Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Craft

Being a Tourist
Yeah, we’re highly trained and experienced photographers who always take “serious” photographs (whatever those are). But do you ever find yourself being a tourist? I recommend it as a balance to our vision.
Tourist
Tourism is huge business. Especially after Covid restrictions people seem to be in a frenzy of wanting to travel. So much so that it has become a problem for popular areas. And many people are just rotten and inconsiderate tourists. Don’t be a bad tourist. I am not discussing any of these issues. Just the subjective point of view of a tourist.
Tourists queue in front of the Louvre in Paris in 2017. The museum shut down for one day earlier this year after employees walked out due to overcrowding (Credit: Getty Images)
I have written before about how I like to travel. This is a different take on it.
The desire for travel and tourism seems to be inherent in most of us. It is a longing to explore and experience new and different things.I liked this definition of what a tourist is:
In simple terms, a tourist is an individual who embarks on a journey to explore new places, experience different cultures, and seek relaxation or adventure. They are the adventurers, the beachcombers, the culture enthusiasts, and the thrill-seekers. They are the ones who venture beyond their everyday lives to discover the wonders that the world has to offer.
As a photographer
All of those things can be true of a tourist, but a photographer may have additional objectives. I realize that many people on vacation only want to take selfies and classic tourist shots of iconic places. Nothing wrong with that if it is what gives you pleasure. But I am discounting it here, because I have additional goals and, if you are reading this, I figure you do too.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Whether traveling or being in my home area, I want to shoot images that reflect my vision. That bring a unique and different perspective on what I am seeing. This can be a challenge as a tourist. We are in unfamiliar territory seeing new sights with perhaps a tight schedule or even the dreaded “group tours” to deal with.
If we are traveling to a distant location for vacation, we probably cannot justify taking all the gear we would like to have. We may have language and transportation challenges to overcome. And we may not be in full control of our schedule.
Ultimately, unless you are one of the fortunate ones who can plan a multiple week stay in one location, we are under real or perceived time pressure. I hope you do not plan one of those “6 countries in 5 days” trips. But even with a more leisurely schedule, we know we have places to go and things to see in the time we have.
This means we do not usually have the luxury of settling in and getting to know an area. To find the rhythms and pace of the place. To learn to see beyond the superficial. We are a tourist.
Out of control
In effect, this renders us out of control. We have to live with the schedule and the travel arrangements and the lighting and the weather and whatever other conditions you encounter. Usually we cannot say “I will come back tomorrow to get a better shot”. Tomorrow we are likely to be someplace else.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
And in this situation it is very hard to have a feel for what is good. Everything is different from our normal experience. Wow, what a great street scene we think. But in reality it is mediocre at best. If we looked around or spent much more time we could do much better. But we don’t know because we do not know what to expect and what is good and bad and we are pressed for time.
We know that if we could control the circumstances better we could make better images. But we usually can’t do that.
If you are a control-oriented person, this will be extremely frustrating. I am not a controlling person, I tend to take things as they come, but it can still be quite annoying even to me.
Out of your comfort zone
Being a tourist in an unfamiliar area puts us out of our comfort zone. Everything is new and calling to us to be photographed. It is hard to take more than standard tourist shots, because we do not have time to think much about each subject. We may not have the chance to walk around it to view it from different viewpoints or contemplate it at leisure before having to rush off to the next sight. And we seldom have the chance to compare it to other similar scenes to find the best one.
Dealing with this and making shots we will be happy with when we get home takes a lot of discipline. We have to learn to be flexible and able to respond to circumstances instead of carefully planning and controlling our shoots.
Strategies
I have informally developed some strategies I use to try to survive in these situations. Let me cover it with disclaimers: these kind of work for me; no guarantee they will be right for you. As always, these are descriptive, not prescriptive. I do not believe in dictating a methodology to anyone.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
When you are a tourist, everything is interesting. Go ahead and shoot that tourist shot. You will want it for the memory. Now that that is out of the way, pause and look for the more interesting thing. That may be a detail of the main subject. It may be something totally different if you turn around and look. If you are on a dreaded group tour, spend time scanning for interesting shots while the guide is describing the current historical monument.
I try to go with some project ideas in mind. This helps to channel my thoughts away from just the tourist views to some themes I will be paying attention to. On a recent trip to France my themes I tried to keep in mind were: antiquity, Joie de vivre, trees, devoted to God, and think B&W. It is not that I was actively working on these project ideas. Just that they gave me a framework for considering the sights I encountered. I find doing this gives me more focus and helps me avoid running off randomly in all directions.
And I try to get into a kind of flow state. I am unlikely to truly achieve flow, but I can approximate is by being tuned in to what is happening around me. The goal is a heightened sense of awareness. In this mode I recognize a possible shot more quickly and can be ready to react to it. I want to be shooting instinctively for fast moving situations and more meditatively when possible.
Being mindful
I know it doesn’t sound like it from what I said above, but I think the thing that helps is to be very mindful. Experience openly and freely, but keep the analysis running in the background. Take it all in but be very conscious of how you are reacting to it. Quickly reinterpret what you are seeing through your own vision filter.
Remember, as a tourist you are breaking out of the ordinary. Use that you your advantage. Shake up your habits.
We all tend to form habits. Talking about photography, John Szarkowski referred to this as “habitual seeing” . Being a tourist everything is fresh and new. It is a great chance to break some habits and see things in a new way, flex your mental muscles. Try to bring this new found ability to see back as one of the important souvenirs of the trip.
In the definition I gave of a tourist above, one of the key words to me is “experience”. If we are mindful and actively trying to capture that experience we are more likely to get some images that represent how we felt and experienced the trip.
If it fails
Keep in mind I am suggesting that you be experimenting on what may be a big expensive trip. When you are trying something new, you may get worse results, not better. No guarantees.
My argument is: that’s OK. You’re not going on a National Geographic assignment where you are contractually obligated to bring back certain results. This is our art. We should always be experimenting. If you are disappointed with some of your results but you come back a better artist, isn’t that a win? It is for me. The experience is more important that the product we bring back. However, in my case, my wife is there beside me taking all the conventional selfies and tourist shots on her phone. So they will be there if I want to see them. 🙂
These shots of mine are all “tourist” images from a trip to France. Hopefully they are not just standard boring travel shots.
December 18, 2024
En Plein Air
This is a big buzz with my colleagues who manually put pigment on a substrate (e.g. they paint). There is an aura that makes it something exotic about creating “en plein air”. Actually, plein air is what I do, too.
Plein air
In itself, plein air art is not a new concept, or even an artistic concept. It has been done commonly by painters since the 1800’s.
It is sometimes spoken like an advanced technical term. Something your have to be an insider to truly appreciate. But it is just an everyday French phrase. I have been studying French recently (another story) and was surprised to find this in normal use. It literally means “plain air”, or outdoors. Nothing fancy or hidden there. If you go to a “plein air” concert it just means you are going to an outdoor concert.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
In painting
So if you are a painter and you gather up all your stuff and take it outside to paint scenes from nature or whatever is in front of you, you are painting “en plein air”. Does that make it different or special? Maybe. Monet thought so. I”ll talk about that in a minute.
But to give the painters credit, it required some technical and workflow innovations for this to happen. We forget history sometimes.
It used to be (pre-1800) that artists had to find or buy their own pigments. Then they had to purify them and laboriously grind them into an extremely fine powder and mix them in a binder, usually a type of oil. By the way, you know those beautiful warm, rust toned palettes favored by Renaissance artists in Italy? Ochre pigment was a common, naturally occurring mineral there. Coincidence?
But then, sometime in the early 1800’s, the technology for producing and selling pigments already ground and mixed and in tubes was developed. This allowed the artists two things: first, they could get any colors they wanted. But second, and more important for this discussion, it became much easier to take your oils with you. As the desire to move about grew, enterprising vendors also developed smaller, portable easels and pre-stretched prepared canvases. Artists were not tethered to a studio nearly so much.
Now artists could pack their gear into a relatively small bundle and go where they wanted. One of the places they moved was outside.
Monet
I find I use Monet as an example a lot. I like his work, but another thing is that he was an innovator and revolutionary. He fought the entrenched art establishment and helped establish a whole new style. Something photography is still struggling to some extent to do.
Monet was one of the early practitioners of the plein air movement. One of the motivations of the whole Impressionist movement was his and others desire to paint outdoor scenes in the light of the moment. As Guy Tal put it in his marvelous book The Interior Landscape, (I get no incentives for promoting it) “Monet famously credited the success of his work to the emotions he felt when working out in nature … As Monet himself put it, ‘My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects.’ “
Working outside and observing fleeting effects. That’s what I like to do, too!
©Ed Schlotzhauer
I work outdoors
The same impulse motivates me, even though the technology I use is very different. I find and capture my images almost exclusively outdoors. Shooting in a studio does not motivate me.
Seeing things most other people do not see excites me. Finding those things, even if they are little, seemingly insignificant things, that I can show you in a new way gives me joy. Especially if I can show you something and you share my joy and excitement.
I admit I do not have the patience for painting. It’s too slow for me. Spending a few hours or days capturing a scene would be so frustrating to me that I would quickly give up. Seeing something, visualizing what this could be and what to do with it is hard and takes lots of experience. That is one of the fun and creative parts of photography to me. And it is fast enough to not bog me down or interrupt my creative flow. The process of capturing and producing the artifact doesn’t need to be so difficult.
Other than post processing work on my computer, my images come from outdoors, en plain air.
A new genre?
Have I created a new genre of art? Should I trademark the term “plein air photography”? Sign up for my workshop!
Well, I probably can’t do that. Photography has always been strongly associated with the outdoors. I think the first surviving photograph was an outdoor scene. Admittedly early photographs were outdoors because that’s where a good light source was available. Flash had not yet been invented. Even when it first was, it was difficult and dangerous to use (and smoky).
But those are technical considerations. The fact remains that photography has always had a strong connection to the outdoors. Especially for crazy people like me who photograph outside year around in a place like Colorado.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
It’s the outdoors that motivates me. I’m a hunter. That’s where I find most of my prey. And my inspiration. It is not an uncommon obsession. Look at publications like Luminous Landscape, Nature Photographer’s Network, Outdoor Photographer magazine and many others.
To the painters, if working outside motivates you, excellent. We share a common bond. I hope the outdoors inspires us both to do our best work. But working outdoors is not a new concept or unique to painting. Plein air just means “outside”.
I’ll be looking for you outside. But we will just pass each other. I’ll be moving about a lot discovering and shooting a lot of things while you are painting. Not to say one is better or worse, just very different art forms. Both en plein air. Let’s wave to each other.
December 11, 2024
Out of Focus
A few months ago I wrote about being in focus, both technically and mentally. I want to go a little deeper into how technical focus happens in modern cameras and an an experience I had recently where what I did was out of focus.
What is focus
Technically, focus is simple when the lens is adjusted so that the part of the subject you are most interested in is sharply defined. Your lens has a focus ring to use to manually focus. Most of us probably use the camera’s built in auto focus capability. This is much more precise than my old eyes. And a lot faster than most of us can do manually.
Focusing physically moves one or more of the lens elements inside the lens barrel. This is required to adjust the focus point.
I will let you argue whether focus is an absolute, precise point or just an acceptable range. I will just say that I am swinging away from being adamant about absolute technical perfection and leaning more toward artistic judgement and intent. Set your own values you will live by.
Whether we manual focus or use auto focus, we observe in the viewfinder the image moving from a fuzzy blob a crisp, detailed representation of the scene before us. Unless we have a very old piece of technology in our camera with something called a split image viewfinder. I had this in my first SLR. It was magic and awesome for most of the subjects I shot.
The split image viewfinder showed the image sharp regardless of focus. The image was divided into 2 pieces in the central circle. The pieces were offset from each other when out of focus. Use the focus ring to bring the 2 halves into alignment and the image was sharply focused. Magic. Enough trivia, though.
Little did I know this was a type of and precursor to what we now call phase detection auto focus. Let’s get a little deeper into the technology.
How does it work?
Auto focus in a DSLR or mirrorless camera is complex and requires many precise components. But it works so well now that we tend to take it for granted.
There are 2 basic technologies in modern cameras. The older one is called contrast detection and the newer and better one is called phase detection.
I have written on histograms, a subject I consider vitally important to photography. Histograms and their interpretation are the basis of contrast detection auto focus. It is brilliantly simple in concept and in process as what we do when we are manually focusing.
If an image in the viewfinder is out of focus, the pixels are blurred together. Kind of like looking through a fog. A result is that in the histogram, the values are clustered in the center. This is an indication of low contrast. But when an image is sharp, there is a wider range of brighter and darker pixels. This illustrates it:
From https://digital-photography.com/camera/autofocus-how-it-works.php
Focus process
So conceptually, the system moves the focus a little and measures again to see if the histogram got more narrow (more out of focus) or wider (sharper) . If it got more in focus, continue moving that direction and measuring until the peak contrast if found, But if it got more out of focus, move the focus the other direction and continue the process. It is a hunting process to find the optimum focus point. Just like we do to manually focus.
Unfortunately, this process is slow. It can take seconds to arrive at the focus. This is why phase detection auto focus came to prominence.
In phase detection auto focus, some of the light coming through the lens is split off to a separate sensor. Like the split image viewfinder I mentioned above, it is further split into two paths. Through some brilliant engineering, they can determine in one measurement how far off focus is and in what direction. The focus moves there quickly. Note that in mirrorless cameras all the light goes directly to the sensor, so these auto focus sensors are built directly into the sensor.
I said that phase detection is “better” than contrast detection. That is true as far as being very fast. Actually, contrast detection can achieve more precise focus. There is a kind of system called hybrid the combines the strengths of both. I will not discuss that or go into the bewildering variety of focus areas or focus modes.
Out of focus
This is all great as far as technology goes. It works quite well in the cases it is designed for. We are lucky to have it.
But all of these systems rely on the sensor having enough light to see some contrast. It doesn’t work in the dark. Yes, there is another variation on auto focus that is called active auto focus. It shoots a red beam from the camera to illuminate the focus area. This has a very short range and does not help the scenario I’m about to describe.
Recently I was in Rocky Mountain National Park, over on the west slope where there is little light. It was full dark on a moonless night. The mountains all around provided lovely silhouettes. The stars were astonishing. Beautiful. I had to stop and get some star images.
A trailhead parking lot provided a great and convenient place to set up – wondering if those occasional sounds I heard in the dark were bears. I guess not. It was perfect. Except. There was not enough contrast to focus, even at 6400 ISO. And the viewfinder image was too noisy to be useful for manual focus. I did not have a powerful enough flashlight to cast enough light on the nearest object, over 100 yards away, to allow the focus system to work.
Adding to the problem, the lens I brought on this outing did not have a focus scale (a curse of modern zoom lens design). Normally, in low light, I switch to manual focus and set the lens to infinity for a scene like this. I guessed, but missed badly for a big section of the images. They were uselessly out of focus. I am ashamed to show an example, but like this:
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Experience is a great teacher
I write frequently advocating that we study our technology to become expert with it. And to practice, practice, practice to know how to use our gear, even in the dark. I failed. I encountered too much dark and a lens I had never tried to use in low light. The combination tripped me up. I am ashamed to admit I did not follow my own advice well enough.
But every failure is a learning opportunity, right? It can be a great motivator and reinforcer. I did some research and discovered a “hidden feature” I never knew my camera had. It should save me the next time I do this.
My Nikon camera has a setting I had never paid any attention to called “Save focus position”. When On (the default) it remembers the focus position of the current lens when the camera is turned off and restores it on wake up. But when Off – this is the brilliant part – it sets the lens to infinity on wake up. Now I will have a known infinity focus setting, even in total darkness! This setting is now in my menu shortcuts so I can access it quickly.
I would never have learned about this feature if I had not failed so spectacularly. Experience really is a great teacher.
So dig into those obscure settings you never bother with. There sometimes is gold there.
Keep learning and failing!
The featured image
That night’s shooting was not all bad. I nailed the focus on this star shot. It was purely of the stars and had no foreground. This foreground has been substituted from another blurry image that night (actually, redrawn by hand).
This is artistic expression rather than literal reality. I do that a lot. As photography progresses and matures, I believe that is more and more the norm.
October 30, 2024
Get in a Flow
You have probably heard of flow states. Maybe you have experienced it. It is a wonderful place to be. Let’s talk about what it means to get in a flow. It does relate to art. Trust me.
What is it?
The concept of a flow state was described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Good luck with the pronunciation. It is actually fairly easy after you hear it.
Csikszentmihalyi was a child in Eastern Europe during WWII. It was a deeply traumatizing experience. And he noticed that, even after the war, many people were not able to recover mentally. He was very curious as to why.
Eventually he moved to America and studied psychology. His main research focus was happiness, what it is and how to achieve it. The identification of what we now call flow was a minor part of this research. He found that people were their most creative, productive, and happy when they were in this flow state.
In Csikszentmihalyi’s words, flow is “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it” (1990).
He discovered that flow was a state people could get into temporarily where amazing and beneficial things happened. They had almost complete concentration on their task. Time would seem to speed up or slow down. The activity they were doing was intensely rewarding and pleasurable to them. And there seemed to be effortless ease in what they were doing.
Who experiences it?
Different people have differing predisposition to get into flow states.
Autotelic personalities tend to experience more flow. An autotelic is someone whose personality is driven by internal rewards more than external motivations like money or power. They are creative and curious and independent. This leads them to pursue goals that motivate them and give them internal satisfaction.
At the other extreme, people with a neurotic personality find it difficult to get into flow. Some think this is because their anxiety and self doubts inhibit the conditions leading to flow.
What happens to the brain?
Many researchers approach the study by trying to identify the mechanisms in the brain that support flow. I don’t have much interest in looking at it this way, but I will note some of the thoughts.
Some believe there can be an interaction between the default mode network (DMN) and the executive control network (ECN) in the brain. The DMN is the background processing we do, as when we daydream. The ECN is most active during problem solving and it helps tune out distractions. They feel that when these 2 centers work together in the right way we can achieve flow.
Another theory attempts to show that flow is achieved through expertise and practice. The idea is that as we become expert at certain tasks and reinforce that through repeated practice, we train the brain to perform it more effortlessly. The brain can sort of turn in to an automatic mode and let go and let the creativity flow.
This second research seems to be “winning”, and it is what I subscribe to.
© Ed Schlotzhauer
How to achieve it
Flow is generally something that happens when we are completely immersed in a task that engages and energizes us. It seldom works to say “I’m going to go get into a flow state.”
As an example, some of the researchers studying the theory studied jazz guitarists. They instrumented them and recorded their brain activity during improvisation sessions. At a high level summary, less experienced musicians had to concentrate hard on what they were doing and did not enter flow states. Experienced musicians tended to go into “automatic”. They concentrated on the sensory aspects of playing the guitar and little time thinking about what to do or how to improvise. They had a low level of DMN and ECN activity. This seems to support the expertise theory.
That’s a lot of theory, but it doesn’t say much about how to achieve flow. You have to be expert in the task you are doing, and you have to have a extensive base of practice. Putting yourself in an environment where you are not distracted or interrupted helps, at least until the flow really kicks in. And being the type of person who is curious and self-driven and intuitive with a good ability to concentrate certainly seems to help a lot.
Does it relate to art?
I believe it is as common and valuable for artists as for jazz musicians or software engineers.
Let’s re-examine the qualities I mentioned above for who gets into flow. Aren’t artists generally curious and self-driven and intuitive and with a good ability to concentrate? Don’t we have an intense desire, even need, to create? Aren’t we independent and self-reliant?
We are prime to be able to find flows! The other missing piece is expertise and practice.
This is one reason I recommend that we need to study to become expert in our craft. Using our tools should be fluid and natural. Exposure and depth of field and shutter speed and mechanics of using our camera should be automatic. This frees up our conscious attention for exploring composition and framing and expressing out feelings.
And practice, practice, practice. Shoot frequently, daily if possible. Shoot something, anything. It’s OK to throw them away. The practice is worth is. All that practice is building the equivalent of muscle memory. Your fingers just know how to make the adjustments. Can you take out your camera in complete darkness and turn it on and set it up? Practice.
When you go out to shoot, immerse yourself in the experience. Concentrate fully on what you are doing. Let the rest of the world fade away. If you are lucky, you will find afterwards that you were in flow. Whether or not you were, do your work. Plunge yourself into your art.
© Ed Schlotzhauer
Chartres Cathedral
It is a positive experience
I have experienced it, many times. As a software developer, I experienced this strange and exciting feeling regularly, long before I ever heard the term. Sometimes I would realize that hours have vanished and I forgot to eat lunch. And the productivity of what I did in those sessions was astounding. It was great to finally hear it described and find out I wasn’t crazy.
As an artist it seems to happen different. I seldom work a scene for hours, although I may spend hours in a post processing session. But I may spend significant time wandering and looking and being immersed in the thought process. I believe this is a kind of flow. It seems to have the same result, where creativity flows easily and effortlessly. And it can produce a set of images that are above the norm of what I would expect.
Even writing articles like this can achieve a flow state. I sometimes open a blog intending to make a few notes and jot down some thoughts I had, and realize a few hours later that I have nearly crafted a complete article. And I sometimes read through it and think “wow, did I write that?” 🙂
A result
Being in a flow is joyful. It is a happy state. But it is a result, not the goal. A flow state indicates that we have become completely immersed in a task that engages and energizes us. One that we are expert in and practiced enough in that we can sort of let go and let it happen. Kind of like those jazz guitarists they studied doing improvisations. It is not easy, it requires major commitment. But it is worth it.
So study your craft. Gain deep knowledge and experience. Be familiar with ideas from other artists. Practice constantly (10,000 hour rule?). These will make you a better and more creative artist.
Maybe, someday, you will look back on a block of creative energy you have just spent and think, that was probably a flow state. It feels great. Enjoy! Remember, Csikszentmihalyi discovered the idea of flow because he was researching happiness.
Note
I found 2 different rationale for calling it “flow”. One was that in Csikszentmihalyi’s interviews it was common for people to describe what was happening as “their work simply flowed out of them without much effort.” Another description says people sometimes described it as like being in a river flow. They were swept along with little effort.
Decide what to call it when you experience it yourself.
October 23, 2024
What You Find
This is heresy, but I recommend most of the time we work with what we find rather than planning extensively and expecting everything to be “perfect”.
Planning
It is common these days for photographers to research locations is detail before ever going into the field. And there are lots of tools to help us do it.
For any given location we can find what time of the year is “optimum”, what time of day is best, even where to stand for the best view. We can research the weather we should be able to expect, the temperature, exactly when sunrise or sunset is if that is important to the shot.
Then, of course, we can work back to where to stay, what time to get up, where the beat eating places are, etc.
Basically, then, we can just show up at the right time, set up and take the shot we want, and leave.
Trophies
A well planned shot like that can lead to some excellent pictures. If you are a National Geographic photographer out on a 6 month assignment to get a certain picture, that is a great approach.
I have 2 problems with it
1. It is collecting trophies.
2. What about the experience?
Much of photography these days seems to revolve around collecting trophies. We have to get that signature picture of Half Dome or the Eiffel Tower to post on social media to impress our peers.
That’s not me. I usually avoid places where dozens of other photographers are lined up shoulder to shoulder, fighting for tripod placements. Those sights are well covered. I do not plan to contribute yet another photo of Half Dome to the world, unless I am able to capture something unique. That is less and less likely when millions of shots are taken of it every year by good photographers.
I fully realize this is a personal value. It also is rooted in my personality type. I derive satisfaction from creating fresh, creative images that represent my vision. Whether or not anyone else likes them. Some other people need to bag trophies. Checking off the bucket list items is more important than actually having the image.
It would be foolish for me to criticize them. We are different. I do not agree with them, but I recognize that this behavior is true for many people. You have to do what is right for you.
What you find
Taking a good photograph is an emotional encounter for me. Talking about the experience you get is subtle and harder to describe. It is intensely personal.
If you are the meticulous planner I described earlier and you show up at your target location, what happens if things go wrong? What if the weather is too stormy to get out? Perhaps there are forest fires around and it is closed or obscured by smoke. Maybe a road is slowed down by construction and you get to the location “too late” for the planned shot.
If things like this happen and you can’t get the shot you planned, is it a failure? Are you disappointed with the outing? Was it a wasted trip?
I’m not usually so disappointed. I am there to see, feel, internalize – and, oh by the way, make images I am proud of. A sunny day may not inherently be better than a rainy day. Why is a snow storm worse than a warm summer day? It all depends on my reaction and attitude and what I am able to do with what I find.
How good are you?
I believe the attitude of accepting what we find and using our skill to work with it is healthy and mature. We cannot control what we will encounter. But we can control our attitude.
So whether I am at the Eiffel Tower or in my neighborhood, I try to make excellent images in whatever conditions I find. OK, allow 2 seconds feeling sorry for yourself, then put it out of your mind, enjoy yourself, and attack the photo problem.
For example, recently I went out locally to shoot some pictures of trees. A favorite subject of mine. But it turned into an extremely windy day. Did that make it a waste? No. Have you ever tried to shoot pictures of the wind? It was challenging and interesting after I reframed the problem. I enjoyed it and I like some of the images.
Making good pictures in unexpected conditions is a test of our craft and our character. Loosen your rigid expectations. Roll with the punches. Make lemonade out of lemons. Insert your own cliche.
But cliche or not, try it. Be flexible. It surprises me that unexpected pictures in bad conditions are sometimes the most memorable to me.
Today’s image
This wasn’t taken on the windy day I described. But it was a much worse day. It was in the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, CO. It is not the conditions I came for, but it was what I found. HIgh wind funneling through the rock formations, blowing snow starting to pile up, bitter cold in Colorado in the winter. Sounds like a great day to be out.
Actually, after I kicked myself out into it and started seeing images, it was great. It turned out to be a very enjoyable experience. I went crazy shooting, when I could keep the snow cleared off my lens. Of course, it took a while later for my hands to thaw out and I was soaking wet and shivering. But I did not notice that very much at the time. All in all, I look back on it as a good time. And I like the image.
September 25, 2024