Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Mastery

Be The 1%
We can choose to be the 1% of photographers. Those who make prints. A print is a special thing with it’s own life.
The 1%
I’m not talking about that 1% we hear talked about – the richest people in the world or the country. The latest data I could find for the USA says that, on average across the country, to be in the 1% you need a salary of about $600,000 or a net worth of $11 Million. Another article said that 1% of the people in the world own over 50% of the total household wealth.
I am not bringing this up to get into any discussion of income inequality, investing practices, demographics, or anything related to that.
No, I am referring to a group of photographers we can easily choose to join. Peter Eastway speculates that only about 1% of photographers make prints. Why do you think we don’t print more?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
What is a print?
First, what do I mean by a print? This may seem obvious, but I want to make sure we are on the same page, so to speak.
By a print I am referring to an image presented in a physical medium. A print is an object with weight and space and presence. We can hold it and touch it. We perceive it with our physical senses. And it is “permanent”. That is, it persists unchanged over time.
A print is an enduring expression of the artist’s intent at the time. I say at the time, because it is quite possible for my intent to change with time. Today’s print may be quite different from one of the same image file 10 years ago. I can come to see it different. That is natural. I am the artist.
What is a print not? It is not an image on a screen. Not your computer monitor or a iPad or your phone. It is not a fleeting image scrolled by on social media.
Screens are important in the production of our art, but they should not be the goal. Psychologically, we know that what we see on a screen is ephemeral. It has no permanence. We discount it easily.
Why a print?
A print is tangible and persistent. It is an artifact in its own right. That is, it is physical. It is an object. We can hand it off to a client who buys it and it becomes their possession.
By giving the print this life of its own, we are creating a new piece of art. It is no longer under the control of the artist. Kind of like a child growing up and going out on their own. They are your family, but they have their own life now.
As the artist, I can no longer “huddle over it” and protect and explain it. It is on its own. Now it is hanging on a wall. Maybe in someone’s home. Maybe in a gallery. But no matter where, it is now perceived for itself in isolation. It has to explain itself, fend for itself.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
What does it do to our thought process?
Deciding to make a print changes our perception of what we are doing.
For one thing, we have to commit our interpretation of what we see or feel in the image. Once we make the print, we can’t come back next week and change it. If we do, it becomes a different piece of art.
And we will go through a more stringent selection process to pick it. Out of my thousands of good images, why print this one? Does it do a better job of representing my view on the subject? Is it a more perceptive representation of something I feel? Will this give my viewers more insight than the thousands of other images I could have picked? Is this an image I will hand to the world and say “this is me?”
And making a print involves new creative decisions. What size should it be? Some images seem to call to be large while others seem to prefer being small. Should this be a paper print or canvas or metal or acrylic? Will it look best as glossy or matte? Sure, some of the decisions will be dictated by the intended application. But many are purely artistic.
And there are technical considerations that come in now. Can I print it and mount it myself or must I send it out to a service bureau to be done? The selected media imposes constraints on the image itself. If the desired effect is soft and ethereal then a matte finish may be best. But if the image relies on sharp detail a glossy substrate will make that pop more.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Technical considerations
Creating a good print is a specialized process that requires some detailed knowledge. The fundamental problem is one of basic physics. Screens generate light and emit it. It is an RGB mix and it is additive. That is, red + green makes orange.
We see prints by reflected light. Light hits the surface of the print and what bounces back is what we see. It is a subtractive process. The ink absorbs some colors. We see the reflected light that is not absorbed. To make less red you add cyan. Cyan is the opposite of red. More cyan absorbing red means less red reflected.
This fundamental difference means that a print will never look exactly like the image on screen. How close we can come is one of the challenges. How close we need to come is an artistic judgment.
One barrier I hit a lot is color gamut limitations. Print media generally has a smaller color range than our computer monitors. It probably has a smaller range than the color space we are working in. No physical media can print the whole ProPhoto RGB space, for instance.
Editing the image for printing is a task on it’s own. We load profiles for the media and printer and inks that we are using. A special profiling view is switched on so we see a simulation of what the final print will look like. This is, at best, a fair but not exact model. The reality is it may require several rounds of test prints and re-edits to get to a final print we like.
It can be a lot of work, but it is part of the artistic process. This is work we have to do to “birth” the print as its own entity.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Viewing it
We have gone through all of this work and expense to create a print. Why? Was it worth it?
This is a personal evaluation.
Sometimes you are disappointed with the result. Some images just do not seem to print well. That could mean we did not choose the best medium or size.
But most of the time you will feel the satisfaction of creating something new. Because the print is a new work of art. It is a distinct physical object with a life of its own. It lives in the world and is evaluated by viewers.
We did our best job of composition and subject selection and lighting and a host of other things. We edited it carefully and prepared it for printing. Now it passes into another realm. We have tried to guide the viewers to see what we saw, but now they are on their own to discover it.
The child leaves home and starts its own life. We are proud of it, but we cannot control it. It is not ours anymore. The viewers evaluate it on its own independently.
Something tugged their interest enough to take a look at it. Maybe we can draw them in and take them on a journey they did not anticipate. That is joy for the artist and the viewer.
Take the leap. Be one of the 1% of photographers who make prints. It can change your art. And it can be a legacy.
April 9, 2025
The Color Is…
Color is one of the major considerations in our photo processing. And it can be hard. Have you ever considered how many tools and settings there are to control color in Lightroom and Photoshop?
But where are you on the color concern spectrum? For you, is color:
1. Critical. It must exactly match
2. Important
3. An annoyance
4. Just a design variable
5. Don’t care
Why do we need to change it?
Despite all of the great technology we have, color is still an imprecise and slippery thing to deal with. Different camera manufacturers often create their own unique ‘look”. Fuji, for instance, has profiles built in for some of their famous films (remember Velvia?). But because of different technology and processing tradeoffs, there are subtle differences between, say, Nikon and Canon. There are even small variations between samples of the same camera model,
The color variations are magnified as we move further along the processing chain. What we see is greatly influenced by the decision to shoot RAW or JPEG, and if JPEG, what color balance is chosen. And is our monitor calibrated to ensure it correctly represents the colors in the digital file?
Finally, when we make a print everything can change drastically. The print is strongly influenced by the paper we choose and the printer’s ink set. Using good profiles for the printer and paper combination helps to produce an output that is “similar” to what we edited on screen, but it will never be the same. Just the move from illuminated pixels in RGB space to reflected light from a paper substrate in CMYK space means they can never be exactly the same. The physics is completely different.
The variations along the way are the process of color correcting the image.
Most of us do not see or pay much attention to these differences. The importance to us depends on our application.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Tools
The color correction tool chain starts back in our camera. Specifically, the color balance setting.
The color of the light on our scene varies greatly in different conditions. Bright sunlight is completely different from open shade, as is a cloudy, overcast day. Indoors under tungsten or fluorescent lighting and. even LED’s give different color casts.
Out eye/brain automatically adjusts for most of these differences, but the camera does not. The color balance setting in the camera is a means to dial out the color casts. But this is only useful for JPEG images and the preview we see in camera. Color balance has no effect on RAW images. Those compensations are made in our image editing software.
My camera stays set to Auto White Balance. I only shoot RAW, so it has little effect on my processing or results.
Lightroom
When I say “Lightroom” that is a shorthand for “Lightroom Classic”. That is the only version I care about. But I”m pretty sure everything I say about it applies to both applications. There are differences in color representations in other RAW image processors like Capture One, but I do not have enough experience with them to say much.
Lightroom is packed full of ways to change the color of our image. In the Develop module you are never far from something that can modify color.
Some of the controls change color globally, that is, for the whole image. Just scanning down from top to bottom (I think my controls are still in the default order), we start with profile. This can be a simple selection of default balance or you can set any of the many provided color effects, including black & white toning.
Next there is the white balance adjustment to allow us to adapt the image to a color that should be neutral. Next to that is the color balance selection to partially compensate for lighting conditions.
Right under them is the Temp and Tint sliders. Vibrance and saturation do not actually alter colors much, but they have a strong effect on the look of colors.
Then there is the Tone Curve, where we can adjust red, green, and blue channel properties directly, followed by Color Mixer and Color Grading. Finally there is the Calibration group where we can control hue and saturation of each channel.
All of these are only the control that affect the whole image. We have many of the same controls to perform selective adjust color in regions (like a linear gradient) or spots (e.g the brush tool).
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Partly driven by the application
Hopefully, you get the impression that Lightroom gives us a lot of control of color. It must be important. I won’t even go into Photoshop with its many adjustments. I trust the point is made. This is not a “how to”.
Color adjustment is a large part of what we may deal with in post processing.
Maybe.
It depends on our application and needs.
If you are doing product photography, the customer is very concerned that the color of their logo or product absolutely matches their specification. Portrait customers have a fairly narrow tolerance for off colors in people’s faces. Or you may have a self-imposed rule that the final color must exactly match the original scene.
In these cases you are probably using gray cards or Color Checker swatches to ensure you faithfully match the original. You may even be calibrating your camera to minimize discrepancies. You will probably be using many of these Lightroom controls to adjust the colors to balance out shifts or color casts.
I’m a Fine Art Photographer
But I’m a Fine Art Photographer. I dislike that term and I’m not completely sure what it means, but I do know that what I create is art. Art is not tied to a real scene. Maybe someday I will get into a discussion on indexicality, but not today. By my definition, anything I want to do as art is acceptable.
I may not care at all about the color of the original scene. I’m certainly not fanatical about matching it or balancing color casts. My consideration is how the resulting image looks (to me) and what effect it has for the viewers.
Yet I do use most of the color controls I listed earlier. Except I very rarely use Calibrarion to adjust color, but that’s just me and my thought process. All the other controls, in global and regional and spots, are tools I use frequently.
Color is a subtle thing. Almost imperceptible shifts can create large perceived changes. It can be tricky, or impossible, to achieve an effect I have in mind. But I try.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Not an absolute
Breaking the assumption that my image must look like the original was difficult for me. Coming from a very technical, engineering background made me think in absolutes. Precision was important. But now that the assumption is broken, it is freeing. The realities I started with no longer hinder my vision (as much).
Even so, I do not usually create comic book-like pop art. Unless I want to for some reason. But, on the other hand, I do often enjoy making images that are so extreme you will think I modified them too much, even if I did little at all.
Sometimes color is the subject. Sometimes an image “needs” to be a different color than the original. An extreme use of color modification is black & white. Yes, taking away all color and just leaving tonality is extreme color manipulation.
In the questions I posed at the start, I’m usually operating at about 4 or 5. It is a tool I can apply to accomplish my vision. Not something I am stuck with because that’s what the original was.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Do what you need to do
Color perception is one aspect of a visual image. But it is a powerful one. With our technology, we are blessed with extreme ability to control or modify color. Don’t be afraid to use it creatively.
Unless you are working in an application that demands absolute fidelity to the original, color becomes just another design element to be used for art.
Make your art. The color is… what you need it to be.
Today’s feature image
Is this the “right” color? I don’t know. First, I didn’t have a gray card with me. Second, even if I did, I couldn’t have held it out the window at 40,000 ft. Third and most important, I don’t care.
This is what I remember seeing at the time. It is the way I chose to make the image look. It is art. I like it like that.
March 26, 2025
What You See Is What You Get
This is a well worn cliché with many meanings. I would like to attach a new one to it. What you see is what you get is also a description of our photography process.
History
You can predict that I like to get into the background of things. The phrase seems to have originated in the mid 20th century. It was popularized by Flip Wilson in the 1960’s show “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In”. Anyone remember that? I have to confess that I do.
I will talk about meanings of the phrase, but one historical meaning was also special to me. “What you see is what you get” (abbreviated WYSIWYG) became a theme for personal computers back in the 1980’s. Before that, computers were terrible at dealing with fonts and layouts. Along came the Apple Macintosh and things changed radically. Thank you Steve jobs! But that is a topic for another time.
Conventional meanings
The normal usage of the phrase implies things are exactly as they appear, simple, no hidden meaning or content, clear.
For example:
“On a side note, with Jake, what you see is what you get; he’s always upfront.”
“In this political climate, it’s refreshing to see a candidate for whom what you see is what you get.”
“The website builder offers a what you see is what you get editor, making it easier for non-technical users to create professional-looking sites.”
We all know what we mean when we say the phrase, at least if you speak colloquial English.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
In our photography
I am proposing a new facet for this old phrase. As photographers, we have to see something to photograph it. So, what we see, is what we get.
That sounds blindingly obvious, but think about it a moment. In today’s world, the ability to notice things is getting to be a rare and precious talent. We live in culture of distraction. Every tech device in our lives is fighting for our attention.
But you are a photographer. I assume it is different for you. You have developed the skill of noticing things. To do that, you have to look and be aware. In order to even do that, you have to have the discipline to disconnect from most of the distraction that is keeping other people in addiction.
It seems like it is the goal of people today to have the least contact with the outside world they can. Almost like they want to live in a Matrix-like simulation.
Distraction
Next time you walk around in your city pay attention to what the people around you are doing. How many are looking around, seeming to take in what they are seeing? Compared to how many are glued to their phones or isolated with headphones. If they are looking around, is it with their phone camera in front of them to record everything they see so they can post it on social media? Do they have to get a selfie in front of that pretty sight, rather than actually looking at it?
The goal of most people seems to be to isolate themselves from the world around them. A 24/7 always on stream of TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, music, or movies provides an exciting alternative to the seemingly boring, mundane life and surroundings people have in their daily lives.
If people are on mass transit, they are plugged in and doing their best to block out the world around them. If they have to walk a few feet from their car, they are already checking email or Facebook. My state even felt the need to make it illegal to as much as pick up a cell phone when we are driving. It was that big of a problem.
And then there is the self imposed distraction of always being in a hurry. We rush and try to multi-task. Many people now do not even take all of their vacation, because we are too busy and afraid of falling behind. But that puts blinders on us. In our frantic hurry, we do not see much of what is around us.
I am in no place to give any kind of judgment about people’s desire to block out or deal with the world. Everyone gets to choose their path. That doesn’t make all choices equally beneficial. If we are artists, that puts us in a different context.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Mindfulness
A theme I can’t help coming back to frequently is mindfulness. Not in any kind of Zen practice, with painful poses and mantra chants. I don’t bend that way anymore.
Like most great ideas, mindfulness is very simple and extremely complicated.
From the viewpoint of photography, It is simple, because at its core , it is just about being aware of where you are, what is around you, possibilities of interesting colors and patterns and compositions and movement and subjects.
Just being aware. Training yourself to be in the habit of looking. Turning down the volume of distractions and looking around with an open mind. Being willing to think about things around you. Being willing to slow down some.
It is complicated, because it is exactly the opposite of what most of the world is trying to get you to do. Instead of closing into your little cocoon you have to open up to experiencing outside stimulus. This means consciously fighting against distraction that are trying to capture you.
Crazies
I love a quote from Lee Ann White I found recently. “If you make photographs when no one else does, you get photographs no one else does.” Simple and obvious. I think it was part of what inspired me to describe this idea of what you see is what you get.
I’m not suggesting taking the idea of being where no one else is to extremes. My friend Dean is an example of doing that. He is full on crazy (IMHO). For example, he goes solo trekking in wilderness areas of the Colorado mountains for days at a time in the worst winter conditions. And seems to enjoy it. And gets unique shots to prove it. That’s extreme even by my standards.
As a matter of fact, I know a lot of fairly crazy photographers. But that is not a requirement for doing good work.
This mindfulness I am recommending does not require existential danger or major travel ventures. It just requires us to be aware. To look around and see more than most of the people around you are seeing.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Give it a try
Look at everything you see as a picture. What is the interest here? How would I frame and compose it? What should I do with the lighting? What depth of field should I use? Is there a better viewpoint?
We can be going through that thought process without even getting out our camera. I hope, though, that it compels you to make the picture. I want you to get so excited about what you are seeing that you have to give it a try.
Have you ever stopped on the way to work because something caught your eye in a new way? Even after driving the route every day for years, today you saw something different. I have.
Just 3 days ago I was driving my normal route that I have done for thousands of times and I had to pull off in a cemetery. In the many years I have been by it nearly every day I have stopped less than a dozen times to actually go in and see it. That day was one. It was a bitterly cold day with a beautiful layer of hoar frost covering the trees. It compelled me to turn in. I’m glad I did.
What you see is what you get
If we do not see it, we will not photograph it. If we are not mindful and paying attention we will not see it in the first place. Just making the effort to look is a necessary first step. Mindfulness is a habit, a thought process. It is something we can learn through practice.
Even then we will not get the picture unless we give ourselves permission to stop and take the picture. Without taking the action we will never have it or the joy of the memory. Be one of the few who is paying attention.
I’ll wave at you when I see you pulled off on the side of the road shooting pictures of something i can’t even see. Looking a little crazy. And happy.
See it. Do it.
You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see.
If with a camera you can make others see it – that is photography.
Ernst Haas
The featured image
I thought it would be good to describe the image at the top of this article. It is exactly a “what you see is what you get” as I describe here. My wife and I were staying in a hotel downtown Denver for some reason. Probably a weekend away.
This was a scene looking right out our balcony. It is not composited or edited other than normal color and sharpness. The reflections were exactly this. I was fascinated and still do not understand how such diverse scenes could be captured on the windows. And I loved the distortions. I’ll take it. I’m glad I looked out and noticed it.
March 19, 2025
Choose Your Style
Many photographers wonder if they have a style, especially if they are fairly new to the game. Do you ever look at the wonderful work other photographers are publishing and think it would best to choose your style to be like them? Don’t.
What is considered a style?
There is no hard and fast rule that defines what a “style” is. To some, it is the type of subjects you shoot. That is, they see little or no difference between style and genre. Here is another list, longer almost to the point of being absurd, but still talking mostly about what the subject is.
Others refer to photographic style as the effects you use to make your final picture. Our phones have an abundance of them. You can find many sets of “styles” available to purchase for use in LIghtroom Classic or Photoshop. They are mostly shortcuts for making your picture look a lot like another artist’s work.
More advanced authors extend the concept to include not only what you shoot, but how you shoot it..This is starting to get to the point.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
My view
When you look at some famous photographer’s work, can you make a good guess who made the image? That is because they have an established and recognizable style.
In my view, style is not as much about what you shoot as it is about what the final image looks like. This final image is not only a function of what the subject is and how you “treat” it to get the look you want, but how you were thinking about it, and the lens you choose and how you frame and compose and expose it. In other words, your own viewpoint on it.
You have a point of view, the way you see the world around you that is different from anyone else. This determines your style. It comes naturally.
That is why, when you see a print of a grand landscape with superb detail and the blue sky printed almost to black, there is a good chance that is Ansel Adams. When you see another black & white image, but blurred in a long time exposure and overall very dark, it may well be a Cole Thompson. Those things are not certain, but they have a defined style.
Can you copy one?
One of the ways we learn is to copy. It is instructive, and can be fun, to try on the style of famous artists to see if it “fits” us. We may find bits and pieces that we adopt.
But most of the time we will decide soon that that was instructive, but I’m done with it. Maybe we’ll go off to copy someone else for a while.
Ask yourself why you are copying someone else’s style. Is it because you admire their work and want to explore it in more depth? Are you really searching and trying to figure out what your style is? Is it because one is “popular” and you think it will help you to sell more?
I can’t question your motives, but I can predict that you will eventually give up trying to copy a style and settle down to doing your own work. It is hard to just copy. You are faking it. Besides, in a new situation, how would you copy someone if you haven’t seen any similar work they have done?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
How do you develop yours?
In most cases, you don’t. What you do is shoot a lot. Cartier-Bresson said your first 10,000 photos are the worst. I think one of the things he was telling us is that we have to experiment a lot to find out who we are.
Yes, we can copy other people’s styles to see if we can learn anything from them. If we are lucky, we might have good mentor to give us honest feedback. But ultimately, it is up to each of us to figure out who we are as artists.
I believe a style is something we look back on and discover. It is not something we plan to get to someday.
Look in your image catalog
How do we know if we have a style and understand what it is? A good start is examining your image catalog. I am using Lightroom terminology, but it applies to whatever sorting and filing system you use.
I assume you have a system for grading your images. You know which you consider your best. Have you put together portfolios? Small collections of your very best work organized by subject or project or location, for instance. If not, pick out, say, your 50 best images. Be brutal. This is important and you do not have to show them to anyone else.
Now go through them carefully and examine them from the point of view of what they can tell you about your artistic likes and beliefs. Are most of them landscapes? Are they predominantly square cropped or black & white or low key? Can you see that your favorite pictures are typically shot with a certain lens?
What about the subject matter? Are your favorites more likely to be a rusty truck than a portrait? Do you favor highly detailed or very simple? Sharp or intentional camera movement (ICM)? Travel locations or mostly close to home?
There are too many questions to enumerate. The idea is to look at this body of work and figure out who you are as an artist. This is you. This is your style. It certainly does not mean this is all you can do. It is just what you naturally gravitate to.
Now you can stop trying to be someone else and concentrate on developing yourself.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Be who you are
This is a very enlightening exercise. You will probably come away thinking “wow, I have a style!” It can be very hard for us to think about and accept our style. That is just something that other people have. People who are real artists.
But yes, you do have a style. It is unique to you, so there is no need to try to copy someone else’s. Your point of view and values will come through in your images, if you are being honest with yourself.
Here is a recent personal example. I was watching a video by a photographer talking about his style. It wasn’t very interesting to me and I was about to turn it off when he said something that caught me. He said he understands his style to be very simple. He is a portrait photographer and he uses simple lighting, plain backgrounds, and basic head shot poses.
That lit up something in me. I hadn’t considered something like simplicity a dimension of style.
I did the exercise I recommended above and saw clearly for the first time that I like complexity, detail, extremes of color and contrast and action. That is a common thread through many of my favorite images.
What does it mean? Nothing in itself. It is just some insight on my work. But I understand myself a little better now. I will be less surprised when I see I am being drawn to these.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Choose your style
I started with the notion of whether or not we should choose our style. I hope I have established that you don’t really choose your style. Your style chooses you. You can imitate someone else’s style for a while for the education and experience, but ultimately we find ourselves drawn back to what comes naturally to us.
Don’t fight it. Don’t worry about it. Relax. Be yourself.
But to be yourself, you have to continually learn and practice and improve. It is a lifelong quest.
March 12, 2025
Sometimes You Can’t Describe It
I find that my most interesting work is difficult or impossible to explain. I can’t describe what it means to me, much less what it should mean to you.
Concrete
It seems like people often want a concrete description or explanation of our work. Being generous, I would say they are really seeking to understand and want to know what the artist was thinking and feeling. Being less generous, I might say they are being lazy. It is easier to be told the “answer” than to try to work out an explanation for themselves.
It might be a gallery director needing an Artist Statement for the piece. Or it might be as simple as a friend asking “what is it?” Either one can occasionally put us in a difficult position.
I know the gallery director needs the statement so they can talk to customers about the piece. That is right and good. I guess it is better for me to give them something rather than have them hallucinate a story. Although I would love to hear their thoughts. Artist statements tend to be a load of bovine excrement.
Even more challenging is the simple “what is it?” question. Of course, I could tell them exactly what it actually is. But I often feel that this takes a lot away from the experience. The picture may be saying a lot more than what it is literally “of”.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
I don’t know
But behind all this is the problem that I don’t actually know what it is. I do not have words to represent concretely what I think the image is showing. And even if I had a good enough grasp of vocabulary, my thoughts are fuzzy and confused. It’s hard to describe something when you don’t understand what you think about it.
A lot of instructors tell us that every image should be pre-visualized. That is, that we know why we are taking it and we anticipate exactly how it will come out. And that works for me for a lot of images. I nearly always know (almost) exactly how an image will look on screen on my computer. Except for those happy surprises, but that is another topic.
But to me, strictly pre-planning and pre-visualizing everything takes some of the joy and creativity out of it. It becomes more documentation rather than art. I honestly do not know why I take some pictures.
Instinct
A lot of the shots I end up liking best are purely instinctive. In normal shooting, I have all kinds of subroutines running in my head, analyzing composition and framing and exposure and focus and lighting and all the other considerations in making a decent picture. But when I am shooting instinctively, they are mostly subconscious. I am not spending much conscious thought on design and technique in the moment. Things just seem to take on a life of their own.
Sometimes this can happen in a flow state, which is a joy. But not necessarily. Sometimes it is like there is a light flashing, signaling from my subconscious. Telling me “hey dummy, look! There is a great shot there!”
When I am smart enough to pay attention to that signal, I don’t spend much time on analysis. I don’t stop and describe what it is and what I am feeling. Maybe I should. But I feel like I should just be scrambling to take advantage of the gift I have been given.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Can’t hurt to try
Some great photographers do try to document their thoughts when they shoot. They tend to keep notes and even analyze their feelings and thoughts at the moment. A great example is Tony Hewitt, an amazing photographer in Australia. He not only writes down his thoughts, he sometimes even writes poems expressing what he felt while shooting!
I don’t write poems and I very seldom can force myself to take the time to analyze my feelings. I would like to. I always carry a notebook. Usually all I note is where I am, if I am in an unfamiliar location. Later, examining the images on my computer, I have to try to reconstruct my feelings.
So I encourage you to do what I say, not what I do. Try to record some of your thoughts in the field, while it is fresh. It might help to understand them better.
Get used to disappointment
When someone asks the dreaded “what does it mean” question, what do we do? Maybe we bluff and make up some nonsense about representing the existential struggle between good and evil. Maybe we be brutally literal and say it is a picture of a weathered car door. I just liked the shapes.
I would like to say, like Wesley said to Inigo in their sword fight (Princess Bride) “Get used to disappointment.” I don’t know what it means, so how can I try to tell you? Do the work yourself. Come up with your own story. It is just a valid as mine.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Language doesn’t work
Each type of art media has they own unique strengths and weaknesses. You can’t always represent equivalent ideas with sculpture and painting.
Words and images are 2 different art forms. They cannot always say the equivalent things. I believe an image can tap into feelings, yearnings, deep beliefs, dreams, and memories that cannot adequately be written down in words. These things exist as things that pass through our minds as thoughts and feelings without being expressed in words.
Perhaps I am not doing my work justice by not spending the effort to try to unpack the “meaning” of my images. That would take a lot of time, and i know from experience that when I return to the description some time in the future, I would say no, I see something else now.
Our feelings when looking at art are based on our experience, knowledge, emotional state and perhaps health at the moment. These are moving targets.
So I do not consider it a fault when I cannot describe exactly what an image means. I could only tell you what it means to me, today. You should have the privilege of deciding for yourself what it means to you. If anything. Maybe nothing.
it could be that an image “means” nothing. It only has the value or meaning we ascribe to it personally. Too deep for now. That is a discussion for another day.
Meanwhile, let yourself be led to make images that are meaningful and significant to you. Even if you can’t describe what it precisely is you can take joy in what you feel looking at it. Not all of the world can be expressed in words.
February 5, 2025