Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Tag: failure

  • Love the Unlovable

    Love the Unlovable

    Do you ever take any bad pictures? Of course. We all do. Some of us more than others. But instead of immediately deleting the bad ones, I suggest living with them a while. Love the unlovable ones. Study them. We can learn from them.

    What is “bad”?

    What constitutes a bad picture? That is subjective and/or technical.

    There are clearly, technically bad pictures. Badly out of focus. Poorly timed so that the subject has left the frame. Badly exposed. Handheld at too slow a shutter speed so it is unintentionally blurry (as opposed to intentionally blurry). Most of us would agree that these are bad and we probably immediately dismiss them as useless.

    Other than that, a bad picture is one not up to our expectations. This is subjective. A bad picture to a highly experienced photographer may seem excellent to a novice. If you judge it bad, it is bad.

    A related question for another time is, how do you know it is bad? Learning to critique your own work is challenging. If you can’t, how can you know what is good?

    But in most cases, bad is obvious to us and we can learn from bad pictures. Humans generally learn more from failure than success.

    Pseudo terra incognita©Ed Schlotzhauer

    It is your picture

    First, though, let’s acknowledge that this is your picture. You took it. Sure, there are exceptions. I have sometimes accidentally pressed the shutter while I was carrying my camera and gotten random sidewalks or blurred bushes. That is a clear, unintentional mistake. All the other bad pictures were deliberately taken photos.

    But in all cases, it is our picture. No one else is responsible for it. These bad pictures didn’t just happen for some reason we don’t understand. They did not magically appear on your memory card. We raised the camera and pressed the shutter.

    There’s a reason you took it

    We intentionally took these bad pictures I am talking about. And we did not intend them to be bad. Something happened between the intent and the execution to cause it to not work.

    You thought there was at least a reasonable chance that this would be a usable photo. The picture is probably not totally bad. Not meeting our expectations does not necessarily mean it was bad in all respects. There are many possible reasons it was a failure.

    I have talked about the chain of steps between our brain and a final print. Failures can happen anywhere along that path. Specifically, any of the technical decisions required in camera to capture the image could be faulty. It is easy for the exposure or the focus to be off, especially in the excitement of capturing a good scene.

    When you discover that the failure was a technical problem, that is easy. Figure out what you did wrong, so you won’t make the same mistake again. This is just improving your technical skills.

    Or maybe the failure was in your head. As you were visualizing the shot you want, maybe you weren’t clear in your own mind about the best framing and composition. Maybe it is inexperience. You look at the resulting shot and think “no, that’s just not quite right.” If you’re lucky, the scene is still there, and you can work it more. If not, you try to determine how you would approach the same thing next time.

    In all these cases, the bad picture provides an opportunity to learn how to do better next time. We will benefit from taking the time to learn what we can from the experience.

    Layers of grafitti©Ed Schlotzhauer

    Was it an experiment?

    Another big area of failure for me is experiments that did not work out. I experiment a lot. It comes from curiosity and an ongoing process of wondering “what if…” I often push the edge of my comfort zone.

    Maybe it is intentional camera movement (ICM) at different shutter speeds and with different types of movement, just to see the effect. Perhaps it is shooting a mountain stream at different shutter speeds to determine the amount of water blur I like best today. Maybe it is trying shots straight up or straight down, just to see what I can do.

    There is no end of these. I might use a slow shutter on a passing train to see what happens. Sometimes I will take shots of a sprinkler in a park, just to see what I can do with it. Bad weather is a great motivator for me to get out and try things. Travel is a great source. Can I get interesting pictures that are not the typical travel shots? If there is great light on something, I will shoot it. Just to see what I can get.

    The possibilities are endless. That is part of the fun and challenge. But when shooting experiments, I know that most of the shots will be failures. They may all be failures. I expect it and am more curious than upset to examine them.

    That time when you do get something good in an unusual situation is pure joy. It makes all the failures worthwhile.

    Reflections in the Rhine River©Ed Schlotzhauer

    Out of your control

    A lot of what we attempt to do relies on things out of our control. The light may change before we get the shot. The subject may move. Clouds come up and dampen that reflection you were trying to capture. Clouds go away and leave you with an uninteresting clear blue sky. It got windy, so everything is moving. You had a day set aside for photography, but it was a blizzard.

    Unless we are setting up a still-life scene or controlling a set, we are at the mercy of conditions and events. We must learn to roll with the conditions. When our planned shot goes away, find a better one. Use your artistic talent to make something great of what is there. That is being resilient.

    The bad shots may open our eyes to new learning. We may discover we really like B&W scenes with dramatic clouds. Or we enjoy intimate details of scenes rather than only grand landscapes. A new world may present itself in a decaying, rusty truck.

    Keep them permanently?

    There will always be discussion about keeping the mistakes or less good images. Some photographers say they keep everything except technically really bad pictures, e.g., out of focus.

    I will give my opinion, but you probably do not want to listen to me on this. Every photographer adopts a workflow that fits his style. Part of mine is that I shoot a lot, and I don’t hang on to pictures unless I can convince myself there is a reason to.

    I have given some insights on my process (slow edits, etc.). Part of it is a multi-step editing process to promote images. Good ones rise to the top with time. A side effect is that bad ones get dropped out and discarded. Eliminated. Deleted from my disk.

    If I shoot several frames of the same scene, I seldom feel compelled to keep more than the best and maybe 1 or 2 other promising views. The rest are gone.

    Since I usually shoot handheld, I often shoot 2 or 3 duplicates to ensure I can select the sharpest. After I select the keeper, the others are deleted.

    It’s brutal. Many people will disagree. That’s OK. It is my style and workflow. I have never found myself in the position of wishing I had one of those deleted frames instead of what I kept. But, when in doubt, keep them until you can figure out your feelings.

    Through a Screen©Ed Schlotzhauer

    Learn from mistakes

    But the point of the article is that our mistakes are a valuable learning for us. Sometimes, they can be as valuable as the keepers. We should examine them, determine why they were a mistake, use it to build our skill or our artistic vision. Every failure is an opportunity.

    Failure often means we stepped out of the safe rut we were in and tried new things. The failure rate is high when we are innovating. But so is our growth rate as artists.

    So be courageous. Choose to eagerly adapt to conditions, to try new things, to explore new ways of seeing, to look carefully at your bad pictures. Our bad pictures help us along the way. Learn to love the unlovable ones. Learn from them.

  • No Learning Required

    No Learning Required

    Photography is a craft we traditionally spend years learning and practicing. What if we could shortcut all that and have some “hacks” that would let us make great images with little work or training?

    The click bait

    It seems like I am getting more and more click bait like this (actual names redacted to protect their anonymity, and to not support their sales offer):

    Most photographers spend years trying to figure it all out on their own—slow progress, scattered tutorials, lots of frustration.

    But what if you could skip that?

    What if this is the year you jump straight to clarity, consistency, and results?
    That’s exactly what the [program name] gives you: the proven system that pros actually use.

    If you’re at the bottom of the learning curve this seems attractive. Who wouldn’t want to be able to leapfrog to the top of your game with little effort? This would save years of hard work.

    For a little money, I could buy my way to success, fame, and fortune. I could become a respected artist quickly. What’s not to like?

    There are 2 things: there is no secret knowledge, and it still involves a lot of hard work and learning.

    Decrepit railroad tie, no track.©Ed Schlotzhauer

    Secret knowledge

    It is a popular and successful sales pitch to insinuate that there is secret knowledge known only by elite practitioners in a field. If someone shares this secret knowledge with you (for a fee), you, too, can be one of the elites.

    The problem with this is that photography does not rely on secret knowledge. Rather than being a closed league, like a guild, the field is very open. Most photographers readily and openly share their knowledge and insight.

    Why would they make all this knowledge available? I think it is for 2 reasons.

    First, many photographers rely on workshops and book and tutorial sales to supplement their income. It is just a reality. The number of people who live solely on image sales is relatively small.

    Second, they know their knowledge is not secret. It does not need to be closely guarded, because it is wisdom based on years of experience. Every photographer who has been in the game long enough basically knows the same things. Most of the ones I know are eager to share their experience and help others benefit.

    Learning required?

    Are there “hacks” you can use to get you where you want to go faster? Maybe. Depending on where you want to go.

    If you are the family photographer, there are simple things you can learn to make your images more enjoyable. Making yourself aware of the lighting and how to control it, framing the subject more deliberately, using shallow depth of field to isolate, and seeking a “decisive moment” are techniques to raise yourself above the norm.

    Or if you want to make your vacation pictures less boring to others, there are “hacks” that can be used. Learning to see and use the light, actively looking at what is going on all around your frame, use wide and close and high and low views. Culling out most of your shots will help a lot, too.

    If these are the kind of specific goals you have, then certainly learn the “tricks” and be satisfied. You will take better pictures but not be an artist.

    One tree leaning on another one©Ed Schlotzhauer

    Results or creativity?

    So, what is the goal? Many people, probably most people, only care about getting a decent shot to put on social media or in a memory album. I do not criticize this at all. That is where their values lie. Learn some simple techniques that will improve your photos.

    But if you aspire to be an artist, if your goal is to make creative and interesting images that express your point of view, that is an entirely different path. If you go to photography school, you will learn techniques like I described above. Probably in the first semester. Then you will be pushed onward to learn actual image making.

    Creativity is hard. You must know the basics of the craft very well, but then you must develop your own unique way of seeing and have something to say. It goes far beyond just being able to take a good picture.

    Are there shortcuts?

    The ad I quoted talks about “slow progress, scattered tutorials, lots of frustration” being involved in the way photography is usually learned. Maybe they have synthesized a program that guides a person through this messy time. Or maybe they just have a rigid program to follow to make a novice a clone of the instructor.

    I believe. that learning to be a creative photographer is hard work. Personally, I don’t think there is a reasonable shortcut. A good mentor can help immensely by pointing things out and giving good feedback. But you still must do the work. It is long and frustrating and sometimes you want to give up. We want to be progressing faster, but we don’t seem to be getting there yet.

    Henri Cartier-Bresson famously noted “Your first 10,000 photos are your worst.” That is true. It does not, however, mean your next 10,000 will be great. As someone who has shot many multiples of 10,000, I know that it is a long and difficult road.

    But we keep pushing, because something compels us to do it. Psychologists tell us we learn more from failures than from successes. As aspiring artists, we generate a lot of learning opportunities. And we do learn. Practice and ruthless evaluation eventually pays off.

    Night landing at the airport©Ed Schlotzhauer

    Doesn’t AI do the work?

    An elephant in the room these days is AI. Won’t AI provide the shortcuts we want? Can’t we rely on it to make our images better?

    Yes, we can. It already happens every day with AI “enhancements” when we take a picture with our phone. And there are many AI “enhancements” that can automatically be applied to our images in Lightroom or Photoshop or whatever your tool of choice is. It will only get more powerful and more pervasive.

    If your goal is to make your image better, then yes, it will be glad to do it for you. But you didn’t do it. And by letting AI do it, you didn’t learn how to do it better next time. We become a tool of the machine rather than it being the other way around.

    If our goal is to become a creative artist, my opinion is that this is going the wrong direction. An artist is responsible for all the creative decisions in making an image. We delegate some simple things to our tools, like when I put my camera on Aperture mode and let it choose the shutter speed based on the aperture I selected. That is a simple technical calculation, it is not taking creative responsibility for the image.

    Maybe AI is one thing driving the resurgence of photographers shooting film and doing chemical darkroom work. They remain firmly in charge of all aspects of their image.

    Foggy night in the park©Ed Schlotzhauer

    Look back

    Sometimes looking back helps us look forward.

    In my blog I have given some glimpses of my culling and evaluation techniques. I will not describe them in detail, just to say that I do not use a basic 5-point ranking scheme. My images must go through several rounds of critique and editing to progress up to my top set. The ones I would be proud to show anyone.

    Recently I was going back through to catch up on my backlog of hundreds of images that are still “in progress”. It is a time to look realistically at each image and decide if it deserves to be promoted to the next level.

    An interesting thing occurred. Having to revisit these hundreds of images, I couldn’t help thinking that I have been making some pretty good and occasionally creative pictures. I shoot so much that I sometimes forget to look back and see the arc that is traced by the past. It was encouraging.

    Art is hard

    Becoming a better picture shooter is easy. Becoming an artist is hard. It involves lots of learning and practice and self-examination. And suffering. At least the mental suffering of falling short of your expectations. But even then, there is no certificate, no award ceremony, nothing to tell you that you have arrived. You keep pushing and reaching forward.

    It takes time and effort. I do not believe there are any magic shortcuts that will get you where you need to go. Put in the work. Put in the time. It is worth it.

  • That Didn’t Work

    That Didn’t Work

    You had an idea. You tried for it, but the result must be considered a failure. If that didn’t work, what do you do? Does that mean you are a bad artist?

    An idea

    You get an idea of something you want to try. Call it an inspiration if you will. More likely it is an extension of what you have done before, maybe applied to a new subject or situation.

    As an artist, most of our work begins with an idea. As a photographer, we than follow up the idea with trying to realize it as an image. Maybe several, working different positions, lenses, shutter speeds, etc. to try to optimize the resultant image.

    If you are very experienced with your craft, you might be able to visualize fairly accurately what the result will be. But no matter how experienced you are, you will get surprises. Surprises can be fun and a great creativity boost.

    Antique diesel locomotive©Ed Schlotzhauer

    Fail

    But whether you blast away 100 frames or selectively shoot 1 frame of a scene, you will sometimes look at the result and say it was a fail. How we react to such a failure is very important. Your reaction could ultimately determine the level of success you have later.

    I’m using the idea of failing, but what does that mean? The definition will be different for each of us, but in general, I hope we can agree that it means the result does not meet our expectation. It does not necessarily mean the image is terrible or unusable, or even bad, but what we planned or pre-visualized did not happen.

    At the risk of sounding like a cliché, this is a learning opportunity.Intentionally imperfect. A blurred effect capturing the motion of the scene.©Ed Schlotzhauer

    Permission to fail

    Failure seems like a terrible fault to some of us. I am one of those in many things, but not in my photography. For my art, I have given myself not only permission to “fail”, but the expectation that I will and should. I have embraced failure as a healthy part of growing as an artist.

    This was a big step for me. I discovered that the fact of failure was not the main problem. The larger problem was fear of failure.

    How much are we held back in our art by fear of failure? Do we fear being humiliated? Or that people will dismiss us as an untalented lightweight? Do we believe we are somehow bad when a shot does not meet our expectation?

    Here’s the reality: few people care about what we do. They are not sitting around thinking about us and they take little or no notice of our work. If they’re not fixated on it, why should we be?

    We are our main audience. Our work succeeds or fails based on our own perception. All that matters is whether we get to a result we are happy with. Failures along the way should not matter.

    Risk

    Author Herman Melville once said, “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” I believe the greater risk in our artistic life is to fail to be creative.

    AI is constantly learning how to mimic all existing art. The only solution is to be different from what exists.

    If we are repeating the same boring stuff that 99% of photographers do, what have we contributed to art or to ourselves? Chasing likes on social media is normalizing. That is, it brings us down to the average level of everyone else.

    Theodore Roosevelt said: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.” If we are an artist, the risk is to not give it our full effort and not become what we can be. To let what is within us die because of fear of failure. That seems too great a fate to risk.

    Tripod leg on edge or rushing river©Ed Schlotzhauer

    Learn, modify, try again

    The sports legend Michael Jordan said “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.“

    Unlike Michael Jordan, we don’t have millions of fans watching live as we fail. We can curate our work and select what gets presented to people to see. You won’t see my failures, unless I am trying to make a point.

    Given that, why should we consider failure a problem? A failure is an experiment. We try something, we see the result, and we like it, or we don’t. Either way we can learn something new and try again. But the reality is, we learn more from failing than from success. But only if we make the effort to figure out the cause.

    So, when we’re shooting, we have an idea or a vision of what we want to achieve. We make the image. Later, we examine it closely on our computer. Sometimes the result is far from what we envisioned. That is a time to introspect. To determine what we did or didn’t do that made the result different from what we wanted. Maybe to ask if the result is better or worse than what we visualized.

    These days, I find that less of my fails are because of exposure or composition problems. Most are concept-level issues. Ansel Adams said “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” Concept failures are harder to diagnose and correct, but they certainly keep me thinking more.

    But whatever the cause of our failure, our goal should be to learn, modify, and try again.

    Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

    Winston Churchill

    Sketches

    I consider most of my images to be sketches. Things that are helping me work toward an idea I haven’t fully envisioned. When I shot film, these experiments were expensive, and I tried to minimize the loss. Digital frames seem almost free. No problem to take several experimental tries.

    So now we should be free to work a scene as much as seems valuable. But I seldom do it that way. My sketches are more tests to see if what I saw can become a good image. Perhaps it is a fault of mine, but I spend little effort making many slight variations of a scene.

    I don’t like doing comparison tests of 12 different views of a scene to try to figure out which is best. If I come up with 4 that are equally good, how do I decide a “best”? When I find myself in this situation, I often conclude I am not really applying much creativity to the image. I seem to be optimizing for technical concerns.

    A possible exception is shooting intentional camera motion (ICM) images. Each frame could be considered a failure from a purist technical perspective – blurry, motion, no sharp subject. These are fun because it is an abstraction technique, and each frame is unique. For these, I may do a few variations on a scene, trying different motion techniques. You never know exactly what the outcome will be. There are occasional happy surprises.

    Intentional Camera Movement©Ed Schlotzhauer

    Discoveries

    When we allow ourselves permission to fail, we sometimes discover that we have stumbled onto something entirely new. We see a glimpse of a new creative statement starting to form.

    This is a different form of courage in the face of failure. The recognition that yes, we failed in what we tried, but it opened a new insight on our world. The first emergence of this new idea is probably crude. It seems like a failure. But as we reflect on why we are drawn to it, why we do not immediately delete it, it may give new insight to change our viewpoint and try to perfect it.

    This is one of those rare and exciting moments when we get a tingling in our spine and we perk up and wonder what just happened here? That is a cue that we are about to step outside our comfort zone. It is dangerous for an artist to be too comfortable for too long.

    That is creativity. Sometimes creativity is based on recognizing that what I did didn’t work, but I now see a glimpse of something better. Being an artist is a process, not a destination. Failure can be an opportunity to advance ourselves to a better state. Analyze it, experiment, modify, try again to see if you are going in a good direction.

    Sometimes, finding “that didn’t work” could mean we are on the brink of an exciting new step in our art.

  • Learning Takes Effort

    Learning Takes Effort

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

    Curiosity

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

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

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

    Learning

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

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

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

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

    Failing

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

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

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

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

    Interleaving

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

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

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

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

    Dots

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

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

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

    Photography

    What does this have to do with photography and art?

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

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

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

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

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

    Neil Gaiman

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

  • Seeing the Invisible

    Seeing the Invisible

    A camera records what it is pointed at. But is that all we do? Shouldn’t we be seeing something no one else sees? This is what I call seeing the invisible.

    Not just recording

    I have written before about the camera as a recording device. That is the nature of its design and that is what the vast majority of people do when taking pictures. The big advantage of a camera is that it immediately records what is sees. Its disadvantage is that it records what it sees.

    Not to get Zen on us, but yes, it is an advantage and a disadvantage. I’m not good at drawing and I am fairly impatient. The camera is a near perfect tool for me in my creative process. But on the other hand, what value have I added if I just show you exactly what was there? True, maybe it saved you a trip there. But is it really art?

    I hope to do more than show what you would have seen for yourself in the same place.

    Make something

    I can take a picture or I can make a picture. To me, the difference is the thought and perception and interpretation that goes into it.

    If I am driving along and I think “Oh… Pretty” and stop and step out and shoot a picture, it may be beautiful. Many people may like it. I will do this almost every time I see a pretty scene. But usually I won’t show them to you.

    I want to feel like I have gotten deeper into the scene. Maybe it is to take a few minutes to move around to find a better vantage point. Maybe it is to work through various compositions to find a better way to see it. Perhaps it is to zoom in to a part of the whole or go wider to emphasize the space. Or even to note to myself that this should be black & white.

    Whatever it takes, I hope to make something special and different out of the scene. To put my particular stamp on it to bring you something new.

    One of my tests is my wife’s shots. She shoots everything with her phone. After years of being with me and picking up some hints, she is good. But she basically just shoots to post selfies and pretty pictures to Facebook. My test is that if my picture looks like hers, maybe I haven’t really created something yet. Maybe I haven’t found the key to distinguish this from the conventional shot. It is a pretty high bar.

    I’ve taken a picture but I haven’t really “made” a picture. I haven’t discovered the invisible something that is there.

    Project our feelings

    It really is about the artist’s emotional response to the scene. I felt something. What was it? Have I captured it? Can I articulate what I am responding to?

    Tony Hewitt is a great photographer in Australia. He has been known to write poems about images he likes. I am not suggesting we have to do that, although I think poetry is one of the highest art forms we can aspire to. But we can and should ask our self questions. And force our self to answer them honestly. Even if we just keep asking “Why?” over and over. Probably about 3 layers of that will peal away our complacency and help us to discover what it was that appealed to us in the scene.

    Now that we understand what drew us, we can work the scene. Refine and elaborate on our initial view until we really make something.

    For myself, I usually find that it was a feeling or emotion that triggered the process. I may not have been able to put a name to it immediately, but there was something: joy or disgust or wonder or excitement or just the way things looked together. Something drew me to the scene. By understanding what it was I can better develop the shot into something that may have the ability to stir the same emotion in you.

    More than a rock

    It is what it is, but it can mean more. That is a lot of the magic, isn’t it? How can we have a picture of something we recognize, but it seems to have some added significance? Edward Weston famously posed the paradox as

    This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.

    Edward Weston

    It is a photograph of a rock. But can it be more than just a photograph of a rock? If we take a moment to reflect on it, is there a deeper layer to it? Can we get a glimpse of something the photographer saw on a deeper level?

    Guy Tal even wrote an entire book on the theme: More Than a Rock: Essays on Art, Creativity, Photography, Nature, and Life. It is a worthwhile read and he brings up good points.

    The fail

    I hate to end on a down note, but I think we will fail more often than succeed. Our intent is not clear to the viewer. They do not see the depths we wanted to show them.

    There is a notion of equivalence, meaning the process of transferring our intent to someone else. The basic takeaway is: it’s hard. I know that even in Guy Tal’s good book, a lot of the pictures I look at leave me flat. I don’t see what he obviously saw. To use Weston’s metaphor, it’s just a rock to me. I have a different experience base and different values. Meanings and emotions do not transfer easily in the best of circumstances.

    So should we give up and not try? Impossible. We’re artists. We have to try. That’s what we do. When it works, it is magical. Sometimes, we can really help someone see things that were invisible to them before. In that, we can share our joy and wonder. That makes it all worthwhile.