Category: Process

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Seeing the Unseen

Time shift, ICM, intentional blur

Photography is unique in the arts. It can record things we cannot see or imagine. Photography can be an adventure in seeing the unseen.

Unique

Photographers are sometimes made to feel inferior. Usually by proponents of the “real” arts, like painters or sculptors. Get over it. Photography has qualities that go beyond any other arts. Qualities that make them envious.

Photography is a technology-based art. That technology can be used along with our artistic vision to capture and create things regular art cannot. We can peer into things the human eye cannot see. We can freeze time to examine events the human eye cannot show us. Likewise, we can extend time to show the effects of movement in new ways.

Exposure

The human eye is amazing. But it has limits. Even though it can see a huge range of light, photographic sensors can push beyond our eye’s limits.

When you look at the stars, for instance, we can see what seem to be an immense number. But I have astronomer friends who have a process of taking hundreds of frames of 1 point in the sky. Then they use special stacking software to combine them and sharpen them to create levels of detail far beyond what the eye can see. Even my amateur astronomer friends routinely show me pictures they have taken of distant galaxies that cannot be detected at all with the eye.

Those same astronomer friends have solar filters – essentially completely black glass – that let them view the surface of the sun! They can see and photograph sun spots and the corona. Things that would destroy our eye if we tried to look directly at them.

The technology and practice of photography allows these things.

Light range

And “normal” (non-photographic) art is all done in the visible light range. Makes sense, That is all we can see.

But most of us have seen infrared imaging. This is done using a special dark red filter that excludes most light we can see. What is left is what we would consider heat – the world of longer wavelengths beneath the red response of our eye. It gives us a subtly different perception of the world around us. A paint artist could not do that without taking an infrared image of the scene then painting from the photograph.

Similar filtering can be done to see the ultraviolet world beyond the highest violets we can perceive. And have you had an X-Ray? That is just imaging done in another range of “light” we cannot see well beyond the ultraviolet.

These are somewhat niche capabilities, but they can bring us information that is exclusive to the photographic world.

Time

Time is one of my favorite variables that is unique to photography. One of the three legs of the exposure triad is shutter speed. By varying the shutter speed we can effectively slow down or speed up time!

People have developed flash systems that can freeze movement in slices of 1 millionth of a second. Even the fastest bullets are frozen in midair. Explosions can be captured as they start. You’ve probably seen pictures of a drop of liquid falling into a dish. The splash patterns are beautiful and interesting. Not many things we come in contact with in our lives are not frozen at this kind of speed.

At less extremes, a waterfall at a fast shutter speed can look like a cascade of diamonds . A bird in flight is completely frozen at about 1/1000th of a second. Every feather is crisp and sharp. We cannot see it this way with our eye.

At the other end, long exposures capture movement over time. This is the area I like to work. Not super long. Just long enough to change our perception of what is happening.

We have all seen long exposure pictures of waterfalls or cascades, where the water is smooth and silky. It is so common that it is in danger of being cliche. But the reason you see it a lot is because it is a pleasing effect. Some photographers make exposures of minutes. This makes clouds streak and water blur to a milky texture. Not really my thing, but I appreciate the reality distortion caused by the time shift.

Movement

A subset of this idea of time is where the camera is moving relative to the subject or the subject is moving relative to the camera. The camera motion side has become popular as Intentional Camera Motion (ICM).

Like many techniques in photography, it is easy to do but hard to do excellently. Anyone can take a blurry picture because the shutter speed was too long to stop the action. Most of us have to work to overcome this. ICM deliberately pushes this “fault” to a point of art. I do ICM for some projects and I have seen a lot of ICM that I consider excellent art. And I have seen a lot more where I have to think, “yep; that’s your standard ICM”. That’s OK. Most experiments in doing something new and creative fail.

One interesting aspect of techniques that involve movement and time is that it is almost impossible to take the same picture twice. There is always variation. The variation often leads to pleasant surprises.

Stretch the notion of reality

So photography is unique in giving us alternate views of “reality”. With conventional arts, like painting, nothing can be created that the artist does not first see or imagine. Photography can show us worlds or effects we did not imagine. This sometimes opens up new creative paths to explore. And the exciting thing is it is actually reality. If the camera captures it out in the “real world” (whatever that is), it is reality. What we get may be a complete surprise, but that is part of the exhilaration.

Photographers, never feel inferior in the arts. Know that what we do is as valid as any other kind of art. And try not not to be smug knowing we have the option of being more creative than most other forms of art.

Go explore the unseen and enjoy your discoveries.

Live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ – the boundaries of the unknown. – J. Robert Oppenheimer

Today’s image

This is part of a series I did fairly recently. It combines ICM and time and subject motion and some secret sauce optical techniques to create this look. I consider it a creative view on a reality that happens around us all the time, but only photographers can see.

Is it “real”? Yes, absolutely. It is a minimally modified shot of a real, physical subject. It is a subject most of us can find right around our town.

To find out more about what it is, go to my web site and find a similar looking image in Projects.

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Mix a New Image

Pseudo aerial. Extensively processed.

Recently I was watching a video series on audio mixing. That is a separate story. But I was struck by some of the similarities between the process of mixing for certain genres of music and image editing and creation for certain types of art. It made me think of the ways we mix a new image.

Audio mixing

Producing an audio recording is simple but difficult. Let me take a rock band as an example. The group goes into a studio and the source material is captured, sometimes for the group all together but more often by “tracking” each band member individually. It is fairly typical to start with the drummer, because the percussion is the base beat that everything else fits into. Then guitars and/or other instruments are overlaid. Finally, the vocals are recorded last, because the singer needs to hear everything else.

Each individual or instrument is recorded on one or more tracks. The drum, for instance, might need 10 or more tracks to capture the full drum kit. And there are multiple takes for each track.

Then in the studio, the recording engineer works with the performers to create a mix that pleases them and had good production value.

Digital image creation

Let me take an example of creating a fine art composite image. It will be built of many layers and elements.

The artist has a general plan for what will be needed and how it will come together. This helps to ensure that all the pieces are photographed and the individual images are created with consistent lighting and perspective and mood and focal length, etc. The artist shoots each element separately.

Working in the computer, the elements are brought together and blended to create the final image.

On the surface, there seem to be certain parallels of structure and process. but let’s go a little deeper.

What really goes on?

What I observed in several videos and in first hand experience is that a song is basically re-built from scratch in the mixing phase. Of course, simple problems are fixed. Pops and noise is removed. Parts of tracks may be re-pitched. The best parts of several takes are cut together for each performer or instrument to make the master.

Then it gets weird. After a good basic master is put together the producer goes on to ‘liven up” the sound. This may involve equalizer changes, to tailor the frequency response of a track. It probably involves effects processing that will add delays and reverberation and echoes to give the sound depth and sound like it is performed in a large venue. Maybe even adding things like claps or new percussive effects.

And it goes on. The producer then may start to “play”. It may involve intentional distortion in parts. It may introduce new sounds that were not in the original recording. As an example, one trick I saw was playing tracks into a garden hose and recording the weirdly distorted sound and mixing it in subtly. You miight even see them put is a track played backwards! Several other very strange techniques can be used to create strangely distorted effects that you would not directly notice, but that add character to the overall sound mix.

My learning was that, to the recording producer, the original recordings were just raw material to be used, changed, distorted, added to and anything else that could be thought of to produce a sound they liked.

Similarities

Isn’t it about the same with photography sometimes? I used the example of fine art compositing. Brooke Shaden and Renee Robyn are 2 good practitioners I think of.

All the individual pieces that were shot are just raw material. The artist puts them together to create the basic image, then starts to mold it into a final work of art.

The finishing may involve distortion, warping, masking, radical color changes, and extreme lighting changes. Then new elements are probably introduced, like textures or patterns. There may be multiple layers of them combined using blending modes. Often subtle and not immediately recognized, but making the image into something different.

An artist using a non-destructive workflow will end up with dozens of layers to create this final image. The end result may only look a little like the original parts.

Let go more

This emboldens me to think I am usually too cautious with my vision of what the final image could be. Being an ex-engineer I have an ingrained tendency to go for realism. The final image must look exactly like the original.

This is probably a mistake. I am self-limiting my artistic freedom. Long past are the days then the novelty of capturing a scene gave interest to a picture. Now an image needs to be a work of art. It needs to show vision and creativity from the artist. That involves letting go of an absolute realistic goal for the image.

Have you ever heard a “dry” (unmodified) recording of a famous singer? There are very few of them who are so perfect they would let it be heard. All music is heavily processed. It is coming to be the same with images.

I do not mean AI. That is a separate issue. I am claiming that, to be well received, many images need to be heavily and artistically processed. We have the tools. Let’s use them well.

A song is built by getting good tracks recorded. Then the producer takes it apart and builds a final song. In a similar way, we can often do the same with an image. The only thing stopping us is our self-imposed limits.

I will try to learn to not be afraid to mix a new image. Think like a song producer. The original data is raw material to be created with. Post processing is just another tool we use to achieve our vision or feeling.

Today’s image

This is me starting to let go. A little. It seems like a pretty conventional aerial image. But of someplace you don’t recognize. Looks can be deceiving.

Sometime I may describe what it is.

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Color Perfection

Texas wildflowers in spring.

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!”.

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Sustainability

Watching paint run - creatively

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.

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Learning Takes Effort

Avalanche

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!