Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Tag: art

Passion
I believe the best art is based on passion. We hear advice about “follow your passion” all the time from self help gurus, but what is it? What does that mean? Do you know how to find your passion?
What you think you want
In these times I think it is harder than ever to find our real passion. There are too many demands. Too many competing voices calling for our attention.
My personal opinion is that we are seldom equipped to know our passion until we get more experience of life. True, some people have a clear “calling” for something. They may know from childhood what they want to do. I don’t meet many of those. Expecting to identify your passion when you are young seems as unfair as expecting a 17 year old high school junior to pick their major when applying for college. They don’t know. They haven’t experienced enough life to really know what they will be good at and want to do for the rest of their career. That’s why so many change majors. Sometimes several times. Nearly half of older millennials — 47% — wish they had chosen a different career, according to a CNBC Make It survey.
So some people might say their passion is landscape photography. Next month it may be French literature. Another month later it may be organic cooking. But they are not being dishonest. They really don’t know. They are trying to figure it out.
Maybe our friend likes a certain thing so we think that is our passion too. Often a celebrity feels strongly about something so we get caught up in it for a while. But those are someone else’s passion, not necessarily ours. We quickly get tired of following other people’s passions.
What you’re willing to work for
Passion demands work. I think a lot of times we discover our passion accidentally. We find our self putting a lot of time and work on something, and to our surprise, it doesn’t seem like work. It actually energizes us and makes us happy.
That is a passion. They are usually not easy. If they are too easy they will not hold our interest. It takes a lot of time and effort to master something worthwhile and even more to practice it and keep learning and exercising our creativity. Our passions are those things where this work seems almost like play. We would rather be doing this than almost anything else we can think of.
What are you working for and what can you effect? You may be “passionate” about homelessness, or the environment, or inequality, but what are you doing about it? If you are just saying “someone needs to work on that”, then it may be a value of yours, but probably not one of your passions.
In A Beautiful Anarchy, David de Chemin makes the point that a lot of people tell him they envy his lifestyle. They would love to travel to exotic places and do interesting projects that benefit people. But, he says, the reality is they won’t make the sacrifices required to do it. They “wish” they could do it but won’t pay the price or go out on the limb to risk it.
What price will you pay? And what is worth paying it? Those questions help you understand if something is really you passion.
Learning is part of it
Ramit Sethi promotes the idea that we should always be willing to invest in our self, to constantly learn. I completely agree with this. He goes on to offer actionable advice. He discounts the time honored “10,000 hour” rule as being what is required to be an elite expert in a field.
Instead he says that for a great many things, if you put in 20 hours learning it, you would be better at it than most people and far enough along to know if you are interested in going deper. So he advises if something appeals to you even a little, get a book on it, take a class, spend a week focusing on it and trying it. If after a week it has run it’s course and you feel done, then you know. But if you are still interested, keep digging.
This is great to build a base of experience to build on and it can be a great help to identify your passions.
But whatever our passion turns out to be, we need to be a student of it. Be familiar with what has been done in the past. Stay somewhat aware of trends and directions in the present and who the thought leaders are. Learn the technology involved. Master the tools. These things are just a base to build on.
Long term
When we find our passion, our commitment to it is usually long term. While it is true that our passions can change over time as we mature and our experiences change our values, we usually hold on to a passion for quite a while. Years.
It may take years to build sufficient expertise in our area of passion to achieve mastery. Then we can enjoy pursuing it at a high level of skill and satisfaction.
But mastery is an illusion. We may become quite proficient in the technology and the practice of the subject. If we feel like we have learned it all and there is no more challenge, then our drive and our passion will evaporate. The reality is that for most art we learn that no matter how far and deep we go, we are a beginner. We can always look at it fresh and discover new paths to explore.
This is the challenge that keeps it engaging and captivating for us.
More than a feeling
Your passions are not just a matter of feelings. Feelings are ephemeral. They come and go with our mood. Our passions are like love. Love is not a feeling, it is a commitment.
Passions touch something deep inside of us. Something that is a need that seems to be fulfilled by pursuing the passion. I like the quote “What is it that you can’t not do? This is your art”. And your passion.
We have many demands on us. Sometimes we just have to block things out and go spend time on something else for a while. Like, you know, a job. That is life. But our passion is what we daydream about when we have a few moments. It is what energizes us when we think about it. Subconsciously we are usually planning new projects or envisioning new creative things to do. We can’t not do it.
Your value in the work
We pursue our passions because they have value to us. It may not be monetary. It can just be a sense of fulfillment. Or just the joy it brings us.
For those of us who are artists, our passion is often our art and much of the joy comes from creatively engaging in the practice. Speaking personally, my value derives from being able to do creative things, to grow and stretch my limits, and my love of the things I create. I get little pleasure in doing the same things over and over. Creatively discovering new ways to present my vision is what I need.
It’s ours to make
We are all unique and different. All were born into a situation we did not control. Each of us is given a certain set of talents and capabilities. It is up to each of us individually to decide what we do with what we have. Saying we are disadvantaged or not capable of doing what we want is just whining. We each will chose what to do with what we have and can do and the time we get.
I could never have played NBA basketball and I can’t even draw well. OK. Those are some paths that are closed to me. I will do other things. It may turn out that the particular things we do may not be important in themselves. The important thing is our fulfillment of our needs and the benefits we may bring to other people.
Today’s image
I would not call it great art, but I appreciate this image. It shows an aspect of railroads we usually don’t notice. I wonder sometimes how trains are able to stay on their track.
Beyond that, it reminds me that our path is usually twisted and with many branches and turns. It is seldom clear at the start where we will end up. But the choices we make lead us somewhere. Following our passion involves making choices and tradeoffs. Do it consciously. Let’s choose the best outcome for our self that will help us become the best person we can be.
July 26, 2023
Moments
Moments are frozen instants in the flow of time. Our life is about moments. Most art, but especially photography, is about capturing moments.
Flow of time
Time is like a stream flowing around us. It goes from infinity to infinity as far as we can perceive. But we can’t stop it or dam it up. We can’t even jump in the stream and flow with it forever. Instead, we must watch it flow by and hear the clock ticking.
Time itself may be virtually infinite, but our time is not. We have been alive a certain time, but we have no idea how long we have left. There may be many years left, or our time may be done tomorrow.
Many of us live our lives as if we have infinite time left. That is simpler and less troubling than acknowledging the impermanence of our existence. So we become numb to the passing of time. We bury our self in our job or other responsibilities or diversions. Days flow into weeks into months into years and we barely realize it. Someday we look back and wonder where the time went.
Art is moments
A characteristic of a lot of art, though, is that it records moments. They may be beautiful moments, or touching ones, or poignant ones, or frightening ones. But the moment itself is the art.
Art portrays these moments so we can look at them from outside the time stream. It gives us a new perspective on the moment. Whether the art captures the moment as a 2 dimensional image to hang on our wall, or a 3 dimensional form in the garden, or a poem or story we can visit whenever we want, they re-create for us a moment or a scene we want to save.
One of the powerful aspects of the art is that it is concrete. That is, it is fixed, unchanging, staying as it was created. This plucks moments out of the stream of time and preserves them for us, beautiful and unchanging.
What we remember
Our memories are really a collection of remembered moments. Do you remember what you did at your job last month? Probably not, but you remember that time last month when your boss came to you and praised you on doing a great job on something.
Do you remember college? Or is your memory based on some great times, some miserable times, a time when a professor said something that opened up a whole new world of thought for you?
In our lives and with our families we tend to remember events, certain happenings – in other words, moments. Everything else is just a blur.
Moments we miss
Astounding moments are flowing by us all the time. Mostly, we don’t notice. Those moments are lost and can never be regained.
Mindfulness is a practice of being aware and “in the moment.” It attempts to let us forget the past and not worry about the future, but instead be very aware of what is happening right now.
Being mindful is a good thing, but when you look up “mindfulness” it often gets co-opted by types of eastern mysticism. Ignore that. The concept is simple, even if the practice may be hard.
When I say we should be mindful I simply mean we should practice greater awareness of the world around us and the way we are responding to it. As artists this is especially important. There is beauty and interest almost everywhere. Fascinating moments are happening all the time wherever we are. Mindfulness is teaching our self to see them.
This usually involves unplugging from our technology and stepping away from the fast pace of our lives for a bit. A walk is a great tool for me. Being outdoors and getting exercise helps me see more of what is going on. Of course, this only works if we put the phone in our pocket and take off the headphones, freeing our self from our tether to the machine.
But being there and seeing the moments are two different things. We have to be open to the experience. Pause and marvel at small moments. At common, ordinary things around us that can become magical sometimes.
The way we live our moments is the way we live our lives.
Annie Dillard
Photography is about moments
By its nature, photography is about capturing moments. The shutter opens on a scene in the “real world” for a fixed slice of time. The sensor records what is happening during that time slice. What we get is not imagined or fake. We have captured a moment. If we are good, it is a worthwhile moment.
Of course, I can create fantasy art that is impossible or surreal. I enjoy doing that. But most photography is a straight capture of a real scene.
The photograph is a portrait of a moment. We have plucked it out of the stream of time and set it aside for contemplation, to show other people what was there that they could have seen. Since there is such a rich flow of moments passing before us, one of the challenges is to develop the experience, the “eye”, to recognize a worthwhile moment as it is happening. In a sense, what Henri Cartier-Bresson called a “decisive moment”.
Shoot it when you see it. Painters may be able to hold a moment in their memory well enough to be able to sketch and paint it back at their studio. But photographers have to react immediately. Capture it or lose it. The famous Jay Maisel so rightly said “Always shoot it now. It won’t be the same when you go back.“
Prints freeze moments
Even in the realm of photography, there is the special case of the print. A print takes this fleeting moment and casts it in a more permanent form onto a substrate like paper or canvas or metal.
The moment becomes a real object. It has weight and form and texture. This is important because by being an object of substance, we have a different relationship with it. An ephemeral moment has been transported to a physical object we can see and touch and hold.
Even more, it has permanence. Memories are unreliable things. They fade and change. A print holds the moment up for us to see for many years to come. We can come back to it and relive it at will. Maybe only to remind ourselves that great moments are happening all the time and we should be more mindful of them.
A print celebrates a moment that is worth keeping among the continuous flow of time.
Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Susan Sontag
July 19, 2023
Eliminate Scale
Photography makes it easy to visualize the world differently. By using various lenses and changing our position we can get closer to or further from the subject and we can change the composition dramatically. A technique I like to use sometimes is to eliminate scale to give a fresh view of a subject.
Not intimate landscapes
Intimate landscapes are popular and common. This is simply getting in close to a section of a landscape. It allows us to call attention to shapes and colors and relationships that would be lost in the immensity of a wide landscape scene. It is a classic technique and I use it a lot. I love it.
But this is not what i am talking about today. Most often in an intimate landscape, it is clear that the scene is a segment of a landscape or nature view. We get in closer to isolate the part we want to call attention to, but we keep the context of the overall landscape. If I make a close view of a rapidly flowing stream, it is clear that the context is a cascade in the mountains.
Aerial Photography
It is popular to make abstract aerial landscape shots. They can be beautiful and compelling. The shapes are organic and pleasing yet the scene is somewhat abstract because we can’t place what it is. Some well known photographers like Peter Eastway and Tony Hewitt are known for this technique.
Drone photography is also increasingly popular and available to more photographers because it is a lot cheaper. Drone photography is typically done at a few hundred feet elevation, as opposed to conventional aerial photography that is typically up to a few thousand feet.
The common characteristic of these is that the views are looking down, usually straight down, to a relatively flat plane. Scale references are usually missing, so the viewer is left to imagine the size of what is being seen. That is part of the fun of viewing them.
Macro
Jumping much further down the scale, another technique to eliminate scale is macro photography. This usually refers to images that are life size or closer. A life size shot is termed 1to1. This signifies that the image is the same size on the sensor as it was in real life. For a full frame sensor that means shooting a scene that is 24mmx36mm. That is getting close. Macro photographers routinely get much closer than this.
This type of shooting tends to get very technology-heavy. There are special optical techniques with extension tubes and bellows and reversing lenses to give the required magnification. Special tripod fittings are used for focusing, because the whole camera system has to be moved to focus. No auto focus here.
Lighting is another consideration that gets difficult. Macro photographers use multiple flash setups with bounces or ring lights or even light tubes to direct the lighting to the very small area being shot and eliminate glare.
On top of that, macro shots have extremely small depth of field. It is more and more common to use focus stacking techniques to record many, sometimes hundreds, of “slices” at different focal points. Special softwar combines it all to produce a final result. I have a friend who designed and built a robot system to automate macro and micro photography with steps of microns.
I am not saying these things as a negative against macro photography, I am just trying to place it in context of what I am discussing. Macro images are often great and intriguing because they show a realm we do not see with our eye. But I don’t have the patience to do it seriously. I prefer a more spontaneous style.
Pseudo-aerial
The particular kind of scale elimination I am talking about today I call pseudo-aerial. I haven’t seen the term anywhere. As far as I know, I coined it.
I do not lay out the big bucks to book a plane or a helicopter for a shoot. And I have not gotten a drone yet. I already said I don’t have the patience to do serious macro work. So I figured out a way to do my own brand of simulated scale-less images that mimic aerial photography.
I find small scenes with interesting shape or texture or color and with few if any clues for size and typically shoot straight down from a standing position, basically about 2-3 ft above the scene. The results are my own brand of abstract aerial photography that I call pseudo-aerial. It is sort of the macro version of aerial photography.
One advantage over true aerial photography is that subjects I shoot are often static. I can spend more time composing and moving freely, compared to being in an airplane. And I can spend longer on a scene, maybe waiting for the light to become “right”. Of course, the subject does not actually have to be horizontal, as long as I can get perpendicular to it.
Challenges
There are some challenges, but they are pretty minor. Making sure my feet or the tripod feet are not in the frame is something to always check for. Likewise, being careful not to let my shadow intrude in the scene.
I often shoot these without a tripod. Without a tripod there is the balancing act of leaning out far enough to be perpendicular to the plane of the image and get my feet out of the frame and not fall over while making sure the shutter speed is fast enough to stop and motion. Yes, I have been off balance. Embarrassing but not yet damaging.
A bigger challenge is to visualize a small scene as if it were an aerial shot. Making sure there are no clues of scale, like grass or twigs or leaves to de-mystify it. Imagining the final image printed to check the impact and interest. Dare I say “pre-visualizing” it?
Example
I will make it concrete with an example. The image presented today is one of these pseudo-aerials. It reminds me of an angry sea breaking on the beach, changing color over the sand and diminishing the violence.
In “reality”I shot it at my local car wash. The camera is upside down on the center console of my car, pointed up through the sunroof. In that position I had to use the camera’s app on my phone to view and control it and take pictures. Very little was done to the actual image data except to color it to match the effect as I visualize it.
A lot of experimenting (and luck) was needed to get the timing of the water and soap and brush movement to get an effect I liked. Plan to throw a lot away. But when it works, it can create a unique and interesting scene.
After describing my pseudo-aerials as shots looking down at a small static scene, I turned it upside down to show an example shooting up at my sunroof at a dynamic scene. I wanted to emphasize that the original orientation and details don’t matter. What matters is if the final result will be accepted as an abstract aerial shot. To me this does.
I like pushing the boundaries of the medium. This technique to eliminate scale seems to me to be a rich area for exploration. I intend to pursue it a lot more.
What do you think?
May 24, 2023
Waiting for Permission
Are you using all your artistic talent and showing the world what you really see? Or are you waiting for permission to be an artist? Guess what, no one is going to give you permission.
Priorities
You are an artist. As such, you have to be fiercely independent and confident. Yeah, I know. Few of us are really that confident, especially when we get criticism. But criticism comes with the job. We are an artist if we let it roll off and not distract us from what we feel we have to create. It hurts just as much, but it can’t derail us.
As an artist, we each have a unique viewpoint. This is what gives us our own style. Expressing our viewpoint has to be a priority for us. Even if it is not popular. Even if it seems to be going in a different direction to the mainstream.
Our priority has to be making the art we see and feel. If we are not following our own heart artistically, we are not authentic, we are an imitation of someone else. Sorry to be harsh, but if we are copying someone else’s art to be popular, we are a fake.
Agenda
The world has an agenda. Never believe otherwise. Galleries are not interested in the creativity or uniqueness of your art. They only want to include what their customers have historically bought. Curators have built a reputation for promoting a certain style or type of work. They are only going to select art that matches their program. Art consultants seek to maximize sales by choosing safe, known styles for their applications.
If you are creative and following your own path, you may well not be a match for their agendas. Anything even slightly outside the norm or expected will be rejected.
Does that mean your work is inferior? No, If it is your heartfelt creation, it is your art. Just because the gatekeepers do not embrace it does not mean they have the authority to deny you being an artist.
It may not be popular
There are people selling programs to “help” us sell our art to a wider audience. Usually they are based on some version of “look on Etsy or Artfinder and see what is selling, then do that.” These programs probably work, and if your only goal is to sell things, that is OK.
But I’m assuming you feel a burning need to create your own art, not a copy of someone else’s popular work. Now things get more difficult.
In his marvelous little book “A Beautiful Anarchy“, David duChemin writes:
Of course, public reaction, either negative or positive, in not the point. The point is that the long history of creativity – in every imaginable field – takes us inevitably into places where we have to pour new wine into old wineskins, and that invites criticism, which in turn invites fear, and soon we’re back to hiding in the shadows, letting others take the risk while we abdicate the responsibility to do the one great thing we can do with our lives – be fully ourselves and make art of our lives.
A Beautiful Anarchy, David duChemin
What you see and feel
As an artist we have to be able to stand up and say “This is what I see and feel; look at my view of the world.” We are out in the world seeing with fresh eyes. Capturing images to present to our viewers from a new perspective. No one should be able to take that away from you.
As Mr. duChemin puts it, we cannot shrink back in fear and hide in the shadows. If we do, we have robbed our self of creating our art and we have robbed the world of what we can give them.
Go your own way
One of the sayings I live by, to my wife’s alarm, is “ask for forgiveness, not permission”. Actually, I seldom ask forgiveness either.
Asking permission gives someone the opportunity to say no. Why give this person the authority to place rules or limits on your creation? They should not have the right to deny you your art. Do not be left waiting for permission.
An artist is driven by his vision and a need within to create. Do not let the world discourage you or quench your creative spirit. Do not accept labels or let the world pigeonhole you. Take responsibility for your own art. Avoid the trends and whims of the gatekeepers around you. Be what you feel is right for you. Create for the joy of creating.
April 12, 2023
Photographing the Unseen
Photographing the unseen? That is impossible isn’t it? If you can’t see it, how could you take a picture of it?
Ostranenie
Osranenie is a concept. It is based on showing things in a new way, from a new point of view. I have written on this before and I want to circle back to give some practical applications. No, I still don’t know how to pronounce it.
Central to the concept is that the artist tries to force the reader or viewer outside of their normal state of perception. The goal is to make you break your normal habits and look at things different.
A unique ability of photography
Photography is uniquely suited to help see things outside of our normal perception. Other types of art, like painting, are generative. That is, you start with a blank canvas and what appears is what the artist envisions.
Photography is totally the opposite. It is basically subtractive. The camera captures everything in its field of view. It is up to the artist to be selective in framing and composing to restrict the image to what he wants to present.
That is well understood, but in addition, the camera settings and attachments allow exploration of states that we cannot perceive with our normal sight. Without any special tricks, my camera allows shutter speeds from 1/8000th of a second to 30 seconds. And the long exposures can be extended to any length I desire. I can also change lenses to give different perspectives on a scene.
Photography may be, at heart, a mechanical and technical based art, but that technology allows us to peek into the world in unique ways.
Camera vs eye
As humans, our marvelously designed eyes work in a totally different way than a camera. We constantly scan around and “snapshot” small slivers of our field of view. Our minds seamlessly stitch this constantly changing stream of images together, kind of a real time panorama. We don’t notice it happening. What we think we “see” is actually a model built from these scans and our interpretation of its meaning and our experience with similar subjects.
The camera has no built in biases. It just represents what it gathers in one exposure.
Time extremes
I have mentioned time as a variable of photography. But so what? How can that give us a new perception?
If I adjust my camera to take a frame at 1/8000th of a second, it does it. The result is a frozen slice of an instant that we cannot perceive with our normal vision. A cascade is a classic example. Shooting at a very short shutter speed freezes the motion of all the water and allows us to examine what is truly happening in an instant. All the complexity and the turbulence we cannot perceive.
On the other extreme, if I expose it for seconds, the water will blur into streaks that give an impression of the overall motion going on. We sort of understand that this is what it might look like over time, but we can’t actually see it unless we take a picture.
Here are a couple of (not very good) examples. Actually, I seldom use short shutter speeds on water so I had to go out to the local river and generate an illustration.
Short shutter speed, 1/4000th second
Long shutter speed, 1/10 second
In the first case, the water seems crystal-like, frozen. In the second case there is a distinct impression of motion and flow. The point in each case is that this is not what we actually see when we’re looking at the waterfall. Each is a bending of our perception, revealing new views on the world to us.
Space
Our cameras also have the ability to give us different perspectives on the space around us. Our eyes have a fixed focal length that is around 40-50mm equivalent for a 35mm camera. And we see the world in a horizontal format. But we can put a variety of lenses on our cameras to give views from extreme wide angle to extreme telephoto. And we can rotate our camera in different orientations.
We’re used to seeing our “normal” point of view – that’s why 50mm is called a “normal” lens. A wide angle stretches our view, Things converge in unexpected ways. Lines make distinct new compositions. Buildings “bend” in funny ways. It brings together much more width of view than we are used to seeing.
And the opposite, a telephoto lens, compresses our view. It narrows in on a small area, like when we look through binoculars. It gets us closer to something we would not normally be close to, such as a wild animal. And it lets the artist draw our attention to details of small parts of a scene.
Each of these effects is a distortion or exaggeration of our perception. It is not what we actually see, but it allows us to discern the world around us in new ways.
Motion
Our perception of motion is another effect the camera can record but that we perceive much different. Try an experiment: move your head rapidly from side to side. You don’t really notice much as your head is moving. As soon as you stop you have a clear view of the scene before your eyes. Our mind kind of “skips over” the motion.
Or try another experiment: stand beside a road and start straight ahead as cars go by. What do you notice? Something obscures your vision briefly, but we tend to ignore it. It’s more of a distraction to what we are watching.
The camera, though, sees all that passes in front of it. It doesn’t know to ignore some things as immaterial. I often use the technique knows as intentional camera movement (ICM) to achieve reality distortions to show the world in new ways. The image at the top of this article is such a motion capture. You know what the scene is, but you also know that you have never actually seen the world like that. It helps you think of it is a different way.
Color
Another thing we have excellent control of now is color. More or less, change the hue or saturation – it’s easy with our tools. These things could not have happened in early photography.
I feel the need to single out one significant category of color manipulation that we are very familiar with. Black & white. This is not the way we see the world. By presenting an image without color information, our perception is changed drastically. It keeps us from getting distracted by color and helps us to really look at the shapes and tones and forms in the scene.
We don’t produce a black & white print now because we are limited by the medium. A black & white print got there by the artist deliberately deciding to remove the color. We may not think of it this way, but black & white images are a deliberate distortion of our perception to help give us a new point of view. It is an alternate reality.
Bending reality
Photography has the ability to bend reality in many ways. That is one of the things I love about it. I am not ashamed of it. It is not cheating or an artifice. It is using our creativity to create art.
I think this quote expresses it well:
In our time it seems entirely appropriate that the widest choice be open to artists. Those using the camera or other photographic means to produce works of artistic merit should seek to exploit their medium in the most adventurous ways … The derogatory use of the term artifice is more often than not a bugaboo. Art is artifice. Its reality is of another nature than that of the purely physical world.
Aaron Scharf
A different perspective
I really appreciate that photography has abilities to give us different perspectives on the world. I am tending to push in these directions more and more in my work. Of course, artists in other media can do most of these things, but they would have to either have an amazing ability to visualize the unseen, or they would likely take a picture to show them the unknown and then paint it. Photographers do it directly.
Maybe it is stretch to call this bending of perception ostranenie, but I don’t think so. I doubt if the term will ever catch on. Probably a good thing, because then I would have to learn to pronounce it.
There are few actually new things in the world. The idea of ostranenie was penned in 1917 – 106 years ago as I write this. But I am happy that photography lets us push the boundaries into new visualizations of reality. It is a uniquely capable art form.
Let’s go out and shoot the unseen and impossible! Keep on bending! Get outside of normal perception.
March 22, 2023