What, Another Photography Blog?
So…I’m not sure if the world needs another photographer’s website and blog. There are a lot of very well done websites out there and just as many, if not more, blogs (including the video variety) that cover virtually every aspect of photography. I’m a landscape photographer, just another small fish in that monumental ocean, so what is it that makes me special? Sure, I’ve kinda, sorta got a niche, the “moodscape”, a fine art type category I ascribe to images captured with long exposure techniques and frequently, but not always, processed in monochromatic fashion. But is that reason enough to put myself through this? Aside from family and friends, will anybody care? Will anybody even stop by?
I don’t know, most likely not. But I’m going to forge ahead anyway.
WAIT…WHAT?
Why? A simple answer in two parts:
It’s a good place to show off my best work, my little corner gallery on the Internet dedicated to my art and my thoughts. If people stop by, fantastic. If not, that’s OK too. But you have to build it before anybody CAN stop by.
It’s the next logical step in my personal odyssey, which will be the primary subject of this blog entry.
THE SITE AND ITS PURPOSE
The images here are divided into three galleries: Landscape, Moodscape, and Recent, each to contain a number images that will rotate and change periodically, the Recent category more often that the other two. Forty to fifty images sounds like a lot, but compared to the hundreds I’ve captured and processed just over the last few years (I’ve got several hundred on display in Instagram) it’s a pittance. Choosing what I think are my best will be an educational process all by itself, helping identify what I like, why I like it, why the composition worked, why the processing worked, and how can I duplicate that going forward.
The blog entries will reflect my thoughts on photography in general, equipment, processing, places I’ve visited to photograph, frustrations and triumphs, and instruction or commentary offered up about particular images and why I captured and processed them the way I did. That too will be educational, forcing me to further understand and enhance my capture and processing capabilities and methods, and hopefully develop a personal style that works for me.
This is about my continuing education as an artist. If you want to move toward artistry - and I do - you’ve got to put in the time and the practice, and understand what those efforts accomplish (or don’t). This site gives me a place to memorialize those efforts. To record those lessons and ensure I remember them, along with the images that resulted.
And yes, it would be pretty cool if somebody else out there on a similar artistic path could - after reading what’s here - shave a few miles off their own journey.
I’M AN ARTIST, DAMN IT!
I got my first “real” camera after graduating college (a long time ago in a galaxy far away), a Minolta SLR I bought on credit with a Texaco gas card. (Try finding working versions of those two items today.) Gave that to my dad several years later and bought my first Nikon. When digital appeared I bought a monstrous Kodak, one of the few affordable (but not that affordable) options at the time. I believed I’d been granted freedom from the tyranny of film and Fotomat (look it up), and I was ready to become the photographer I was born to be. Bought a printer too, and all manner of special inks and paper, with the intention of taking, making and printing masterpieces.
Those dreams ended when I ran into Photoshop, the most counter-intuitive, confounding, and complicated piece of software I’d ever run across. With a high frustration factor I never learned to use it very well, so my prints ended up pretty simple and not particularly artistic, not much better, really, than what I got in the days of taking film somewhere to be developed. Combined with the cost of paper and ink, the previously novel concept of “free” photography became a lot less novel, and a lot more expensive. Technology, it seemed, was interfering with my artistic dreams.
I loved taking pictures, even more when I got my first DSLR, but it all ended after capture. All those masterpieces, if there were any, remained hidden away as JPEG files on a computer. I heard about RAW, an alternative to JPEG offering more data available for processing. But it all just seemed way too complicated, a language I couldn’t crack. Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Black Point, White Point, Clarity, Sharpness. It was gibberish. I mean, come on…Unsharp Mask?! (Still don’t actually know what that means.)
Still carried the camera on vacations, drove my wife nuts taking bracketed images of the same scene to ensure usable exposures, all shot in JPEG. Any excitement, though, would fizzle when it was time to upload images for processing.
THE PHOTOGRAPHY GIRLZ
One day at work I overheard three young women talking about something called a Project 30. Two of these ladies had just gotten cameras and were learning how to use them; the other had some high-end gear and even shot weddings but was trying to be more creative. When I understood what a Project 30 was, I wanted in. So we came up with a bunch of ideas/projects - frame in a frame, unusual mailboxes, food, reflections, etc. - to fill up a month and we agreed to submit 7-8 photos every week for that month. For the first time in what seemed like forever I actually had an enthusiastic reason to be working with the camera. I had projects!
{Many thanks to Amina, Alex, and Jackie for getting me excited over that endeavor.)
SO THEN WHAT?
After the Project 30, I started using the camera a lot more, re-familiarizing myself with it, even read the manual. Then I got a new Nikon for Christmas, a relatively high-end camera for that time and still a pretty solid piece of equipment. I took that thing everywhere. Put it into Manual Mode and left it there. Discovered Lightroom and took what, at the time, was a monumental leap to shooting RAW, and actually processed the images. (Quick Tip: Create an image culling process before you start processing; nothing quite so freeing as only having to work on a handful of images instead of the hundreds you just offloaded.) I’ve never looked back; still shoot Manual 99% of the time, still use Lightroom, still shoot RAW.
Took another leap then, into a Project 365 (a year long version of a Project 30), because it was the next logical step in learning how to become an artist with a camera. With my images shared on Instagram, the Project also became a wondrous exercise in seeing what other people were doing - other photographic artists, I mean - and saying, “Man, I want to be able to do that! How do I do that?”
That, in turn, forced additional learning: compositional methods, chasing light, planning shots, understanding histograms, to name a few. Ansel Adams said something like “You don’t take a photograph, you make one.” Learning my camera started my educational process toward understanding what that meant. Getting into the weeds of Lightroom furthered it. After my Project 365, looking for another challenge, I took on Photoshop again.
And guess what? It ain’t quite so bad as I thought it was. I mean, it’s still an unslain dragon but the process continues. Luminosity masking, Gaussian blurs, Color Ranges, Curves and Levels, Dodge and Burn…man, what a ride it continues to be and the learning never stops. But that dragon has almost become a convivial companion.
That’s all led me here, to whatever level of artistry I’ve attained and continue to strive for. And it’s never-ending, which is fine; you know what they say about life, journeys and destinations.
Welcome to mine…