Art For The Masses, Or Not?

Ever wondered about some of the things we struggle to make right in our images - the subtle print qualities that few can appreciate, the nuances of composition that go over the heads of most of our audience? What if only the arts educated can appreciate our work? Fortunately we can look to the other arts to help us put things into perspective.

There are many authors I don't appreciate yet my wife does - the difference? She was interested in writing to start with, did well in that area of her schooling and went on to get a masters degree in theatre history so I'd guess we'd call her "arts educated" when it comes to the written word.

Now, if a book is appreciated by someone like my wife, but someone like me gets bored with it after the first two pages, does that make it any the less great literature. If that were so, much of what society considers great literature would not be valued (since the uneducated masses, like myself, don't appreciate it).

There are brilliant composers who put layers of sophistication into their music that most of us are completely unaware of and have little to do with whether they wrote a "good tune". Some of those composers managed to do both write clever sophisticated music with depths for those who could appreciate it, while also writing for the masses, music which was a "good tune" and a lot more. Sometimes this can happen in the same piece of music - eg. Bach. Other composers though never wrote a catchy tune in their lives yet are revered by those in the know.

Now, I'm being a bit facetious with the "good tune" comment because there's music that can bring tears to many people and certainly doesn't require an arts education to be appreciated.

From my experience selling at the farmers market, there are a goodly number of young and old people who appreciate the finer points of photography, who "get" what I'm trying to do with my images. Sure, there are lots who simply want a pretty picture for the wall, but there are enough with a discriminating eye to make my time there rewarding.

Nowadays, the vast majority of people who see my work are other photographers, and with the publication of my book, that's only going be even more so. Photographers as a group may not be arts educated, but can in general appreciate the work that went into a good print.

You'd think that the obvious answer is "we want it all", we want the highbrows and the peons, the art educated and the huddled mases to appreciate our work. It may not be realistic to want this though.

For example, my often quoted Pepper Number 30 by Edward Weston is almost universally liked by photographers, but lots of the public just don't get it - all they can see is a pepper, and not even a particularly good specimen either. By the same token, many photographers actively dislike postcardy scenes, yet they certainly sell well. After all, for everone who can appreciate cubism, there are 1000 buying velvet paintings.

So, universal appeal is unrealistic. Miles Davis may be a genius, but I don't like jazz. How can anyone criticize country and western with lines like "get your tongue out of my mouth honey, I'm kissing you goodby" and "all my exes, live in Texas".

If you are prepared to agree that universal appeal isn't either possible or practical, who then should we aim to interest? I'm guessing that we shouldn't all aim at the same market for no more sophisicated reason than it would make for a very crowded market, better you aim to sell to someone other than the fellow I'm working on.

I suspect that attempting to adjust one's photography to the market we wish to impress is problematic. Whether that market is people with lots of money or gallery owners or curators or editors, our efforts are best spent fine tuning the work that means the most to us, and it happens to have a limited market or following, well so be it. Therein lies the difference between a professional photographer and an artist - the former suits his work to his client. While he may use various artistic techniques, it is always with a goal in mind that someone else set. The artist photographer is hopefully making images for themselves first.

There are of course fine art photographers who do in fact cater to their market, which would seem to make them professionals but not artists - a debatable point but none the less relevant - they aren't creating from inner sight, a need to create or because they have something to say. Sure they use the same compositional and editing skills as an artist photographer and it's even possible some of the images might look the same, but you have to wonder.

So, if we feel strongly about commercial art vs. fine art, should we in fact have any particular audience for our work, or do we simply "do it" and hope someone appreciates it?

For myself, I found that working at the farmers market, I started to think of "this would sell well" when I was out shooting. Since I stopped working at the market, those thoughts haven't popped up once - the images made are for me, because I need to. If they happen to appeal to you or someone else well that's nice. I've never once thought - gee, this would look good in the blog, and hope I don't ever start thinking that way. I don't like that I was thinking this way after being at the market some time. The realities of running a business (and that's what it was, even if on a small scale) invariably start creeping into the photographing end of things.

If I really wanted to prostitute myself, I'd shoot sunsets and grain elevators, but have no interest in doing so. There are others who genuinely are interested in the fast disappearing wooden grain elevators and attack the photographing of them with energy and creativity. To do so though just because it sells well...

Does this mean that there is such a thing as a photographer's photographer - someone who's work is generally most appreciated by people who know what's involved - who are into the process as much as the result? Might this explain the obcession in some magazines with antique or alternative processes - because the editor appreciates the effort involved in creating the image?

I've never bought into "it has to be difficult to be good" but I suppose if I did, I'd be shooting on film and printing on platinum, even though I happen to think that inkjet looks better than platinum.

First and foremost we photographers are ordinary people - we watch the Simpsons, belch after a good meal (if we can get away with it) and fart as much as anyone. My point here is that before being art literate, we are first a member of the masses, attracted to images with emotional appeal or unusual or interesting - that is, we enjoy a good tune. After that, we can also appreciate the nuances of fine photographs. Some images are intellectually interesting (art educated) while others may be more like the good tune.

When it comes to planning images, I suspect that none of this is relevant, we simply see what interests us and do with it what we can. If we put into the image things that most can't see, well we can, and some other photographers can, and perhaps a part of the public can. We can't predict ahead of time which things are important to any one person, so we do our best and say "this is me" rather than "I thought you'd like this".

More Rust

Stairs

Rusty Rings

Having finished with the back alleys, I wandered down to Independent Machinery and wasn't too surprised to find them open on what's a holiday in many places. They were spray painting indoors so I spent my time outside. Since my last visit, everything had been moved and changed and I found myself with a whole new set of objects to photograph. I needed to move some steel to clean up the background for these rings and blend for depth of field but otherwise it wasn't difficult.

This version is toned down a bit - the orange of the rust is actually quite dayglow yellow/orange but I wanted the softer look. I'm not sure that I'll keep it that way, but I'll get to know the image for a while first.

Back Alleys

I had one particular shot in mind but after capturing that, I wandered along the back alleys in the Inglewood district this afternoon.

Stitching Update

It's been some time since I have written about stitching, but despite owning a 1Ds2, I continue to stitch on a regular basis. There seems to be a lot of talk of needing shift lenses to stitch and nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, camera rotation stitching works just as well as shift image stitching. Sure there's more processing but don't forget that in rotating the camera, you never have to approach the edge of the image circle. As far as ease of processing, I continue to use PTGui.

I have used Photoshop to do some stitching but have not found it as reliable as PTGui - there's nothing worse than spending several hours working on an image only to find that there's a discontinuity in the stitch that you hadn't noticed, and now it's back to the drawing board. I like the fact that PTGui gives me feedback on the success of my efforts - a good stitch, or not so good, or poor, and I can check the alignment of the control spots (matching pairs of points in adjoining images). Most of the time I get a perfect stitch first time out, but with close work and really wide angle work, finding that nodal point becomes more critical and so sometimes the alignment isn't perfect. Photoshop just goes ahead and does the best it can, PTGui warns me that there are problems and even shows me where they are located.

As I never do more than a single row stitch, taking the stitching images is no great chore, using my RRS nodal point slider and a levelling head under the ball head so it rotates horizontally. I normally just eyeball the lens, knowing ahead of time roughly where in the lens the nodal point is and if the camera is aiming up or down (so the ball head leans forward or back), I adjust the slider accordingly so that the nodal point is vertically over the centre of the ball, not the actual clamp.

When stitching with the camera aimed really down or up, one does need to take into consideration that at either end of the image, you have angled edges to the stitched image. Since you have to crop this to a rectangle (assuming you are a traditionalist), you need to include a bit more to the left and right to allow for this cropping. You'd have to do the same if you shot a single image aimed up or down if you later plan to correct vertical perspective in photoshop since filter/distort/lens correction will also give you angled sides when you dial in the change in perspective.

The only limitations in stitching for me are water, where waves can be tricky to blend - especially organized waves like the ocean, or where I need to blend images for depth of field or for increased dynamic range, in which case I usually won't stitch, though occasionally it's worth the effort.

As a landscapist, I find there really aren't any medium and far distance images in which it isn't worth the effort to stitch.

Radio Remote Release - First Use

Boy, the radio release got a good workout today, and performed well. My first image was with the 17 mm. in the window and that required me to get out of the way - crouching in front of the tripod was not an option. The radio release was ideal. I could have used the self timer so it was hardy essential, but it did let me wait till the dresses stopped swaying after I left the window before bringing up the mirror, then firing off the shot when ready. I simply clipped the release to my jacket, the receiver on the hot shoe, and used it all morning - no wrapped cords, no fumbling for the end of the cord, no stepping on it or jambing it in the head. I think I'm going to like this - and if it can last anything more than twice as long as the attached cords, then it won't have cost me any more either.

Update On Harman FBAL Gloss

I've been using this paper for a few weeks now and here's my latest thoughts on this paper.

Quickly glancing at images, the paper looks fantastic, with blacks deep enough to dive into and smooth tone gradients and subtle highlights. It doesn't require output sharpening and the images really do look like they were made in a wet darkroom, from 4X5 (all be it in 8.5X11 prints). On further inspection, the gloss might be just a tad too shiny - it's a little tricky finding a position to hold it without some reflections. For hand holding prints, this isn't really a problem - for mounting on the wall, well it might be - haven't done that yet so it's pure supposition. On my iPF5000 and selecting a custom warm tone in the monochrome printing - the results are absolutely lovely - warmth without a hint of pink or green and no signs of metamerism.

I can certainly see using this paper for portfolio presentations as it really does show off the images to their absolute best. Today I found that Booksmartstudio has just put up an ICC profile for the paper and the iPF 5000 printer and I was able to use Paypal to fork over $4 for the profile - a bargain! I haven't used it enough yet to know just how accurate it is, so far so good.

Production quality is superb - the best of any of the 'glossy' papers I have tried so far - not a marred sheet or dinged corner yet.

Pure whites do have slightly less gloss than the rest of the image - but this is slight and frankly not a big issue - I am happy to sell prints on this paper.

Well, That's Different

I had thought to start a series of images shot in Inglewood, an older, artsy, crafty neighbourhood in Calgary. One of my patients owns a store there and it seemed a place to start. I expected old and antique and sort of general store but in fact she owns a clothing store and I ended up shooting her window for her as well as interiors and her staff dressed in some of the outfits, hardly what I am experienced in.

I made a couple of screwups - first, I didn't clean the lens on my 17-40 and the number of flare spots from all the track lighting - well, fixing that kept me busy this afternoon. I don't even own a flash so fill flash is a foreign language - but if I'm to do this again, I might just have to learn. I solved her problem with photographing her window display (too many reflections through the glass) by parking the tripod right in the corner of the window, leveling the head, then shooting three images with at 17 mm. for later stitching.

I plain forgot to use the nodal point rotator so alignment of the images was problematic - fortunately fixable in Photoshop.

I don't have model releases so won't post any of the people shots but above are a couple of shots from the store itself.

I actually had a lot of fun doing it. It's interesting to be on the spot for coming up with some creative ideas.

If I'm to ever do this again, I'm going to have to read up on handling models - because I'm not much above the "Say Cheese!" level - never had to direct a rock or a piece of steel.

Distillery

The story is that a year ago I asked my patient, environmental engineer for the distillery, if I might be able to photograph in the plant. He checked with the powers that be and I made a couple of trips to the plant, had interesting tours of the making of grain whiskey and spent hours photographing.

From Distillery

Printing Revolution

The latest issue of Lenswork arrived in the mail today, my day off, so with a cup of tea, I leisurely flipped through the magazine, noting something about Revolution in the lead editorial. Having gone through the images informally, and it's a great collection this issue, I went back to the lead editorial and started to read about Brooks' thoughts on the effects of improved commercial printing on the value and role of the original silver gelatin print.

I strongly encourage you to read this editorial as I think it has profound implications for the future, the way we display our work and even what is going to happen to the whole issue of selling photography.

I'd like to take off on where Brooks leaves, which is to the effect that he has tested mechanical reproduction and it can be every bit as good as original prints and in some ways better and he suspects this is going to radically change photography in ways we can't yet predict.

First, home inkjet printing is advancing every bit as fast as commercial printing, so that with new papers and gloss pigment inks from the latest inkjet printers, black density and resolution and tonality are giving silver prints more than a good run for their money. I have had several excellent wet darkroom printers of reputation comment that they have been able to make better looking prints via Photoshop and inkjet printers than they had ever been able to make in the wet darkroom. This is especially true for difficult negatives, but is becoming true even of good negatives.

That home inkjet printing is moving ahead as quickly as commercial printing is just as well since 99% of photographers will never see their work in large commercial runs, whether for Lenswork or a book, even though they may be quite talented.

Second, original fine art prints require framing. This means that no matter what the cost of the print, there's going to be another $200 or more for framing on top. This, of course, presupposes that a) you want the image on your wall, and b) you have some wall space left, and c) it's an image you want to see every day for the duration of it's hanging. It's possible to rotate your artwork, but frankly, storing the unhung but framed works of art is a pain in the deriere, taking up lots of space and requiring very careful handling and padding.

In truth, there are a lot of wonderful images which are best appreciated when viewed occasionally. In fact, I might go further and say that I suspect the vast majority of photographs are best appreciated when seen occasionally - almost like making a new discovery every time a book is opened.

I happen to be one of those people who thoroughly enjoy seeing movies several times over, but there's a limit to how often even I want to see a movie over a short period of time, before the movie gets tucked away for months, or even years before being resurrected and enjoyed "for the first time" all over again. Why should we assume that an image needs to be seen every single day? Perhaps there's at least a grain of truth in the old "familiarity breeds contempt", or at least, if not contempt, at least a bit of ho hum.

I can store thousands of photographs in a single bookcase. I can pick a book off the shelf, sit in a comfortable chair, cup of tea at my side and look through the images at leisure. I can purchase 40 or more images for $100 or less, making the cost of each image at most $2.50. At that price, not only can I afford a lot more images, I can afford to take chances, push the boundaries, explore styles of photography I don't yet understand or appreciate. I can painlessly test the waters of new to me photographers. I can accept the recommendations of a critic or editor without breaking the bank.

Frankly, when you think about it, the concept of purchasing an image, framing it behind glass and hanging it on a wall seems downright silly.

What does this have to do with those 99% of serious photographers who won't produce a book? Well, for a start, if the images they sell are of modest size, say 8.5X11, then perhaps I can purchase a print for a modest sum (say $25+shipping), and simply add the print to a portfolio box when it arrives. The portfolio box costs me $25 (vs. $200 for framing) and holds anything from 20 to 50 prints. It can sit in my lap, next to my cup of tea, and I can leisurely flip through the inkjet prints I have collected.

To be fair, that makes those prints 10X the cost of the book prints, but consider that I was able to individually select the ones I wanted, so one could make the argument that they are worth considerably more to me - a reasonable tradeoff, and frankly, the only way that I'm going to be able to access the work of less popular (but not necessarily less talented photographers).

So, a story. After I was published in Lenswork with my "city forms" series (Lenswork 57), I was asked to trade prints with a well known New York professional photographer - a very nice boost to the ego). I decided subsequently to see if I could arrange a swop with another photographer who had been in Lenswork. To be fair, his reputation far outstripped mine, his skill too, but none the less, I felt that our common grounds of being in Lenswork meant I could at least ask.

He wrote back nicely declining to swap prints, pointing out that he had no way to deal with all of the prints he received and so no longer participated in swaps. He did however offer to send me a print free, if I would pay the shipping. Given his reputation, this was a most generous offer. By this time I felt guilty and arranged a compromise, I paid for one print that was my favorite, while getting a second print free. So, in time the prints arrived. I wasn't particularly flush with cash (having made large prints for a show) and so only one of the images ever got framed, the other sits in the original shipping box. Some day I'll get round to framing the other, but you see my point, it's always a thought to have to commit that much money to frame each and every print you obtain.

Another time I recommended on my blog, the work of Cole Thompson and he was grateful for me doing so and very generously sent me a print. It arrived in a huge box, superbly and professionally packed, but frankly was large enough, that it too remains in it's box, even though it's a very nice photograph. Had he sent me an 8.5X11, I could have it in a portfolio box, and I could look at it any time I want.

I could, of course, simply take his print and pin it to the wall, and toss it when I'm tired of it - but that's sacrilege and I just can't make myself do it, even though it does make sense and his work would be better appreciated by me than it is now, sitting in it's protective box, taking up room.

I think I might just invest in a really large portfolio box and store received images that way, but large prints are hard to handle and flip through and risk being damaged in the handling, where small prints are stiff enough not to kink or need fingers on the surface when being "flipped through".

I dearly hope that some day I will have my work in a fine art book so that many can afford my work and see it. In the mean time, I think I'm onto something with this portfolio box of small prints idea.

I wish the best of luck to photographers who continue to price their inkjet prints at $500 each, or more, but I think the writing's on the wall, guys, I don't see you doing it for much longer.

I think Brooks is right, there's a revolution and we can't predict how things are going to change, but change they will.

Cable Releases In An Electronic Era

Of course, my 1Ds2 can't accept an ordinary inexpensive mechanical (read reliable) cable release. No, it has to use a Canon made, expensive (prob. 8 X the price of a mechanical cable release) which is highly unreliable and so far seems to have a lifespan of six to nine months shooting (or considerably less). The other day when my third such release failed, I had to switch to my even more expensive release with the intervalometer (purchased before a trip when they were out of ordinary ones). OF course it's so long it falls on the ground and gets dirty, the lcd screen on the release gets stood on and scratched, and the whole damn thing gets wrapped round the tripod and head and camera in ways you wouldn't think possible.

Anyway, this time when I went to pick up a replacement, I was offered a third party release for significantly less, OR, I could purchase a radio release for twice as much. I splurged for the radio release on the grounds that I'd not have to deal with long cords and the pull on the plug (which is I suspect the area of difficulty for the normal ones). I'll let you know how it works out. So far the first obvious thing is that since it sits on the hot shoe, it has to come off when the camera goes in the bag, but I think that will be manageable. I'll clip the actual release to my clothes so it doesn't get lost (it comes with a clip and a hokey chain which I immediately replaced with a better one I had lying around.

Both the receiver and remote are small, the plug looks solid, but time will tell.

The release is made by RFN and certainly works in tests and can even handle B shutter speeds and partial presses for focusing. Here's hoping.

Contradictions and Conundrums

The vast majority of fine art photography doesn't have a huge emotional impact. This includes the vast majority of landscape photography, much of architectural work and frankly even a fair amount of portrait or figure work. Oh sure, the dark sky may be a bit threatening, the expression wistful, but that hardly equates with the emotion of "Migrant Farm Worker" by Dorothea Lange or lots of photojournalism. Certainly the most that can be said in terms of emotion about the typical rocks and roots pictures is well composed, very pretty, nice capture, and so on - comments you see all the time on some of the photo posting sites. What the hell is a "nice capture". Sounds like you got lucky, hardly a compliment.

So, if there are great photographs which don't engender really strong emotions, how is it that they are great, especially in comparison to all the other well exposed, skillfully edited and printed and perfectly composed images out there, created by many famous photographers and lots of skilled amateurs?

I suspect that a considerable number of these images either leave you guessing about some aspect - the where or the scale or how or even why, or they offer contradictions within a single image. That contradiction could be as simple as sharp vs. rounded, or old vs. new. It could be tranquil vs. stormy, smooth vs. rough.

Recently Craig Tanner of Radiant Vista posted a portrait on his diary which expresses this perfectly, the presumably blind man is dresssed in real style (that he can't see), the whole image is done in shades of light gray and blue, except for the bright yellow box of M&M's. You are left wondering just what he's doing with them - he could be carrying them home but the box is open - did he get hungry? Is he standing on the street corner at halloween handing them out. Craig offers no explanation for the image and I really want one, yet realize that once I know the explanation, I won't have the opportunity to wonder about the story, or to make up my own story for the image.

The work of Elliot Erwitt epitomizes the contradiction, puzzle, visual pun style of photography - the short dog with the tall, the bull dog sitting on the stairs, only he's on the lap of his owner whose head is behind the dog.

To some degree, the same thing is true of many of the photographs of Cartier Bresson - in his case it's the exquisitely timed capture of a figure placed in the scene or an expression or a grouping - in this case it's less of a conundrum and more of "how the heck did he manage to line everything and everyone up so perfectly?".

Perhaps it's time to start thinking about your next location in terms of contrasts, contradictions, mysteries and puzzles.

Night Time Can Be Great Time

I've never done a lot of night time photography but truth is, with digital it's a whole lot more satisfying than in the old film days for a couple of reasons.

1) Lack of reciprocity failure means that calculated exposures don't have to be anything from double to 10 times longer than predicted - what you measure is what you get.
2) Modern light meters are pretty sensitive and can often estimate the correct exposure at night.
3) the feedback of the LCD is invaluable.
4) Though digital doesn't have the dynamic range of black and white film - multiple exposures can be blended and short exposures to capture blown highlights are short and therefore painless to take.

In the case of this image, it was shot with a long lens and so depth of field was a problem. I used a blended series of exposures run through Helicon Focus to get decent depth of field. One could argue that flare from the lights is problematic, but in fact in this case it suits the image very nicely and I was happy to have it.

Colour was a bit tricky as these were sodium vapour lights, very orange, but with a bit of balancing and toning down the colour, I'm pleased with the results.

I think I'll give night time photography a bit more workout.

The Finer Points Of Seeing

There's a whole chapter in my book on "seeing" with tools and exercises, but after yesterday's shoot I thought I'd try to better describe what one is doing when seeing.

For many novice photographers, the definition of seeing is probably "looking for something pretty".

At its simplest level, a photograph consists of shapes and tones. Shapes are determined by the real world characteristics of the subject matter and by the position from which it is photographed. Unless you are going to use Photoshop to distort, that's it, there is no other way to change the shape.

Tonality is a bit more flexible in that exposure and focus can affect the tonality, as well as lighting (including bouncing a little light off a white sweatshirt to fill a deeply shadowed rock. it is even more dramatically affected by printing manipulation, whether in the wet darkroom or in Photoshop. If you have been following Bruce Barnbaum's series of articles on printing in Photo Techniques magazine, you will be aware of the degree to which even a traditional image can be manipulated. With more precise and greater control as well as things like local contrast adjustment the power of digital image editing is even greater.

So, we have shapes and we have tones and the former is fixed when we plant our feet, the latter can be substantially changed once we are home with the image.

Therefore:

The process of seeing is simply a matter of looking for shapes which have potential, and tonalities which with adjustment as needed can provide suitable tones. In the past I might have argued that photographing in bright sun might have been pushing it, but Uwe Steinmuller on Outback Photo has been merrily doing so, hand held no less, with his HDR techniques, so even there... Still, the closer the tonalities are to something which will print well the greater the chance of a good print, and the less work you will have to do to get there.

Correct Order

So, should one be on the lookout for interesting shapes, or surfaces which photograph well? From experience I can tell you that it works in either direction. I might see some great metal shapes sitting on a shelf, and though they tonalities are boring, I know that with work and can deal with that (see prev. blog entries on editing including one on adding roundness and depth with image editing). On the other hand, water provides great tonalities and usually the shape comes second.

Shapes

A month or so ago the Lee Valley Woodworking Catalogue came in the mail and I was very impressed with the cover photograph. Some photographer or designer had shown a lot of ingenuity in photographing tools on black rectangular blocks, stacked up in a staggered hill, both sideways and backwards, creating a series of small flat areas on which to sit the tools. The blocks were all painted a textured black which the photographer had managed to capture perfectly. The tools were metal and wood, many of them hinged rulers forming a series of L shapes on the ledges. The whole thing was photographed from above and to the right so that all the rectangular blocks formed parallelograms and the L shaped rulers all matched. A sign indicating 30th anniversary was in a colour which matched the aged wood of the tools s there were really only three colours in the entire image, aged steel, black and an orangish yellow wood. Obviously it impressed me, after all it was just a catalogue.

The image works because of the powerful shapes chosen in the first place, the placing of the camera which turned rectangles into vertical and a series of matching diagonal lines.

The above illustrates the selection or the finding of the shapes, combined with positioning to modify the shape to meet our needs.

It's possible that one is born interested in shapes, or one is not, but I strongly suspect that anyone can learn to improve their powers of observation. Certainly my own experience is that my own skills have improved hugely even in the last five years.

An Exercise To Try At Home

Go to your tool drawer or even the junk drawer and find some intersting shapes. Take them with you to a comfortable chair with decent but not too harsh lighting. Put on some suitable contemplative music of choice and sit down for an hour looking at each of the objects for at least five minutes each. Inspect it from every angle, from really close to arms length away. Pay attention to the way that light reflects from the surface and how lines change as the object is rotated in front of your eye. Look at shadows on the object and pay attention to how those shadows change the presentation of the object. Are there any positions from which it's hard to identify the object? Why?

The more you do this, the greater variety of objects you study, from vegetables to eggs, to a cloth duster to a pair of scissors, the sharper will be your powers of observation when out photographing and you spot a similar shape or surface.

Spend time with these objects cataloging which shapes are more interesting. It's likely not the whole object, rather one part that has an interesting line to it. Do you like sensuous curves or zig zags, tidy rectangles or triangles?

What An Object Is

The actual material or function of an object is really only of importance if you are doing advertising or photojournalism. For fine art, the object's function is completely irrelevant. This can be hard to get past but remember Edward Weston's use of toilets and dead bodies (animal and human) to provide fodder for his image making.

My image of round rubber gaskets hanging is a good example of the material and use being quite beside the point.

Order

Perhaps the one encompassing theme to looking for suitable shapes to photograph is order. The shapes have to be arranged in a cohesive way, whether by human hand or natures, whether the photographers or some metal worker from 50 years ago. There are times where even the randomness of objects can form a pattern - for example my image of a recycling plant below.

Order can be the way a garden hose is coiled, or the way cloth drapes from a breast or the repeated way that light reflects off of skin in a nude. Can you imagine the human body if each area reflected light differently, left from right, top from bottom, and so on - not nearly as effective in an image.

Shapes Bounded

Remember that whatever shapes we discover, we need to encompass it within the edges of a rectangular print (well usually and traditionally). Shapes which gradually peter out, like the end of a branch, exposing more and more of the background towards the edge of the object can be difficult to frame and the background becomes ever more important. Shapes transected by the edge of the image don't have that problem but now we have lost part of the shape and what is left has to work against the horizontal or vertical line of the image edge. Not all shapes are suitable.

Plus Two

And Two More....

Looking more like an exotic plant than something out of a machine shop, it is in fact a series of circular hanging gaskets.




Not sure that this wiring is up to the latest codes, though one could argue that since it's been working for more than 50 years, and it's unlikely anything made today is going to survive that long...

And Once More Into The Breach

This was trip # 7 to Independent Machinery. The amount of "stuff" lying around is incredible, most of it with an eighth of an inch of dust on it. There are boxes that probably haven't been touched in 50 years, all manner of odd parts.

I did pull out the box of springs and moved the gears closer to the edge of the shelf for one image and set them up vertically for the other. This whole business of being able to arrange one's subject at will is completely new to me and very challenging, but in a way more rewarding than simply discovering something and blasting away.

Success

It occurs to me that success in photography may have lot more to do with things other than artistic talent and therefore at least potentially is available to a lot more people than we might think. Here's some ideas to help any reasonably competent photographer gain more success.

1) Work hard. That may seem self evident, but the reality is that few successful photographers found that success instantly, most had to schlep their portfolios around a lot of galleries and clients before getting even a glimmer of success. Hard work is getting up early enough for the best light, slogging through the rain and snow to get the best weather for photographs, standing in the middle of the icy water for the best viewpoint, going the extra mile to get just the right image - whether that's in distance walked or details pursued to get the right studio shot.

2) Sell yourself. You can't get published unless you submit, you can't get clients unless you sell yourself. For many of us, the idea of becoming more salesman than photographer is complete anathema but talk to a lot of successful photographers and it's their gift of gab, their ability to present themselves that creates sales, whether it's standing around at a gallery opening or persuading a customer that they want bigger and better. For some of us, this is so unappealing that we may well decide that if this is what it takes to be successful, it's time to redefine what we mean by and want for success. New York studio photographers spend 90% of their time fixing problems and talking to customers, only 10% actually doing photography. Even Ansel had to approach and appease clients, work at Best's studio and clean the darkroom, order supplies, drive to the post office and all the mundane things which those of us who don't work full time as photographers have to do. Kinda makes you think. Be careful of what you whish for, you might just get it.

3) Pick a project. It's no coincidence that the images I have had published have been part of major sometimes very long term projects. Independent Machinery is six trips so far and I hope to head out this afternoon again. My badlands series in this issue of Lenswork Extended goes back 23 years. Odds are that any project that you have the energy to really commit to is going to be something that means something to you and is likely to produce more meaningful images, even if you can't see it. This is true whether you are talking Yosemite or a local 5 acre park, your city hall or Gugenheim Bilbao.

4) Success is relative. While you could aim for instant glory and eternal fame, if no one has ever heard of you, you need to start with modest ambitions. If no one has ever seen your work, clearly that is the first step - rather than submitting to contests in the hope of being the one winner, start showing your work around, get some feedback and act on it.Develop a really strong portfolio andd learn from early mistakes. If you have never been published, getting a series of rejections isn't going to be helpful, so start with a one or a few images for a readers section of your favorite magazine.

5) Give people what they want. This doesn't mean you need to make postcard pictures but you do need to consideer your "market", whether that's curators, gallery owners, publishers, connoisseurs, or the general t-shirt, baseball cap wearing public. If you don't like what you need to do to satisfy your public, then perhaps you may have to look for a different audience. Giving them what they want might dictate print size or shipping methods or doing matting for people if that's what your clients need. Issues like subject matter are sacrosanct. It may be that pictures of cute animals will sell better, but you have to decide if you are an artist or a hack.