Writing On Stone Provincial Park

 

 

The first products of an overnight trip to Writing On Stone, named for the native drawings in the soft stone. It turned out to be very hard to photograph - so much interesting stuff yet hard to find workable patterns to it or particularly interesting details.

Nighttime Street Scene In Victoria

This would have been crap in colour, crap during daylight, but nice with a bit of editing and judicious use of two black and white conversion layers to get the two doorways left and right to roughly match in tone. Akvis Enhancer lightened the image and increased local contrast so I darkened it after (after all it was supposed to be a night scene). The sidewalk was way too dark compared to the rest of the image so I lightened it. I opened up the dark upper right corner again to blend well.

Below is the original image as recorded.

Stats On Photographs And Photographers For Book

Here's some statistics for both the photographers and photographs for 'Why Photographs Work'


Age:

the youngest photographer is 29, the oldest 85, the majority of the photographers are in their 50's and 60's and several are within 4 years of my age (61), which I didn't find out until after selecting the images. Three were born the same year as me (1949).

I have met only 7 of the photographers.

The newest photograph was made in 2009, the oldest in 1958


11 images were made with 4X5

3 images were made with an 8X10

1 image was made with a 5X12

4 images were made with 35 mm. film

1 image was made with a Polaroid SX70

1 image was made with an iPhone

14 images were made with a digital camera, inclluding one that was medium format digital

13 were made with medium format film

1 was made with 6X17

1 image was made with a flat bed scanner and NO camera (at least in the usual sense)

1 was made with a home made camera AND lens


24 images were made in colour, 28 in black and white

about a third of the photographers have significant musical background, but two thirds DO NOT

most of the photographers make most of their income from photography - either print making or teaching

8 of the photographers are women

countries represented include:

USA, Canada, Mexico, U.K., Germany, Sweden, Bulgaria

14 images include people (if you include ghosts, 13 else)

6 of the images are constructed of multiple images - stitched or placed or overlaid

2 of the images are multiple exposures, both onto film, a third is a sandwich of two 4X5 transparencies.

All of the photographers for this book GAVE their images without charge, also their time and their writing and I am profoundly grateful for their generosity.

Only two photographers had to drop out of the project, one because of other very time consuming commitments, another over a misunderstanding brought about by a lost email. Only one photographer refused outright to participate and to be fair it was his assistant who thought the project unworthy - I think he was wrong. One photographer dropped out when he found that there was already an image using similar techniques to be in the book and he didn't want one of his older images to represent him.

The vast majority of the photographers let me make the entire decision about which image to choose, a few had preferences and NONE dictated which image I should use.

Some of the images are iconic, extremely well known. Others I'd be surprised if you have seen.

Six of the photographers frequently work in platinum/paladium.

A good number of the images are not what I would consider well within my comfort zone, yet each and every one has been fascinating and even the effort to select images and then write about them has broadened my own horizons, widened my tastes.

Why Photographs Work - The Printers Are Rolling

Just heard today, the proofs look great and the printers are cranking up. I'll go into more detail about book content when it actually becomes available, but for now, here is the introduction I wrote for the book explaining the why and the wherefore.

Why Photographs Work

by George Barr

Introduction

Why this book, why now, and perhaps most importantly why me? Who is (and who isn’t) the book  designed for? How did I select the images and is there a strategy to the book?

I wrote this book for me, as if I could go back in time to when I was starting out as a serious photographer. This is the book I wish had been available then, to explain great photographs, to point out what works and how these images are planned and composed, how tones should be printed, how subjects explored. Not coincidentally, these are the same issues that help someone who already enjoys photographs learn to appreciate them more, and to open themselves to more genres of photography.

Looking At Photographs by John Sarkowski was an important book in my self-education. It is still available and still very worthwhile to read. It does, however, have a couple of shortcomings. It has no color photography, and as a curator and historian of photography, Sarkowski brings to the book a bias toward talking about processes as much as images—useful perhaps for a student of photography, and even a collector, but not as important to someone who simply wants to make or enjoy photographs.

With digital imaging vastly expanding the interest in photography, more people than ever are taking photography seriously. While much of the book is in color, there is still a need to show the power, the subtlety, and the beauty of black-and-white photography to a new crowd whose cameras shoot color by default. There are many ‘how-to’ books and even ‘how I did it’ books. But there are not many books available that discuss why photographs work from a practical rather than theoretical or philosophical point of view.

I’m the one writing the book both because I can and because I feel the need. I can because of the success of my previous two books—the publisher is willing to run with this idea. I can because I have experience writing about photography in clear, relaxed, and comfortable terms—terms that the average person can relate to. I won’t claim there is no art-speak in this book, but I do assure you that you won’t need an art degree to understand, appreciate, and take advantage of it.

This book is for any photographer who wants to make beautiful photographs. And it is for anyone—photographer or viewer—who wants to understand why some photographs stand out from all the others. It can certainly be of value to students of photography, but probably not by those specifically studying photography criticism, where art theory and history, philosophy and culture become more important than whether the photograph is beautiful or powerful or meaningful.

In choosing photographs for this book I used as my own source books (I have more than 100 books of photographs in my personal collection), magazines (hundreds of issues of those magazines which celebrate wonderful images), the internet, and my own life experiences meeting other photographers and hearing their suggestions of still more photographers to consider. As such, it is unashamedly biased toward Canadian and North American photographers simply because I am more familiar with them.

I have tried to push past my own comfort zone in photographic subject and style, being inherently a photographer of fairly conservative tastes. After all, I am a middle aged white guy from Canada. We’re known for our niceness, not our pushing the envelop of modern tastes (OK, we wear weird hats called touques, but I don’t think that counts). I want to open readers to new ideas of photographs that are not ‘traditional’ or ‘straight’.

My own tastes are firmly based in the highest image quality; that concept does not trump craftsmanship; that being radical is not an end in itself but rather a tool to express ideas that are difficult to express in more traditional techniques. I’m an experienced photographer, with high standards for both my own images and the photographs of others. I have had some success being published and in selling my photographs and it is with this background I chose the images for the book.

This book is about great photographs rather than great photographers. Some of the images I have chosen are by relatively unknown or even less experienced photographers. Some of the photographers are famous, others are not. Some of the photographers have literally thousands of strong images and many books to their names, while others have only made a handful of great images but are poised to make many more.

I have made an effort to search out international photographers and there are some, but not as many as I would like. Women photographers are not equally represented simply because I know fewer women photographers. Some of the photographers were completely new to me, and discovering their work has been a delight, while others are long time friends of mine.

The book is about photography as art. Many common genres of photography are either sparsely represented or entirely absent. You will find no sports photography, no wildlife, and almost nothing of reportage. Each of those subjects has certainly been responsible for many great photographs, but in those images, the subject and the story predominate over the image as art, and quite frankly I don’t feel qualified to comment on them.

Enjoy this book as a collection of 51 wonderful photographs. Some you may well know already, but I trust there are enough new images to surprise and delight you. Feel free to flip through the book to simply enjoy the images, but sooner or later, do read about each image, about what I think makes each work, about what the photographer was thinking in making the image, about who the photographer is and how they came to see the way they see.

George Barr, Calgary, July, 2010

And Yes, I Also Did Some Colour

Again, straight from the raw processor. This was a propellor, lying near a path and next to the inlet, large, rusted, covered in graffiti and making for a wonderful hour of working out compositions.

From Trip To Victoria, B.C.

A steel fabricating shop in Victoria, the cutoffs. He was working on the pieces for the bulbous bow of a ferry as I was photographing using a computer driven acetylene cutter, the planned cuts looking like a complicated model. I am informed some of the pieces cut out from these pieces went to make Honda Goldwing Tricycles.

This image has not been edited yet - straight from the raw processor.

and

Empty Grate

Sitting reading a book, occasionally glancing up, and the empty grate looks interesting, almost as if there were a phantom fire. Oddly, without the fireguard in front, contrast increases and the image loses the effect.

Canon 5D2, 70-200 f4 IS lens.

Environmental Portraits

This is the start of a new project. I'm photographing friend and people I know, as well as the people who work at the local mall.

Camera is Shen Hao 5X7, HP5 film, 305 G Claron Lens, developed in HC-110 via tray processing. Image is slightly cropped, left and right - on the left to remove a bright spot through the branches, on the right to eliminate a bright area behind the tree trunks.

Scanning was done on my 4870, via a cardboard film holder. I'll be interested to see how wet scanning does on a V750, but here's a crop.

Click on the crop to see it larger to get at least some sense of the quality. Individual hairs are easily seen, the word PASS is quite readable on the handlebar and texture in the cloth and leather jacket shows very nicely.

Rock Pool

From Jura Canyon floor, shot with the Shen Hao 5X7, T-MAX 100, 210 lens.

Rusty Drum Again

Another with the 4X5 camera, this a beautiful Shen Hao 4X5 - teak with black fittings. Only double extension but quite solid, very reasonably priced and if anyone were going to venture into 4X5, this would be a good way to start.

This needed both tilt and swing to get the focal plane just right, and though it certainly doesn't have infinite depth of field, it does very nicely thank you.

Back Hoe

Linhof Technika IV, 135 mm. lens, Delta 100, HC110, 2 minutes at f45, me blocking the light from a street lamp that came on and shone into the bucket.

I used the backtilt of the camera to stretch the width of the top of the bucket so I wouldn't have to crop the three 'teeth' at the bottom, using lens tilt to compensate for the back tilt.

Metering was with my S90 camera - so far it's working very well to meter in all manner of situations. The only thing it can't do as well is measure contrast so there's still a role for a spot meter.

Rusty Drum

From a 4X5 negative, Delta 100, HC110, scanned on my 4870 at 2400 dpi. A work in progress.

Making Prints For The Book

I thought I might share some of my experiences in making test prints for the upcoming book 'Why Photographs Work'.

It's a tremendous responsibility doing my best to get these images exactly right. Some of these well known photographers don't do digital and I have had to work from raw scans or jpegs or scanning prints myself. Some of the black and white images are strongly toned and that image colour is going to have to come across.


Sometimes it takes literally hundreds of changes to get a file just right. My reference varies from prints to books to web images.

I have just printed Angel Descending by John Wimberley - wonderful image - and I noted that in the file he sent me there was nothing approaching white - so I lightened the image by moving the white point. The change was subtle, but now the image looks bright and perky, not 'moving' like the original - not all images should contain pure white, even when white things are represented in the image. The original file is the way to go.

Briggite Carnochan sent me the file for 'Pillow of Sickness' and I was having a terrible time. I reprofiled my monitor and printer and still couldn't get the image right. On the phone this morning I learned that she prints on an art paper, not inkjet paper, and the resulting image is muted and soft and lovely, but it takes a 'brisk' file to make that final image. Huge relief - thought I'd been doing something wrong. She's going to fed ex me a proof print - from which I will edit her digital file so that it will come out right in the book.

A Roman Loranc image took dozens of prints, despite having a profiled monitor and printer, before both he and I were satisfied with the result.

Brian Kossof sent a file in which he had  diffused the highlights - yet it didn't have the subtlety or the degree of diffusion of his image as it appeared in Lenswork. He'd been working with film. I had to come up with a variety of diffusion techniques in Photoshop in dozens of layers to match Brian's intent and make both of us happy with the result.


I wrote the above neither to impress you with my skill nor my hard work, but simply to give you an insight into the making of fine prints and of book making. Welcome to my world.

Seeing Doesn't Rest

I was sitting, reading and drinking tea when I noticed both the position and lighting on my wife's feet. I asked her not to move, retrieved my dSLR, located the battery (in the charger) put in a fresh memory card, erased it, and shot a few pictures before thinking to check ISO - 3000, so adjusted that and took a few more, closer or further, more or less tightly cropped.

I lightened the red channel, used fill light to open shadows, reduced contrast and applied blur selectively to a copy of the image, then toned it.

The point of course is that I wasn't thinking about making images. This wasn't a deliberate effort on my part to be observant. Mind you, I suspect that it comes from practicing deliberate seeing.

I have no idea yet whether this is a good image - I can only say that at the moment it pleases me. I like the almost marble sculpture effect.

Beginnings Of A New Project

I didn't think that photographing concrete could be a worthwhile project, especially new, unweathered stuff, but perhaps it's worth exploring further.

On Not Being Famous

The vast majority of us are not going to be famous - probably for anything, and certainly not for our photography. Arguably, since you are reading this, I at least have some notoriety and have had images published and published two books and a third on the way, so am perhaps not the right person to write about fame, or more accurately the lack of it. That said, truth is, through the by far biggest part of my photographic years I was entirely unknown, so do speak from experience, and not that long ago either.

Truth is, most people who achieve a goal very rapidly take it for granted and set a new, even tougher goal to achieve, so basking in one's fame, at whatever level, is fleeting at best.

Add to this the problem that john q public isn't able to appreciate all that our work offers. I know I certainly didn't when younger have the eye to appreciate much of the work I now admire, partly through education, largely through experience. For many of us, it is sharing our work with other photographers (and with non photographers who can appreciate all that our work means) that gives us the biggest kick.

For a lot of us, we never shared our work before the days of the internet - we didn't belong to a club, we didn't submit to magazines (or didn't get accepted), and our best work sat for years hidden away in old printing paper boxes. Satisfaction came from solving problems and getting things right, and also simply enjoying a beautiful print of our own, and feeling that it held up against the work of others we had seen, in books and at exhibitions.

Given the choice of making a photograph that is meaningful for myself or someone else, I'd pick me, every time. I have images which have demonstrably failed to impress in the public domain and despite not only lack of enthusiasm but downright and legitimate criticism; continue to 'work' for me.

This 'working for me' can happen at any level of skill and if someone has no knowledge of how wonderful a photograph can be, they may in fact be happy with what many would consider quite mediocre images. But does that actually matter? As long as they aren't trying to foist their poor images on the rest of us and feel satisfied in isolation, who are we to criticize. If later, they find out what really good images look like, and change their minds about their 'early' work, well, moving on and learning and getting better is all worthwhile. If a few of their early images continue to be important to them, that's lovely.

If a photographer thinks one of their images is terrific and the rest of us could or would disagree it doesn't matter. Most golfers tell me that they compete against themselves far more than the compete against the other players - it's about improving their game. I think there are a lot of reasons why photography should NOT be a competitive sport.

Book Progress

Why Photographs Work is coming along nicely, though delivery before Christmas seems a bit iffy. The book is at the layout editor as I chase up the last few photographer portraits and get photographer approval of all the edits of the text.

There are 52 photographers (seems I can't count), but better more than less. I can't comment on whether people will enjoy what I have to say about the images (though as I have done some previous image assessments on the blog, you can look back for some examples), but I think that between looking at the pictures and reading about the photographer making the images, it will be a fantastic book.

I can't thank the photographers enough for all their efforts on my behalf, for nothing - incredibly generous of both images and time, as text has gone back and forth and through multiple edits and I've asked for more from the photographers.

More On Large Format

I was photographing the other evening, and suddenly realized that all my lenses were mounted so the name of the shutter would read right side up when the lens is mounted (technika), but that it would be infinitely easier if the f stop and shutter speeds were on the side (right preferably) so I could see them when the camera is mounted at eye level.

Spent the evening filing notches in lens boards and remounting the lenses sideways - not as aesthetically correct perhaps, but a damn site handier.

I've been using my Canon S90 for viewing and exposure metering, but it doesn't help me assess contrast so I have purchased a used spot meter.

There is an interesting series of videos on tray processing of large format film on youtube that suggests that scratch free negatives can be had with just a bit of care. Oddly, part of that is placing the negatives in a tray (in waterbath) that isn't too big so the negs. don't go all over the place. Also clip one corner of one neg. so you always know when you are back at the beginning of the pile. Hmm. would be nice to process more than two negs at a time (BTZS tubes). I'll think about it - and practice a lot, before risking good negatives.

I've been thinking that the 5X7 would make a suitably impressive camera for shooting environmental portraits and I might just get up the nerve to give this a try. Digital would be a hell of a lot easier, but I think the result would be different - will report on progress.

I now have a 5X7 Technika V (as well as the Shen Hao). Even more weight (12 lb.) but built like a tank, and with wide angle focusing knob on the outside (like the Technika 2000 and 3000, for a whole lot less. The Shen Hao is far better looking, but the Technika does have its advantages - absolutely rigid, perfectly aligned, can handle wide lenses like the 72XL or even a 55 for 4X5, and has bellows long enough to use my 450 mm. lens without an extension board. The back has a bail for opening it, and of course a rotating back. The extension rail has only a single button to press down on and it's on the left side, making extending it a lot simpler. But 12 lb. - don't think I'll be getting far from the camera with this monster.

Have been doing some scanning of the 4X5's and 5X7's. So far no 5X7 that wows me.

The BTZS darkcloth is definitely the best, if a bit hot and humid in there - have to be careful not to breathe on the ground glass or the damn thing fogs up - or even worse, the moisture gets between the ground glass and the fresnel. May have to get some snorkel gear - and I thought I looked silly already.

Had forgotten just how frustrating cable releases are - designed to fall off, or break off, yet fiddly enough you hate having to screw one on for every change in lens - so I leave them on, and they break, and they fall. Am about to find out if they rust, having dropped one in the stream I was standing in.

It was only after photographing that I even gave thought to the image being upside down in the ground glass - didn't even notice as I was shooting - mind you I'd shot with a view camera for a number of years - just not in the last few.

I had kept purchasing View Camera magazine, which seemed pointless at the time, yet hard to let go - guess it was prescient.

First Film

This is the first 4X5 film of the new era, a concrete box for the new storm sewer installation next to the tennis courts (I'd been playing and noted the light, so returned the next day at the right time).

Shot with a Technika IV, Delta 100 film, dry scanned on my 4870, lens was the 210, f 11, focus on the front surface of the box.

Voja Mitrovic, Printer To The Greats

Check out the two part essays on Voja, who has printed for the likes of Cartier Bresson - for his best prints anyway, and read the followup blogs on The online Photographer.