Put them on a US postage stamp
If you want to mail friends and relatives with a legal stamp bearing the likeness of your nearest and dearest, go to Stamps.com, upload your favorite snap and send some money. Turnaround is about a week and the post offce accepts these. Here’s our boy Winston:
Which is what it’s all about.
All that cataloging in Aperture did have a bright side, specifically an opportunity to reacquaint myself with many pictures from days past. So after all this talk of cameras and printers and software in recent columns, I thought it might be nice to share some pictures with you.
As is the case, I suspect, with many photographers, I have perfect recall of the equipment and film used to take these, even though the stored files are silent, as it’s not something I routinely record. The digital age, of course, does this for you today.
So here goes – 15 snaps chosen at random and in no particular order.
A very special place.
I have been visiting Limekiln State Park for some time now. It is seventy miles or so from home, up Highway One, so no excuse is needed for the drive. Roughly midway between Cambria and Carmel on the central California coast, it offers magnificent ancient redwoods and waterfalls galore. Best of all, it’s generally deserted and though I have paid more than my fair share of California taxes, I do not feel too badly about the $6 entrance fee. It is a special place and sheer hell to photograph.
One reason is that you are simply overwhelmed by the beauty of the venue, meaning your first few trips result in lousy pictures. Then as you get to learn it you begin to appreciate the huge contrast range and begin to tackle it as best as you can. Unlike most landscape photography where the best lighting is early and late, Limekiln is best photographed between noon and 2 p.m., by which time the coastal fog has burned off and the sun is high enough in the sky to penetrate the dark forests of one hundred foot high redwoods. Then you get that magic light effect of sun dappled spots surrounded by this herd of ancient giants.
Up to now my best work there has been on 4â€x5†film, which means 1-8 second exposures on my favorite Kodak Portra VC160 film with the 90mm Angulon wide angle stopped down to f/22 or smaller in the perennial quest for depth of field. That means the massive Linhof tripod has to come along with the Crown Graphic and all those film holders. Well, by the time you get there, what with lugging all that gear, it feels like the cocktail hour. Anything to stop the shakes.
So today I tried something different. No excuse was needed to try the new toy, the Canon EOS 5D, but the gear was minimalist at best. The camera, the 24-105mm lens (OK, so it’s the only one I have. I’m making virtue out of necessity here), my little alloy monopod and that wonderful Leitz ball and socket head which I seem to have been born with. Add an inexpensive quick release plate on the camera and the monopod and you have the kit I used today.
Now I’m still sticking with 6mp JPGs. Not that RAW scares me but because I’m a dumb ass. In all my excitement when I was placing the order with B&H, all those eBay medium format sale proceeds burning a hole in my pocket, I forgot to order a couple of 1gB CF cards on which to store the large 13mB RAW files. The only CF card I have at home is a 256 mB used in the Olympus C-5050Z, the one with the one hour shutter lag, so I stuck that in the 5D while waiting for the big capacity cards from B&H to arrive. Boy, UPS must just love me. In fact the gate to the estate finally gave up the ghost today from all those deliveries…. JPG gets me 47 images, RAW 13. Now 24 is about right for me, so JPG it is for now.
I’m rapidly learning that to extract maximum dynamic range from digital your exposure has to be pretty much spot on. It feels like using slide film again. Maybe 1/2 stop tolerance either way. That means sharpening my skills as I’m used to the two stop latitude of color negative film. It also means that, in Limekiln’s dark interior, I finally used the built in LCD screen on the back of the 5D to optimize exposure. At least it was dark enough to see it. Several pictures were a stop out, so I erased them on the spot (that wretched 256 mB card!) and re-exposed. Two clicks on the Info button and you get a little picture on the camera’s LCD screen with the overexposed bits flashing at you. Now is that cool or what? The working dynamic was fascinating to compare with 4â€x5â€. Where the latter dictates f/16 or smaller apertures, meaning seconds of exposure. I cranked up the 5D to 400 ASA (oops! ISO. That dates me!) having learned that the big sensor in the camera shows no noise at this speed. 1 1/2 stops gained. Then I shot at f/4, the maximum aperture on the 24-105mm, as the lens is simply very, very sharp at all openings. 4-5 stops gained. Then I used the IS in the lens to cut vibrations for another three stops gained. That’s some 9 stops gained over 4â€x5â€, meaning I was shooting at 1/30th @ f/4, aided by the monopod. And the results are critically sharp. My back does not hurt and I don’t feel a day over 50 on arriving home.
Next time you visit here I shall be messing about with RAW. Is this a steep learning curve or what?
Let’s face it. Your photographs are no good until you have shown them to the world. Whether that means your next door neighbor, an exhibition at the local town hall, a book or the virtual universe, the world is waiting.
One thing you can be sure of is that the world will most certainly not come to you.
So if you don’t screw up your courage and expose your work to the broadest possible audience, you will never know whether it is any good.
I know of what I write. I have had my work published in competitions, put out a book of my pictures and a while back started a Photoblog. I have an extensive web site of my pictures. Be assured, only someone with the ego of Attila the Hun would venture into any of these display avenues without a few butterflies in the old stomach. Why? You know why. You will now be subjected to criticism from all and sundry. The critics will all be strangers. Only friends and relatives will be consistently supportive and nice, even though much of their feedback will be damning with faint praise.
But without criticism, how will you ever know if your work is any good?
Not fair, you say. Like Oscar Wilde’s Lord Darlington, you believe that all critics are, at best, cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Look, even Wilde made a living as a critic before he started earning income from his plays. And you can be consoled by the knowledge that when you do finally expose your work to criticism, you will be dealing with the same, bunch of snobs, ignoramuses, morons, petty idiots, ill educated fools and sundry other losers that plagued Wilde. But without them your work will never be seen or appreciated. Is that not one of the reasons you take photographs – recognition and appreciation by your fellow man?
My experiments with criticism started when I got my first serious camera, the Leica M3 I use to this day, in 1973. As I started making street pictures which I thought had merit I began to submit them to the many photography magazines in the England of my youth, only to be rewarded by much critical feedback. Sadly, most of it was printed in form letters known as rejection slips. Very hurtful. How could everyone else not like my work? Plus, let’s face it, as a poor student whose scholarship money and governmental support could only go so far I needed the money for film and paper. So I kept banging away and as my ability to produce decent prints gradually improved the Honorable Mentions and better started to roll in. I must have been doing something right because the leading photography magazine of the day, a monthly named, originally, ‘Photography’, saw fit to award me The Photographer of the Year award – for one single picture no less! – in the mid-1970s. An award built on rejection slips. Here is that picture, if you must ask, dust spots and all. You did ask, didn’t you?
What a joke. One picture makes you Photographer of the Year. Of course, by that time you had paid your dues with any number of rejection slips, Honorable Mentions, Third Prizes, Second prizes, and so on. So acceptance had to be due any time soon. Like being a frequent poster to a discussion forum at your favorite internet chat board, say. The fact that your content is undiluted tripe, the fact that your claims to fame are never substantiated with a single picture, just having done your time and consistently published your work makes you accepted and lauded.
About the same time Leica Fotografie, the house organ of the camera maker of the same name, published a snap I had taken on Rue Mouffetard in Paris and I thought I had arrived.
So I stopped submitting pictures for publication. I had beaten the system. I had got inside the minds of those lousy critics, the same ones who had sent me all those rejection slips, and beaten them at their own game. It didn’t hurt that I still liked the work I was submitting, but I no longer needed the rewards, economic and psychic, which resulted. I now had a full time job and could take pictures to please me, not the critics.
Well, of course, that was all wrong. For twenty years thereafter I banged away, filling boxes with beautiful 8 x 10†prints which no one ever saw. I was self-satisfied with my work and did not need anyone else to tell me it was good. Or bad.
Yet something was missing. As human beings we all have an ego and not one of us dislikes being told that his work is good. Why, screw up your courage and you will even be prepared to hear that, well, maybe it’s not so good. Find a good critic who will help redirect you, question his input, and maybe you will find new directions and meaning in your photography.
One thing has changed greatly since those days of my youth and it is access to distribution. It has never been easier or cheaper to get your work out there and you no longer need to butter up publishers, attend obligatory cocktail parties or call people ‘darling’ while reminding all and sundry that the editorials of the New York Times and Guardian are your thoughts exactly. One month from reading this there is no reason why you wouldn’t have scanned your hundred best pictures, placed them in a word processed document and submitted your output to a print-on-demand publisher at very modest cost. Why, if you are a digital photographer the most onerous part of the task, the scanning part, does not even exist.
But the chances are you will not do this and that is a shame. Excuses are easy. I don’t have the time. The spouse is ill. It’s too complex for me to learn. No one is interested. And on and on.
All of these excuses say just one thing. You really do not care enough for your photography to do anything with it.
OK, so the book route is not for you. Well, how about a Photoblog? Access is even easier than publishing a book. You go to any one of the providers on the web and set up an account. It can be paid, like the one I use, where the friendly people at Expressions charge me the stunning sum of $3 monthly to host my picture uploads. I use them as they provide a nice point-and-click selection of screens to display your work and have been very nice in helping me design a screen to my own liking which is not available in their canned selections. Plus, I’m not exactly God’s gift to the coding profession.
Or you can try a free service such as the oddly named Flickr and share your work for all to see. Free.
So now tell me, why, within 60 minutes of reading this, you should not have a Photoblog up and running. You want to get paid for doing this?
Frankly, unless you are an equipment collector, in which case why are you even reading this, there is no reason.
Tomorrow I will share my Photoblogging experience with you, by which time your Photoblog will be up and running. Promise?
And closing on another Wilde witticism, when you get rude, uninformed morons trashing your work, “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.†Then delete their droppings.
One of the earliest recollections I have of a painting as a child is of Degas’s Bellelli Family.
Looking at the painting over the years it is clear that what attracted me to it is the photographic nature of the composition. Painted in 1860, in the early days of photography (Daguerrotypes first hit the market in 1839), the canvas is remarkable for several things. The informal pose of the paterfamilias on the right contrasts sharply with the stiff formality of the mother and her two daughters, the younger of whom appears to be an amputee! (She was, in reality, sitting on her tucked leg, the way kids do). Degas simply painted it as he saw it.
Now no one had done anything like this before, and Degas was lucky the Bellellis were affluent relatives (the mother in the portrait, Laura, was his aunt) for no one would have commissioned a portrait as strange, by contemporary tastes, as this. David Hockney would imitate his style a hundred years later by which time people were prepared to pay goodly sums to have their portraits painted in like manner.
Degas lived a long life, dying in 1917 at the age of 83, and the realism seen in his oil paintings taught me a great deal about photographic composition and seeing. No single painting does it better than “L’Absinthe”.
Painted sixteen years after The Bellelli Family, his powers of observation and composition are at their greatest in this superb painting. The effect is even greater if you can get to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris where it hangs for all to see – a modest sized canvas some 36″ x 24″in size. Absinthe is distilled from anise (similar to licorice) and wormwood. Poor distillation left behind toxic levels of chemicals, which could cause all sorts of harmful side effects ranging from vomiting to blindness. But none of that troubled the consumer who focused on the alcohol buzz (absinthe is some 60% alcohol) and the hallucinogenic high from the other chemicals present in abundance. Now you get the picture and the painting!
And what a remarkable painting it is. If you think Caravaggio’s ˜Conversion of St. Paul” is the greatest ˜wide-angle™ painting ever, well, “L’Absinthe” runs it a close second. The strong foreground with the knife cheekily signed by Degas leads the viewer, courtesy of those zig zagging diagonals, to the bombed pair in the rear. Except that they are almost out of the picture as if the painter himself had had a couple of shots during the process. The man’s pipe is cut off and he gazes out of the frame. The young woman is nothing less than a portrait of despair itself. The pair cast strong shadows on the wall behind. And you think Brassai invented this kind of thing?
Now I have no facts and figures to back this up, but I would bet that the average photographer rarely looks at a painting, even less thinks about painted art. What a shame for there is so much there to excite the eye and stir the imagination and those are two of the reasons we look at art. The third is to enjoy that sense of aesthetic satisfaction which good art provides. Not a bad definition, come to think of it, as to what exactly constitutes ˜art”. It is that which arouses the aesthetic senses.
Degas took up photography at the tender age of 61 and immediately set to recording that which he wanted to paint, except he did it with the compositional eye of a master.
Enhance your vision and imagination. Add a book of Degas’s paintings to your library.