Ideas For Projects

Where do ideas for projects come from? How do we know if an idea is a good one, or is it us trying too hard or getting desperate or doing it because we think we should?

Here's some things to think about.

1) of all the great artists there have ever been, only a tiny fraction were revolutionary - most were evolutionary - that is, taking an idea and modifying it to make it their own. Why should we expect any more of ourselves? So, take a cool idea by someone else and modify it to make it your own.

Ryuijie photographed flowers in blocks of ice. So you come up with something besides flowers to photograph in ice, or a different way/veiewpoint to photograph the ice, or something besides ice (fine sand or flour?). What about photographing faces in water - you'd need either a fish tank or a waterproof camera and a pool. What if the water were coloured, unevenly? What if you used oil? How about using coloured lights shining through the ice to make interesting effects?

Get the idea?

2) Never underestimate the value of doing something for fun. Cleaning out my Dad's house the other day I came across his original leather encased folding SX-70 - and with film being made for it again, this is a great opportunity. Can't see the point of doing landscapes with it, but what about nudes, flowers, mechanical close ups?

3) I guarantee that no matter how clever you are at coming up with an original idea, someone else will point out that you weren't the first after all - so why all the angst over the struggle to find original ideas. How about instead finding a good idea by someone else ans asking yourself, "how can I use this idea around something that is important/interesting/exciting/puzzling to me?"

4) follow up on those fleeting observations. I have noticed that often large trucks have interesting patterns of mud or snow on their back doors. There's never time to photograph them on the highway, but what about going to a truck stop and spending a day photographing trucks - forecast is for snow this weekend, so might be my last chance this year.

The other day I was crossing a bridge and noted the interesting shapes of the light rail structure as I passed. I might just start a project on recording the city's rail system - think about it - you can photograph at sunrise or sunset, in the rain, at night, in a snow storm or after one. You can photograph the tracks, bridges, wiring, stations, and don't forget the travellers. You can go on the trains and photograph the people (good use for a small non threatening camera like a point and shoot). There's more chance that your efforts to record part of your city as it is now will have lasting impact than any project photographing delapidated buildings.

5) no point in pinning all your hopes on a project you are unlikely to pull off any time soon - sure it would be interesting to go to Namibia but I can't afford it, don't have the time, and it's a long way. Work instead with what you have available. Don't bemoan lack of mountains if what you have is prairie. Come up with a way to make what you have work for you.

Don't underrate the idea of a project as simple as "the people I know".

Good luck and great ideas.

George

Michael Reichmann

Just have to comment on Michael's latest image of a ladder on his site. Not sure if this link will survive new content on his site but do check it out. he comments that it was taken with the Fuji X-100 and that he's managed 4 portfolio quality images in one shoot. One can't help wondering if a fixed lens no zoom camera like this perhaps lets you concentrate more on the seeing instead of the fiddling - will look forward to his comments in the next few weeks.

This is a lovely image, almost abstract, simple, strong, wonderful colour. Makes you think, want to look again, ask questions or simply admire the beauty in something not inherently beautiful.

Image Editing Videos Now Fully Uploaded

There are now seven videos uploaded to youtube, labeled athabasca edit 1 through 7, for about an hour of real time editing with commentary. You may learn a few tricks but the more important message is the process of analysing the image to see where improvements could and should be made, about decisions on cropping and taking things too far and backing up, of trying things and seeing what works.

Just do a youtube search for George Barr

What Are The Best Photographs Ever?

I'd like you to name your all time favourite photographs by someone else - the top of the top, the supreme, the wonderful, the magic.

Here's why. I want to see if we can learn anything from these images - are there threads of consistency - about subject or approach, project vs. one off, obvious message or not, etc..

I think a number of us would list Edward Weston's Pepper #30 as one of those top ten photographs, despite its mundane subject and lack of political message, but you can't infer much from a single image, so bring em on, what are your top 10 outstanding choices.

Why not open it to images of yours? Simple. You might think it's because I don't think you can make an image that good but you'd be wrong - it's just that we have emotional attachments to images of our own which may not be apparent to others and that is going to confuse and analysis of common threads.

If you can supply a url that will take us to each image, even better, we can look them up.

Come on, enlighten us, surprise us, shock us with your all time favourite photographs.

George

Image Editing Video

The second image editing video is up, showing the use of Selective Color Adjustment Layer to fix a specific problem without creating more problems than I'm fixing.

Athabasca Edit 2

I should have Edit 3 up later tonight as I fix the water.

George

Videos

There are now a total of four videos on youtube

1) is a brief description of the three books I have written, to a background of me out shooting.
2) is a slideshow of images selected from those I made in 2010.
3) is a more detailed description of "Why Photographs Work" and includes 8 of the images from the book.
4) is my first editing video - this takes my athabasca falls image and shows the adjustments I make in camera raw, then an analysis of the image on what needs to be fixed or improved. Subsequent videos (not yet made) will take you through the changes I make, from cropping to colour adjustment, contrast enhancement, fixing highlights and shadows, and fine tuning an image.

Second Edition of Take Your Photography...

My publisher has asked me to do a second edition of Take Your Photography To The Next Level. I have made it clear that I'm not prepared to label it a second edition without substantially improving the book - at least a couple of new chapters, expanded text, more pointers and better resources. My challenge now is to deliver on this stand before the end of July.

I have some sense of where I'm going with this but am definitely open to suggestions from those who have read the book and liked it and more especially found it useful.

You can either comment on this blog entry or email me directly through the contact on my website. The latter allows for more detailed suggestions and also some privacy, as well as giving me your email address so that I can respond to you, perhaps with some questions or discussion on your suggestions.

Thanks,

George

Lightroom For Editing?

Frank Field commented on my use of Lightroom, saying he's gone the opposite way - using Photoshop for his editing.

Let me make it clear - I was referring to the use of Lightroom for organizing my images, not editing them. More specifically, after watching the Luminous Landscape tutorial, I am even more convinced that the point of Lightroom is to make editing easier, not better, and as I've said many times, fine art photography is always about better. Easier is a distant second.

I do pay attention to easier - the whole digital workflow is what has made me sufficiently productive to get published and write books and for someone who has to edit a lot of images, Lightroom may be exactly what they need.

For example, they show editing of an image of a nearby hillside and distant hills. They want to balance the brightness of the two and use two different gradients, and it gets close, but you can still see that the blend is not perfect. Then they use local adjustments and fancy masking, and still don't fix all of the problems that the gradients caused. I could have fixed the whole thing in seconds with a curves adjustment layer and skip the gradients. OK, I have some skill in using gradients, but I argue in my second book, From Camera To Computer, that it is better to use a few tools really well, than dozens with less skill - especially when working on one image as opposed to dozens or even hundreds. It's the difference between getting a single image fantastic and getting a whole wedding shoot really good.

Lightroom

After procrastinating for years, I'm determined to start using Lightroom to catalogue my images properly. A new computer and even more hard drives has pretty much forced me into this.

I'm almost finished the superb Lightroom 3 Tutorial Videos from Luminous Landscape, more than 8 hours of invaluable information. I'm starting with the importing of all my raw files (some I haven't seen in years) and most importantly, adding keywords to them so all the images from each imported folder can be found, then more keywords for smaller groups of images.

I'm also looking into using Lightroom and an add-on website publisher from Photographers-toolbox to link to my Rapidweaver website - to automate updating my web images through lightroom and to better control the size of images on various sizes of screen.

Video On Youtube

I've just uploaded my first video to youtube. It's short and simply describes the three books I have written, but it shows me out photographing at one of my favourite local spots. You might be slightly entertained.

Can't sort out the link from the office but if you do a youtube search for George Barr Fine Art Photography, you'll find it.

Heating Plant Reflection

I tried blocking the reflection with my hat but liked the version with the reflection. The dark circle bottom centre is not my head - it's the front of the 17-40 mm. lens and camera body. The lens was touching the window.

Snow Plow

You may know that I like trains, both model and full size. Was in Banff with our office staff and had a couple of hours free time. Not art, just interesting to me.

Book Sales

Sales of "Why Photographs Work" have been very good with only 780 of the books left at the distributor. I sent off the proofs for the second printing, different printer.

For about half a day, the book was # 430 at amazon.com and # 4 photography book and in Canada, amazon had it at # 76 overall for a day., all this without any major online promotion other than the amazon reviews, which have been excellent, 6 fives, 1 four, and one 3 (he thought too simple).

I think I got it just about right - pleasant to read rather than work, yet informative. Sure the best read photographers are probably only going to pick up a few points in the whole book, but hopefully even they will enjoy reading it.

Remember that the book is meant to be enjoyed by non photographers too, and that also seems to be the case.

Happy New Year

Getting Some Exercise

While the obvious thing to do is hike with a large backpack, it is -20 C and I work for a living and can't always be out photographing - this business of writing books consumes a lot of time, which reminds me, the publisher wants me to do a second edition of "Take Your Photography To The Next Level".

I refuse to do that if there isn't significant new content, more images, new and useful text and improvements well beyond fixing the odd typo - so many hours of work.

Anyway, I thought I'd tell you of my latest purchase, an eliptical. I spent a bit more than I wanted to and a lot less than I could have, but it's solid, went together beautifully, and I'm wiped and sweaty after my first workout. Actually it was really the third workout - the first being getting the thing into the basement, the second assembling it.

It's a Horizon CE 9.2 - which comes from Canadian Tire - and is roughly equivalent to the Horizon EX-79, albeit with a heavier flywheel (23 lb. instead of 17).

The real test will be to use it regularly - a treadmill I purchased years ago quickly became a clotheshorse and progressively a cause of marital friction.

Wish me luck, and check in a month for a report card on both machine and progress - that should motivate me.

Mea Culpa - on Profiling

Oops - sure I had all the right settings in print setup - but I forgot to turn off Photoshop does colour in the main printer dialog box. Shit...

I'll reprofile the Hahemeule in the next 24 hours and publish the results.

Hope everyone had a nice Christmas. Had planned to post a Christmas Card, but yet again blogger can't upload images - this has been more down than working over the last several months and they still don't have it working - Mac and Firefox for me. I'd switch but then I'd have to maintain all the archived articles, all > 1000 of them.

Print Darkness/Contrast/Tonality

Don't know about you, but for every time I have worried about print colour, I have worried 100 times more often about the brightness of print tones and even more. This was a problem with canned printer profiles, it remains a problem with home made profiles using my Color Munki - and although I don't have the $2000 to test fancier profiling equipment, I fully believe it will be a problem with the big guns too - after all that's what was used to make those profiles supplied by the printer and or paper manufacturers.

My 'standard' paper is Epson Enhanced Matte (Ultra super duper - or whatever they are calling it this week). it is so because it is easily available, not to stiff for stacking up multiple sheets in the feeder, has a good surface and behaves well. It even lets me pin up several prints in a stack on  my examining room walls and I frequently catch my patients checking out the latest images and what's underneath as well - and that's just fine.

Yes, glossy paper can look nicer, especially if there are a lot of dark tones in the image, but with modern inks even matte papers look darn nice and are a heck of a lot easier to look at without dealing with spurious reflections.

Behind glass, 90% of the difference between matte and glossy paper disappears anyway (and I'm not talking frosted glass here).


Today I had to make some prints for sale. Although enhanced matte looks fine, it is thin and tends to warp over time behind the matte and I prefer to use a proper art quality paper when I'm selling a print. I happened to be out of my usual Moab Entrada Bright White and found a box of Hahnemeule Photo Rag. I ran off a profile test on it (version 2 icc profile to keep my mac and snow leopard happy - Color Munki lets you default to version two type profiles in preferences).

I was careful to set color matching to epson from colorsynch and then turn off epson adjustments in printer settings and had no diff. making the profiles.

But wow, the prints were way off - not in colour - that looked spot on, but in contrast and overall darkness - way too much of both. I'd had no trouble with Entrada, no trouble with enhanced matte, and only a little trouble with Harman FBAL gloss but this was unuseable results.

I eventually approximated the right tones through use of a compicated curves layer, customized to each print - but this shouldn't be necessary.

So, how do problems like this happen?

1) the monitor is too bright - this is far and away the biggest problem for many people.

2) double profiling - somehow both photoshop and the printer are adjusting the colours, instead of the correct strategy of letting photoshop doing it - but I'd been careful about that (see above).

3) too bright a viewing light - you can buy proper viewing lights but they are typically at least twice as bright as room light which is just plain wrong, and besides, the light is usually the wrong colour. It isn't standard, or warm fluorescent bulb temp, nor north window. It often is closer to sunlight, which we go out of our way to keep our prints away from. It rather depends on whether you believe it is better to be consistent and always wrong or random and occasionally wrong. I happen to view my prints by fluoresent because the bulbs match my office where I do most of my print viewing anyway. When I used to sell prints at the farmers market, they were being seen by mercury vapour (which oddly didn't seem to hurt the images, but made cream paper look downright yellow).

5) using the wrong paper setting. When in the printer dialog box you go to printer settings and change from glossy to semi gloss to matte to fine art - what you are changing is the amount of ink that is laid down - some surfaces can use more ink than others. Overall, while this does affect the brightness of the print, there should not be a problem if the setting you used for making the profile matches the setting you use when making your real prints. Of coures, if you are using a canned profile, it is absolutely essential that you match your paper setting to the one used in making the profile - and paper manufacturers are not always very clear about what that should be - though it is better now than a few years ago when it didn't seem to occur to them to bother mentioning such a crucial piece of information - and you wondered why people started making their own profiles).

6) you are printing black and white and using the advanced black and white driver for your Epson printer - as this totally overrides your profiles, you might as well have not bothered. There's a good reason they offer light, medium, dark, darker and bloody damn dark - it's because you have no control over the tonality without using these settings.

and more)of course, if you haven't profiled your monitor, all this is moot and you are a lost cause.

Assuming you have not committed and of the above faux pas - then so far, the only practical solutions I have found are the following.

1) pick papers that behave well for you - the Hahnemeule didn't for me - not that it can't make beautiful prints, it can - but was far more work this morning than it needed to be. Your experience is likely to be entirely different - you MUST do your own testing - this could be the perfect paper for you. These are papers that when you run test images after profiling, require the least possible adjustments in brightness to get a good result.

2) take advantage of printer proofing in Photoshop (under the View menu) to see what you are goijng to get - with most papers it has been very helpful in predicting the final result.

3) no matter how good your profiles, how careful your procedures, how expensive your equipment, if you are fussy about your results, you will have to make multiple prints to get an image of the right brightness. The closer your profiling can get things right, the fewer 'test' (read throwaway) prints that you will have to make. I can generally get it right in two or three prints - ie. the third print is what I want - this of course after making hundreds of changes to an apparently good image on screen before I even get to the printing stage. Rarely I get it in one, occasionally it takes half a dozen prints to really get a print that matches what I have on screen - not because my equipment is bad - it isn't, but because I care about the results (read fussy, ok, very fussy).

It is possible to create a curve to make adjustments, but my experience is that no single curve works for all images on a single paper.

Remember that no one will ever care as much about our print quality as we ourselves do, both as an individual and as a group of photographers.

Typical customers can't even see the difference between warm and neutral papers, never mind the difference between ultrachrome and ultrachrome K3 and Ultrachrome Vivid. We sure know though.

I'll be interested in how others have solved the brightness and contrast issues.

Dis and Dat

Why Photographs Work is now out and orderable from the major online booksellers and instore at real ones too. It's gathering excellent reviews so apparently we're not the only ones who think it's a beautiful book. We're scrambling to arrange a reprint asap.

Mark Dubovoy had written an article for Luminous Landscape promoting the use of medium format. I don't disagree with what Mark says, but I do think there are some points that are important to make.



Pros use medium format because:

1) they often are asked to make huge prints
2) paying customers like to get noseprints on detailed lanscape pictures
3) the equipment is tax deductable
4) the equipment differentiates them from the masses - an important marketing tool (as opposed to an ego boost - pros are too busy for that nonsense)


And there are other reasons. Those of us who do photography for the love of it instead of putting food on the table can afford the time to stitch and blend our way to good photographs, and if the images look better at 13X19 than 40X60, who cares. That said, more than a few serious amateurs are going to be looking at the Pentax 645D.

One of the most useful and powerful tools for doing landscape and industrial photography is live view - totally absent from medium format. Mark talks of the problems of camera misalignment, yet he has to squint into a tiny ground glass if he wants to focus and tilt - while I simply move the magnified view to the corner and check the focus on the sensor, not a substitute - using live view. I think in a few years people will find it hard to believe people ever struggled with substitutes.

We live in interesting times - DPReview has rated the Pentax K5 as the top medium priced dSLR, topping both Nikon and Canon - we live in interesting times.



It's holiday season, Christmas for some of us. May you all thrive and find the images you want.

Amazon Have 'Why Photographs Work'

At last, Amazon list the book as in stock, albeit with a warning about taking an extra day or two - I think they are actually between the distributor and the amazon warehouse as we speak but that means that people should have the book within the week.

Books Are At The Distributor

Have just heard from Rockynook that the books are now at the distributor. They then pass the books onto the various retail outfits, including the biggies like Amazon. Don't konw if this will result in a change in the status on Amazon but they should have the books within the week.

Why Photographs Work - The Book Has Landed

Good news. The books cleared customs in New York earlier this week, a few days late but are already on truck on the way to the distributor. It will take a week at the most to get to Amazon and other retail sellers, so, it should be possible to get a copy of the book just in time for Christmas. Hopefully Amazon will update their release date info within the week.

As of now, no one else has read the book, not even the photographers, who only got to see thier own section (ok, the editors have), so I am both excited and scared, waiting to hear what people think of the book. Those who have flipped through the book agree it's beautiful and I feel good about the images I chose for the book. About my writing I'm less secure. I think it's good, that I have useful insights into the images and what makes them work, but it's a bit like introducing your new bride to friends and family, you so desperately want them to think well of your mate, or in this case, my baby.