Category: Mastery

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The Magic of the Lens

Hotel deVille, Paris

Do you ever stop to think about your lenses, besides wanting a shinny new one? There is a magic of the lens that we seldom consider and perhaps do not even understand.

Many constraints

My perception is colored by my background as an engineer. I see a modern lens as serving so many constraints that it is a wonder they do the job as well as they do. We expect high resolving power and “good” bokah. It needs to have a good zoom range but be small. It must be weather sealed and rugged, but inexpensive. And, of course, issues like low chromatic aberration and great edge to edge sharpness and low distortion and minimal light falloff (vignetting) and minimum flare are all givens. Oh and blazing fast auto focus, too.

The poor lens designers are in a tight place. Luckily for them computer design tools have advanced greatly. Also, new materials are available to help overcome some of the design problems of the past.

Still though, we ask a lot of a professional grade lens. Probably more than we realize.

Simple lens

We have an idea in mind of how a lens works. You probably did an experiment in High School Physics with a simple lens. Then you took it out and fried some ants.

What we normally picture is a biconvex lens. Don’t let a fancy word scare you. That just means both sides are thicker in the middle than on the edge. Like this:

By DrBob at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2065907

The rays (red lines) illustrate how the lens focuses on a point. That focusing is what images the outside world sharply onto our sensor.

This is true. It works. But nothing in life is simple anymore.

Reality

The reality is that, because of our high expectations and the piles of constraints to satisfy, real lens design has to be much more complex.

I am going to use the Nikon Z 24-120 f/4 zoom as an example. For two reasons: it is a representative high quality modern design, and I like it – a lot. It is my go-to lens for everyday use.

Lens design has gone far beyond the “simple” lens pictured above. Here is a cutaway of the Nikon lens:

Photography Life: https://photographylife.com/reviews/nikon-z-24-120mm-f-4-s

We can see that it has many lens elements (a word for a piece of glass in a lens) – 16 of them to be exact. Few of them are simple biconvex elements. Some of them are exotic glass. Things like high refractive index (they bend light more sharply than regular glass) or other properties. Some are aspherical. This means they are quite complex designs to achieve specific results. These are hard to design and manufacture. Usually they are necessary to correct for effects of other things and make the resulting image better.

Zoom

Let’s look at a few specific features. This lens has a 5x zoom range, from 24mm to 120mm. Now you would think that, for the lens to zoom 5x, it would have to get 5 times longer. This would be true for a straightforward design.

However, us users of the lens would not like that. It would have to be very big and bulky to do that. And it would be awkward when zoomed all the way out. It would be long and off balance the camera.

But complex design magic and some of those special lens elements allow them to shortcut physics. it zooms over the 5x range while only extending to less than twice it’s collapsed length. Amazing and very welcome.

Reflections

The real world is not a well behaved bundle of parallel rays coming into the lens, like in the simple lens picture above. Light is coming from everywhere. Most of it is what we want to end up on the sensor. But a lot isn’t. Light coming in from a sharp angle tends to “bounce around” inside the lens and cause a lowering of contrast. Kind of a fog look.

Modern lenses have special coatings on the glass and use some of the special types of glass i mentioned to fight this. These go a long way to canceling the reflections.

It used to be that shooting in the direction of a very bright source, like the sun would always cause unwanted internal reflections that degrade the image. Now it is amazing how little that happens. I really only worry about that if the sun is directly or nearly directly in view.

Abstract study in texture and shape©Ed Schlotzhauer

Chromatic aberration

Chromatic aberration is something we seldom consider, except when we are getting down to the last details of a final print. One of the nasty realities of physics is that each “color” of light is a different frequency. The amount of “bend” the lens gives to light is dependent on the color (frequency) of the light. This means not all the colors focus at the same point. That’s bad.

Have you every looked very closely at magnified blowup of a sharp edge in one of your photos? Especially if it is in a high contrast lighting situation. You may see a slight fringe of green or purple around the edge. This is called chromatic aberration. Not all the colors focusing together.

One of the purposes of the exotic glass and all the elements in modern lenses is to minimize this. They do a pretty good job.

But they are not perfect. Luckily it is a simple check box in Lightroom Classic to have the software automatically remove chromatic aberration.

Other considerations

If you ever carry a camera around all day you learn to appreciate light weight. Lens designers would like to design their lenses with a very sturdy metal shell and structure. But we would not like to carry that. Modern plastics and design techniques have allowed the designers to create our lenses at a more user friendly weight while still being sturdy enough to hold up to hard use. Thank you.

Did you know that some lenses make the light come into the sensor is a certain direction to make the sensor receive the photons better? Did you know that most of our zoom lenses, especially, have quite a bit of distortion and vignetting and resolution falloff at the edges? Those are some of the things that are part of the tradeoffs. But one reason they are traded off is there’s a bit of perceptual and software slight of hand.

First, we don’t notice it much. Really. We are not as sensitive to it as you would think. Unless you spend your time photographing test charts. Second, many of us set Lightroom Classic to look at the model of the lens and automatically apply a “correction” to the image we see. Adobe has a database of lenses with mathematical models to correct their distortions. This is a good thing.

As a matter of fact, Nikon has a special deal with Adobe such that the great Z 24-70 f/2.8 lens is automatically corrected in Lightroom Classic, whether or not the user selects that. It is impossible to defeat it. Hardware and software are joining in a symbiotic relationship. Making an image is a blend of both and it will only increase with time.

Almost everything done to solve one problem creates another. This is why designs are so complex and expensive. Everything is a tradeoff. It is all a question of how good can we make this property while not letting that other one get worse than a certain level.

Example black & white image©Ed Schlotzhauer

Magic

I am in awe of these brilliant designers. They achieve beautiful balance. Like I said, I regularly use this example lens I have talked about and I am generally very happy with it. But let me emphasize that pure, unexcelled technical perfection is not usually my goal. A lens like this is “good enough” for 99.9% of my needs.

For me, as a user, I take the camera out and start using it. What I see and feel is more important than technology. Sometimes, though, my engineer nature kicks in and makes me marvel at the complexity. But really, I shoot and expect my great gear to capture what I want. And it usually does. Marvelous.

The magic of the. lens. Like most good magic, how it works is invisible to us. But occasionally stop to consider how lucky we are and what an incredible piece of technology we have attached to our camera body.

Feature image

The image at the top was shot with this Nikon Z 24-120mm f/4 zoom lens I have been using as an example. This is the Hotel de Ville in Paris – their Town Hall. You can’t really tell in this small jpg, but I am completely happy with the capabilities of this lens. If the opportunity arose I am sure I could make a very good 60″ print of this. Here is a section of it zoomed to 100%.

100% section, ©Ed Schlotzhauer

Let me assure you that I am not affiliated with or sponsored by Nikon. I am just using this nice lens that I use frequently as a representative example of what a modern zoom lens is and is capable of doing.

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Don’t Show It All

Small cascade in Colorado Rockies

Not like that. This is a follow up to my last post on portfolio selection. A simple, overarching principle to keep in mind is: don’t show it all, or even most of it. Actually, not very much of it.

We’re proud of our work

A blessing and curse of digital photography is that we now shoot thousands of images. Of course, we’re pretty good, too. Everybody should like to see 500 pictures of my cat. After all, they are all different poses. And that big trip we enjoyed so much, here are the very best 900 pictures from that great trip to France. They’re all worth seeing.

We fall in love with our own pictures. This is a fact of life. Each one is special because it was exciting, memorable, unique for us. We remember what we experienced at the time. It makes it significant to us. To us, each one of those 900 pictures from France is worth showing to other people.

And when we are too attached to our pictures we tend to overlook problems that are obvious and distracting to others. The telephone pole growing out or your kid’s head is not seen. After all, it is a really cute expression. And we overlook all those people in the foreground of the beautiful picture of Chambord. Just look at how spectacular that Chateau is. It is too easy to convince our self that that tilted horizon is not a problem, or the poor composition, or the bad color balance.

But we have to be adult. Part of that means being very aware of the actual quality of our work and of what is appropriate for the situation. And in most situations, less is more.

Other people generally don’t care

I don’t want to pour cold water on your enthusiasm, but other people are not excited about what you have. That is a hard reality you have to learn.

They weren’t there. They did not experience what you did. None of these images have the same meaning or impact for them. It wasn’t their vacation, or their family, or their cat. Call up your pictures of France and hand the phone to someone to page through. If they are good friends, they will fake interest and flip through a lot of them. But even they will probably not look at any image for more than 1-2 seconds.

When they look at your pictures, they don’t see it the same way you did. They can’t and never will. Understanding this is a key to getting our images viewed by other people.

It gets much more challenging when we are wanting strangers to view our work. They do not know us, they were not there when the image was taken, it may not be anything they are interested in. But here, look at my pictures. Thanks, but I’ll pass.

Photographing a true icon - The Eiffel Tower©Ed Schlotzhauer

Context is key

The context where we are and where and when we are presenting our images makes a huge difference. Is it to friends or strangers? Is it one-on-one or a public venue? What is drawing people to pay attention to your photos?

Pushing pictures on social media is a main venue for many of us. The audience is friendly if it is our network. They will politely scan through a few of the pictures. A few of the viewers may even give us a thumbs up to make us feel good. But did they actually see them or care? We can’t tell. And we won’t know.

And how often have we been cornered by friends who have “a few” pictures to show us? They hand us their phone, sure we will love the 50 pictures they took of the great sunset last night. It is one of those “just shoot me” moments. But if they are a friend, we have to be polite. Back in the film days it was a common joke theme to go over to a friends house only to have them get out the slide projector to show “a few” pictures of their trip. After the first few hundred we want to fake a heart attack to get away.

Up to here we are only bothering captive audiences. We can get away with little editing and selection. It will make us look foolish, but our friends will forgive us – eventually.

But perhaps we decide we’re pretty good and book a booth in an art fair. Now the audience has no connection to us and no inherent reason to look at what we have. We will get a glance as they walk by. People will only pause to give a second look if we present something that captures their attention. They will only come in to look more closely if we show them something exceptional.

Now take it to the big leagues. We get an opportunity to show our portfolio to an art director or gallery manager. That is a tough audience. These are professional art viewers. They look at huge numbers of pictures and it is their job to reject almost everything. What are you showing that will capture their attention? It better not be 100 of your best cat pictures.

How many?

How many images are in a portfolio? There is no hard rule for this. It depends on what the portfolio is for.

Peter Eastway, the publisher of Better Photography Magazine, has a nice little ebook titled “Creating a Portfolio“. It is worth reading if you can get a copy. He tries to address this and many other considerations of putting together a portfolio.

In his Australian humor, he says “The number of photographs in a perfect album is 12. Or sometimes 8. Or maybe 24.” In other words, it depends. No rules. But the number is probably much lower than you thought, and whatever you put in needs to be the best. No filler. Nothing that’s there because you want to show some variety to widen the interest.

Peter gives an interesting test. He says do not put an image in your portfolio unless you think you will still be proud of it in 12 months time. That is significant to me. I often am enthusiastic about an image, only to find I cool off toward it with time. My filtering process has built in delays. It take months for me to elevate an image to “one of the best” status. I do that intentionally to let the initial enthusiasm be replaced with a more objective evaluation.

In general, between 12 and 20 for any collection of images in a project or portfolio works for me. I would feel free to violate my own rule if I were doing a documentary or a book. Or for a multi-year project that had significant importance to me. But I would have to make a very conscious exception.

More than a rock - seeing it different.©Ed Schlotzhauer

Less is more

I advocate that we take a mindful “less is more” attitude. Always take out images until it hurts. Then take our a lot more.

Remember, your audience has a short attention span compared to your view of your portfolio. Any weak image will loose their interest. They may even abandon looking at that point. I have heard it said that you will be judged by the weakest image in your portfolio. I believe it. It is human nature to find the worst as a way to critique the whole.

I consider building a portfolio kind of like an athletic contest. Teams have to compete in and survive multiple rounds of playoffs to be chosen the champion. Hopefully the best emerge. Same with our images. It is a brutal, hand to hand contest.

If you are evaluating coolly and objectively, every one removed makes the remaining set stronger. Remember, when you remove one, you are not saying you don’t like it or it is a bad image. You are just acknowledging that it does not hold up against the competition of the rest of the group. That is good. But hard.

It is very hard for me. If I want to select a project with max 20 images, I may pull at least 60-80 very good candidates. Doing the first cut is only a little painful. Maybe that gets me down to 50. I try to toughen up and go slashing again. Now maybe I have 35 left. OK, I swallow hard and cut some more and get it down to 30. Still a long way from 20.

The trouble now is that I really love every one of the 30 candidates that remain. The pain of eliminating any of then is extreme. Remind myself over and over that taking one out is not saying I don’t like it. It would be a lot easier to relent and let myself use all 30.

You would think it would get easier now. After all, I think all of them are great. But the reality is that there is a rank order to be discovered. Some are better than the others. That is what I still have to resolve. Eventually I get there. It is painful and lengthy. But a funny thing happens. I love the set that survives, and forget about the pain of the ones that didn’t make it.

The optimum number to show people is fewer than you think. When we learn that we don’t have to show it all, we can build stronger portfolios.

If you’re not your own severest critic, you are your own worst enemy.

Jay Maisel

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The Hardest Part

Canterbury Cathedral

I have figured out what I consider the hardest part of photography. Excluding Marketing. It is selecting a portfolio.

Pick a few

It’s a common situation. Perhaps I am entering a selection for a gallery competition. Maybe a client has requested a few choices for a job. It could be just needing to pick some images for this blog post. Whatever the reason, I am faced with the problem of selecting a small set of images for a certain use.

Oh sure, I have the images that would work. It’s not like I”m not happy with my choices. The problem is selecting only a few.

I’m calling what I am doing here making a portfolio. That is not precisely correct. Formally, a portfolio is a collection of images designed for presentation to an audience. Often one-on-one. However, the process is substantially the same for that and the situations I described. So I will not distinguish them.

Embarrassment of riches

Please don’t take it as bragging, but I have lots of images that I like. I have been at it a long time. Lots as in many thousands. That’s just the ones I promote to my top level selection category. A lot of others in my catalog would be useful for certain applications.

Yes, I have a disciplined filing system. Everything is culled through multiple levels of selection. I find it is hard to pick the ones I like best from a shoot, so my process is oriented around rejecting the ones that are not as good. I don’t know why, but it is easier for me to say “I don’t like that one as well” than to say “I like that one best.” That is repeated through multiple levels. I apply more stringent criteria at each level.

Giant bear peeking into an urban building©Ed Schlotzhauer

Most of my images are filed geographically and I have an extensive keyword system for tagging all sorts of information. And I use it.

All this should make it easy to find just what I want. You would think, but no. It is easier in that I am only wading through thousands, not hundreds of thousands of images to pick. But that’s not even the most difficult part.

No guidance

We are awash in training material to help us become better photographers. Some if it is actually good. There are thousands of hours of videos on camera operation and composition and visual design. Many more on techniques in the field and techniques for post processing. And gear guides are limitless. As are books to supplement the videos. All of this can help boost our knowledge and improve our technique.

But when it comes to pulling together a portfolio, the advice is: it’s hard, keep editing, get it down to a few great images.

Thanks, but that is not really helpful. Well, it is helpful to find out that I should expect it to be hard and I have to do it myself. But where is the video that shows me to pick this image instead of that one?

Should a choose a tight theme with carefully coordinated image selections, as for a project? Or would it be best to present a range of subjects and styles to show the breadth of my work? Would it help to research the curator of the exhibit to try to guess what they would like? Why would this image work better than that one?

I feel kind of left hanging out there.

I’m on my own

That’s the point and the conclusion. We are on our own. We have to be grown ups and make responsible decisions. That is no fun. It is downright hard. That’s why, to me, this is the hardest part.

Very abstract created image. Representa the evolution of an image.©Ed Schlotzhauer

So a typical scenario is that I have to select, say, 4 images for a gallery. Open theme. I’m on my own. No guidance. It is very easy to go through my catalog and pull 50 images that I would like to submit. Another pass or two might get it down to 30 images. Then it gets harder and harder as I push on. I love every one of these images. Eliminating one seems like I am abandoning it. I know that’s not the case, but the feeling is there.

It is sometimes easier if I set it aside for a few days to let the emotions settle down. Then I do my best imitation of being coldly realistic to screen out some more. But what seems to happen is that I get down to, say, 8 images. I can only have 4. That final cut is extremely painful.

i envy people who have a colleague or mentor they can work with to advise the process. I don’t. The decisions have to be made by me with no help. I have an awesome wife, but she isn’t an artist and cannot help with this.

Well, I get there. It is painful. I come away with sadness because I had to eliminate some of my favorites in the final mix. That disappears with time, though. After a few days I can look at the final set and be proud of them.

Overthinking it

A reality is that I tend to overthink it. What I know is that the images I pull are all very good. And I know, and have demonstrated to myself often, that, with a set of excellent images, every time you eliminate one, you make the overall set stronger. That is, if you make intelligent choices. I try to remind myself of great advice I got one time that you will be judged by the worst image you show.

So why do I agonize over it so much? It’s not like I throw a great image away if I remove it from the set.

I think there are two problems. First is that I love these images and feel bad about taking one out, because I’m emotionally attached to it. I can live with that. But the second and bigger problem is, how do I know I have made the best choice?

Self doubt

That is the core of the problem. There is no guidance. I am on my own. There are much bigger and more important choices in life that are like this. Who to marry, what career to pursue, where to live, what investments to make, etc. We must use our judgment to make the decision. It hurts. We want someone to look over our shoulder and tell us we did the right thing. Unfortunately, being an adult doesn’t work like that.

Picking some images for a use is way down in importance from those big life events. Why is it so painful then? I think it is the same fear of failure and the consequences. But I try to be realistic.

So I try to convince myself that the final set I choose will be excellent. Even though I feel like I am in the spotlight and I am being examined to see if I am worthy, I know that if I do the best I can, that will be good enough. And if not, well, nobody dies.

I tell myself that, but it doesn’t feel like it when I am in the pain of the process.

All parts of the photographic process are interesting and challenging. All are subjective, But there seems to be a lot of help to be had in all phases of it up until the final image selection.

Resources

There actually are a couple of resources I have found to help give some education in this. Unfortunately they are not freely available. Peter Eastway, editor of Better Photography magazine, has written an excellent ebook on creating a portfolio. As it says, it is specifically oriented to putting together a portfolio or exhibit. But it still gives a lot of good insights.

Creating a Portfolio might be available at www.betterphotographyeducation.com without a subscription. If not, it is an excellent publication and you will enjoy it. 🙂

Another option that I have found out is not paywalled is a three part series of newsletters in the Paper Arts Collective newsletter. This is a hidden gem of a publication. The series I’m referring to was titled Evolution of a Small Project, and it traced the decisions and selection process he went through to put together an exhibit. If you do prints then you should check out Paper Arts Collective.

But I come back to my original problem. It is hard, no one can really help you, you have to make hard choices yourself based on your judgment and artistic vision. And you have to have confidence in your decisions. To me, it is the hardest part.

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Get in a Flow

Mountain lake at sunrise

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.

Gothic cathedral repeating forms© 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.

Candles in a church© 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.

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It Looks Like a Painting

Flowing green shapes and lines

This comment used to make me angry. But I have now rationalized that most people mean it as a compliment. If it looks like a painting then it must be art.

Is painting the standard?

For most people, painting means art. It is what they were taught. Photographs are those low value things they do on their phone. They’re mostly for memories and bragging rights on social media.

I believe most people view painting as “high art”. Like they might view classical music. After all, both are remote and fairly difficult to understand. Removed from their daily lives. High art is something they have been taught that they should value, but they seldom partake of it.

And paintings are viewed as difficult, labor intensive works requiring lots of training and “suffering”. That instills them with high value in many people’s estimation. It is not unusual for painters to encourage an aura of this being something so great and high that we cannot understand it. We viewers are lucky the artist will share a glimpse of such truth with us.

And on a practical note, a painting is one of a kind. The artist paints one original. This increases the value of the work in some markets.

Some people, looking at one of my images, describe it as “painterly”. To them, this is a compliment. Even photo reviewers occasionally use the term. Internally, I usually cringe, unless it was actually my goal to look like a painting.

So for my peace of mind I have decided to accept “it looks like a painting” as a sincere compliment. It may be alien to my goals and values as a photographer, but is probably the best way a lot of people know of to say “it is art”.

What does a painting look like?

I will consider that a “painting” is some type of color medium applied to a substrate like paper or canvas by hand. I will stretch the definition to include pouring or throwing paint. Typical color mediums are oil, acrylic, watercolor, or pastel.

The “by hand” seems to be important. Until print reproductions are made, all paintings are originals. Many people consider a “mechanically created” print inferior to a painting because it was too easy to make.

Brushes are most often used to apply the color. Although they come in a wide range of sizes, and it is possible to create very detailed paintings, generally paintings are a somewhat coarse expression of a scene. That expression is considered part of the artistry.

This is what people think of as a painting. It is an Albert Bierstadt painting titled “Rocky Mountain Landscape”. As someone who lives in the Rockies, I can attest this is purely fictional:

Albert Bierstadt painting, 1870From the White House Collection. Image from Google Art Project

An artist typically paints a scene they can observe (or make up). This means the scene is fairly static. Unless, of course, they take a picture of it and paint from a photographic print. Is that allowed? Does that make the painting something else? 🙂

So paintings are generally relatively large, static scenes, less detailed than a photograph, and created by hand.

Do I want my image to look like a painting?

Do I want my image to look like a painting? Great question. Sometimes yes. Usually no.

This is a fairly typical image I do that screams PHOTORGRAPH. It could be painted, but then that would be a painter trying to make his work look like a photograph. 🙂

Classic B&W photograph.© Ed Schlotzhauer

Why would I want an image to look like a painting? I do occasionally enjoy creating abstract images. Sometimes they work best done as a dreamy, blurry, hand drawn look. I love that photography can achieve a wide variety of effects. I enjoy pushing the boundary and creating an unexpected look.

But in these cases, I have chosen to create the image with this look. My goal was not to “make it look like a painting”. Sometimes an image tells me what it wants to look like. Sometimes what it wants to look like is what most people consider “painterly”. If that is what is right for the image, then OK.

Don’t feel inferior

I think photography is an amazing art form. Its versatility is unsurpassed. Being technology based allows it to operate somewhat outside the limits of the artist’s mind. We can explore time and scale and space and even non-visual realms in ways that other artistic mediums can only copy.

With photography, we can make one print and stop or we can make 1000 prints. We can re-scale a file to make a print very small to fit into a locket or up to wall-sized for a gallery or to decorate a large room. Or even billboards or the sides of buildings.

Never let the intelligentsia convince you you are somehow inferior to painters or other “real” arts. They are just trying to protect their self interests. Photography is as real as any art. Be proud of your art.

So when someone tells you your image looks like a painting, be gracious. Don’t launch into a lecture about why they are wrong and how they do not understand. This would be rude and even insulting. Accept it as a compliment. They are using terms they know to tell you they like your work and consider it good art. Be happy. But also be confident that it does not have to look like a painting to be great art.

Today’s featured image

The image at the top would be considered “painterly” by many people. Did I want it to look like a painting? No. I was exploring possibilities of long shutter speeds with flowing water and reflections in a river. I knew from experience that I could often get abstract results I like. This is an example.

I like it. It is abstract, and it flows and has a lot of subtle details of interest. Does it look like a painting? That is for you to decide. If you think that, great. But it is not a label I try for when I am creating. I would not market my work as “looks like a painting”.