen up” and take an image in an unexpected direction.
To counter that, I often force myself to spend some time considering unusual processing or unlikely seeming combinations of images. Most of these experiments are failures, in the sense that they seldom make it to the final image. However, they can inform my vision. There may be some aspect of the processing that I like and work in to future images. Or it may encourage me to try something else along the same line that I do end up liking.
We live in great times for exploration. Our image processing tools are the best anyone has ever had. Our high quality digital images have the most detail and potential for post processing that has ever existed. The barriers to our vision are mostly internal. We just can’t see it or give our self permission to go there.
Failure to recognize
Have you ever viewed an image in your editing software and been really undecided about it? It is not what you wanted. Your instinct is to delete it. But something way in the back of your mind says to keep it for a while.
That happens to me. I have said before there is something cathartic about deleting images I don’t want to have around. But sometimes I need to keep them. To let them age a while. Or maybe to let my subconscious work on them a while.
Now realistically, most of the time, when I look at them later, I know there wasn’t really anything of interest there. But sometimes… That is the joy of this. Sometimes there is an undiscovered gem. Very rarely I look at one of these saved images and realize my subconscious was trying to show me something I did not perceive at the time. This particular image may not be great, but there is a realization there that can inform my work going forward.
That is an a-ha moment. A growth opportunity. After I get over beating myself up for not realizing the potential at the time I can add it to my repertoire of situations and patterns to look for. I have grown as an artist. Maybe it can even help me be more receptive while I am shooting.
The image with this article is one of those slow to recognize ones. Look it over and see how many pairs of things you can find. It amazes me. I did not consciously recognize that when I shot it, but I think that is what was drawing me to it.
April 20, 2022