Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Seeing

  • The Decisive Moment

    The Decisive Moment

    Henri Cartier-Bresson was well known for promoting the “decisive moment”. I know from experience that in some situations there is an optimum instant to capture the image you want. But for some it becomes a mantra. Let’s examine some nuances of the concept of a decisive moment.

    Sometimes it is not a precise moment

    Almost all of my work is shot outdoors. Sometimes I shoot straight landscapes. Often other found objects around me.

    I believe I have the experience to say that in these outdoor settings, the “decisive moment” may last from a second to many minutes. Or I may have to wait an hour for the moment to occur. In a slowly changing landscape scene it can be difficult to recognize which moment was decisive – and hope you had the presence of mind to capture it.

    In these situations, there may well be a decisive period of time, maybe not an actual moment. It often requires great patience rather than lightning fast reflexes.

    A decisive moment

    I have shot some sports and kids. These are areas with definite decisive moments.

    Sports is easier, in a way. Most sports have a rhythm, a pattern. Once you learn it for a particular sport, you can anticipate the action and predict the best moment. It still may be difficult and you may not be in the best position, but you often will know when it will happen.

    I consider kids more challenging than sports. They are unpredictable. Their moods and expressions can change quickly. Framing then, lighting them, and being in position with the right lens and camera settings requires constant attention. Then on top of all of that is the delicate trigger you need to “spring” at the right moment, when the expression or activity is just right. You have to be fully engaged and in the moment.

    I make it harder on myself, because I never do formal portraits where I try to control things. I greatly prefer being in the environment where they are comfortable and letting them basically forget about me. Candid shots are what I like.

    Now is the decisive moment

    This brings up one of the main points I want to make here: now is the decisive moment. Wherever we are and whatever we are doing, we should consider it a decisive moment. We need to be in this moment. Things will never be the same. We will never have exactly this light or these clouds. We won’t feel the same or look at the subject the same.

    This used to be a problem for me. I would see something interesting, but I was on my way to do something else “important”, so I didn’t stop. If I even remembered what interested me, it was usually not the same when I came back. The light was wrong. The vegetation had grown up and obscured it. It was raining and foggy. Just not the same. If I wait a couple of months before coming back, it may be a housing addition now!

    Well, it may still be a problem, but I recognize it and fight it now. I am much more prone to go ahead and stop and get the shot when I see it. If I am late to something, I don’t mind asking forgiveness. It has not become a problem, except maybe for my wife. She knows now to bring something to read, because I will stop at unpredictable times and places.

    Being mindful

    This all now brings us to the larger issue of mindfulness. Not the pseudo-spiritual mumbo jumbo we get from the self-help crowd. Real mindfulness involves being in the moment. Being fully aware and conscious.

    Modern society does it’s best to train us to not be mindful. We are constantly distracted and entertained. Other people’s ideas bombard us and lead us to pay attention to what they want us to do. But learning to think our own thoughts and to look around and actually see what is there is necessary and healthy.

    Do you walk down the street looking around and actually seeing what is there, or are you scrolling Facebook or email to make sure you don’t miss something? Where is your focus?

    Do you ever take time for yourself? To think, to consider things, to read? Not to think about work or politics or where you are going with your friends tomorrow night. Is the idea of being alone with yourself scary or exciting?

    I suggest you practice being alone in your own head. It might be hard at first. Give yourself some time to just think and to just look around, not expecting something – just looking. Making a quiet place in your head could be a welcome retreat in our noisy, distracting world.

    The image with this post is a result of just being mindful. I noticed this scene on a walk along an ugly little canal in town. The location was not “pretty” in itself, but the conditions were right to make an image I love. I am very glad I took the time to notice it.

    Do you practice mindfulness? Let me know your experience!

  • The Making of “Brush Off”

    The Making of “Brush Off”

    It was refreshing for me talking about making a piece of art instead of just discussing process or training. I will do it again. This time it is the making of the piece presented here. It is titled “Brush Off”. It is one of those abstract, “what is it?” pieces that I like to do.

    Context

    If you think this is something very exotic, sorry to disappoint you. As a matter of fact, it is something common and mundane.

    This is the brush going over the top of my car in an automatic car wash. Looking up through the sun roof. Like I said, mundane. Sorry.

    The point, though, is: even something as common as this can be interesting if you look at it the right way. That is a constant theme of my images.

    Technique

    It was not as easy as just pointing the camera up and shooting. If I did that, even scrunching down in the seat, the lens would be almost right against the sun roof glass. That doesn’t work.

    In order to get the glass in focus and sufficient field of view and depth of field to render the brush the way I wanted I had to get the camera a couple of feet away from the glass. After a couple of wasted sessions of trying to juggle a small tripod in place, I gave up on that and placed the camera on the console looking up. That was the solution. As long as I didn’t bump it.

    Unfortunately though, with the camera there I can’t see what is going on. I had to use the Nikon software on my phone to connect to the camera and control it. Again after trial and error I figured out that I had to put it in manual focus and stop transferring captured images to the phone.

    Even so, there is a noticeable lag between triggering a capture from the phone and it actually happening. Probably about 1/2 to 3/4 second. This took practice to get in the rhythm. I had to anticipate when things would be in place and try to lead the event correctly. Lots of trial and error. I ended up throwing a lot of frames away.

    Finishing

    After all that, I wish the image I saw on the computer screen had looked like I visualized. But no. This was a sunny day. There were lots of reflections on the sun roof glass, both from outside and inside. It was worse because I had to abandon my polarizer to get the shutter speed I needed. It was a balancing game to blur the brush just enough to add to the mystery and abstraction without making it just a smear.

    I did the initial exposure balance and crop in Lightroom, as usual. Then in Photoshop it required extensive selective color tonal manipulation to eliminate the reflections. Then there was more tonal corrections, dodge/burn, limited sharpening, etc.

    Mindfulness

    What I want to point out, though, is that the image is not mainly about technique. Behind the “how” is the “why”. I was curious and mindful even while in a car wash. I asked what it would look like looking up through the top during the wash. And I spent the effort to explore it.

    I’m glad I did. I like it. This is one of a series of images I did in the same car wash over many washes. It turned out to be a useful place to ask some “what if” questions and see what happened.

    I encourage you to follow your curiosity. Don’t be afraid of looking foolish. Don’t worry what anyone else thinks. It is your curiosity and vision.

  • Lucky, or Good?

    Lucky, or Good?

    You’ve heard the phrase “it’s better to be lucky than good”. Some people will claim this is terrible advice. But I think there is enough truth in the phrase to merit some thought. Strive to be as good as possible, but welcome and embrace luck when it happens.

    Not the way to plan

    We can’t schedule or control luck. It is an external thing that happens, or it doesn’t. Since we can’t control luck, we better work on the things we can control. This is just pragmatic.

    The context here is art, but it really applies to most areas of our life. Work hard. Develop all the skill you are capable of. It is a life-long quest of continual improvement.

    When we are good at what we do we have more control of the outcomes. Another old saying you’ve heard is “the race doesn’t always go to the swiftest, but that’s the way to bet.” In this case, bet on skill. Our skill is a huge determinant of what we will achieve,

    Art, though, like many important things, is not completely predictable and deterministic. Unexpected or unforeseen things can happen and that can be good.

    Luck happens

    When the unforeseen happens we tend to call it luck. No matter how great our skill or how much we plan, sometimes something happens that just makes us say “wow.”

    If this event takes us away from our desired goal we tend to call it unfortunate – bad luck. If it sparks a new idea or gives a new insight or makes some problems go away we call it good luck.

    In either case this event was unplanned, unexpected, unanticipated. That is part of the beauty of it. Or it can be, depending on what we do with it.

    Be open and receptive

    Luck can be received as a gift. We should be flexible enough to re-evaluate our plans and goals in the moment to consider what we have seen or learned. Psychologically healthy people tend to have an attitude of gratitude. This luck could be pure gold. We should consider ourselves fortunate.

    It can trigger the creation of a great image or even bring us to a new place in our art. Even what we at first consider to be bad luck can have good outcomes. There have been times when I had been working on an image or even a project and a piece of bad luck causes me to reevaluate what I am planning on doing. Sometimes I conclude I was going down a dead end. The bad luck sent me to a different and better place.

    This cannot happen unless we are open. I could not possibly list all the times some lucky accident caused me to change my plan. Or the number of times I have learned something new to eagerly apply in my work.

    This image

    Let me talk a little more about this image than I usually do in these articles. I try to get out all year in all weather. In the winter I try be aware of good ice patterns, because I sometimes like the patterns and textures. Usually, here, there is enough snow to make the ice cloudy and less interesting. Nice, but kind of all the same.

    This day, though, I hit a brief window where the lakes had partially thawed. Then a hard freeze, with no snow, and calm conditions, had led to the formation of beautiful ice crystals. In addition, the edges of the lakes I was at had good rock just under the surface to give more pattern and color.

    I abandoned everything else I was planning to do and nearly froze to death shooting this ice. It was very cold.

    I love this image. It has not been altered substantially. Just some color boost and correction. I haven’t seen these conditions before or since. It was a happy accident – good luck.

    Lucky or good?

    So, is it better to be lucky or good? I will let you answer that for yourself. For me, I believe we need to work very hard on our skill and our vision. We have to be able to produce the work we want to create at the quality level we want. But I also believe we should be receptive to the happy accidents that bring joy and freshness to our life and vision. They seem to go together.

    Maybe Samuel Goldwin was right when he said “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

  • What the Camera Sees

    What the Camera Sees

    One of the important things every photographer has to learn is to see what the camera sees. It is a different process from painting or other visual art. It is a technical process, not only of how the sensor works but the transform of a 3 dimensional world to a 2 dimensional representation. This is part of our art. We have to understand it and be able to predict the results.

    Static image

    Unless you are shooting video, the end result of the camera’s capture is a static image. That seems like a “duh” to most of us, but it is significant. The entire image is recorded “in one instant”. Yes, I’m ignoring moving shutter slit, HDR, panoramas, time exposures, and other exceptions that can bend the rules.

    This “in one instant” is significant because our eyes work in a totally different way. We can only see a small spot at a time. We continually “scan” around a scene to “see” it all. Our brain stitches all these scans together marvelously to give us the impression of a complete scene. We are not aware of it happening.

    What difference does it make? Well, there are subtleties. If something moves in real life, our eyes jump to the movement and study it. Movement has a higher priority in our brains than static things.

    Our photograph no longer has that movement or flashing lights. It is a flat and static collection of pixels. We have to learn techniques to stimulate the viewer’s eye in other ways. We learn that the eye is drawn to the brightest or highest contrast areas. That informs how to capture the scene and process it to end up with results that help direct our viewer to the parts of the image we want to emphasize. It helps a lot to anticipate what we are going to want to do. This is part of learning how the camera sees.

    Depth of field

    The static image we create may or may not seem in sharp focus throughout. This is known as depth of field. It is referring to which parts of the scene are in “acceptable” focus. The aperture setting controls the range of this good focus area.

    Remember that the 3 main things controlling the exposure of an image are the aperture, the shutter speed, and the ISO setting. The aperture controls the amount of light coming through the lens at any instant. How long the sensor is exposed to the light is the shutter speed. And the ISO setting is the sensitivity of the sensor to the light. A side effect of the aperture setting is the control of effective depth of field.

    In real life we do not see limited depth of field. Our eyes focus on one small area at a time. Each spot we focus on is in sharp focus. The resulting image our brain paints is that everything is in focus. Try it. Look around where you are now. Then close your eyes and try to remember which parts were out of focus. Spoiler – there aren’t any. We remember it all in focus.

    So this is a big disconnect between what we perceive of a live scene and what we record in a photograph. Some photographers see this as a problem if they cannot keep the entire scene in sharp focus. But intentionally making non-subject areas blurry can also be used for artistic effect. Since this is different from how our eyes see, this creates something that stands out. It can change our perception.

    But like it or not, it is something that the camera sees differently and we need to learn how to handle it.

    Shutter speed

    To our eyes, things seem to be either frozen sharply or “just a blur” moving by. Things are usually only perceived as a blur if we are not paying attention to them.

    But for the camera, the shutter is open for a certain amount of time and things are either sharp if they are still or blurred if they are moving. The camera does not understand the scene and it is not smart enough to know what should be sharp.

    Let me give an example. Say you are standing beside a road watching a car go by. If we care about the car (wow, a new ______; that would be fun to drive) we are paying attention to it and we perceive it as sharp. To the camera, it is just something moving through the frame while the shutter is open. It has no name or value. The photographer has to determine how to treat this motion. What it should “mean”.

    So the photographer may pan with the car to make it appear sharp while the rest of the image is blurred. Or the intent might be for the car to be a blurred streak in the frame. Either way, it is a design decision to be made because the camera records movement differently from us.

    The lens

    Unlike us, our cameras let us swap out a variety of “eyeballs” – the lens. We have a certain fixed field of view. That is why camera formats have a particular focal length designated as the “normal” lens. For a full frame 35mm camera like I use, the “normal” lens is in the range of 45-50mm, because for this size sensor this corresponds to the field of view we typically see.

    But most of our cameras are not limited to that. We can use very wide angle lenses to take in a larger sweep of scene. Or we can use a telephoto lens to bring distant subjects close or to restrict our view to a narrow slice. Or we can use macro lenses to magnify small objects. All these things give us a new perspective on the world that would not be possible with our regular eyes. This is another way the camera sees that we need to learn to use.

    Mapping to 2D

    The world is 3D. Pictures are 2D. It seems obvious. Yet we must be aware of the transformation that is happening.

    In the 3D space we move in, we are acutely aware of depth and movement in many axes – length, width, height, pitch, roll, yaw, and others. We use this information automatically to interpret the world. But it is lost when the scene is captured on our 2D sensor.

    We sense depth. “In front of” or “behind” come automatically to us. Our camera is not as smart. The camera sensor records everything in front of it as a flat, static image. The scene is mapped through the particular perspective of the lens being used and onto the flat sensor.

    An example to illustrate. This is a classic. You take a picture of your family downtown. The scene looks perfectly fine and normal to you, because you intuitively realize the depth and separation of things. It gives you selective attention. But when you look at the picture there is a very objectionable telephone pole poking out of Uncle Bob’s head. You did not pay attention to that at the time because you “knew” the pole was far behind him and you dismissed it. The camera doesn’t know to ignore it. All pixels are equal.

    Light

    This is fundamental to our cameras. There has to be a light source. The camera sees only light from a source or light that is reflected or transmitted by objects. But being humans, we interpret the real world as objects. They are “there”. They have mass and form and value and color. Not so to the camera. It doesn’t ascribe meaning to a scene. All a camera can record is light. Our fancy sensor doesn’t see a red ball. It detects, but doesn’t care, that there is a preponderance of light in the red band being recorded.

    By its very definition – photo-graphy means writing with light – photography is dependent on light. Our modern sensors are marvelous products. We can shoot at very high ISO and make exposures in almost total darkness. But if any image was recorded, there was some actual light available.

    Everything in every image we make is a record of light. More than almost any other art form, photography is dependent on light. Photographers must be intensely sensitive to the direction and quality and color of the light sources that are illuminating our scene. Likewise we must be very aware of the objects the light is falling on, their shape and texture and reflectivity and color.

    Learning to see, again

    Art in general, and photography in particular, is a lifelong learning. We learn to see creatively. We learn to see compositions and design. And we have to learn to see the way the camera sees. This is the way we capture the image we want.

    Note, after writing this I found this good article by David duChemin. He is a great writer.

  • Beautiful Chaos

    Beautiful Chaos

    I am thinking about some words by William Neill in his book Light on the Landscape, combined with an old country song by Diamond Rio named Beautiful Mess. I’m referring to the visual chaos of the normal world around us. Managing this chaos is one of the great challenges and rewards of outdoor photography.

    Visual chaos

    Alas, the world outside is a chaotic place visually. Things just aren’t naturally arranged to make it convenient for us poor outdoor photographers. Plants are in the way. Trees aren’t in the right place for the best design. Rivers bend the wrong way. Clouds are too much or not enough or arranged wrong. Weather doesn’t cooperate. Sigh.

    I say that facetiously, of course. That chaos and the difficulty of making something pleasing out of a cluttered scene is one of the unique and challenging parts of photography. If it was too easy it would be difficult to create outstanding images.

    Bringing order

    I love this challenge. The inner designer in me rises to it. It is a very satisfying mental exercise to try to mold a chaotic scene into a clean and appealing image. This is one of the defining characteristics of photography. Painters start with a blank canvas and selectively add only the elements they want for their scene. But photographers must start with an existing, disordered scene and simplify it.

    We have many techniques to apply to do this. Lens selection will widen or narrow our field of view. We can change our point of view to include significant parts or exclude distracting elements. Selective focus can emphasize the areas of attention. Exposure can be used to darken or blow out parts of the frame where you don’t want any detail. Long exposure can change moving elements into a different graphical design. These and other techniques give us great control over the arrangements of the parts.

    But above all, it is a design challenge. We have to decide what is key to the scene and how to emphasize that and minimize distractions. Is it the S curve of a river or the graphical arrangement of branches? Is it the forms or the leading lines that draw the eye a certain way? Most scenes can be arranged to bring an interesting view. Some more than others, but most can be improved.

    Refine

    Following on from a previous post, we need to very consciously work to refine our design after we set it up. This is a weakness of mine that I plan to improve. I have long training in composition. When I walk up to a scene I tend to do a tremendous amount of subconscious evaluation to select a composition. My natural tendency is to set up and shoot what I visualized as I came on the scene and stop without taking it further.

    But I know that many designs can be enhanced by exploring variations. I will try to discipline myself to do this more diligently. Move – left, right, up, down – look for improvements in the composition with slight shifts. Look closely at the entire frame to make sure there are no distracting elements that could be eliminated by in-camera techniques. Walk more to see if a more dramatic change of viewpoint could help.

    Most of all, I need to make sure I look and think. What I have is good, but can I make it better?

    Don’t over analyze

    A caution, though. Don’t over analyze the situation. Design and creation should be an act of joy. When you are learning new techniques it is normal to have to concentrate a lot on what you are doing. But try to get to the point where it flows naturally. To where you move with it and follow your instincts. Trust your instincts.

    Shooting in the outdoors should be energizing. We should feel excited about what we are seeing and capturing. Don’t let the joy get sucked out for you. Creativity is exciting and invigorating. Most of us aren’t going to get rich at this. We should at least have fun and feel satisfied.

    This is a journey of discovery. Enjoy the journey and have fun!

    Note on the image

    The image in this article is personally satisfying to me. It is a location that brings me joy and that i return to as often as possible. Despite wading through mud, swatting mosquitoes and trying not to slip in and get swept downstream, I loved the scene. I did follow my advice in 2 significant ways: I worked it until I got to a composition I loved, and I had a great time.

    I hope you will find scenes that bring you such joy.