Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Tag: Artist

  • My Favorite Lens

    My Favorite Lens

    In general, we photographers love our equipment, Especially our lenses. It is not uncommon to have a favorite one. You can always get a discussion/fight started among photographers when you talk about lenses. I would like to discuss what has become my favorite lens.

    Lenses

    The lens is a critically important piece of equipment to photographers. Sensors are improving dramatically and lenses have to improve with them to achieve all the sharpness and resolution the sensor can capture.

    Modern lenses constantly improve in resolution. Look at DxO image tests of current best lenses vs. the best from 20 years ago. Our lenses now enable us to capture more information and be able to produce wall-size prints that are extremely sharp.

    The lens determines the point of view that is captured in our frame. It establishes the field of view, the width of the scene we are capturing. Some of us naturally have a telephoto view. Others have a wide angle view. This refers to the lens choice we tend to select to frame our subjects. This is just personal preference. The lens is a tool to help express our esthetic.

    Many photographers feel they need a whole bag full of lenses of various focal lengths from extreme wide angle to super telephoto, with macro lenses and tilt/shiftes thrown in. Because, you never know what you might find. 🙂 Personally I have simplified my life a lot over time. I generally only carry a 24-70mm and a 70-200mm in my kit. But that is just me and where I am at right now.

    So what we want is a lens or lenses that allow us to capture all the information we want (resolution, sharpness, dynamic range) in the field of view we want. A big ask, but doable.

    Digital workflow

    Most of us are in the digital world now. The digital workflow is quite different from the analog workflow.

    What we call the analog workflow – the film days- involved developers and enlargers and prints and lots of chemicals and time. Personally, these are days I don’t miss. I am a big fan of the power and freedom and flexibility we have now.

    There is a corresponding workflow for digital processing, though. It includes loading images on our computer, viewing them, culling or grading them, processing selects with our software of choice, etc. Each of theses steps is time consuming. Especially since we tend to shoot so many more frames now that they “don’t cost anything”. And each step requires software and considerable training.

    The result, though, is that we spend a lot of time in front of our computer now. We probably spend more time in the digital workflow than we did in the analog workflow.

    My favorite lens

    What does this have to do with a discussion of my favorite lens? Well, in a sense the “lens” I use the most and that has the most impact on my work is my computer monitor.

    This is where I view all my images. Zoomed in to 100% I look at individual pixels. Here is where I crop and color correct and adjust tones and contrast and saturation. This is where I view and edit the image when I convert it to black & white. When I create new images by compositing others together, that is done entirely though the monitor “lens”.

    Yes, all of the things I just said are actually done through specialized software. In my case it is primarily Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. But metaphorically and to me, the monitor is the lens into the process.

    Now days the monitor is where we view everything we do. Regardless of what the original image looked like, what I see in the monitor at the end of the edits is what counts. The result could be a complete re-imagining of the starting image.

    The new primary lens

    I spend more time in front of my monitor than I do outside shooting. More and more it is coming to dominate my workflow. If I lost or broke a lens, that would be terrible, but I could continue doing my art with other lenses with only minor re-adjustments to my vision. I had this experience recently. My 24-70 lens dropped and shattered the polarizer filter. I was up in the mountains and I did not have a filter wrench with me to get the jammed filter off, so I had to switch to using an alternate lens. A little frustrating, but not a big deal.

    But if my computer died, although I could continue shooting, I could not view or process a single image until I fixed it. Eventually things would back up to a critical point and I would have to get the computer back. I also couldn’t select images for galleries or process images for printing. Dead in the water.

    So in a sense, the focal point of the digital workflow is the monitor. That is the new lens I use to view and do most of my work. The monitor is the lens for the increasingly important part of the digital workflow.

    The future

    In the future will this trend increase or will we return to simpler times? What do you think?

    My money would be on the increase of digital processing. We will trend more toward an attitude that the camera and lenses are used to gather raw material, but pictures are actually made in the computer, looking through the monitor. Increasingly, the final image may look less and less like the original capture. Better processing software opens up new possibilities. And viewers are more willing to accept that photography should create something more than a true representation of reality.

    So the next time you are lusting for a wonderful new lens, it might be better to upgrade your monitor instead.

  • Created by Me

    Created by Me

    Generative AI is all the rage now. I suppose there might be some applications for it, but you will not see any of it in my work. What I show is entirely created by me, and I have no plans of ever changing that.

    It’s all around

    The news is full of hype about ChatGPT and Bard and, for images, DALL-E 2. Tech companies are inventing hundreds of billions (yes, “billions”) in it, so it must be about to take over everything, right?

    It is hard to read anything without seeing references to the coming revolution. It is the “next big thing” in tech. MIcrosoft, for instance, has invested huge in ChatGPT and says it will embed it in its browser and all of its applications. With so much press and money and interest, it must be true, right? Maybe.

    But do you understand what it is?

    What is AI?

    I have said before that I am a reforming Engineer. Well, I must admit that at one time I was involved in AI applications. I even believed in it at the time. That is just to say I have some technical background in the subject, so I am not just quoting press releases.

    “Artificial Intelligence” is a weird term. It is definitely artificial. Whether or not it represents intelligence is debatable. To me, there is no real “intelligence” involved. It is just a fancy computer algorithm with a lot of data embedded in it.

    The AI that is hyped today is called neural networks. It is based on a fairly simple structure that tries to mimic the way the human brain is organized by simulating neurons and synapses. Then they train the network with huge sets of data. The connections and values of the neurons and synapses are adjusted to give a desired output for a given input.

    To over-simplify it, imagine a patient teacher trying to train a neural net to recognize an egg. They “show” it a picture of an egg and say “this is an egg” and let the network adjust its values to give a positive output. Then they show it a picture of something else and say “this is not an egg” and again let the network adjust its values to give a negative output. Repeat it over and over thousands, maybe millions of times with different pictures. Eventually the neural net would get pretty good at identifying an egg, if the training data was good enough and extensive enough.

    But so what? The AI does not at that point know what an egg is. It just classifies shapes as being one or not.

    What is the good of it?

    We are discussing generative AI, so I will try to focus on that. Generative AI takes a request to make a picture or song or some such work, maybe based on the style of another artist. You could say “make a picture of a tree in the style of van Gogh”. It would make one. It would probably look like something Vincent might have done.

    If you were generating the image for an advertisement, you might be able to simulate a certain style without the encumbrances of creative fees or intellectual property laws. For you, the user of the image, you get to bypass paying the artist. Or maybe, charitably, you get something you wish the artist had created, but they did not.

    Many companies are very eager to have AI trained to be able to produce minimally acceptable results faster and cheaper than a human. Be aware of those companies that want to get rid of their people and replace them with minimal acceptable results. Have you used an AI-based chat agent to try to get support from a company? My results have been way below minimum acceptable. Maybe search engines is the best application for these bots. Most of the search results already can’t be trusted.

    So for someone wanting something cheap for a practical use, it can be a good thing.

    Is it art? I have my opinion, but let’s get to that in a minute.

    What are the limitations?

    Neural network-based AI only “knows” what it is trained to do. Its abilities are limited strictly by the data it is fed. And I used “know” in quotes because, one of the great limitations of this system is that it doesn’t know what it knows. It doesn’t even know what knowing is.

    AI cannot explain it’s actions. The data compressed into its network has been stripped away from its source. This is going to become one of the major limitations that will cripple it or stop it’s use. So, for instance, when an AI system turns you down for a loan, you cannot force it to explain why. All it can say is that you just didn’t meet the pattern. Lawsuits will come of this.

    And it may produce wonderful seeming results, but it is a cheap trick. AI products are a regression to the average, at best. That is, a large set of training data defines the average of whatever domain is being learned. This is all it knows. It does not understand the difference between unacceptable and acceptable and exceptional results. It does not understand the concepts behind what it is doing at all.

    So when you ask it to make a picture of a tree in the style of van Gogh, its data bank has many images of trees. It has encodings of parameters describing patterns of van Gogh’s style. It can mix them and make something. But it can’t step back and say “Wow, that is great. I’m proud of that! That is good art.” There is no more feeling than a tax form.

    Where does the training data come from?

    This is a little off topic of the quality of the results, but have you considered where this huge volume of training data comes from? Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and many, many others, including your Government, collect and use all the information they can find . This includes public data like Wikipedia or the Library of Congress, but also everything they can scrape up about you. So every network search you have ever done, every web page you have ever visited, all of your email, all of your pictures, your contacts, your contacts contacts, every post you have ever made, your facial images, your job, your salary, your spending habits, all of your telephone calls, everything is just free data to them.

    This is all used without your permission or control. So for an artist, for example, all of their online works can be used to train the AI to do better to try to replace them. And with no compensation or attribution.

    There is currently no accountability for AI or the companies profiting from it. It has been proven that much of the training data used was biased or incorrect, producing bogus responses from ChatGPT. And Google’s Bard got a black eye the day it was announced when it gave false information to a query about the Hubble telescope. No accountability, no ability to explain.

    A passing fad?

    One part of me thinks AI is just another passing fad. It has come and gone before. AI was going to revolutionize the world about 20 years ago or so. It died. Now the pundits are enamored with it again. Most of them are too young to realize it died of natural causes already. But venture capitalists and tech gurus are very quick to throw billions of dollars at “the next big thing”, even if it has been unable to generate any money.

    But no, I’m afraid we will have to live with this for a while. Too many billions have been invested for it to die soon. And it can show some limited tricks. Either you believe AI is a higher and more perfect form of life that will make the world better or you don’t. I don’t.

    Not on my watch

    Lots of rambling, but back to the adoption of generative AI. As far as I can see, I will never use this in my art. This is not like the introduction of digital imaging, where film purists wailed about the passing of a wonderful era. This is not a technology shift, it is a tool that plans to eliminate artists.

    I will use useful tools, like sky selection in LIghtroom or Photoshop, but that is just a force multiplier to get my job done quicker. I could do the same thing myself and I can often get better results. It is like a woodworker using a planer to smooth a tabletop quickly rather than spending hours sanding it. You don’t say the tool created the piece of furniture.

    When you see images from me, they were created personally by me. I don’t and do not plan to use AI to create my art. I don’t think art created by AI is really art, but that gets into the argument of what art is. What I call art is only created by humans.

    Call me a Luddite, but I believe only humans can actually create.

  • Out There

    Out There

    My previous article discussed being an explorer based on curiosity. I absolutely, intensely believe that. But I don’t want to leave the impression that most of the exploration can be done in books and videos and trips to museums and even on the computer. For what I do, I have to be out there. Out there in the outdoors. Thinking about images is great, but you haven’t created art until you actually make an image.

    Exploration can happen anywhere

    Exploration is partly a mental activity. Feeding your mind with new ideas and new images causes growth, new connections. This is a vital activity for artists – and for everyone if you care about growing. There is a limit to it, though.

    Creativity is a balance between thinking and doing. Thinking allows us to consider new possibilities and imagine what we would do. Actually getting out shooting lets us test the ideas, see unexpected things, apply the ideas and discover new ones.

    The craft of making something balances and perfects the ideas of what we might do. It is a feedback loop. They reinforce each other. Thinking new ideas helps us see more possibilities when we are out shooting. Capturing images helps refine what works and doesn’t. Then when we see what works we discover new possibilities to try another time. Putting theory to practice is necessary to perfect both.

    I shoot outdoor images

    At some point we have to stop just thinking about what we want to do and actually go do it. Get off the couch and out the door.

    Occasionally I set aside time to travel someplace specifically to shoot pictures. That is a joy. But i don’t get to do it as much as I would like. Some reasons are:

    1. It is expensive
    2. I have to be at my studio to process images and take care of all the things that need to be done.
    3. New places are enjoyable but I’m a visitor there. I feel the need to find fresh images where I live.

    So I force myself to get out frequently and explore in my own backyard, so to speak. I consider it great discipline to find new, interesting images in familiar areas. And I do find many that I consider good.

    I will confess that I am naturally something of a couch potato. Getting out in all kinds of weather is a significant act of will. Especially when you consider that where I live the temperatures can range from -10F to 110F. It can be easy to convince myself that is is just not fun. But it is a habit I force myself to do. When I am home, then 4 to 5 days a week I go our walking with my camera.

    Yesterday, for instance, it was 2F and snowing and we had about 4 inches of fresh snow on the ground. I walked over 4 miles. I’m not bragging. Probably many of you do much more. My point is that it is a conscious decision that I will go out with my camera and explore every chance I get. I am somewhat amazed at what I find.

    When I am looking at an image I like, I always remember what the conditions were when I shot it, but that is not a factor in my evaluation of the worth of the image itself. The image must stand on its own. But I sometimes find the best pictures in the worst weather.

    Practice makes perfect

    Exploration is largely a mental activity. Feed your mind. Take in new ideas and possibilities all the time and assimilate the learnings into your vision. But you have to do it, too. Make images. Express the creative ideas you formed. Realize the idea in a finished product for your viewers. It can be hard.

    In his e-book “10 Tips for Aspiring Photographers”, William Patino said

    One thing that I feel greatly helped my learning was the amount of time I was willing to invest in being outdoors, playing with my camera and observing light and the land.

    Invest the time. Be out looking and feeling. Getting good at anything takes time. Practice. Play.

    I find that creative ideas tend to be rather vague. They tend to come as an idea of something that would be interesting. But actually making it happen can sometimes be difficult. It may require planning or more research or travel or, typically, many attempts to capture the idea in a real image.

    When I was working on my Speeding Trains project I threw away hundreds of attempts before I learned how to capture the impression of motion and speed and power and presence that I envisioned. Even after I sort of figured it out, my “hit rate” was probably about 1 in 10. Practice makes perfect. Or at least better. 🙂

    Believe you are very lucky

    Being an artist is hard work. If anyone tells you different, they haven’t tried it. You have to create a huge body of work and continually refresh it. You have to deal with rejection. Gatekeepers are everywhere proclaiming themselves to be the arbiter of taste and style and you are not fit to be allowed in to their select club. You will want to give up. As an artist you have to believe in yourself and your work. Regardless of what others say or do. Push on.

    It seems a contradiction, but on the other hand, many people admire and look up to you. They dream of being able to step out of their drab world and create. To have the freedom to make art and tell the world they don’t care if no one else likes it, because it pleases them. We seem an independent rebel, living the creative artistic life. They are right.

    In a private correspondence my friend Les Picker said:

    It’s like a colleague of mine once said: There is no such thing as a bad day for a nature photographer. We’re out there. We’re walking the path. How fortunate we are!

    So when it’s 0F and I am feeling frostbite or it’s 100F and I’m about to pass out from heat exhaustion, I remind myself that I am out creating and following my vision. How can this be bad?

    My vision leads me to shoot outdoors. So this is where I have to go. I can’t cherry pick and just say “Oh, today is not totally perfect , so I will just stay in”. That would never get anything done. Get out in it. Get dirty or wet or hot. Look past the conditions and discover what is there to see.

    Being an artist is about seeing. I have to be out in the place I plan to shoot before I can see. I want to make art, not just think about art.

    Your mileage may vary

    It sounds like I am saying that you have to shoot landscape scenes to be an artist. Not at all. I think the principles apply to anything you do. If you do portraits, do them, a lot. Don’t just think about doing them. If your thing is commercial or food or street photography or abstract still life studio shots, it doesn’t matter. Do it. Practice. Get in the reps.

    My thing involves outdoor photography. I have to kick myself out the door to shoot. If you do your work in the studio then make yourself get up and go do the work there.

    You’re not an artist unless you are creating art.

    Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

    Andy Warhol

    The image this week

    I mentioned suffering in the cold. That is the time of year I’m in as I write this. What would be worth going out in that kind of weather? Well, things like this. I love patterns and reflections in ice. It is a very interesting subject to me. This kind of shot makes me forget the discomfort and think of the beauty in unlikely places. I hope you get out and find things like this, too.

  • Exploration

    Exploration

    I firmly believe exploration is a foundation of art. Without it, we become stale and stagnant and eventually just start repeating the same things over and over. Exploration leads to growth and creativity.

    Many ways to explore

    I consider myself an explorer. It is a fundamental activity that I pursue. But I seldom go off to uncharted lands. There are countless ways to explore. Many without even leaving my studio.

    Exploring often involves travel, but it also encompasses the ideas of searching and inquiry and discussion and evaluation. It is more a mental activity than physical. Just being in an exotic location does not automatically classify, for me, as exploring. That depends on what you bring from the experience.

    When I read books by artists or view videos about artistic technique and thought, that is exploring. It is an inquiry process. I ask questions of myself and attempt to answer them. The process stretches us. Once stretched, we don’t come back to the same shape.

    I sometimes spend hours at a time “exploring” on my computer. No, I don’t mean watching TikTok. Exploring editing possibilities and compositing possibilities. Reviewing images and trying to discover new things in them.

    When I go out wandering in my local neighborhood, that is exploring. I do it with an open mind, seeking to see things in a new way. It is amazing that I can usually find new sights or see familiar ones in a different way. That is exploring.

    Feed your creativity

    At the heart of exploring is curiosity. Curiosity is the fountain that waters art. We need to have an active and healthy curiosity to sustain us.

    Most people aren’t overly afflicted with curiosity. Is your curiosity a living and active part of you? We have various needs that have to be met, things like food and shelter and emotional satisfaction. I consider my curiosity almost on that level. I wouldn’t die physically if it died, but mentally and emotionally I would be very damaged.

    Curiosity can be fed and nurtured to help it to thrive. There are many ways and I’m sure each of us responds in different degrees to each. Some that work for me are reading, learning new things, looking at good art, listening to intelligent people talk, a change of scenery, and play. All of them are consciously done activities that stimulate my brain. I believe this is very important for a healthy, creative life. The fact that you are reading this means you probably feel the same.

    The one that probably seems out of place to most people is play. Are you too serious and grown up to play? I hope not. It is actually very important. In a newsletter, Srinivas Rao once said “When we play, we return to a childlike state of curiosity”. I believe this attitude is important for artists. Through play we discover opportunities to extend our artistic vision.

    If you believe something is interesting, you are right. Go with it. Follow it to see where it leads. Considering something play lowers the barriers of expectation. No big deal if it is a failure – we were just playing. Brilliant!

    Get out of a rut

    Without experimentation that is driven by curiosity, we get stuck in ruts. We repeat the same old way of seeing and thinking all the time. Do you have any self imposed “I always do it this way” limitations? We need to view life fresh. Spend a certain part of your time just playing and trying random and ridiculous things. Do something silly. Have fun.

    Brooke Shaden once said creativity is curiosity + experimentation. I think that is a good viewpoint. Experimentation helps us discover new things to encourage us to climb out of the rut. Curiosity drives the experimentation. I think most exploration begins with “what if…”.

    Head in the clouds

    Has someone told you you have your head in the clouds? They were probably not complimenting you. Most people are so focused and pragmatic that anything other than today’s goals seems useless. As artists, we can’t be that. We are on a lifelong quest to create and see the world differently. Sometimes that is best to do from the clouds.

    If I can reframe “head in the clouds” to mean healthy exploration backed by wide-ranging curiosity, then I want to be called that.

    Be an explorer

    Become an explorer. That doesn’t necessarily mean we have to jump on a plane to a remote corner of the world. Your attitude determines it. It may just mean going outside with a fresh, new attitude. Let your curiosity guide you. Give yourself permission to play, to experiment, to do silly things. Shoot something new. Go extreme in post processing. Find new themes. No telling where that might lead.

    I consider myself an explorer. It is the way I live my life. It has nothing to do with how many frequent flier miles I have. Wherever I am and whatever I’m doing I’m looking at interesting sights, examining compositions, thinking about themes or possible projects. Curiosity compels me to always be seeking.

    Today’s Image

    I love this image. It is built on some things most people would never stop to look at, much less photograph. It was put together in a playful way with some post-processing magic thrown in to flavor it. Complete play. It is a joy to me. I hope you enjoy it.

  • Perfection

    Perfection

    For an artist, I believe perfection is a false goal. It can lead us to spend our energy in the wrong places. This seems especially true for photographers. Our technology-based art can lead us to believe technical perfection makes good art. It doesn’t. At least, not by itself.

    An absolute

    I am a recovering Engineer. I know a lot about specs and technical details and I am naturally drawn to “perfection”, whatever that is. As photographers, we tend to be pulled this direction. Are there any overexposed highlights? Do the shadows contain some information and very low noise? Did the lens and sensor resolve every bit of detail that could be used? Was “proper” technique used to maintain total sharpness and low noise? Did it follow the “rules” of composition?

    More and more I am convinced these things are relatively unimportant compared to the impact of the image on the viewer.

    Normal people view and enjoy prints at a distance of about 1 1/2 times the diagonal measure. Photographers tend to press their nose right against the print to try to see any imperfections. Yes, I do too at times. But this is not realistic or very important for normal viewers.

    One of the themes I enjoy at times is images that have super high detail. Images about complexity and texture and the details of the material. I have good equipment and I am OK at using it, so I can do that whenever I want. Some subjects seem to lend themselves to it. But I don’t think I have any images that I consider great solely because of their technical perfection.

    A moving goal

    And what is “perfection”? Who defines it? Is such a thing achievable?

    Our technology is constantly improving and pushing the boundaries back. The camera I use now is vastly better than the one I used 10 years ago. It has higher resolution, lower noise, and wonderful new features like live histogram view. These things let us achieve ever better results with our craft.

    Likewise with printers, drop sizes get smaller, allowing for sharper prints, inks get better permanence, and printers get larger. Along with that software technologies improve all the time. We can upscale and sharpen images with much less artifacts. New algorithms can reduce noise without materially damaging sharpness. It’s a great time to be a photographer.

    Is this perfection? Sure, a photographer can put his nose up to a large print and see “perfect” detail, low noise, great edge sharpness, and smooth tonal gradation. Is that what perfection is?

    So is perfection the absence of any artifacts and a hyper-realism that looks sharper than real life? That is nice, for some images, but I do not believe it is what perfection is.

    Why perfection?

    Before I attempt to get in over my head, I will ask why we need perfection? Does it make better art?

    I have seen prints by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Stiglitz, and many others. Many are stunning and have amazing presence, but not all are technically perfect. At least, by today’s standards. I have also seen many paintings by Monet, da Vinci, Rembrandt, PIcasso, O’Keeffe, etc. Again, I would say that the great ones may not be because of perfection in the sense I have been discussing it.

    Craft trumps perfection

    Take Ansel Adams for example. He shot mostly 8×10 negatives and spent many hours producing a print. But, the film technology he had was arguably not as good as modern high-end medium format sensors. And his lenses were not particularly good compared to modern designs. Some of his prints are not as technically “perfect” as many artists at their studio today making a print on their Epson or Canon printers.

    But there is something else that overrides the technical limits. There is a magic in what he brought out in the printing process. He was a marvelous craftsman. He knew how to work an image until it changed from an average original to a stunning final print. “Moonrise, Hernandez” is a classic example of that. He shot it quickly because he was losing the light. So quickly that he couldn’t find his exposure meter, so he had to guess. Because the negative was badly exposed, it was very difficult to print. It required many hours of work in the darkroom to create a rendition of it. But it became one of his masterpieces. The final print is far superior to the original capture.

    As he himself said

    A photograph is not an accident it is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative. From that moment on to the final print, the process is chiefly one of craft; the previsualized photograph is rendered in terms of the final print by a series of processes peculiar to the medium.

    Ansel Adams

    Adams was very good at all the aspects of photography. But in my opinion, it was his craftsmanship that made him rise above most everyone else. He would work a print until it glowed and had a life in it. The tones and contrasts and lighting were amazing. The results he created went far beyond considerations of technical perfection.

    Story trumps perfection

    I include story here because I believe it is powerful. But in general I struggle some with the concept. In a sense, story happens automatically. If you pause to examine a print for more than a couple of seconds it is natural to build a story. Humans naturally seek meaning and story. Guiding the viewer into seeing a more interesting story is a plus, both for the viewer and artist.

    I do prints. Generally single images, meant to hang on a wall. To me, it is difficult to tell an extensive story with one isolated image. Not that it can’t be done, but I don’t see it happen as much as critics and some artists want us to believe. Probably the Engineer in me is still too literal.

    But I see examples sometimes that make me wrong. A great one is Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Place de l’Europe, Gare Saint Lazare, Paris“. Long name, but you’ve seen it:

    Place de l’Europe, Gare Saint Lazare, Paris

    I think this is a great story captured at, what Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment”. As you look at it, you tell yourself a story about what is happening, why he is doing this, what he is thinking, what happens next. It is still a memorable image today, even though it is under exposed, the subject is slightly blurry, and, depending on your notion of proper composition, the guy being about to disappear out of the right frame can be a problem.

    It is a great and famous and beloved image. Being technically perfect would not have improved it at all.

    Emotion trumps perfection

    Emotion is something I have struggled with for a long time. I now believe that if I can’t make you feel something about my print, it is cold and sterile. I believe it so much that I feel that emotion far outweighs technical perfection. This is one reason I have been doing more ICM (intentional camera motion) projects lately. It throws out all notions of sharpness and detail and focuses mainly on capturing a feeling or impression.

    Emotion in art has been written about a lot lately, but let me repeat and reinforce it. If I can’t make you feel something of what I felt when I made the image, I have probably failed.

    There are techniques for creating an emotional response, but I am not concerned with them here. The fact is, we have to do it. As an artist, I have to share my feelings in an image or there is not much interest for the viewer.

    Sharing and being transparent is a challenge for some of us (me). I am learning. The results are apparent to me. An image with a depth of feeling has more impact and staying power. Sigh. I will just have to force myself.

    But the point is that an image that touches you emotionally is more meaningful than one that is just technically perfect.

    Table stakes

    So perfection, mostly technical perfection. Where does it fit? Am I saying it is not important? No. A technically perfect image may be excellent, but not just because it was perfect. It also has to embody emotion and story and excellent craft. Perfection is a table stake. It has to be there in order to get in the game. It is not the game itself. Art has to go beyond technical measures.

    Today’s image

    Earlier I mentioned ICM as a tactic I have been using occasionally to break away from the feeling I needed technical perfection. This image is an example of that. It is from a series I did called Speeding Trains. The intent is to capture the sight and feeling and power of a huge train speeding by. I hope you like it. Read the artist statement and see the rest on my web site.