Why Photographs Work - the Book

 I was asked about the upcoming book. As excellent progress has been made and we have a definite list of photographers, I thought I'd bring everyone up to date on this exciting project.

The book is a discussion by me about what makes each of the 51 photographs work, followed by a description by the photographer of making the image (why more than how), a short bio, picture of the photographer, reference to their website and publications and who were their influences.

Photographers include:

Bruce Barnbaum
Charlie Cramer
David Maisel
Beth Moon
George Jerkovich
Sandra C Davis
Hans Strand
Michael Kenna
Carol Hicks
Francois Gillet
Joe Cornish
David Ward
Pete Turner
Larry Louie
Cole Thompson
Susan Burnstine
Kim Kauffman
Louie Palu
Michael Levin
Freeman Patterson
Craig Richards
Elizabeth Opalenik
Bengt Ekelberg
Sven Fennema
Harald Mante
George E. Todd
John Sexton
Roman Loranc
Wayne Levin
Tillman Crane
Christopher Burkett
Shaun O'Boyle
Gordon Lewis
Brigitte Carnochan
Lawrence Chrismas
Dennis Mecham
Charlie Waite
Brian Kosoff
Milan Hristev
Paul Mahder
Blair Polischuk
Billie Mercer
Huntington Witherill
Ryuijie
Joe Lipka
John Wimberley
Mitch Dobrowner
Nick Brandt
Phil Borges
Dan Burkholder
Thomas Holtkoetter



Each photographer has one image in the book. Many of the images are famous but perhaps people don't know why they like the image and therefore can't create similarly great images and the book will help. Some are quite unknown images and will suprise and hopefully delight.

The book will be 10X10 inches. Printing will be good but not coffee table quality (check my previous books for similar quality - very good) but it will also be reasonably priced, some 200+ pages.

The status of the book is it has been written and edited by the publisher (Rockynook) and I am in the process of re-editing. it is hoped to be out before Christmas but it's going to be a close thing.

I should say that each photographer has donated his or her photograph and writing to the project with no compensation other than some free copies of the book and I'm extremely grateful to them for this (the project could not have been done otherwise).

There is a significant variety of photography in the book. 46% is in colour, there are 8 women, photographers from Canada, USA, Britain, Sweden, Germany and Bulgaria. There are nudes, traditional landscapes, manipulations, abstracts, allegories and more. I pushed my middle aged white guy background to select images but love every one of them, in some cases for years.

Not all the photographers are famous, not all have great depth of wonderful work behind them, but each has risen to the occasion to produce a beautiful and or meaninful image.

Even in the time that I have collected photographers and done the writing, some of the least known photographers have been or ar about to be published or have won international awards - I think I have chosen very well, even if I do say so. My writing in the book isn't terribly different from the style used in my blog.

The book is for photographers who want to learn from the greats, and for viewers of photography who want to better appreciate great images, and for everyone to push their taste boundaries a little beyond comfort, while still paying strict attention to traditional print values. None of the images stands on concept over skill, idea over craftsmanship.

George

The Right Light

The right light is critical to good photographs. Both brillant sun with its black shadows and really flat light result in dull boring pictures, especially in black and white. HDR has helped the sunlit images but really flat lighting just plain sucks.

Predicting what light you will have for your photographs can be really difficult. Some photographers will only go out at sunrise but of course sunset lasts just as long and can be every bit as nice. I have found it practical in summer to head out in the afternoon, photograph at sunset, either camp or motel and then go out very early to photograph before and during sunrise, heading home again.

Weather conditions often change though and by not heading out you may be missing on the wonderful light that followed the crap light. A thunderstorm develops and the light is magic. Perhaps you end up photographing something in the shade, with somewhat directional lighting provided by other objects reflecting into the subject area. When photographing the small, local conditions trump overall lighting and even holding up an umbrella, shirt or you can be enough to change the lighting from poor to great.

Box And Pipe Version 2

In keeping with getting the shot quickly into the camera before things change, I made the picture posted on the weekend, but I also then stopped to think about what I was doing. I decided to include more of the curve in the upper left, while at the same time exposing only the lid of the box. Moving back a few inches and adjusting the zoom allowed for what I think is a better composition. Again, Helicon Focus is used for near infinite depth of field, and this time I was careful to consider the framing with the closest focus as the image is slightly magnified (ie. cropped) which means that if you do your framing with the distant part of the image in focus, you may get the framing wrong.

I took advantage of the colour sliders in the black and white conversion layer in photoshop to give the grass just the right tint through adjusting the yellow and green sliders while slightly darkening the beige box by darkening the red slider, none of which affected the relatively neutral concrete. Considerable work was done with curves adjustment layers to get the tonalities right (some 10 layers of adjustment), as well as subtle highlight dodging near the end of the workflow - just as I wrote about in my second book.

I have just realized that the bottom corner of the grass looks a little weak - so before I make my first print, I'll darken that (but have left the problem here for you to see the kind of thing that I adjust to make a good print).

Local Sewer Construction

Gardening Leads To...

I was just thinking I should do more with my rust images, but after working on the book for months, the garden was sadly neglected. I repaired the wheelbarrow, flipped it over after replacing the wheel which was always going flat, and lo, rust, lots of rust, in interesting patterns.

After taking the picture, I hauled a couple of barrow loads of compost for  a new flower bed. Not a great photograph, but a nice one.

Merg Ross

As part of the new book project, I'm asking photographers to name the people they admire. More than one name was unknown to me. I had a look for Merg Ross and was delighted to find all manner of interesting images. In checking out the site, I see that he was a student of and friends with Brett Weston and one can certainly see Brett's influence in Merg's photography, but his images are definitely his own, very strongly designed and an interesting variety of subjects, well worth checking out.

Toning In A Digital World

My persistent absence from posting is of course because I'm hard at work on the next book, but it's months away (and longer if I don't keep my nose to the grindstone). For the book, which is about photographs by other people, I have had all manner of methods of delivering images to me, from digital files ready for the book, sized and everything, to prints, to unedited scans from transparencies and colour negatives as well as monochrome. Some of the photographers print on silver, others platinum. So, reproducing their work as closely as possible has not been a simple task.


Dennis Mecham sent a beautiful silver print, monochrome and not toned (or so I first thought). I scanned the print for him and to check on quality, made a print from the scan. Wow, his print had a lot of colour compared to the totally neutral inkjet print from my 3800.

I noted that the blacks were black, but the midtones warm, almost pinkish rather than sepia, yet so subtle I hadn't even noticed it till I made the comparison print.

Someone had the suggestion on the net that a good way to tone images is to forget quadtones, stay in RGB and do the following. I regret not being able to credit the photographer but I dare say the idea has multiple sources anyway. Here it is:

Add a new fill layer from the layers menu in Photoshop. In the layers palette, set this layer to colour - thus applying colour information to the previous image layer but not luminance, thus tinting the image.

In doing this you are asked for the colour of the fill layer and you specify the hue you want. For my first effort, I chose R 208, G 201 and B 185. I later reddened it a bit, making the toning look more pink than orange by moving the colour slider on the right downwards when setting colour. (you can change the colour by double clicking on the layer icon for that layer in the layers palette, just like bringing back up the controls for any adjustment layer).

Now, here's the bit that I found helpful in the above project.

1) roughly set the opacity of the fill layer so that the middle and lighter tones in the image look right.

2) double click on the layer (to the right of the layer name) and you get up the blending window. Here you can change all manner of blending. What I wanted was neutral blacks and a gradual switch from toned in the lighter colours to neutral. I did this by using the underlying image slider at the bottom of the window. You will find a split black mark on the underneath of the slider. Holding down the option key, I dragged the right half of the dark slider nearly all the way to the right. This had the effect of determining which parts of the underying image would have the toning effect applied by the fill layer.

Essentially in pure black I had no toning, and a gradual switch to full toning where the split marker had moved to on the left.

Now, with the saturation of the fill layer and the controls of the blending window, I could get the toning close to perfect on screen. A few prints later, I not only had the colours of the two prints, one digital, one silver, matching extremely closely, I had the prints matching for luminance as well.

I did notice one phenomenon. Though I don't worry about metamerism these days (digital prints changing colour in different light sources), I did note that the strength of the toning to the two prints changed in relation to each other as I moved from flourescent to north light. It isn't a problem, just something to note. Anyway, the two prints are on their way back to Dennis.

Try this method of toning your black and white images, I think you will like it.

April Blizzard

Wednesday was a lovely 17 degrees C., Thursday morning I walked the dog in warm sunshine. That afternoon the wind whipped up to 30+ mph and the temperature dropped below freezing and the snow started falling horizontally.

Friday I headed to Edmonton to see my Dad and found snow drifts along the highway and in one spot, they were black, dust blowing off the newly tilled fields.

Today the snow was almost gone and the temperature back up and my friend Lawrence Chrismas and I headed for the badlands of Drumheller. Lawrence is one of the photographers in my next book and we needed a portrait of him, so we stopped off at his small miner's house property adjacent to the Red Deer River and made this portrait.

The Process

I walk into the living room, and see my wife's harp sitting in a sewing basket, with the sun shining on the harp and casting interesting shadows on the end of the sofa. I am not thinking photography in the least, but this is too good to not do something.

I know that the sun will hide behind our spruce tree within a few minutes, so I grab my Canon S90 for a "
grab" shot. I try about five images but think this is worth recording with my "good" camera, so dash downstsairs, switch lenses on the 5D2 to my 24-105 IS, pop in a memory card and run up stairs.

I quickly realize that the best shots are going to be with me lying on the floor, camera looking up so the curve of the harp complements the curve of the end piece of the sofa. I zoom to fit where I flopped down and start shooting. By luck, I happen to be at roughly the right exposure, even though the camera was left on manual, but I start using my head. I convert to program mode, and up the ISO to 400 as the first exposures were 1/8 second.

I realize that I may not be at the best spot, so I move back and forth, making minor lateral adjustments so that the gap between harp and sofa end are ideal, using the zoom to fill the frame. Closer in looks nice, but I also zoom back so I can fine tune the crop after the fact - recognizing that the light is already fading from the top of the harp.

In all, I shoot about 20 images, moving back and forth, fine tuning one edge only to realize that another one needed adjusted. Eventually the light had changed enough it was time to quit.

I would have preferred to use my tripod but with its centre post it wasn't going to get low enough and I didn't think I had the time to go get it anyway. In hind sight, I should have gone back to manual control and used a wider f stop so the background sofa was more blurred. Certainly the images from the S90 had way too much depth of field - and the highlights were blown on auto exposure with it.

With the 5D2 shooting raw, I did need to recover the highlights a bit. Several of the images suffered fatally from hand shake (I was in an awkward position on the floor). The light was better in the earlier images. I did though have several exposures to choose from, showing various crops.

Above is the first shot I tried to work with - sharp, decently exposed, encompassing most of what I wanted - though it didn't include the top of the harp or the very top of the sofa. I worked with the full size image and made a print and decided that although the shape at the bottom right was nice, the seat if the sofa sticking into the image didn't help. I thought I'd concentrate on the lower part of the image and so cropped the top so that the left edge of the harp would meet the top left corner of the image.

But I wasn't entirely happy - too much space int he middle and I missed the opening up of the gap between harp and sofa at the top (here it got smaller and smaller till the top edge).

I decided to look for another image. Better.

Then I thought, what if I converted it to black and white, and what if I used the filtering capabilities in the conversion (CS4 b&W adjustment layer) to enhance the wood.

Now, this is the end of the story, so far. I might pick a diff. image which includes more to the left so that I could have the edge of the harp meet the top left corner (though so far I actually don't like it as much - I tried). The wall needs more work, a bit uneven, and the walls showing between harp and sofa end should perhaps be a bit darker too, but I find that this is a good spot to stop, put up the image where I can see it several times a day, and in a few days I can see if further work, or even a different image will be the best.

Congratulations To Chuck Kimmerle

Chuck has a lovely portfolio of Prairie winter photographs in the latest Lenswork. To see the images you have to purchase the magazine of course but here's a link to Chuck's home page. There are a couple of points we could make about this portfolio. I was raised on the prairies and these images speak to me of my experience. The images are not dramatic, they aren't scary or depressing, they don't have any political agenda unless it's to remind us of our roots. Each image quietly goes about illustrating one aspect of winter in the middle of North America, the flat lands. Many find photographing flat difficult, being only able to see the grandeur of peaks and canyons as being worth while. Here is a reminder that closer to home can be very productive.

The other point is that each image of the portfolio reinforces the others, fills in a few gaps in describing prairie winters. Brooks Jensen has always had a preference for and encouraged and promoted portfolios of related images rather than a "best of" strategy and it's very clear here that the photographs work together.


It might be tempting to think that weaker images combined can have sufficient strength to make a good portfolio but in reality, any portfolio is heavily biased by the weakest image therein. Two weak images and the portfolio is in trouble, three and it's more than likely game over.

This does not mean that photographers who are eclectic are precluded from creating portfolios - it simply takes longer. If every year or two, you illustrate a particular subject again, then within 20 - 30 years you might well have dozens of potential portfolios. Many well respected photographers did exactly that. The downside is it takes patience and we do not live in a time or a society that is enamoured of patience - we want fame and we want it now. The only possible solution would be some sort of a compromise - mostly eclectic but one or two projects which could turn into portfolios in a reasonable length of time. After all, since you photograph all manner of different things, surely there must be fodder there for a project.

Anyway, this started out as a heads up to Chuck's images and I think they well well repay careful study.

The other portfolios in Lenswork 87 are quite different and perhaps not to everyone's taste. Here too study can repay. Brooks presumably thought them worth bringing to our attention and perhaps we can figure out why they work. Sometimes we can learn from styles entirely different from our own, while not compromising our own style and taste.

This Isn't Photography

There are a lot of things we do in our pursuit of the craft/hobby/art of photography, which often distract from the real job of DOING photography. For example:

- talking about photography
- reading about photography (except for my books of course)
- playing with cameras
- running tests
- checking out the local camera store
- trying new papers
- checking out online reviews/anecdotes/stories
- writing about photography (oops)
- thinking that we should be photographing, except that (here add your own excuse - weather, time, money...)

Gee, when you add it all up, that's a lot of time NOT photographing - what would happen if we spent an equal amount of time photographing - just think how good we'd get, how many marvelous images we'd make.

Sigh...

Working With What You Have

Howard Grill has a nice essay and example of fighting the subject, then realizing that it makes more sense to work with what you have.

One In A Hundred

Doesn't seem to matter who you are, or even what style of shooting you do, most people report that they are really happy with about one in one hundred photographs. This explains why I was so frustrated as a large format shooter as the same odds seemed to apply there - and it would appear they applied to Ansel Adams. Of course, his one was better than our one, but he probably didn't feel any happier with the one than we do.

Common sense would suggest that if you approach each scene methodically and find the absolutely best position and wait for the perfect timing, light and wind, success should be much more common. But, for every picture that you spend 20 minutes (or more) fussing over, you missed 19 other photographs which from my experience quite often turn out better than the one you stopped the car for in the first place.

We will distort the figures if we start shooting 10 images to do a focus blend, 5 images for a stitch, 3 for an exposure blend, etc. but discounting those inflated  numbers, the rule is pretty close to right for many of us.

Knowing the odds, we can relax about shooting (it hasn't been one hundred yet so I shouldn't be kicking myself for not getting a great image). In fact, the more desperate we are for a good image, the less open we are to seeing what's interesting in front of us and the more rigid our thinking about what will make a good photograph.

It would be rare to shoot 100 different images at a single scene. I find this takes about three separate scenes. So, if I want to come as close as possible to guaranteeing a decent photo today, I'd better plan on photographing more than one scene/setup. This is relevant in terms of setting up the day, but also in being open to finding something interesting on the way to or from the main work of the day. Some of my best images have been photographed after the light turned bad, while travelling to or from the scene, or from finding something different at the scene from what you expected to photograph.

This willingness to be flexible is crucial to being successful in getting a good image and getting good images is what drives us out there the next time.

Emotion In Landscape Photographs

Photographers often struggle with creating emotion in their landscape images, without actually photographing rubbish heaps and urban sprawl and industrial pollution. I think there are at least two ways in which emotion plays a part in really good landscape images.

For a start, instead of asking what emotion an image generates, think instead of mood of the image - is it peaceful, dramatic, bold, quiet, subtle, shouting, sad, angry, agitated, scary, shy, loud, brash, rude, sublime? Does it make the viewer feel awe, wonder, puzzlement, curiosity, calm, smug, satisfied, complete, uncertain, doubtful, regretful, wistful?

Awe and wonder can be generated without dramatic light, huge canyons, storm clouds and long shadows. The awe can be created (in some viewers) through subtlety, by showing something not usually seen, through the detail shown and the careful arrangement of the elements of the photograph.

ColorMunki

I had been frustrated with the quality of my prints, especially on some papers - great on Harman FBAL gloss, quite far off in the bottom half of the tones with Enhanced Matte, despite using the proper profiles.

I decided to pick up a ColorMunki - even if it didn't work out for printer profiling, I hoped it would do a decent job on the monitor.

The first thing it did was measure the room brightness and announce that even though I didn't have the monitor anywhere near the top of the brightness range, it was WAY too bright. Now it's set less than half way to brightest (any further dark and I'd need a candle). Other than that, not a lot changed in the monitor profiling before and after as shown in the ColorMunki software - better skin tones - more pink and less yellow. Anyway, on to the printer profiling. Complete disaster. First round, second round, third round, with considerable reading on the net to find out what I was doing wrong. It wasn't whether I used perceptual with or without black point compensation, it didn't matter if I used relative colorometric, all were awful. Colour management was off as requested, I was getting frustrated.

On the fourth attempt, I found a youtube video on the colormunki by Oliver Neilsen. He pointed out that the colormatching setting in the print dialog box was critical. In photoshop, when you select no colour controls in the second print dialog, it overrides color matching, but when you print the test prints from Colormunki, it doesn't and you have to manually change the setting from colorsync to Epson (or other vendor if dif. printer).

The printed sheets looked hugely different - much darker and more saturated colours. The resultant profile is miles better than the Epson provided profile for Enhanced Matte (my standard proofing paper).

Why x-rite didn't control this (Photoshop did) or at the very least mention it in their help, I don't know. Why wasn't it mentioned in the dozen articles I read about problems with Colormunki?

Anyway, thanks to Oliver, I now have the best color matching between monitor and print I have ever had.

I will have to test with a variety of prints and with various papers before I can give an unlimited endorsement to the Colormunki - but now that I have the problems out of the way, I am very impressed.

So:

when you print the test image from ColorMunki, you need the settings both above and below:

 

I don't really know if 2880 makes a difference on enhanced matte - now that I have the colour right, that will be a reasonable thing to find out - with a different profile of course.

High speed deposits ink while the head travels both to AND fro, and with modern printers doesn't seen to be an issue. In theory, were there play in the head or belts, you'd want to do all your printing in one direction but test so far have not convinced me there is a need to take almost twice as long to print.

I'll update you on my experience with the ColorMunki as I gain more experience with the new profile and work with other papers.

More On Meaning

Following up on the thoughts about whether photographs have to have meaning, I went through my images to find an ideal pair of photographs, one with meaning, and another which has been well accepted, is beautiful but has no message. In truth, I found it very hard to find even a few images that didn't have an obvious message or mood.

With landscapes, typically there are no messages sent but the photographer has a reaction to a scene and that will show in the photograph. The viewer however will bring their own circumstances, education and personality to interpreting the scene. The photographer may have been full of wonder as the sun came over the mountains at 6 am while the viewer, reminded of visiting a similar scene with their parents, may feel sad. In general, when an artist creates a work that reflects how they feel there is the potential for great work. When the artist wants to manipulate the viewer to the artist's viewpoint, we have propaganda and the odds of great art are much less. If you really want to manipulate peoples thoughts, join an advertising agency.

Do Photographs Have to Have Depth?

I'm busy with the next book and have written more than 50 essays about why particular images work. I have noticed that many of these great images have or create or allow one to imagine a story to the image. A photograph might make you think of your childhood, or galaxies or feeling trapped. Other images are what they are and one isn't directed, encouraged towards or supplied with any kind of story at all. A picture of a flower is a picture of a flower - no nebulae, no sex, no childhood memories, just a flower - but it's a fantastic picture of a flower, made by Mapplethorpe with his 8X10 , the print magnificent in its detail and subtleties of tone.

So the question is: do all really great photographs work on multiple levels or can a photograph indeed be quite simple (not just in design) and yet be magnificient?

"Simple Gifts" is a wonderful tune. Of course, it has been used as a hymn, but I discovered it through Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring, and in the movie Witness and I don't have any imagery when I hear it, it just works for me, and apparently a lot of other people. Same story with Amazing Grace. As someone put it it, "a bloody great tune". No complicated mathematics like a Bach Cantata, no imagery like Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony or the moods of the Wagner and Mahler.

Could it be that some photographs are simply themselves, without pretentions of depth and sophistication, yet done so well that they stand on their own?

Elliot Erwitt's photographs are pretty simple - the small dog, large dog, lady's boots image for example.  Many of Cartier Bresson's images are magnificent without having a political, economic or even cultural statement to make (many do, but that's another story). These non involved images are just as revered as his ones of concentration camps and exotic countries and poor people.

This would suggest that extra layers of meaning are not in fact requisite to greatness, that an image can simply be itself and still be loved and admired.

This raises the question then as to whether an image which doesn't have these extra layers of imagery and message needs be that much better composed, more perfectly printed, more interesting in subject and what does this mean for our own photography and does this have anything to do with the discussions we have had recently about "crap" photographs and not getting images?

Perhaps some people don't actually appreciate "a bloody great tune" and choose music you can't hum to in the shower.

Rust and Stripped Paint

Photographed this morning. Had actually planned on photographing locomotive, but this particular old passenger car had wonderful peeling paint patterns and cracks and I spent most of my time exploring it. The sun was just barely off the car side as I started and by the end was just glancing it.
5D2, single image, f 16.

Slamming What You Don't 'Get'

Warning: RANT AHEAD

There were some quite negative comments about my article and my images on Luminous Landscape in the last week, something I fully expected and I have written some counter arguments to the critics, both on the luminous landscape forum and here, for what it's worth. Today I read the extremely negative comments about the latest artcle on Luminous Landscape, Light Fantastic, denigrating both the article and the images. I cannot leave this alone.

Two issues come to mind.

1) a remarkable number of photographers seem to feel that if they don't like an image, it is automatically junk and should never have seen the light of day, and most certainly doesn't belong on a recognized site like Luminous Landscape.

I don't 'get' jazz, but the idea that I'd suggest to anyone that it is rubbish is bizarre. Not only am I sure that it isn't rubbish, I would be afraid to look stupid if I wrote a criticism of the genre or a particular piece - I simply don't know enough to comment. This is my problem, my deficiency, my ignorance and I feel bad enough writing about it here - to pontificate on its worth is unimaginable. Apparently to a lot of people, commenting on what they don't understand, appreciate, 'get' or like is not only fair game, they feel it's their god given right if not duty to do so in extreme terms. It's one thing to say you don't like an image - that is simply a statement of fact. To say that it is rubbish, and shouldn't have been published is an entirely different thing.

2) I am surprised at how many photographers seem to be entirely satisfied with their photography, apparently not aspiring to improve it. They suggest that talent is inate, that creative expression has nothing to do with skill and craft, and therefore they have no need to practice, learn, consider alternative views, or expand their horizons.

I have taken the trouble several times to look up the work done by these people - ther attitudes show in their work. But they are happy, and I have no intention of belittling their work - perhaps I just don't 'get' their work.

Such happiness with one's work must be very nice for them, I just don't see why they need to shoot down other people.

Of course, what I have done is to criticise the criticiser - almost certainly a futile task, and perhaps not a little ingenuous - ranting about ranting?

Anyway, I have got it off my chest, and YOU were warned, and I'm sure no one is going to change because of what I have just written. People who like to improve (and I'm guessing that's close to all of us involved in this blog) will continue to stretch and try and learn and look, worry and doubt, fret and obcess - and the others won't and, yes; I know I shouldn't care.

Have a nice day, if you made it this far, thank you for listening to my rant, you have helped a poor man in his suffering...

Sigh...

Michael Kenna Video

As part of my next book project, I have been checking out information on Michael Kenna. On his site are a number of interviews and one in particular, a video; shows Michael out photographing and gives an excellent sense of "working the scene", as Michael wades through thigh high snow, and moves about the scene, trying different angles, getting down on his knees for a better view point, and stopping to think about the image rather than rushing about maniacally. View it Here