Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Tag: fine art photography

Elevate Me
Why do you view art? Is it just to enjoy it, to see what other people are doing, to get ideas? I do those, but at a slightly deeper level, it is to elevate me.
Elevate
I admit to being somewhat jaded about art after years of focusing on it and trying to make it. It seems sometimes that my artistic appreciation is dulled, drained. I have seen so much that it is unusual to encounter anything that excites me. It is a sea of sameness.
I read an article that said that our dopamine sensitivity falls off 10% per decade after we get to be adults. Therefore, the things that excited us in the past don’t have the same impact later. I think I feel this in my life. I don’t get juiced as easily.
But then it happens. Something breaks through my deadened barriers and grabs me and shakes me. An artist has created something that speaks to me, shouts to me even.
When I thought there was nothing new to discover, I discover something new. When I thought I couldn’t get excited any more, suddenly I am – metaphorically – jumping and shouting.
This piece lifts me up; pulls me out of the depressing sameness I thought was the norm. It elevates me. I see more clearly and can think new thoughts. I become a better person. There is reason to go on.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Inspire
An event like this is inspiring. When I was beginning to think there is nothing new and creative to be done, suddenly that depression is shaken, even broken.
A new work like this can point the way to new ways of viewing my work. Not to copy the other artist, but as the introduction of new ideas into my thought process. New ideas are there to chase. New possibilities appear.
It is a joy to be given the gift of new vision to see the world with.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Challenge
Events like this are a challenge to us. Rather than depressing us because of the remarkable insight another artist had, it is an enticement to use it to catapult us to a whole new place. I may not want to do work at all like theirs, but something in their work shook me. Something helped reveal new directions. It gave me a glimpse of a distant place I want to find.
I used to believe that the best creative challenges came from within. Now I see that other artist’s creativity shapes many of those challenges. Yes, they come from within, but part of them may have come from something we see in another artist’s work that reacts with something in us to germinate a new idea.
There is an old quote I always liked but never fully understood:
Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
Lionel Trilling
As mature artists, we do not imitate something we see that inspires us. Copying does not recreate their work or produce new work we can be proud of. Instead, we try to isolate what excited us, distill it down to its essence, and incorporate that flavor, that scent, into our thought process. It influences our new work.
I steal the inspiration and re-form it into something of my own. It elevates me. From this elevated position, I can see further. I can discover new things.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Artist’s intent
Where does meaning and intent come in? For me, it doesn’t matter much. I have said before that I believe I must try to bring my feelings and intent out in my images. But I have also said I believe the only thing that matters to a viewer is the feelings and meaning they derive from the image.
Christopher P. Jones is a writer on Medium who analyzes the structure and composition and symbolism painters put into great works. His articles are very interesting, and they reveal background and levels of depth I had no idea about. It is educational.
But, when I look at a famous painting or another artist’s photograph, all I can get is what I perceive, the meaning and depth I take from it. To the artist, it may be the deepest, most symbolic and meaningful work they have ever done. And that may be completely lost on me. Sorry, I’m rather dense. I’m not very interested in theoretical analysis of art.
Because of or despite their intent, I may perceive something fresh and creative in the image. Something that attaches to something in me to strike a spark that might ignite a fire. It may have nothing to do with the artist’s intent. But it is my valuable takeaway.
Artistic value is a difficult concept. But I am more an artist than a viewer. It is more important to me to develop my own creative eye than to become a more knowledgeable viewer.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
It could be mine
I love those rare times when an artist’s image sparks excitement in me. But sometimes there are golden events when my own image does that.
I am not being egotistical. Honestly, I take a lot of bad images. Occasionally there are some pretty good images, but only rarely does one take my breath away. Often, I do not recognize it at the moment. Most often when I am shooting, I am experimenting with camera or subject motion or working a scene to try to refine my point of view or caught up in the flow or shooting. Later, when processing the images, it may get a “hum, that is kind of interesting.” It is usually after doing some color correction and processing that the image comes into its own and starts to reveal itself.
Sometimes there is a magical one that jumps out and grabs me. I get a chill and my breath catches. It is a rare one. It is like finding a treasure.
What an absolute joy to find that one of my own images thrills and excites me. Something I shot elevates me. Wow. That is a double bonus.
But whether it is one of our own images or something from another artist, great images elevate us. They make us see a new point of view on something. They give us new ideas. That makes us better artists.
March 4, 2026
Loud Whispers
Most images today are designed to explode, to attack, to shout. Are these the ones you remember? I usually don’t. I think the quiet ones, the loud whispers, have more staying power.
Attention
It is repeated endlessly and taken for true that we are in an attention economy. Media vendors make money by keeping people engaged on their site. So entertainment, doom-scrolling, click bait, fake news, short videos, and many other products and psychological tricks are used to hook us and keep us watching. I read that the average person now touches their phone 2,617 times a day. We spend over three hours daily on social media alone.
A byproduct of this attention manipulation is that it changes us mentally. Many people develop a short attention span. We must be continually stimulated to keep the dopamine flowing. Basically, the companies encourage us to regress to childhood.
Do not believe that the media companies care about art. It is just a commodity. They don’t care what they sell so long as it keeps eyeballs on their app.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Photography
This short attention span affects much photography today. Images are expected to have punch, to hook us immediately. It is believed that they should immediately reveal their meaning without requiring any work by the viewer.
Implicit in this is the assumption that a viewer will look at an image for about 1 – 2 seconds and then go on, looking for the next exciting image. The next dopamine hit. Doom scrolling until we go blind.
Even in a gallery or a museum, where it would be expected that people would have a higher level of appreciation, it is normal to watch people just strolling by the lines of art on the wall. Just idly considering some of them, but dismissive of most.
Now I will be quick to say that a lot of art, including photography, can be quickly dismissed. Things that try so hard to be “creative” that they forget to be good. If it is made by or for the short attention span generation, there is little staying power.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Impact
I believe that much of the “impact” that is promoted in the attention economy is false. It’s like eating candy. There is a quick sugar rush that feels good for a minute, but it fades quickly and there is no food value that is good for you. It is actually worse for you than skipping it completely.
The dramatic, over saturated sunset is pretty, but there is little to get from it. The classic landscape image is pretty, but it is just another wide angle shot from the same viewpoint everybody stops at. Portraits tend to be either selfies or would-be fashion shots that tend toward creepy.
Most of these are easily forgettable. A few minutes later we don’t even recall anything about them.
I guess the question is was it OK to put it out there just to get a few “likes”, or did you want people to engage with your image? That is a very personal question. I can’t claim there is a universal right or wrong answer.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
What stays
I have noticed, over the years, that many of my images are “nice” and people like them, but only a few leave a lasting impression on me. It would be nice to be able to give a definitive description of what makes one have staying power, but I cannot.
Since I cannot define it, I cannot reproduce it on demand. Often, I do not recognize these images immediately. It is not uncommon for the images that excited me when I was taking them to not be ones that had this staying power. It may even be that some of these long term keepers are on the edge of being culled out during editing. Sometimes, though, something pulls at my subconscious, and I keep it until I can figure out how I feel.
It may be days or weeks in coming, but eventually I have a mini-epiphany and recognize that there is something significant there calling to me. Or perhaps I must work with the image for a while. Crop it, change it around some, maybe see it in black & white. But at some point, a new understanding may emerge. It changes magically from a picture I guess I will keep to something I really like.
That is like finding a buried treasure.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Quiet
I said I can’t define what makes one of these images, but one thing I can identify as a frequent characteristic is that they are quiet images. They don’t shout for attention. They don’t jump up and scream “look at me!”
Instead, they are often more reserved, almost shy. These are the ones that whisper instead of shout. These are the loud whispers. They quietly have something to say, and they know it. It is there to see, if the viewer takes the time to look for a while. The reward will come through investing the time and attention to appreciate it. I think that is the side of the attention economy I prefer.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Out of the mainstream
So, maybe it is true that the attention economy. has completely taken over photography. Perhaps most people expect every image to jump up and shout and bare all in 1 second.
I am old and out of touch. I still have this notion that a photograph must be well crafted and thoughtful. That it should be something you want to keep coming back to. You want to spend time with it and reflect on the subtle interest and meanings you find. These are the ones I call a loud whisper.
So, I will continue to shoot a lot, to experiment freely, and to try to think fresh about my subjects. Occasionally I will discover one of these quiet gems. I will continue to go along my own path of obscurity, but content in the joy and satisfaction my work brings me. And it does. Sometimes the whisper becomes a shout.
February 25, 2026
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.
©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.
©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.
©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.
©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.
February 18, 2026
Does the Image Find You?
Does the Image Find You? It is often repeated. I don’t think I agree with this. Maybe it is just a matter of semantics.
It finds you
I have often heard it said that the image finds you more than you find it. I can’t find a print reference, but I know Kai Hornung said it in a very good recent Nook presentation on Inspiration.
This sounds reasonable in a Zen sort of way. And sometimes I agree with it. I know it is sometimes frustrating to go out determined to “make an image.” They don’t seem to be there when that is our attitude. But then we give up and put our camera away and suddenly images seem to come out of hiding. They are everywhere. We frantically get our camera out again and snap away.
Was this a case of the image finding us? Or was it us taking the mental barriers away and finally being able to see the images that were there?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
It doesn’t care
This leads to my quibble with the quote. The responsibility is with us, not the potential image.
My cynical nature does not believe images come looking for us. I think they don’t care. They just are there. Images don’t look for us, they just go about their life on their own terms. They are doing their own thing with no particular interest in or need of us.
Think of a scene like a child playing out in the yard. They are in their own magic world. They may be acting out roles or playing an imaginary game or just moving and enjoying themselves. It could be them following their curiosity on a voyage of discovery.
Beautiful, meaningful images are being generated constantly while they play. Not for us. Not because of us. But they are there for the taking if we let ourselves see them and react to them.
In moments like that, the best we can do is be aware but be careful to not interfere. Don’t get in the way or interrupt the flow. It is not about us.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Wisdom of Jay Maisel
So, if images do not come looking for us, all the responsibility is on us to find them. We must stay receptive to what is happening around us.
Jay Maisel is one of my favorite photographers to quote. He is a rich source of wisdom.
Here are a few of his gems that I believe apply to this subject:
It’s always around, you just don’t see it.
It is important to realize that the pictures are everywhere, not just where you want or expect them to be.
Don’t overthink things in front of you. If it moves you, shoot it. If it is fun, shoot it. If you’ve never seen it before, shoot it.
If you’re out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you’re not out there, you’ll only hear about it.
What you’re shooting at doesn’t matter. The real question is, does it give you joy?
You can’t just turn on when something happens. You have to be turned on all the time. Then things happen.
Had I not been told to look, I would have quit, ignorant of what was really there, because I had “made plans” and was wearing visual and emotional blinders that limited my perception and vision.
Try to go out empty and let your images fill you up.
Being receptive
From these quotes and from my own experience and beliefs I think I can safely say good photography is not a passive experience. In most cases, we can’t just sit around and wait for images to come find us.
Pictures are everywhere, but when we try to make them happen on our schedule and to our expectations, it often doesn’t work. What Jay called “visual and emotional blinders that limited my perception.”
When we limit our perception, we are usually going to miss the exciting things that are happening instead. And as he says, the pictures are there, just probably not where and when we expect them. Sometimes you have to turn around. The interest may be happening somewhere else.
One of Jay’s most famous themes is that we must “go out empty.” We must put our expectations aside and be open to see the images that are there, not trying to “make” them happen. And the images are going to happen where and when they happen. We must always be ready when we’re out shooting. After they happen is usually too late to react.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Whichever, take it
So, whether you believe images come looking for us or you believe we must go looking for them, do it. Don’t let semantics get in the way.
Not much advice is universal. I realize that commercial photographers always do planned and staged shots. That is not what I do so I don’t talk about it. I am just talking about what works for me.
The rest of us who rely on everyday magic must be ready, mentally and with our equipment at hand. Be prepared to respond when we recognize that great image. Get out of your own way. See it – shoot it.
Let your images fill you up. Collect them with gratitude.
February 11, 2026
Too Much Help
Is it possible to have too much help in our photography? Are there long-term downsides to some of the technology we employ? What does it do to us as creatives?
Photographic technology
One of the characteristic things about photography is that it is closely tied to technology. Since the invention of photography, it has been technology based. The specialized emulsions and chemicals and techniques required training and a certain level of technical savvy.
Today the technologies have changed drastically, but the tie between photography and technology has not changed. If anything, it is stronger than ever. Being a “serious” photographer just about requires a complex camera system, a capable computer system, and specialized training in the tools.
The companies that make our technology try to ease some of the cognitive load by getting more helpful all the time. Usually, we welcome that. Who would not want our tasks to be easier? But we need to ask ourselves if there are hidden costs in taking the easy path.
©Ed Schlotzhuaer
AI
The antagonist I want to single out is what we generally call “AI”, or Artificial Intelligence. It is creeping into many aspects of our art with the promise of making our life easier or getting things done faster.
I will be very open that I am against most uses of the things called AI, as embodied by large language models like ChatGPT. Not only in photography but most areas of life. I am not just a Luddite. I spent a long career in the tech industry, and I studied and practiced AI at some points of my career. So I have some familiarity with what it is and how it works, including a moderate knowledge of the technology within it and its limitations.
Study of coding
I am curious about lots of things. I enjoy looking at seemingly unrelated areas and trying to see parallels or applications.
Many studies are starting to be done on the human impact of AI. One that intrigued me was a study of software developers in Italy and what happened when their access to AI was cut off.
In 2023, the Italian Data Protection Authority suddenly banned ChatGPT based on privacy and security and non-compliance with European data protection laws. The effect on software developers was immediate and dramatic. Code check-in on GitHub – a proxy measure of output – dropped 50% in 2 days.
But on further analysis, 2 very interesting things emerged: the output of inexperienced coders went up slightly while the output of experienced coders went way down, accounting for most of the drop in output.
One of the suggested explanations is that novices were concentrating more on developing basic skills for themselves, therefore not relying on AI as much. Experienced developers, on the other hand, embraced AI to do a lot of the routine work. But the productivity booster had become a crutch. They lost a lot of the ability to do the work they used to do.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Productivity tools
I believe there are parallels for photography. At this point, I will ignore the novices just learning the craft, since I am not there and can’t think like them anymore. Let’s concentrate on experienced artists.
Our tools constantly offer to take over more of the photographic process. Some of this is good, but not all of it all the time. I have bought into a lot of it. I don’t think my handheld light meter even works any more. And I have long forgotten how to use the manual calculators to determine exposure or desired depth of field. Now, my camera’s metering is so good that I usually trust it. And DOF, well, I can immediately see my image after shooting, so I can check it easily.
I often use “AI” tools in limited ways. In Lightroom (Classic, the only “real” one ☺) I often use the Auto button to see it’s opinion of a good starting point. It does a pretty good job for the outdoor shots I usually take. I seldom leave its settings untouched, but it can be a time saver. Likewise, I use the manual Remove tool a lot for dust spots and distraction removal. I very occasionally use the generative remove, although it is about a 50/50 chance of it being better than doing it manually. Lightroom is getting much more capable of creating useful masks. I often use them as a starting point.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Creative rot
But who says art should be effortless. Our tools want to take over increasing portions of our work, to “help” us and make it easy They offer to automatically remove dust spots, they provide great aid in removing distractions, they offer to distort our images to align verticals and horizontals, they offer to cull our photographs and assign keywords, etc. All these things can be helpful time savers, but at what cost?
Like the experienced coders in the Italian study, at what point do we start losing the ability to do our own work?
Editing, for example, is something I consider a necessary skill for photographers. I have noticed in my own work that I am now sometimes uneasy in manually removing complex distractions. My initial instinct is “that’s hard and will take a lot of time; maybe it would be better to just let the software do it”. That is a warning flag to me. I feel that I need to be skilled at doing this and confident that I can. If I cede these decisions to my tools, I believe I have abrogated part of my role as an artist. I am responsible for every pixel of my image. Software should not take over important creative decision making.
Or take culling images as an example. I strongly believe culling is a critical part of the artistic process. Confronting our mistakes and selecting the best of a series is a necessary part of improving our work. I would rather not spend the time required to do it, but I feel I must. Without it, I am deluding myself about my actual work. I can’t afford to let the computer do it for me.
There are too many examples to list. AI technology is trying to embed itself in most phases of our process.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
The other AI
Let me pause for a moment and note that I am not discussing fully AI generated images. There are times and places to use them. They are not inherently bad. It is kind of like hiring an illustrator to create some graphics for a presentation or a graphic designer to make pictures for a marketing brochure. Those are business products, not art.
I firmly believe that AI is incapable of coming up with creative new ideas or art. It cannot do more than it is trained on. Good art is a product of human creation. I admit that there is a lot of bad art that is no better than AI.
Caution
I am not going to abandon technology advances. Many of them make my life easier and more convenient. But I do intend to maintain a certain skepticism that will keep me from becoming dependent on convenience features.
If the great automatic metering and auto focus in my camera went away, I still know how shoot fully manual. If most of the automatic aids in Lightroom and Photoshop disappeared, I still remember how to do things the hard way.
I fear that younger photographers who have grown up with the tools do not have that fallback position. We could soon be in a position where photographers require AI tools to do their work, because they cannot do it themselves. If they have to rely on it to do their basic work, then why not allow it to do more and more. At some point, who (or what) is the artist?
I do not believe my smarter tools have negatively effected my images or my creativity so far. I keep a watch for that.
Or maybe I am wrong and completely out of touch. Maybe photographers are no longer required to be masters of our technology. It could be that the requirements for making an original and creative work are different from what I believe. In that case, I am just an old dinosaur holding on to a forgotten past. But I choose to believe my knowledge and experience is something AI cannot copy.
Maybe this disquiet about too much help is one of the reasons there is a resurgence of interest in “old school” technology, like film and manual cameras. Many long for simpler days when we were more in control and closer to our end result. I am somewhere in the middle. I don’t want to give up most technology, but I refuse to be controlled by it.
February 4, 2026