On Not Taking A Photo

It seems the photographer is sometimes thought of as a person not in the here and now, focusing only on her camera and getting her shot.

This is referred to humorously in the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Walter has just found in the Himalayas the famous maverick Life photographer Sean O’Connell, who has the illusive Snow Leopard in his camera’s sights, but prefers to not be the photographer at that moment.

Walter Mitty: When are you going to take it (the picture)? 

Sean O’Connell: Sometimes I don't. If I like a moment, for me, personally, I don't like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it.

Walter Mitty: Stay in it?

Sean O’Connell: Yeah. Right there. Right here.

When I spent three years in India, after the first year and a half I ran out of colour film, which in those days was not available inside the country. I found it a relief to put the camera away for several reasons, one being I was free from the vexing question of whether to take the camera out in a situation and try for a shot.

I know sometimes I am more in the moment without my camera, but would a real-world Sean O’Connell even be waiting patiently on a Snow Leopard without the photographic intent? Would my eye be as developed as it is if I were not in the habit of continually looking?

Yesterday on the subway a big man sat down across from me. Although he had a slight moustache, the rest of his head, including his eyebrows, was hairless. There was an instant when, with eyes closed, he tilted his head back and the overhead light perfectly modelled the curves of his black face. I wonder if I would have noticed the stunning beauty of that brief moment in the midst of all the mundanity were I not a photographer?

I found this quote by Dan Winters recently. “I now find peace in the realization that millions of potential masterpieces happen each moment the world over and go unphotographed.” 

I suspect that most of the people who do recognize those moments, in the here and now, are the photographers, regardless of whether they have their camera or not.

Vivian Maier and Love

Vivian Maier was a career nanny in Chicago most of her life. In 2007, shortly before her death, someone stumbled across boxes of photographs she had taken. By the time her talent was identified she had died.

Although it appears she never received any encouragement or money for her photograph, she left behind over 100,000 images, some as undeveloped film and so never even seen by her. 

The words amateur, or hobbyist, could be applied to Vivian. She made no money with her camera, had no career path, was unknown. If she had talent, it was unrecognized during her life. On this basis we might not consider her a serious photographer.

An amateur (French amateur "lover of", from Old French and ultimately from Latin amatorem nom. amator, "lover") is defined as someone with a love of something.

This amateur photographer was the exact opposite of a hobbyist, was someone totally serious about her endeavour.

If I am an amateur, if I do something just for the love of it, should I not see that impulse from my heart as the most important activity I can have in my life?

How Real is a Photograph ?

A photograph is not reality.....

Any photograph is a deviation from reality. We accept its flat, two dimensional nature, and that it has been selectively cropped; that you can't have a photo without this, or that we accept it, does not make it less of a distortion. Similarly we accept black and white photos as legit, even though taking all colour out of a scene is an extreme manipulation.

There is a story that a man once said to Picasso, "I'd like to show you my wife" and produced a snapshot of her, to which Piccaso responded, "She's very small, isn't she".

Things that are accepted imperfections of the optical side of photograph are also approved, such as lens flare, wide angle distortion of perspective, or the softness of the out-of-focus area of a scene (something present in our own vision, but usually avoided by our pinpoint attention and our brain). Some of these optical phenomena are actually used by some photographers for a purpose, as if, in our image saturated world, they have become phenomena in the natural world as well.

There are no rules here.

In a photo community I am part of, individuals sometimes describe a photo as "SOOC", which means Straight Out Of Camera, in other words, "this is one photo, believe it, I didn't mess with".

One of the key areas I like to adjust is the sky. I like to deepen the blue. I want the sky to somehow have a sense of mystery, to be somehow beyond the objects in the lower part of the picture. I love this dichotomy between the down-to-earth particular and the nameless unbound. This is what I feel when I look at a scene, that's the feeling I want in my photograph, and so I deepen the blue. If it's a black and white I can sometimes take it to something close to black along the top.

A photograph is reality......

And yet, even with all I've said, a photograph has power because we see it as a representation of the real. The sailor kissing the woman on VJ day in Times Square is an image with a significance no painting could have hoped to achieve, even considering that there is controversy about how spontaneous it was. It's as if we're looking back in time and experiencing that exact moment.

The photo collages of Jerry Uelsmann, combining straight images with solarized or negative images, have a fascination because they play with this real/unreal conflict.

I find myself creating two kinds of images. One is the obviously manipulated, such as the photo above. With the other kind of image I may take liberties with the appearance or content of the photo, but I am not happy if the photo does not look real, something anyone would feel they could see in their own world. 

As a photographer, I warn you that any of my photos that you view have without doubt been manipulated. How and to what extent is my concern. How real they are is something I'll let you worry about.

Bokeh, and Other Distortions

For Debbie

Bokeh, a Japanese work meaning blur or haze. Wonderful stuff. Created by the lens optics primarily. Maximized by using a standard or telephoto lens with largest aperture (iris) possible, and set at that aperture. Short distance to the object, and long distance to what's behind the object matters too. The rose was taken with my lens with the largest aperture f1.4, and the red light photo below with a telephoto lens. For some reason some lens models manufactured, compared to other lenses with similar parameters, will create softer, creamier bokeh.... prized results. I bought the 50mm lens I used for the rose picture mostly for its bokeh reputation alone. I find colours seem to become more pastel too. Bright points of light in the photo become discs.

The whole in focus / out of focus characteristic of photographs (something we don't see with our eyes) is one of the modifiers (you could say distortions) in the photographic process that a good photographer knows how to use to their advantage. Selective overexposure or underexposure, graininess, changes in colour cast or saturation, flare, motion blur, perspective changes, these are just some of the distortions we now accept in photographs.

Yonge Street Traffic

It's the Composition, Stupid !

Spring on the Don River

I have been reading about composition in photography for years, just recently I got how important it is. 

I think I've always had some intuitive feel for composition, but generally have made photos by seeking out something interesting and then pointed the camera at it.

Learning to use composition in my photos is the most important realization I've had in photography, and yet I resisted it for so long. Maybe it was laziness, or I didn't understand it, or I didn't want to be analytical, but over the years I could have made so many photos so much better.

We often have things in our photos that have emotional content, for example a stormy sky or an old barn. That's good, but I've learned that a photo almost always needs more than emotional or sensual content. A photo is a graphic design just like a painting. In other words a photo is an arrangement of visual components like form, line, angle, pattern, repetition, tone, balance, contrast, foreground/background etc. For a photo to really have power it has to have a composition that adds to the content. And you can make a great photo that has no special content, but has its elements arranged in a composition that is interesting. That's what the best street photography is all about.

The painter has freedom to arrange elements on the canvas. The photographer, having to deal with the physical world beyond the camera, has severe limitations. Although I can sometimes move elements prior to the shot, something I do without hesitation, it is often impossible. So I must use all means available to arrange what shows up on the camera's view screen. The challenges are legion; for example a slight change of viewing angle to introduce a line may cause something else to disappear from the frame.

One of the best teaching stories I've heard recently was by a renowned photography instructor, Ben Long, who found a pile of old car doors that for some reason were sitting in a meadow. He wanted to show not just the doors, but their incongruous location. After trying to get a good shot he said he gave up because, although the doors had interest in themselves, there was no way he could make an interesting composition that included the meadow. His acknowledged failure taught me so much.

The other day I found a stone head stuck in a tree leaning over the Don River, the head taken, I suspect, from a nearby graveyard by vandals. I initially thought that because of the location all I could do was a rather straight-on shot but then I pushed myself to find someway to make a composition The photo above shows how I finally included the sparkle on the water as a balance for the head. Still not a great photo, but at least its more dynamic and interesting than the head alone.

So now I refuse to be intimidated by reality. I try to use all the photographic modifiers I possess to structure the world into a composition. And if that doesn't show in my photos, please kick my lazy ass!

What We Lose by Smiling

"The Architect Hans Heinz Luttgen and his Wife Dora", 1926, August Sander, Tate Gallery

AUGUST SANDER was a German photographer, active mostly between the two World Wars. His personal goal, unusual for the time, was to create a collection of 600 portraits of ordinary people in their environment, to be called "People of the Twentieth Century". Stopped short of completion by the chaos generated by Hitler, these photographs nevertheless stand as a wonderful portrayal of people captured simply but evocatively in the midst of their everyday lives.

One certainly notices how almost no one is smiling. Does this mean they are unhappy?

We tend to think in our culture that smiling is success. All those ads by banks, of customers smiling and looking into their laptops and presumably seeing how their investment portfolio is growing. For some reason they always have a coffee mug beside them. The smiling face is ubiquitous in our culture, at least in the media. 

Do the people in Sanders photographs look grim? Or meditative and thoughtful? How would the photos look if they were smiling?

Old portraits, whether photographic or in oil, almost never had smiling people. So when did "Say Cheese!", first raise its smiling head.? When did we start to equate not smiling with being unhappy or grim? When did the mystery in another's eyes become hidden behind a generic, forced expression?

The film Baraka has many wonderful shots of people gazing into the camera, unsmiling. Stare into the faces of Sander's subjects, and the initial sense of a grim look dissolves. There's something soulful, moving, about looking into the eyes of another human with no reference to any emotion or communication. Just experiencing each other's existence in a moment of present being.

"Master Mason", August Sander, Tate Gallery

Terrigal Sandstone

Currently on display at Arcadia Gallery, about 25 photos I took one afternoon near Terrigal Beach, north of Sydney. I'm really pleased with all these photos, nature did an amazing job of weathering the sandstone into some amazing shapes and colours, and I just ran around for an hour at low tide snapping it, all in one location. The only difficult part was later, dealing with the sunburn I got while I was having so much fun.

Mirage

A photo I took today over about 30 miles of water of Hamilton steelworks down the lake from Toronto. Notice how the image of the buildings is mirrored and the whole thing seems to be floating above the water. The texture of the waves is very odd too. I used a 300mm telephoto lens and then cropped down the image by about 20X.

Black and White For Sure

Saw these cormorants down on the breakwater, Sunnyside, Toronto. Interesting how they all line up, evenly spaced (there were more, but this is all my lens would include). Then this swan swims by, an interesting contrast. I had no hesitation in making this a black and white photo !