Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Mastery

  • Color Perfection

    Color Perfection

    At the risk of sabotaging potential sponsorships from the color matching industry, I suggest some of us obsess too much about color. There is a difference between color perfection and color correction and color as an artistic decision and color as one of the processes we deal with. Know why you are doing it.

    Obsession

    Photographers seem to be obsessive about a lot of things. Color is only one of them. But we have color equipment manufacturers (arms merchants?) and blogs and videos constantly preaching to us that we must have a perfect color matched system from our camera to the final print or our work is amateur.

    This all sounds logical and authoritative, so we buy into it. And it can get expensive.

    So we buy colorimeters and special color corrected monitors. We make sure we have proper profiles for the printer and paper combinations we use. We even buy special systems to color profile our cameras.

    Now we can be confident that our wildflower picture exactly matches the colors of the flowers in the wild.

    Why?

    Why are we going to all this trouble? Does it really matter so much?

    Maybe, maybe not. It depends on your needs and values.

    All the steps to color correct your workflow are generally good. But unless you are doing product photography, it may not matter as much as you have been told. A corporation cares very much that the company logo exactly matches it’s color standards and that their official color pallet is correctly used.

    But if you are shooting landscapes, is it critical that the color of that leaf is the exact match of the leaf you shot? Or is it more important to match your memory and your preferences?

    My attitude

    I am not a purist about this. Actually, I am less and less a purist about anything as I evolve in my style. Any work I do is an artistic interpretation. I have no problem with changing colors if it gives me a more pleasing image. More pleasing means I like it. It has nothing to do with the match to the original scene.

    But I do it deliberately and intelligently. To do that, it is necessary to have control over your color process. And without a controlled color process your results are not repeatable. What comes out of your printer is likely to be wildly different from what you see on your monitor and different from session to session.

    That is chaos. You cannot reliably create your art. It is unprofessional and unsatisfying.

    But you need to have a color managed work flow

    It is important to color manage your workflow. That is not the same thing as obsessing about color perfection.

    Every month I calibrate my monitor with my trusty old obsolete i1 Display Pro colorimeter. And I print using proper profiles for my paper and printer. This gives me pretty repeatable colors. The biggest problem is keeping my monitor brightness low enough to match the prints.

    So far I do not find it necessary to profile my camera. Since I only shoot RAW, I can “re-profile” the images at will. And Lightroom Classic’s Camera Landscape profile is usually a good start for most of my work. Now days there are lots of profiles to try out to get a color starting pointl

    Overall, the biggest problem I have is dealing with printer gamut issues. Some of my work is highly saturated. It is disappointing when these images do not look as good as what I see on my monitor.

    Black & white

    The outlier in many parts of photography is black & white. Is it important to color manage black & white images? It seems wrong, but I would say yes, it is. It may be more important than in images that will stay in color.

    In color images, we look at the color, obviously. We tend to be pretty tolerant in what we accept as reasonable. But in black & white we only see the color indirectly through the tone relationships of the print.

    The colors are mapped to monochrome tones and shades. This makes it important to precisely control the color relationships to give separation of the tones. We may need to distinguish between fine shades of green, for instance, to give body to the b&w print. More than if the print were in color.

    What I do to the color may look strange if you saw it in color, but the important thing is the precise control required. This makes me believe color precision is more important in b&w than in much color work.

    Conclusion

    Have I confused you? I seem to have said color perfections is not important but you have to have a good color balanced workflow. Yes, that is right. Learn to live with ambiguity. 🙂

    My work is art. Everything is an interpretation of what I saw or felt. I usually do not care if the colors are “true”. They often intentionally are not.

    But it is very important to me to control and repeatably achieve the results I want in the final print. This requires understanding how to color balance my process and how to use it to achieve my vision.

    For me, color control is part of a repeatable process, not a commitment to absolutely match a scene.

    Today’s image

    This is Texas wildflowers in the spring. They really are like this, and in great bands over much of the state. Go there in the spring sometime. Spring in Texas wildflower country is about mid March through mid April.

    This is an accurate representation of what you will remember when you are there and see them. Is it totally accurate color? Probably not. Don’t know; don’t care. If you’ve been there, you will say “Yes! That’s what they look like!”.

  • Sustainability

    Sustainability

    Sustainability is a common buzz word these days. It is applied to everything. Every company and product claims it. For this, I’m going to redefine sustainability from an artistic point of view.

    Creative sustainability

    As artists, we live on our creativity. Do you worry that the well may dry up? What if your creativity goes away?

    If we produce hard, do we use it up? Or is the engine somehow fed by using more? Is creativity a “sustainable” resource or does it get used up?

    Since this is the core of what we do as artists, it is natural to worry about it. Probably all of us at some point have concerns that we may use it up. What would we do then?

    So, an ongoing concern for many of us is, should we ration and conserve our creativity so we don’t use it up? Is it even possible to conserve it?

    Sustainable creativity

    I don’t believe creativity actually gets used up. It is like a good well that always seems to be full when we need it. If anything, creativity thrives on being challenged and used. It seems like the more we call on it, the more there is.

    But is it sustainable? I think so, but we can be our own worst enemies. If we keep doing the same stuff over and over we get less creative. When we try to stay in a safe rut, there is less need to exercise creative. We’ve done it all. Many times. It is a major challenge to apply new creativity to repeating the same things.

    Unless we are following the lead of where our creativity wants to take us, we risk getting stale. When that happens, we seriously fear we are not creative any more. And we are right.

    That doesn’t mean our creativity is gone. But if we do not give it free rein to take us in new directions, it stops challenging us. For all practical purposes, our creativity is them used up.

    Creativity is like a good friend. It will be there for us, but we have a responsibility to nurture the relationship. If we ignore it, if we do not make time for it, it will eventually give up on us.

    Burnout

    Everyone goes through cycles. Creativity, and everything else in life, can ebb and flow. That is natural. But burnout is an extreme. It is a depressed state where it can seem impossible to ever again do the quality of work we want to do. It can persist for months or years if we let it.

    I know. I have been there. There was a time in my career when I worked long hours for years in a job that was not fulfilling. It caught up to me. I crashed. I pulled back, working less hours and not being as satisfied with the quality of my work. Eventually, by changing position and increasing the creativity of my role, I became productive and happy in my job again. It was probably a 3 year process.

    In burnout, it seems evident that creativity must be unsustainable. That’s not true, though. It is not creativity that lets us down, it is the other parts of our context. It is important to manage our lives and environment if we want to stay creative.

    Creative stimulus

    Like an athlete trains constantly, we must exercise our creativity to stay on top of our game. Everyone’s needs are different, so it is impossible to lay out a plan for you to follow to do it. You have to figure that out for yourself.

    I can provide some creative stimulants I have seen and used. Consider them. Try the ones that seem to fit you. Develop your own methods.

    I will just bullet point some of them. Each could be a topic on it’s own.

    Read. And not just the same old stuff. Read new things. Read things by people you disagree with. And also read some light stuff just for fun.

    Study something new. Don’t plan to get a PhD in it. Just learn something about it. If you like it, go deeper. If not, try something else.

    Write

    Go back and review your old work. Put together a new portfolio.

    Go to a museum.

    Travel to a new place that is NOT a major iconic photo location.

    Put blocks of time in your calendar to do nothing. Turn off your phone. Let your mind wander. Doodle. Look around. Intentionally be unproductive.

    Spend time with friends, just living life.

    Take your significant other out for a nice and unexpected meal.

    Find things that make you happy, but that are not just entertainment. Try to do more of them.

    Take walks, with and without your camera.

    Just do it

    The theme here is to fill your mind with new information. This connects in strange and unexpected ways, leading to who knows what. And to give yourself space and time to just think, ponder, consider, unwind. The more pressure we put ourselves under, the more it shuts down creativity.

    And like the inspired Nike tag line, “just do it”. Get out and work. Take pictures, Don’t worry so much about the results. Going through the motions is comforting and leads to results. Eventually. Creativity is not just inspiration, it is a process.

    Relax and try to de-clutter your head. Follow your instincts.

    Is creativity sustainable? I would say definitely. It is one of the most important traits we have as artists. We can consciously take actions to keep our creativity healthy and flowing. But we have to listen to ourselves and recognize what our needs are.

  • It’s OK to be Uncomfortable

    It’s OK to be Uncomfortable

    I recently read an article from a photographer who admitted he sometimes doesn’t stop to take a picture he wanted because he was afraid of what people would think. I understand that. I have been there many times. But I have come to the conclusion that it’s OK to be uncomfortable.

    What will people think?

    You’ve probably been here. I know I have. You are driving down a crowded road and you see a scene you want to photograph. But we decide not to pull off and get out the equipment because we would look foolish standing there beside the road taking a picture. All those people going by would think we’re weird.

    The reality I have learned, though, is that no one thinks about you as much as you do. That is a fact. We overestimate our importance. We will be more free and inventive if we stop worrying about what they may think.

    People go about their dreary lives almost totally focused on themselves and their needs. If they do momentarily notice you, even if they criticize you, you do not know what they are really thinking. Most often, they are responding to something in themselves. Because they do not really care about you.

    I love this quote from Susan Sontag: I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

    And from Olin Miller: You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do!

    If that random person driving by thinks you are doing something foolish, so what? How did that affect you? Did you feel it? Did it hurt? No. You do not know what they are thinking and besides, you are doing your art, not theirs.

    The anxiety we feel is internally generated.

    Attract attention

    I understand. I’m very introverted and I am uncomfortable attracting attention. An interesting dynamic because of where I live is that I do attract unwanted attention sometimes.

    In my area there is a lot of wildlife, such as elk, deer, moose, bear, mountain lion, bighorn sheep, pronghorn, etc. I guess I am missing the right genes, but I have little interest in them, other than to observe them. I almost never take wildlife pictures. But if I am setting up to take a picture beside a road, it is not unusual for people to pull off and eagerly ask me what I see. They seem so disappointed when I point to a tree. It’s actually kind of funny.

    And for the occasional street photography I do, I am one of those people who wants to be totally anonymous, unseen. It is uncomfortable when someone “catches” me taking their picture.

    They won’t like me

    So what do I do about this fear that people will think badly about me when I’m out shooting? The right answer is, ignore them. Easier said than done, but that is true of much of life.

    I have learned to try to put them out of my mind completely and get in the zone focusing on setting up the shot I want. Generally this works. Replace the negative concern of fear with the positive action of taking a picture.

    But even if it doesn’t work, more and more I come to the realization that I don’t care what they think. I am not trying to get them to like me or post a Facebook note about how much they admire that photographer they just passed. I don’t care.

    The results I get in these situations validates and justifies my callous “don’t care” attitude toward them.

    What are they going to do to you

    Let’s say some of the passing people give you enough attention to say to themselves “that’s dumb”. So what? What happened? Did you feel it? Did they throw a rotten tomato at you? Did they stop to get your name and take a picture of you to post on Facebook to shame you?

    Of course not. Absolutely nothing happened. They went on down the road and immediately forgot about you. If they were stopped 20 miles later and asked, they probably wouldn’t remember someone standing beside the road taking a picture.

    This is the quandary: we fear what people might think, but the reality is they don’t bother to think about us. And even if they did, it has no effect on us.

    Do what you need to do

    If you do what other people do, you get the results that other people get. – Bill Miller

    We are artists. We see things differently. That means we do things differently. Other people cannot know what our vision is at any moment unless we tell them or show them. Showing them is typically what we do.

    So do what you need to do to make your art. Do not be concerned about what anyone may think about you. First, they probably don’t. Second, it doesn’t matter. You have art to do.

    If you were embarrassed taking the picture feel doubly joyful when you see the great result. You can say to those people passing by who you imagined felt you were silly, “see what you missed”!

    Get over it

    I hope I have encouraged you to forget about your fear of people’s opinion and go for your art. Art is action. It is only an idea unless we create something.

    Act while you feel fear rather than waiting until you feel unafraid. – David Richo, in How to be an Adult

    How sad it is to think about what could have been a great image, except we were too embarrassed to stop and take it. I have done it both ways. I have passed by and regretted it and I have overcome my fear and stopped and usually been happy I did.

    I am old and calloused enough to believe now that I shouldn’t be overly concerned about what I think other people may be thinking. It’s OK to be uncomfortable. If being uncomfortable is a price for making our art, that is what we have to do.

    Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear. – Anon

    To you who have never been intimidated by other people’s opinions, congratulations! You have a talent most of us do not have. Use it well. Don’t be an ass.

    Today’s image

    Do you like this image of the vast Utah plains? I do. It is not a result of trekking hours across the barren desert, watching for rattlesnakes. I took it in a rest stop on I-70, right next to the restrooms. It felt uncomfortable at the time, but I loved the scene and had to take it. At this point, I don’t recall the discomfort. But I still like the image.

    When you see something you like, stop and take it, unless it is dangerous or you have higher priorities at the moment, like a critical appointment. There are some things more important than our art. Not many, but don’t ignore them.

  • Created From Joy

    Created From Joy

    There are many motivations and reasons for creating art. I can’t say any are wrong if the result is art that truly pleases the artist. For me, I am sure my art is created from joy.

    Many motivations

    What is it that motivates artists to create? Trauma? Money? Desperation? Joy? I am not qualified to say, because I can only speak for myself. Without being in the mind of another artist and experiencing their motivations, I cannot know.

    Much has been written on this, but, again, i am not sure we can fully know what motivates someone else.

    We can look at some works and believe they were created as the artist tried to work out some grief or tragedy or great wrong. Or maybe just try to understand life.

    Guernica

    Picasso’s Guernica seems to be a deep reaction to the horrors of war. Actually, he had been given a commission by the Spanish Republicans to paint a mural for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. He was not making much headway on it and did not seem highly motivated. Then on 26 April 1937 the Nazis bombed the village or Guernica. Picasso was urged to make this his theme and, after reading eye witness accounts of the attack, he did.

    Yes, he was Spanish, although he did not live there at the time and never would again. But rather than being a deeply personal experience for him, he seemed to be able to empathize well enough to bring the emotion through. Anyway, it is considered by many to be his masterpiece.

    This does not prove or disprove anything. It just shows that artists motivations are deeply internal and personal. As much as critics try to analyze and dissect a work, they are groping in the dark unless the artist enlightens them.

    Joy motivates me

    I have discovered myself well enough to understand that joy is my primary motivation when I am making images. Even though I am old and increasingly cynical, joy is what enlightens my work.

    Joy can be a small thing like finding a dew covered spider web in the niche of a wall or it can be the sweep of a grand landscape at the right time, like the image with this article. It is not a particular thing or place or time. It is my reaction to it. How does it move me? What does it bring to me at the moment?

    Finding these moments of joy draws me on from one to the next. The act of selecting a scene to photograph, framing it, composing it, deciding on exposure settings, etc. is a skill. Doing it is a calming and pleasant activity to immerse myself in for a few moments. Everybody takes pictures. To take one that people stop to look at or talk about is art.

    My joy is in capturing and expressing a scene in a way that will be memorable. But even if no one other than me sees it or enjoys it, it is joy and it is my art. No critic or reviewer can take that joy away from me. It matters little what other people think about an image. It can still give me joy.

    Not happiness

    We need to distinguish between happiness and joy. Many people take them as about the same, but they are quite different. Happiness is a pleasant feeling because circumstances made us content at the moment. A warm cup of cocoa on a cold day. An unexpected letter from a friend.

    The next moment, something can take away our happiness.

    Joy is a long term view of life. It comes from within and is not completely dependent on what is happening around us. We tend to be joyful when the way we are living our life is aligned with our values and beliefs.

    Making images that bring me joy definitely aligns with my values and closes the loop. It reinforces my joy. That is, my images come from joy and making them increases my joy. For me, they are created from joy.

    Values

    Do you ever consider your values? The principles you build your life on are too important to go un-analyzed. We are more fulfilled when what we do is aligned with our values and we tend to be frustrated and unhappy when we are opposing them. Think about what you believe.

    I’m not saying everything we do needs to be for some grand social cause. Not at all. I think that tends to make our work stiff and preachy. I am just suggesting we will be happier and do better work if we are doing it for the joy of our feelings and the pleasure of the creativity.

    Try it. You might find more joy in your art and it might come across that way to your viewers.

  • Learning Takes Effort

    Learning Takes Effort

    Contrary to the forest of web sites and blogs and newsletters promising you easy hacks, quick fixes, and effortless skill building, let me disillusion you. Learning takes effort. The more different your new subject is from what you already know, the harder it gets.

    Curiosity

    I think I can speak to this. In a previous post I said I was afflicted with curiosity. That is stated in a humorous way, but I am very serious. I have a deep and burning curiosity about many things. Learning new things or just extending my knowledge of an area occupies a lot of my time.

    I’m the kid who, way back in the days before internet, would spend hours browsing through encyclopedias. Any one remember what those are? Looking up a word in the dictionary could take me an hour. I kept getting sidetracked by other interesting words I see along the way.

    It also drives my approach to photography. I am more interested in finding interesting things, no matter what they are, and making interesting pictures from them than I am in looking for particular subjects or iconic scenes. Almost anything can be a good subject if you can “catch” it doing something interesting.

    Learning

    But if we want to go beyond just an idle curiosity, we have to learn new things. That requires significantly more effort.

    Learning demands a commitment of time and study and effort. And dedication. And drive. It is not easy to master a new subject or field.

    But what is learning, really? It is the ability to independently use knowledge or apply a skill over time and in new situations. As opposed to just recalling facts. The American education system is woefully deficient on this. Our schools teach and measure mainly performance, not learning. That is, what is 3 times 4? Who gave the Gettysburg address and what year?

    It is not that performance is unimportant, but recalling facts for a test is just not making us much more educated. For instance, I love studying history. There are usually several history or biography books around me in various states of completion. But I only care about dates as much as required to be able to put things together in a timeline. It is much more interesting and enlightening to find out why things happened, why to those people, why then, what is the back story.

    Failing

    Actual learning is hard. It requires work. And, sorry, but that is the way it has to be. We learn more deeply when we have to work at it and when we fail.

    Fail?? Yes. I don’t mean like repeat a grade. Failing as in try to use your knowledge and find you are incorrect or inadequate. Then you have to concentrate more on it to learn the right way. This reinforces the correct way and you know and remember it better.

    A small personal experience: one of the things I am learning is French. It’s a long story. You know that old expression that it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks? That is true for me when it comes to learning a new language. A theory, that seems to hold true, is that it takes repetition and mistakes to learn new words. Repeating them over time builds memory, but repeating the ones you miss more often reinforces them.

    My point here is that the purpose of learning is to be able to use the knowledge or skill independently and with some confidence. We usually can’t do that until we have tried and failed and reinforced it and practiced. This involved making mistakes and correcting them and building on that. This applies to our everyday lives and our art. I don’t recommend that as a way to learn brain surgery.

    Interleaving

    Another learning topic that I have found to be very relevant to me is called interleaving. Conventional wisdom says to practice one thing intensively until it is perfected. Then move on to the next thing. If you are learning tennis, then, you should practice forehands over and over until you have mastered them. Then go to backhands. Etc.

    Interleaving, though, says you should mix a variety of things, even if you have not mastered each of them. So in the tennis example, is says it would be better to mix forehands and backhands and volleys in a match-like experience. There is evidence that this is a better way of learning.

    I am sold, because I do it in many ways with good results. I believe interleaving the activities forms more and stronger connections between different components you are learning. The long term benefit is deeper understanding or skill.

    Learning builds on itself. The more diverse things we learn, the easier it is to learn other new things.

    Dots

    Steve Jobs famously called it “connecting the dots“. He stated it best in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech. The picture is that we learn many different, unconnected, things and have experiences we may or not welcome. We can’t look ahead to see how they will connect. But somehow, looking back, they form the path we have taken.

    I love his example of how his audited calligraphy course led to personal computers as we know them. Read it!

    In order to connect the dots, we need a rich set of “dots” in our lives. Because the more we know the more there is to connect to.

    Photography

    What does this have to do with photography and art?

    I am suspicious of typical ways photography is taught. A linear process seems logical and fits well in a course outline, but I believe students should be out making bad pictures from day one. They should have daily or weekly project assignments. As they see their results they can be shown what aperture or shutter speed or ISO or lens choices could do and why they would want to make tradeoffs. They can be shown compositional problems they made and pointed to great artists to see the choices they made. Students can quickly get the hang of manipulating the camera to get results they want and can then get on to the harder part – figuring out what they have to say.

    But in an environment of experimentation and unlimited choices. After all, we are learning to create our vision.

    I believe we should be life long learners and open to new influences. The attitude that we know all we need to know is dangerous. We can always learn something new and get inspiration from new sources. I recently saw work by a contemporary artist I had never heard of. But some of Aline Smithson‘s project The Ephemeral Archive touched me in new ways and opened windows of inquiry for me. And I didn’t think I liked contemporary photography.

    Learn to be comfortable with being challenged with new ideas and with failing. It is one of the best ways to learn. It’s not supposed to be easy.

    If you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.

    Neil Gaiman

    I want to hear your comments! Let’s talk!