Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Craft

Indoor Time
During the times when going out to shoot is difficult or impossible, you can still use your indoor time to develop your creativity and refine some critical skills for your photography practice. Just being indoors should not mean we are shut down. We can claim this indoor time as a opportunity to build ourselves up.
Forced indoor time
A reality today is than many are locked indoors with few opportunities to get outside. What are you doing with this new found time? When this virus started nearly a year ago I bet most of us had all kinds of upbeat plans for self-improvement activities. We could make a significant dent on our reading list, learn a new language, catch up on years of photo filing, use that rusting exercise bike, etc. How’s that working out for you?
After we got bored and depression set in we have probably gained a few pounds, played too many hours of video games, and binged on Amazon Prime. Time to make a New Year resolution to take back control of our attitude and refocus on our art.
It’s not too late. The opportunities are still there. Get off the couch and start working that list again. Remember your earlier resolve. Just because you’re indoors doesn’t mean you brain is shut off.
Bad weather
Weather is another factor that shuts some of us indoors. I live in Colorado. Winters here can get rather cold and snowy. But that is cyclic. It happens every year. I plan it into my week. I may get out and walk less, but I get out. Maybe I don’t travel as much, but I still do some.
A reality for me is that bad weather creates opportunity for some of the types of images I really like. Things on the edge or extreme: the edge of a storm, a raging blizzard, ominous clouds. These are things most sane people do not go out to see. I do. What does that say?
It’s cold at times, but I can dress for it. There might be some pain, but that is life. If a certain amount of pain is a cost of getting images that please me. I’m willing. And I find that when I come back in, with my fingers aching and my beard covered over with ice, I am happy. I am proud that I made myself do it. I feel better about myself and invigorated. There is the satisfaction that I went out and tried instead of sitting at home telling myself the weather was too bad to get out.
Let me disclaim that I have many years of experience doing this, I get pretty good clothes for the climate, I have a good 4 wheel drive, and I carry proper emergency equipment. Don’t jump off a cliff without looking.
Seek ideas
OK, you’re stuck inside. How can you pursue your art? Maybe you can’t be making your images right now, but you can be getting ready to hit it strong when you can. Browse other artist’s sites. (Sorry, blatant plug.) Be amazed at their work and gather inspiration to weave into your style. Not to copy but to motivate new ideas.
Look, too, for interviews and discussions with artists. These are more prevalent these days because so many of us are feeling very isolated. Artists, among others, are are starting to reach out more to build community. Some are inspiring and motivating.
Seriously consider online training, like KelbyOne or Creative Live. It costs a few bucks, but really, less than a Netflix subscription. And they are more valuable to your career. Or there are many sources of free videos, such as B&H Explora. The Learn Photography section has an amazing amount of material. Their series on Understanding Exposure is very good.
And of course You Tube has more photography videos than you could watch in a lifetime. For free. There are valuable ones if you can find them. Your mileage may vary.
Focus on skill building
A specific suggestion is to focus on improving your post processing skills during this time. Most of us could use more depth in Lightroom or Photoshop or your tool of choice. This is a great opportunity.
“For photographers, Adobe Photoshop is still the gold standard of editing applications, and the one to which all others are compared. And even if you’re not a Photoshop user, its omnipresence almost acts like the foundation of a communal language from which to talk about editing photos in general.” – Bjorn Petersen
Yes, love them or hate them, Lightroom and Photoshop are the basis of a shared cultural experience for photographers worldwide. It is useful to know whether or not you use it.
The sources I mention above have a lot of good training for this. And you have extra time now for practice and experimentation. That is a great benefit. This new information should be used to build competence. A lot of repetition is necessary before they are ready to be incorporated into your workflow.
It is not a skill until you can actually do it. The more familiar and experienced you are with your craft, the easier and more fun it becomes. It can be a valuable goal to decide to come out of this with an improved workflow and ability to better craft your art.
Opportunity
Opportunity is there. It is always there. My glass has been half empty for too long. I am trying to re-frame my viewpoint. I’m done with the “poor me” attitude.
The same opportunities are still there. Turn off the TV and Facebook and remember what your creativity is pushing you to do. Start with one little thing. Something you would enjoy and can do in an hour or less. Do it. Now you have accomplished something. Celebrate! Use that to build momentum. Keep going.
This indoor time is too valuable to waste. Use it wisely.
Some photographers who inspire me (in random order):
Cole Thompson
Fran Forman
John Paul Caponigro
Julieanne Kost
Ctein
John Shaw
Ben Willmore (Ben is also a master Photoshop and Lightroom trainer)
Lorri Freedman
Karen Hutton
Jay Maisel
December 23, 2020
Found along the way
One axis of photographic method is the spontaneity of the image making. That is, some artists carefully design and pre-plan every image and some live in the moment and eagerly take what they find. I cannot say one method is inherently superior, but I am strongly on the “found along the way” side. Nearly all my images are found accidentally. Well, accidental but I was deliberately looking.
In the moment
My photography is almost exclusively “in the moment”. I am a hunter-gatherer. Planning usually does not go farther than “it should be stormy tomorrow. Maybe I’ll head east to see if I can find some good shots without getting caught in a tornado.” Literally, being aware of tornadoes, hail, or serious thunderstorms is a primary consideration where I live. But that makes for some great images.
Why do I do this? The simple answer is “it works for me.” I am generally happy with the results I get, even if I sometimes come back with nothing. The thrill of the hunt is reward enough. It is a percentage game. Win a few, lose a few. I try not to be impatient. I love the quote from Ansel Adams that “Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.“
Perhaps I’m an endorphin junky. If I’m out and about my subconscious may recognize something, even if it it just a potential to be worked. It alerts me to it and this creates a burst of light/energy/warmth whatever. It is difficult to describe. But is is a joy and excitement of discovery. Each find creates a kind of high.
I’ve written about this before, but I still do not have good words to describe it. Luckily, I don’t have to understand it in order to be able to use it. It is the way I’m wired.
Wandering
Wandering is a key part of my process. I never scout locations in any detail. I never go to famous, popular places to recreate a copy of someone else’s shot.
Instead, I meander through out of the way places. Places that would not be written up in any tourist guide. Ideally, places I have never even heard of. Most people would cringe at the idea, but it energizes me.
A problem with most of us is we have limited time and a tight agenda of places to go and things to see. Four countries in 3 days. This puts us in blinders. We get so busy working the plan that we do not have time for happy accidents.
Wandering training
The best training I had was when we owned a timeshare. Yes, I know, horror stories abound and most are true. I don’t recommend buying a timeshare. But ours had a wonderful effect on me. Trading for our slot gave us a week in a fixed location somewhere in the world. And our timeshares were generally in very out of the way places.
So we’re stuck in these weird places for a whole week. After a day or 2 to get familiar with the area we were bored and had to fill up time. So I learned to wander. To find the tiniest back roads we could (I won’t tell the rental companies about…). To head off, destination unknown and no goal in mind.
The benefits were incalculable. I learned that the more comfortable I got with a place the more new discoveries there were to uncover. A beautiful little country church, a tiny fishing village, rocky shores, lovingly tended farms, people in a obscure village, forest trails, and on and on.
We don’t have the timeshare any more, but I kept the lifelong learning of being able to find interesting, out of the way places.
Go out empty
I keep coming back to this quote from the great Jay Maisel: “Try to go out empty and let your images fill you up.“
This is gold. It is hard for most of us because we are brainwashed to believe we have to plan everything and know exactly what we want. Maybe that works for you. It does not work for me. I suspect it does not work in general for those wanting to make art instead of record shots.
Don’t have a preconceived idea of what you expect to shoot. Don’t spend your time at the landmarks where all the other photographers gather. Be on your own journey. Shoot what you are drawn to., not what someone else expects you to do. If you are looking for something you will probably find it, but you will miss so much else along the way.
It is an easy tradeoff for me. I have proven to myself that going out empty is my best plan. The images I find fill me up.
Journey of discovery
It sounds like I do a lot of aimless wandering around. That is true. It is a joy to me and it’s how I do my art.
I am energized by finding new places, out of the way discoveries, things few other people photograph. These call me and make my photography worthwhile.
It is said that life is a journey, not a destination. Wise words. It is how we journey through life that makes the difference. Are we head down, staring at our phone as we pass through beauty and wonder, or do we look around and appreciate it? Even stop and walk through it and really take it in?
If we learn to be open to really see the things around us, and if we get off the beaten path and break new ground, we can have a wonderful journey of discovery through our whole life. Do you want to just get to the end or do you want to enjoy the journey and feel rewarded? I have discovered that the things found along the way add a lot of joy.
December 16, 2020
Filling the Frame
A unique characteristic of flat (2D) art is that it lives within a frame. That is mostly what I do right now – 2D art – so this interests me a lot. All 2D art is about how we choose to fill the frame. The process is very different between camera-based art and paint-based art
Composition
Composition is the art of filling the frame. This is one of the holy grail topics of art. Theories, opinions, and good and bad advice abounds everywhere you look.
It is easy to get inundated: rule of thirds, golden ratios, leading lines, diagonals, eye lines, visual flow through the image, contrasts, etc. All of these things are real; all are important; none make a great image. At least, not by themselves.
That is the thing, Composition “rules” are the basics that everyone needs to study, but they are not what actually makes art. Pick one for example: the golden ratio (or golden mean, or Fibonacci ratio). The principle was worked out by the ancient Greeks or earlier and is still taught today. It is still a valid principle to create pleasing constructions. An attempt to simplify it has led us to the famous and often abused “rule of thirds”. Most of us are aware of this guideline and think about it when composing a scene.
Composition rules are just a catalog of things discovered over the ages as ways to achieve good effects. They do not mean much in themselves. Following all the rules does not mean you have a good image and ”’breaking” the rules does not mean you have a bad image. I recommend you learn and follow the rules, unless you decide not to.
Regardless, the principles of composition are equally applicable to all forms of 2D art.
The frame
One of the less discussed elements of composition is the reality of the frame, the border, the edge of the image. Strange and wonderful things can happen as you create within this constraint.
I think we often just disregard it as just the fence we can’t go outside of; the crop rectangle that determines the aspect ratio of the image. While this is true, it can be more.
We need to be very aware and careful of things entering or leaving the frame. And we must consider how compositional elements like diagonals interact with the frame boundary. And extraneous bits of stuff along the edge can be very distracting. Making clever use of the frame can add energy and interest to an image.
I believe these things are more important in photography than in painting. But that’s just my opinion.
A blank canvas
We are to one of the most fundamental differences between painting and photography, which is what the artist starts with. In general, a painter selects every element for inclusion in his frame. A photographer consciously decides what to exclude from his frame.
The painter starts with a blank canvas. Nothing exists there unless he chooses to put it there. All aspects of the composition are completely controlled and deliberate. He is not constrained by the reality of the real scene, if there even was one. He has no excuse for distracting elements or poor composition.
A full canvas.
A photographer, on the other hand, has the opposite problem. When the shutter opens, everything within the field of view of the lens is immediately recorded by the sensor. The artist here has to do most of his work before recording the image.
Photography is the unique art of taking out what we don’t want. We do this by where we place ourselves, lens choice, shutter speed, and mostly, looking through the viewfinder to see what the image will look like and making adjustments. All the while tuning and enhancing the overall composition. This takes a lot of practice.
The great Jay Maisel said “You are responsible for every part of your image, even the parts you’re not interested in.”. We have to learn to really see what is in our frame and recognize and eliminate distracting parts. The natural tendency is to fix our attention on the subject and not see the bad bits. This awareness has to be learned.
It is true that we can do a lot of housekeeping in Photoshop, but a good craftsman only uses that as a last resort. It is much better to eliminate the problems up front if possible. Plus, capturing what you want saves a lot of post processing time. Just my opinion, but “no problem, I can fix that in Photoshop” is a lazy and sloppy attitude. I assume if you read this you don’t mind me expressing my opinion. 🙂
The artist selects
Filling the frame is a process of selection. Painters decide what they are putting in. Photographers decide what they are taking out. Either way, the artist must become skilled in being aware of the composition and how all the elements of the image work together to support it. This is design. It is what we do.
The frame gives an image space to live in. It can support the composition. It may enhance the drama or sense of space. All in all, the frame is a very important part of the creativity of image making. Never overlook it as you are planning your art.
December 2, 2020
Behind the Curtain
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” is one of the classic lines from movie history. It is brilliant and captures a universal truth.
If you don’t remember, or if you’re young enough to never have seen The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends are terrified and fascinated by the projected image of an imposing wizard with his booming voice. But her dog Toto pulls a curtain aside and reveals an old man who is controlling things through levers and buttons. He tells them to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain to try to deflect attention from what is really happening.
Once revealed, the magic is not intimidating anymore. This is very true in most things. Even the Wizard of Oz turns out to be a nice guy.
Magic
The famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is also very true and we are effectively surrounded by magic all the time. For most of us, the internet is magic, making a phone call is magic, even getting in our car and driving it is magic. These and many others around us everyday are marvelously advanced technology products that few people really understand. We use them but don’t understand how they work.
But everyone who uses a tool or product forms a mental model to help us understand how it works. Some of the models we make are wild hallucinations with no basis in fact. These incorrect models quickly break down when we venture into new or advanced territory. They no longer allow us to predict behavior, which is the purpose of the model.
The way to counter this is to learn more accurate models of what is really happening. Learning the reality in effect lifts the curtain and lets us see how the thing really works.
Maybe it is not as romantic and fanciful to learn the reality, but it lets us become more expert in the thing we are using. The magic becomes just technology that now serves us well.
Photoshop
I want to use Photoshop as today’s example of magic. I’m afraid that to many artists Photoshop appears to be magic. This is an invitation to get over that by starting to peak behind some of the curtains.
I will not downplay it or dumb it down. That would not be treating you like an adult. Photoshop is very complicated. At first it seems like looking in the cockpit of a jet aircraft. I have been at it since about Photoshop 4 (it’s on version 21 now) and I have been fortunate to have the benefit of live and video instruction from some master teachers such as Ben Willmore, Dave Cross, and John Paul Caponigro. But every week I study it more and learn new abilities and ways of combining things.
But there is a good side to all this complexity, too. All that capability to learn means all that capability that can be used creatively for your art. I rate Photoshop as one of the finest software products ever created, and I have used a lot and I developed software for many years.
It is almost true that Photoshop is not magic. Content Aware Fill and Content Aware Move and a few other features may actually be magic. But for the most part it is just a collection of relatively simple tools that can be combined together to create artistic results.
Demystify
Demystifying is what happened with the curtain. It will happen for you with Photoshop if you burrow into it and get past the fear factor. You will eventually have a moment when the mists lift and you understand how people create with tools like this and how you can use the tools to realize your own vision. This is a moment of enlightenment. There is no right or wrong way.
If you just try to memorize all the tools and settings and features you will go crazy. There are an unimaginable number of combinations. It is important to first learn the principles of how to work in it. I’m just going to discuss the Photoshop features that are most important to photographers.
Basics
I can’t teach you to be a Photoshop expert here, but maybe I can help point out some important concepts. There are basically 2 things you can do: transform pixels or blend and combine them.
Layers
One of the most important capabilities you will use is layers. Get very comfortable with them. A layer is just what it says. Think of it as a perfectly clear sheet of plastic. You create stacks of layers and each one can contain pixels or mathematical operations on pixels. A layer can be an image from your camera or things you have drawn or painted or many other things, including all or parts of other images. You can add or delete or rearrange layers at will. The image you see in the main window is the view looking down through all the layers. You can never see layers. You just see the pixels on the layers.
Pixels on a layer can just hide ones below or they can be combined with pixels below using what are called blend modes. Blend modes can cause the pixels of a layer to lighten or darken or influence just the color or luminosity or contrast of pixels below.
In addition, a layer can have a mask. The mask can block parts of the layer from view. A phrase you will hear often is “black conceals; white reveals”. The black areas of a mask prevent the pixels of this layer from being seen in the stack. This lets us be very precise in making changes to select parts.
Tools
Operating across all the layers and masks you have a large set of tools. These are like paint brushes or erasers or means to select certain areas to operate on. The tools let you manipulate the layers and masks to work some of the magic.
While layers hold pixels, tools allow us to do things to the pixels. Pixels on any layer can be added or removed or colored or sharpened or blurred or moved around to almost any level. Same with masks, which are also just pixels but just function differently.
Principles
Focus on these concepts. They are some of the powerful principles that make Photoshop such a marvelous tool for manipulating pixels. When you get comfortable with these basic things you will be surprised how much you can do in Photoshop and how simple it starts to seem.
So the reality is that Photoshop is “just” a large collection of fairly simple tools. The beauty of this is that these tools can be used and combined in near infinite ways to modify or create digital art. Each user has complete ability to express his vision without being constrained by the tools to look all the same.
There is no lack of training available in books or on the internet. Look around and find some that work for you. I recommend Ben Willmore and Dave Cross as excellent instructors to start with. They can present powerful concepts simply and make all this wondrous capability accessible to you. Buying some courses on CreativeLive is one way to get their training.
Living without magic
The adult world has less magic than you had when you were a kid. A side effect of growing up is there is less magic in your world. In a sense this is good. The tools we use to create our art should be just tools. No matter how powerful they are, they are just things to be wielded in our creative process.
Save the magic for your creative vision and spirit of adventure. Keep a sense of wonder as you go through the world. You are surrounded my magic. Don’t make it less important by viewing your tools as part of the magic.
What you see and perceive and create is the magic.
November 4, 2020
Tools
Man is a tool maker. Tools are used in most activities in our life to extend our performance or help us get our tasks done faster, easier, and more accurately. The same is true in most of our art. Some people say that it is our tool making nature that allowed us to become the dominant species.
A tool using artist
I’m an artist. Specifically one who works with images originating as photographs. A camera is a tool I use. So is a computer. So is a printer. These tools do not create my art. I use them as part of my creative process.
Yes, the tools allow me to create things I could not do otherwise. That just means they are good tools. My Jeep allows me to go places I would rather not have to walk, especially carrying my gear. That does not mean the Jeep creates my art. I know a sculptor who now prints a lot of pieces on a 3D printer. Does that make them no longer art?
I believe in using tools to make my life better and to take my creativity further. Indeed some images don’t really start coming to life until I am manipulating them in Photoshop. As I try things and apply ideas and tools the essence of the image may start revealing itself to me. Note, though, that I – the artist- decide how the image should develop. I don’t sit back and watch Photoshop create it for me.
Limits of tools
There are probably some sharp Adobe computer scientists working on that right now., Maybe someday you will be able to point your phone at a scene and a “perfectly” composed and processed image will appear instantly in your social media feed. I hope for all of our sake that they decide that even though they could, they won’t. (Note: it came faster than I anticipated. Adobe announced many “AI”-based tools at Adobe MAX 2020. Now anyone can do almost anything to an image without know how they did it. Too bad.)
Tools should be used as force multipliers. Not a crutch to let people with no skills seem to create something. That’s like going to DisneyWorld and believing you went on a pirate adventure. It is a manufactured experience that you did not contribute to. If you are over the age of 5 you know deep down inside it is fake.
At the risk of being unpopular and sounding like a Luddite I will say I do not believe an image created entirely by a computer without an artist is art. It is just software combining patterns it has been trained with and throwing is a little random variability. Maybe this could be said of some artists, too. Let me just add that I spent an entire career working in advanced computer science, including artificial intelligence. So it’s not like I just hate technology.
Digital fits my personality
I am ADD enough that I don’t like there to be much lag between seeing something interesting and capturing it. It would be hard for me to work in a world of making multiple sketches of a scene to work out the best composition and staging, then spending weeks laying down the image slowly in layers with dry times between. All in order to create one work. I would abandon it after the first couple of sketches and be off to another idea.
Photography is much more immediate and rewarding for me. See a scene. Click. Nice, but maybe move a little to the right. Click. Better. Maybe raise the camera a little higher. Click. Almost there, maybe reduce the depth of field. Wait for the right moment. Click. Good! Now I have a good starting point to work with on the computer to create a final image.
In the computer I use a fairly disciplined non-destructive workflow. That just means never commit to something that can’t be undone. This does not slow things down and it actually makes it easier to get in a creative flow. That is because whenever I hit a dead end or even just decide I’m not liking the direction things are going, I can back up to any point I want and modify what I’ve done or even throw large “experiments” out and take a whole different path. The tools let my creativity flow naturally.
This ability to freely experiment and take risks is wonderfully empowering. I even sometimes create several versions of an image. It is an embarrassment of riches to be faced with a hard choice of which one I think works best. The ability to be spontaneous and free is very important to my creativity.
An artist
I create art. My camera or my other tools do not create the art, I do. The fact that I start from a photograph should not matter at all. Some people think something is not art unless the artist had a long and difficult process from training through making an image. How myopic and judgmental.
It had been said that an artist has to suffer. This is true, but you hear the statement from critics more than artists. Critics think they can analyze the process the artist went through to determine the worth of the art. Real artists know that art is suffering and what we learn and the feelings and vision we develop in the process guide our outcome. Art can be a cathartic expression of a deep experience, but that is not required.
But this “suffering” is very personal and internal, at least for me. It may be the result of decades of failures to realize our vision. A suffering born of frustration that drives a continual renewal and a reach for what we feel but can’t quite express.
It has almost nothing to do with a camera. That is just a tool, part of the technology used in creating art.
Any tool
When someone picks up a tool to create something as art, they become an artist. It doesn’t really matter if it is a brush, a pencil, a welder, … or a camera. What matters is what you do with it. Is something better and more worthwhile because it is carved from marble? Is it better if it is oil applied to canvas? Careful. These are dangerous judgments.
The art I create is not because I’m a photographer. Photography is a medium that works very well for me. It fits my personality. I use it to create my art.
I look at the creative process different from an oil painter or sculptor or author or graffiti painter. That is good. Artists are not supposed to be all alike. They should be as unique and individual as possible. That extends to the medium and process and tools, too.
So, I’m an artist. I use a camera to capture pixels that become my art. I’m proud of it. I like what I create and it works for me. I’m very thankful for the tools I have. They help me create, they do not define me.
October 21, 2020