On the Proper Ordering of Carts and Horses

Suppose you plan to take some pictures with a camera. One possibility is to conceive your idea, with all the visual details, all the photographic properties, clear in your mind. Then you can go and scour the earth for a camera that will accomplish that, ideally easily. The other end of this spectrum is to find a camera, perhaps one already in your closet, or if you prefer at some store. Go forth and practice with this camera, and see what can be done with it. Finally, conceive and shoot some pictures that the camera is capable of producing.

In the first case, the cart is well in front of the horse. In the second, the two are the right way 'round, but arguably the cart is rather too far back.

The point is that gear informs vision, and it should. This is, really, the entire thrust of my approach to photography and to teaching photography. Go shoot with the camera you have (don't "practice" endlessly, just go try it out). Look at the results, look at what the pictures look like. Then, use that as you struggle with your muse and try to find something to say. If you simply let it happen organically, the pictures you conceive will fit neatly into the pictures your camera can make. If it just won't happen, well, then maybe a gear change is in order, sure.

You can make beautiful pictures with anything. You can make interesting pictures with anything. You cannot make every possible interesting picture with every camera, but you can make some interesting pictures with any camera. Frankly, it's difficult enough to conceive an interesting photograph without having to contend with some infinite universe of possibility. You ought to welcome some limitations.

Sally Mann shoots this wet plate stuff, which has absurdly long exposure times, and often has all manner of weird artifacts. This has, clearly, shaped her vision of certain things. She's fully capable of shooting sharp, artifact-free photographs on film. She's done a lot of that. But she lets the wet plate methods shape her vision, and she flows with those visual ideas to produce some truly wonderful, amazing, things. So you're shooting wet plate, and the exposure is 6 minutes long. What can you shoot with that?

You've just got to work with what you've got, to develop an idea, or ideas, that work with what you've got.

Of course vision will ultimately shape your gear choices as well, but it should happen in an evolutionary and organic way. If you insist on buying a new system, with completely new visual properties, then in a way you're throwing out all that you knew about the one you're "upgrading" from. There will be similarities as well, of course, but if you insist on revolution then by definition the changes are quite radical and you are, to the degree that the changes are radical, starting out anew.

While I am not a commercial photographer, I submit that this isn't a bad approach for commercial work either. There are certain restrictions, of course. You have to be able to make pictures that are usable by your target market (perhaps that means sharp enough for print, or in color, or whatever) and you have to be able to make them in a way that suits your clients (a single-shot pinhole camera is unlikely to work for weddings). But if you have a vision that's sufficiently commercial to sell, then by definition you can sell it. If that vision is shaped in part by your equipment, so what? If you "upgrade" in a revolutionary way you're just going to have to start over, selling the new vision. "Yeah, I'm shooting large format now, and the pictures look totally different from the ones in my portfolio, but they're ever so sharp..."

The cart and the horse are fastened together. Each pulls on the other, and that is as it should be. But if the horse is not in front, you're not going to get anywhere.

If you don't let the gear shape the vision, to some degree, you're going to be locked in an eternal quest for the right gear. You're never going to find it, and if I catch you at it, I'm going to yell at you.

Vernacular Photography, Again

Another way to think of the difference between snapshots intended to reach across time, and snapshots intended to reach across social connections, is this.

In the film era, the snapshot was supposed to reach across time. It was a tool to trigger memory, "Remember that trip to Disneyland?" and as such is filled with temporal and spatial references. The pictures from Disneyland contain The Mouse, and The Castle. They are recognizable, more or less instantly, as "us, in Disneyland." They would make no sense without the specific objects which tie the photograph to that event, that time.

Pictures from Christmas inevitably contain the Tree, birthdays have Cake, and so on.

These days we get a lot, a LOT, of photographs with no such things. A picture of a latte is useless as a spur to memory, I've drunk a lot of lattes in my life. A picture of me at a party is useless as a spur to memory, I've been to a lot of parties.

As a tool to tell my friends "I am drinking a latte right now, and it is delicious" a picture of a latte is marvelous, however. It neatly encapsulates the moment in an instantly apprehensible object.

In this light, I am being very unfair to the photographic-safari people. These people are generally taking pictures that are rife with objects that anchor the photo to a place and time. They are excellent spurs to memory, in general, and as such could well serve to reach across time to a future self. And, indeed, I am certain they do serve this function. The wealthy gents who take these things, no doubt haul them out 10 years hence and recall their trip to Africa.

Still, I continue to hold that the primary function of the pictures is social signaling in the here-and-now. The pictures exist to say "nice latte, but I was in Africa."

Sally Mann argues that photographs destroy memory, and I am inclined to agree. But she is referring, I think, to the photos that we use as spurs to memory. The photos from Disneyland become our memory of Disneyland, the photos of Dad become our memory of Dad. I'm not sure what the photos of lunch, parties, and lattes do. I already don't remember those things specifically. I think we generally remember those things mostly as categories rather than specific instances.

Does the line between the category of things, and the category of photographs of the things, get blurred? If you're in the habit of photographing your latte, when is your idea of "a latte"? Do you think of an actual latte, or is what floats to mind an instagram photo of a latte? I don't habitually photograph my drinks, but maybe I should start.

For SCIENCE.

Vernacular Photograhy

Vernacular Photography, to review, is the fancy way of saying "snapshots".

I've talked in the past about how it's changed, with the advent of digital and sharing. In the 1980s we got 1 roll per year with the kids posed stiffly in front of: The Christmas Tree, One Birthday Cake Each, The Eiffel Tower (because we went to Europe that summer) and then The Christmas Tree again. Now we have 1000s of digital shots of much more interesting, or at least entertaining, stuff. We get the weird faces, the messes, the funny dancing, the parties, and so on. Digital is free, so we shoot a lot more, and therefore get more of the trivial moments, which are to my eye the more interesting and in some sense important ones.

But here's a little thought for the day.

The function of the film snapshot, printed and put in a shoebox or an album, was to reach across time to our future selves. Remember the trip to Europe? Remember that christmas when you got your first bike? Remember?

The function of the digital snapshot is to reach across space and social connections to talk about now. It's horizontal, not vertical, or something like that.

It's still vernacular, because the picture doesn't matter, only what the picture is of. The photo need only be a fair representation of what the camera was pointing at, good enough to provide evidence or a spur to memory. People like me still take snapshots for our future selves, of course. It's virtually all of what I do, but I dare say lots of people do it to some degree or another.

That usage is dwarfed by the horizontal "look at this thing which just happened", "this is my present, my now, look!"

There's something here that's leaking out into the world of Fine Art photographers. Just as a for instance, these guys go on safari or otherwise make fabulously expensive trips out to the ends of the earth. Frequently they come back with pictures of lions or penguins or whatever which, while technically amazing (oooo, ahh, the resolution, the colors, you really nailed the focus!) could have been made at any good zoo.

When Adams went on epic trips, he sat there and thought to himself "What the fuck am I feeling about this mountain, and how can I shoot that?" and it's not his fault that he always felt the same way. Weston went to the desert and saw the sensual curves and thought "Man, I love women" and shot that.

Kevin Raber says "I'm in freakin' Antarctica! You gotta see this!" and shoots what are, ultimately, incredibly detailed facebook photos. So we see a bunch of penguins and some ice, but it doesn't feel cold. Michael Reichmann is going to give us a bunch of lizards and birds that say "I'm in the Galapagos!" but in the end they're just supporting evidence that he was. They will look like they could have been shot at a zoo. There will be some vistas and stuff too, of course.

But Kevin doesn't shoot how cold it is on the ice, of the way it feels to walk on the layer of ice atop the ocean, or what he felt about the mass of penguins. He shoots exercises in form, he shoots to show off his mastery of the gear, he shoots to provide supporting evidence that Right Now He Is Somewhere Cooooool.

Michael will not shoot his awe at the uniqueness of the ecosystem, he will not shoot how it feels to walk where Darwin walked, he will not shoot the sensation of luxury he gets in the chartered yacht. He's definitely not going to shoot how it feels to make $20,000 in a week for helping old white dudes with their cameras. It's gonna be "Here I, Michael-al-al Riechmann-an-an-an... IN THE GLALAPAGOS ISLANDS! Dun-dun-DUNNNNN" all day long. It's gonna be high end facebook.

And what's wrong with that, I suppose? I object, I suppose, to dressing up ephemeral "look at my present, look at my now" in the clothes of "hear me, future generations, look upon my works."

Leading Lines Are Also a Bunch of Crap

A year or two ago I spent a bunch of time digging to the Rule Of Thirds, and proving that it was a modern idea, only used by photographers, and basically pretty stupid. Turns out that Leading Lines are pretty much the same deal.

We learn about Leading Lines everywhere we look for references on photographic composition. The eye allegedly follows these things around and theye are anciente thinges goinge backe to da Vinci or before.

This is crap. Simply unadulterated garbage. Go find me a reference to these damned things prior to 1900. Go find me a reference to these damned things outside of some crappy book or magazine on taking better photos before about 1980 (at some point this piece of shit started creeping in to popular "How To Draw" books). Go find me an eye tracking study that shows one damned test subject's eye following a leading line. So you can add Leading Lines to the Rule of Thirds, the Golden Ratio, the Golden Spiral, and all that other ahistoric shit that only started "appearing" in "Art" in the twentieth century, as modern man tried to systematize beauty into simple rules.

The way the eye actually moves around a picture is actually pretty simple. You're going to be gobsmacked by this next bit:

Our gaze moves from interesting thing to interesting thing within the frame. Our gaze lingers longer on more interesting things. We don't follow the goddamned railroad tracks to see what's at the end, unless we're specifically thinking "ahh yes, leading lines!"

What are the interesting things, you ask? As well you may!

In order from most to least:

• Faces. Human and animal.
• Figures. Human and animal.
• Areas that contrast with their surround. Perhaps, tonally, texturally, or chromatically.

It's really not very complicated.

This is why non-bullshit theories of composition focus on how to make the picture pleasing, not how to "lead the eye". They are not based on bogus physiology or neurology. They're about making the picture interesting, easy to read where appropriate, and so on.

We get ideas like figure-to-ground, in which we might place a human figure or face against a tonally separated background (dark on light, light on dark) by way of clarifying which human figure we're interested in, by way of making it easy to get to the interesting meat of the picture.

We strive for balance, unity, and variety, to make the whole frame work for us, each piece pulling together, while still being interesting to look at. If the entire left side of the frame hasn't got anything interesting in it, well, why not? There ought to be a reason that makes some kind of visual sense.

Here is an experiment you can probably perform in a few minutes. Go find a photo with a very successful use of leading lines (the examples we are shown, by the way, all have the leading lines leading to something interesting, or at least some someplace no less interesting than anything else). Now go make several versions of this photo. Eliminate whatever is interesting at the end of the leading line, be it a person, or simply a bright spot, or whatever. Insert something interesting elsewhere in the photo. Another bright spot, somewhere new. A simple clip-art human figure pasted rudely in at about the right scale will do.

Where does your eye "go"? Does it trot down the "leading line" or does it just go to the interesting things?

Photograph-like Objects

Daniel Milnor over at Shifter does these "Just Listen" pieces. It's basically a few dozen written words of context, and a 30 second clip of ambient sound.

They're interesting.

It hit me the other day that they're quite photograph-like. They embody a relatively small slice of time, in a specific place. They give you a brief, extremely limited, experience of the place at that moment in time.

There's an aspect of reality to it. That sound actually occurred there at that time. There is a literalness, a direct connection with the underlying reality of the place. A connection that a description, a poem, a painting, a drawing, cannot have, but which a photo does.

As such, they give me that same sensation of "knowing" and yet being aware that my understanding of the place in question is ludicrously limited. I feel some sort of probably false (but maybe, sometimes, profoundly real) understanding of what is going on there, what the deal is with that place, at least in some specific dimension of understanding.

You'd think film or video would be photograph-like, but I find it oddly less so. It stretches through time in a way that photographs don't. To be sure, they're rooted in the real, they are limited, they give a probably false feeling of getting it, but I feel like they're different. Possibly a really perfect short clip? But then, aren't we pretty much making a photograph?

So, Milnor's "Just Listen" seems to be a fundamentally different thing, which is nonetheless somehow the same thing, as a photograph.

What else is like this?

Ownership

Michael Reichmann of LuLa went on some silly rant about how every camera maker should support DNG for its RAW format, casting it as a no-brainer. Obviously, it's just clickbait.

In later discussion he attempted to make it a moral issue, claiming that the image data belongs to him, and that it is therefore immoral for the camera maker to force him to convert their RAW formats to DNG offboard, and that they should do it onboard the camera. Huh? If it's about access to your image data, well, you have that with a one-step offboard conversion. If it's about accessing it immediately, you should be demanding a sensor access port. In fact, Michael just wants clicks, and perhaps to a degree wants DNG output for convenience. If there is a moral issue here, DNG output is not a relevant part of the discussion.

But he did raise an interesting idea. These are his 1s and 0s, it's his image data.

Really?

That is certainly the law in most of the world. But is it right? Is it in fact the moral and proper position?

I don't see that it's immoral as such. And, given that camera makers are making cameras in the current social and legal milieux, there's certainly an assumption of fitness-for-purpose where the purpose includes "image data that is mine."

But is that the way it ought to be? Or the only possible way it ought to be?

What if, for instance, a camera maker decided to claim certain rights to every picture you shot. Would that be immoral? Obviously it would be if they didn't make it quite clear, given the current legal and social situation. There are certain assumptions in play, and not being clear that these default assumptions are wrong would constitute a lie of omission. But if they made it clear? Perhaps if they offered substantial discount on the camera, provided you gave up certain rights, or gave the camera maker certain licenses.

I am confident that there are photographers who would go insane with fury if Canon started offering such a deal, and lots of others who would deride them for such a terrible idea.

That would be pretty fun to watch.

Attention Seekers and Kicking It Up A Notch

I'm going to talk about girls.

Girls use their appearance to get attention. I dunno if it's all socialized in to them, or if it's built in, or whatever. No, it's not universal, not every girl does it. Boys do it to, and so on. Please insert all the sensible caveats here. But it's an identifiable girl-related thing. Of ourse, we all like attention. Boys, girls, middle-aged men with angry blogs. But let's start with girls.

In my youth the competitive landscape consisted, mainly, of one's school. You had to compete with, at most, a couple hundred other girls for the attention of, well, whomever you wanted attention from. Generally the idiot jock boys who, by some bizarre consensus, became the desired attention-sources. But even attention from dweebs like me was not entirely without value. The competition wasn't with all the girls, of course, just the ones in roughly the same social stratum.

Enter Facebook. Abruptly there are 20 million girls roughly the same age as you are, all contending for attention. The attention sources are somewhat more amorphous, but the measuring technology is much better. You can gather Likes! Now you gotta up your game. It's time for more revealing outfits and a whole lot of duckface!

A related phenomenon. Boys with cameras have been talking girls out of their clothes since approximately 15 nanoseconds after the camera was invented.

Enter the Internet. Now we're getting a double-dose of attention: the model and the photographer are both getting attention. Dropping photos of naked or nearly naked young women into anywhere on the internet appears to flip a switch in people's brains. They return to the age of 17, and enter an attention-giving mode. In photographic forums, this manifests as a bunch of facile comments about photographic things. The light is always fantastic, the processing is wonderful, the mastery of technique is, well, masterful. Even when it's not. Nobody actually looks at any of that stuff, they're simply giving positive attention, mouthing the locally-recognized praise words. On wider social media it's Likes, +1s, and comments about how gorgeous you are, which really means how nearly naked you are.

Taking pictures of naked girls is an easy road to genuinely beautiful photos. It's pretty hard to go wrong.

It's an even easier road to Internet Approval, and it doesn't matter whether you go wrong or not. The only things that matter are the age of the model, her body shape, and her degree of nakedness. Literally. Nothing else matters. Find a hot model, get her naked, and photograph her any goddamned way you like, it just Does Not Matter. You'll be told that you a great photographer by pretty much everyone, except some other dudes who also photograph naked girls who will nitpick a bit mainly because you are stealing attention away from them.

Finally, we come around to kicking it up a notch.

Remember how we all seek attention? Maybe you're too shy or cheap to shoot pictures of naked girls. What can you do?

Well, find a place where attention is given, and then take pictures just like the ones that garner attention there. Then kick it up a notch. More saturation, more contrast, more of whatever it is they like there. This is the photographic analog of more naked, and who doesn't like more naked?

OK, so what?

Nothing in here is about photography. It's 100% about engineering your social situation.

But here's a puzzler for you: Isn't great photography supposed to be pretty much about social engineering? Doesn't that great iconic image create a social impact, and isn't that pretty much the point?

So why do we feel it's cheap and stupid to generate a desirable reaction with a naked girl, but it's awesome and cool to do it another way? I don't have an answer here, but I'm gonna noodle on it.

An Acid Test

If you're trying to decide whether some chappie who takes pictures is any good at formal composition, here's some more grist for the mill:

• Does he use arabesques?
• Does he use oval or circular compositions?

In general, the internet-famous guys simply don't. They're all about straight lines. Rectilinear shapes, often with a strong diagonal. Whenever they can manage it, they shove in an actual diagonal line, and when they can't, they imply the diagonal by placing stuff in opposite corners. This is all very well and good, but it's a pretty narrow palette of technique.

I use the pronoun "he" deliberately, here, because I cannot offhand name a single woman who does this stupid heavily gridded derivative stuff.

And, for reference, I am rotten at this sort of thing. But then, I am not offering any workshops.

Lytro Illium

I don't review gear on this blog. This isn't a gear review.

Lytro Illium is a new camera from Lytro, who are doing consumer-targeted light-field cameras. The point of these cameras is that focus and aperture is, to a large degree, computed in post. I've commented in the past that this is part of a natural progression. Digital photography has been, to a large extent, about moving activities from before the shutter button press to after, and light-field technology is just (potentially) another step along the way.

First a technical remark. People complain that the resulting picture size is small. Lytro is coy about these numbers (see below) but the new camera seems to produce something like a 4 or 5 megapixel picture, once the computational smoke clears.

I think this is, or any rate can be made, irrelevant. We're in the land of software. Stitching up enormous pictures out of small ones is old hat. It's not even hard any more.

Here's a tip for the Lytro guys: let me stitch up whatever size picture I like, based on the "as much as possible in focus" model, and let me apply the computed depth of field on the result. Ideally, give me options to compute a plane of focus that is not parallel to the sensor (simulate T/S or large format movements). Even better also give me options to compute a non-planar field of focus. Now I can put this and that in focus, and leave the rest soft. Now we're making some wedding photos, baby!

What's more interesting, though, is this. The Lytro guys seem to be dodging the issue of resolution by recasting the photograph as a new kind of object. They really want to push this idea of an interactive object, where the viewer -- the end-user, not the photographer -- manipulates the depth of field, and performs small rotations, to really explore what's going on in there.

This is to literally re-imagine the idea of photograph. That's pretty damned bold.

I find it incomprehensible. Fiddling with these interactive objects is something that makes no sense to me. But then, as a still photographer, of course it makes no sense to me. I am, by definition, the guy that wants a faster horse, not an automobile. Of course the automobile baffles me.

I have no idea if they're going to succeed. So far it's not looking so hot. But it's interesting as hell, and one wonders what else is around the corner. Is the still photograph itself about to be abruptly supplanted by something we literally cannot imagine, and will not understand when it arrives?

Maybe! Wouldn't that be fun?!

An Exercise

I don't know that this will teach anything, but it's cool, and it gets at some stuff I've been thinking and writing about.

Go get a physical photograph. A page from a magazine will do, or a print, or a page of a book, whatever. You needn't tear it out, just get it in front of you so you can touch it.

First examine it as a physical object. It's a sheet of paper, probably. Some thickness. It smells, feels, sounds, a certain way. It has some sort of pigments or metallic deposits on its surface.

Now consider the pattern of tone and color on the surface, created by those pigments or deposits. What are the colors? Are they complementary, or what? What's the range of tone? What patterns are present in shapes and lines and masses of tone and color, on the surface of this piece of paper?

Descend further. Step through the frame now, in a sort of Matrix-like transition: What's it a picture of? Note the visual details. Is the man wearing a tie? Is that a mountain in the distance? Inventory the contents of the frame and place them in space relative to one another. Consider those relationships a little, and how that translates into visual relationships on the page.

Further. What is she thinking, is it hot or cold there, how heavy is that thing he is holding? What do you imagine about the scene?

A picture is always many things, and a photograph has the additional feature of having once been something real (usually).

On The Use of Photographs

The use of a photograph varies with context. Photojournalistic pictures claim to show us what really is and so we tend to look through or past the photograph, and tend to see instead what is depicted. The photograph is transparent. Take that same photograph and place it in a collection of the Best New Photos of the Year and we will tend to see the photograph itself, we'll see the design, the colors, and so on. When told that it's a good photograph we will tend to examine it on those terms, as a photograph.

Simply by directing attention this way or that with context, we can change the way a viewer experiences the photograph. "Look at this object" causes us to look through the picture to the pictured. "Look at this picture" causes us to examine the photograph as a thing itself.

Photographers, but especially novice photographers, worry too much about the photograph. Being interested in the craft of photography, and having recently learned a few things about, say, composition, color balance, lighting, they will tend to examine photographs in those terms. They have a built-in bias against looking through the picture at the pictured, and toward examining the photograph as a photograph. In particular, they tend to examine it in terms of whatever they learned most recently. Non-photographers tend, on the other hand, to always look through the picture to the pictured. They see what the photograph is a picture of, and judge the picture largely on those grounds.

If the flower is beautiful, the non-photographer will like the picture. If the color balance is off, the novice photographer will dislike the picture.

The claim is made, and I have made it, that getting photographic, technical, details right -- good composition, skilled use of selective focus, and so on -- will support and enhance the subject and make even the non-photographer like the picture better. While this is true, the subject will surely dominate. A badly lit picture of my child being charming will trump a beautifully lit picture of my child looking like a criminal, every time.

There are a lot of consequences to this.

How do all these horrible fauxtographers get clients?! Because their customers don't give a god damn about your stupid 85/1.8 lens, what they care about is that Julie takes great pictures of their kids. Maybe a little blurry sometimes, but the kids are so happy. You, on the other hand, take razor sharp pictures of sullen children, and charge 4x as much. Screw you.

Who shall I ask for critique? If you want technical details examined, ask a novice photographer. For anything else, ask.. anyone else. Just as the mom literally cannot see the technical quality of photos from the angry local photographer, so the novice literally cannot see the subject, or the emotional aspects, of a photograph.

How shall I judge a picture? Step past the technical, and look at the whole thing. Don't judge the portrait based on the lighting, judge the portrait based on whether it flatters the subject. The difference is "this type of lighting pattern is generally flattering to this kind of subject" and "this is actually a flattering portrait of the subject."

Technical details only make the picture better if they actually make the picture better.

What Looks Real?

It seems that every time someone mentions the idea of photographs looking real, or not looking real, or whatever, a chorus starts up about how every photograph is inherently false. I've beaten this drum myself, mostly in discussions of photojournalism. The name of the game, from the chorus' point of view, is to shout down the idea that a photograph "looking real" is a meaningful, and to make themselves look terribly clever in the process.

As usual, the chorus is is quite wrong. Any fool can see that some photographs look real, and others look fake, and there's some sort of grey area as well. The fact that the chorus isn't capable of sorting out what's going on doesn't mean that nothing is going on. Here's what's going on.

No photograph is a "true" representation of reality, to be sure. Neither is what we see a "true" representation of reality, our eyes and visual cortex are mighty liars. This matters for discussion of photojournalism, where there is a planted axiom to the effect that a good photojournalistic picture is "true", but it doesn't matter for most other contexts.

A photograph "looks real" for you if, when I give you the photograph and allow you to compare it with that which was photographed, you respond intuitively "that picture looks like the thing it is a picture of". It's entirely subjective, and partly some sort of social construct, but much of the time many people will tend to agree. It changes over time, as well. 50 years ago, most people were willing to accept black and white photographs as looking "real", but now very few people will. Younger people will likely accept saturated colors and HDR-style processing as "looking real" whereas old bastards like me won't.

Photographs are not even remotely "real" but we train ourselves, and are trained, to accept certain things and to not accept certain other things.

• There are photographs that "look real"
• There are photographs that "look fake"
• There are photographs that are in some grey area between these two

None of these photographs actually is an accurate representation of reality.

So, next time someone wants to wave off the idea of a photograph looking real, you can tell them to go pound sand.

Dogmatism

There are many things in life one can study, practice, and with diligent effort get a little bit good at, or even very good at. Two of them, just to pull some handy examples, are baking bread and taking photographs.

The progression runs, roughly, as follows. You learn a little, and you get some positive results. Your bread rises, your photographs are in focus. You think you're pretty good, and your friends agree. Everyone is a little surprised and astonished that your bread rises, and that your photographs are in focus. Still, everyone also recognizes, on some level, that there are degrees of goodness. You are not suddenly the best in the world, you're just "good" on some very broad spectrum of "good".

As you learn more, as you experiment more and find things out, develop skills, and so on, your idea of what's good will probably narrow. As you begin to actually understand what separates your first efforts from the greatness that you always recognized, you will perhaps, probably, begin to view your early efforts as "bad" rather than "good". You might also grade your current efforts as "bad" but you work to get past that.

At about this point there seems to be a very very natural event that can occur, almost regardless of discipline: You may find a social group with a set of ideas, methods, procedures, doctrines. You discover that by hewing to these, your results get to be pretty good. Leagues better than your early efforts. Furthermore, by espousing these ideas, methods, procedures and doctrines both in what you say, and in how you work at your chosen craft, you gain acceptance into this social group. Some people who you consider to be expert begin to compliment and accept you. This is powerful, this is tribal.

Now there is an excellent chance that what you know at this moment will harden into dogma. You may give lip service to the notion that you're always learning and growing but inside, somewhere, you secretly think that in fact you have found The Answer. You know the true method for ultimate excellence, and now it's just a question of more perfectly executing the approved methods and procedures. Your growth stops. Your results are pretty good, more or less, but as you perfect your adherence to the dogma you have selected, something is lost. The creative spark is gone.

Bakers stuck here just wind up producing a couple kinds of decent bread, and being happy with that. Photographers who get stuck here produce emotionally dead garbage. Any soul they once had, any fresh ideas they once had, will be inexorably squeezed out in the relentless refinement of the approved methods and procedures. These photographers eventually reduce their "mistake" rate to vanishingly small, and wind up crapping out an endless stream of more or less identical lifeless examples of a very very specific form, while their social group cheers them on with cries of "wow, another great one! you are so great! can you teach me your workflow?" (arrg, "workflow" I must write an essay on that particular horror as well)

There is another way.

It happens that I am an excellent bread baker. I hew to no dogma. Well, at any rate I am not aware of any particular dogma to which I hew. Instead, I have a pretty firm and yet ever changing idea of what constitutes excellence. My approach evolves constantly. I understand, clearly, distinctly, and differently week-to-week, the ways flour, water, salt, and leavening work together. At any moment I have methods and approaches, and I have firm ideas about what sorts of things will affect the resulting loaves in what ways; and these ideas changes and evolve constantly. Sometimes I develop genuinely new ideas, and other times I simply think about old ideas in new ways, I develop a new mental image of what's going on to describe the same things.

What's important here is that my thinking is (usually) right, or at least not very wrong. It changes and evolves constantly, but rarely diverges far out of the zone of being pretty much correct. I'm usually in the zone of right, because I do know a lot of stuff, and I have spent a lot of time reading, talking, hanging out with dogmatists who do indeed own a piece of the puzzle. Still, there's infinitely many ways to think about these things, not just one.

This means that my bread constantly changes. Sometimes it is frankly not very good. Usually it's somewhere between good and astonishingly excellent. It's rarely boring. And, let me repeat this: sometimes it is astonishingly excellent. This is an important point.

You can, I think, approach photography the same way. Learn from the dogmatists, take their ideas of excellence and add them to your own. You have always known that there are good pictures, and better pictures, and superb pictures. Your job is to develop an ever-evolving, constantly changing, theory of what makes the astonishing ones astonishing. Keep your mind open, and your thoughts flexible.

Try to hold on to that early naive idea that everything is good, only some things are better.

Sometimes, you'll make pretty bad pictures, or pretty bad bread. If you're not a commercial photographer or baker, that's OK. If you are, of course, you have to find some formulas that work and stick to grinding them out -- at least in the day job. Even so, at night, when nobody's looking, remember that everything is good. Devise a new theory of what makes it good, and shoot a bunch of that for a while.

If your stuff isn't crap some of the time, then, eventually, it's crap all of the time.

More Color Fidelity

Here's more things to think about.

I've been thinking about how much stuff we look at doesn't really have real colors any more; so much of what we see is a perceptual color created by mixing a small set of dyes or lights. We spend hours looking at a computer screen, and more hours looking at printed materials. We spend almost no time looking at apples, and no time at all really looking at an apple.

Color-managed workflow, that paragon, that ideal state of perfection, is all about managing those perceptual colors. It tries to ensure, and largely succeeds in ensuring, that the perceptual color I see on one monitor is the same perceptual color I see on another is the same perceptual color I see on the printed page.

A good process can actually do this, for a pretty broad range of colors. The color my visual cortex comes up with based on the Red, Green, and Blue light sources on one monitor is more or less the same as the color my visual cortex comes up with based on the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black inks used to print the page. With certain fairly stringent restrictions.

What's missing from this? Did you notice the elephant that we're not talking about?

There's nothing in there that makes sure that the color on the monitor, or the page, looks like the color of the thing I photographed.

A side note. We occasionally see some eggheaded idiot explaining that the Red Channel is Clipped, and how that's Unacceptable. This same person would not complain that the highlights are blown where the sun appears in the frame, because anyone -- even an idiot -- may know that the sun is simply out of range. If you're going to get a picture of anything else, you have to let the sun go. Yet, when photographing an object with an out-of-gamut color, precisely the same problem exists. One or more color channels will clip. Fixing it will destroy the rest of the picture.

Some experiments to try: Use your favorite method for getting a "correct" white balance, and photograph a handful of small objects, all in one frame. Use a grey card or whatever you like to "get the white balance correct". Produce an image file with correct white balance. Now hold your objects up to the monitor, or set them near the monitor in good light. Do the colors on the screen match the objects? What happens when you tweak the color to get one of the objects spot-on?

In my tests the answer is "ha, ha, ha, not even close" but your mileage may vary. The hell of it is that on-screen they look pretty darn good. They're convincing when compared with my memory of the object, but place the object close to the screen, and the illusion falls away. The object I was mostly interested in was not even out-of-gamut, I was able to persuade my monitor to produce the color quite closely without much trouble. Correcting the picture for that color simply ruined the others, though. With an out-of-gamut color, I cannot imagine the situation would be any better.

Cameras, for excellent technical reasons, tend not to actually see things the way eyes do. Some cameras do better than others.

The result of this experiment might be liberating. If the prospect of getting the color accurate is taken away from you, then you don't have to worry about it any more. Make your picture look nice.

Color Fidelity is Bullshit

The title, obviously, is hyperbole. The pursuit of color fidelity is a thankless, often impossible, job. The amount of time and effort spent on it is probably wildly out of proportion to the actual usefulness. That said, if you need it, you probably know enough to know where the limits are, and you probably know what a thankless job seeking it is.

This essay is for everyone else.

You probably know that we "see" three colors, more or less, and there's something about Red, Green, and Blue.

In the real world things have colors. Light sources, or objects reflecting light, or whatever. These are all, essentially, things from which light comes to our eye. That light has an intensity for every wavelength of light. Let's consider only the visual spectrum here, that still means that the light we perceive as colored has an intensity for every possible wavelength between 390 nanometers and 700 nanometers. Every single one. 307nm? Yes. 519.97234nm? Yes, that one too. All of them. This spectrum is a physical color.

Our eyes have three types of color receptors, each of which responds to every wavelength, but to varying degrees. You can think of them as "mainly red", "mainly blue" and "mainly green", but these are really just the humps in a graph of sensitivity. The "mainly green" ones are highly stimulated by green light, and less stimulated by blue light of the same intensity, and so on. We may think of these things are producing a number, a quantity, which represents how stimulated it is. It's actually slightly worse than that, but this is close enough.

The "mainly green" cones in the eye will produce the same output for a very intense blue light as they do for a much less intense green light. The "mainly blue" ones, though, would produce a much greater response to the intense blue light, which is how we distinguish colors.

Anyways. What it boils down to is that there are lots and lots and lots of (infinitely many) physical colors that will cause the same overall visual response. Different physical colors will produce the same perceived color.

So what? As long as we all perceive the same color, who cares?

Well, of course, we don't. Very close, but not quite.

What we actually do in imaging (analog, digital, it doesn't matter) is we use a small set of fixed physical colors, which we can combine to vary the amounts of red, green, and blue light hitting the eye. We are, emphatically not, generating a full gamut of physical colors. Nothing like that. We are generating a very very very small set of physical colors which happen to cover quite a lot of the perceived colors. To get quite specific: we are mixing this small family of colors up in varying ratios to produce a wide range of visual color responses, of physical and neurological responses, which we identify as "colors" in our minds.

There are two problems with this.

The first problem, which everyone who's looked into it in any depth knows about, is that we can't actually generate all of the perceived colors. This is the "out of gamut" problem that every display or rendering medium has. There are colors that we can see -- there are mental constructs of "color" -- that the medium cannot produce. Every medium is surprisingly limited in what it can produce, and no two media even produce the same gamut of colors.

The second problem is that we perceive colors differently. It is in fact that case that we can have two people who, when presented with the same synthesized perceptual color (the same mixture of red, green, blue, let's say) will assert that it precisely matches two different swatches representing two different physical colors. In the absence of color blindness, the colors will be very close, but still each subject will see the other's swatch as "slightly wrong", given the very same mixture of red, green, and blue.

What does this mean?

Suppose you're photographing an apple. The sunlight -- which is some spectrum or another, some physical color -- bounces off the apple, which absorbs some wavelengths more than others. The reflected light has a physical color, a spectrum, based on the combination of the two. Our eyes would chunk that into three quantities, and we'd see it as "red". The camera likewise chunks that light into three numbers, R, G, and B, which numerical "color" drops into our color managed workflow.

If we're lucky, the perceived color of the apple falls into the available gamut for our computer monitor and our printer, so we can in theory make a print that "looks the same" as the apple did. How we would know what, exactly, the original perceived (or physical) color of the apple was I am, I confess, not sure. By which I mean "we don't, and pretending we do is a fool's game."

Even if everything is in our favor, and all the colors are in-gamut, and even if we could get that very apple in that very same sunlight and show it to people next to our print, some people would say that the match was perfect and other people would say that it is not. This is because the physical color of the apple, and the synthesized perceptual color, are in fact quite different physical colors. Two different people will respond to the same physical color slightly differently, so there is no way with our limited set of inks, to mix the inks in such a way to to produce the same visual response as the apple in these two different people.

The point of the synthesized perceptual color, made by mixing a few colors of ink, is not that it is the same color as the apple. It is not. The point is that it induces, in the human eye and visual cortex, the same perception of color as the apple. People are amazingly similar in how they perceive color, but they are not identical.

I haven't even touched on the way that viewing light color affects the physical colors of a print, and therefore the perceived colors. I haven't even touched on the emotional impact of one color balance over another. I have barely touched on the problem of knowing what the original physical color was. I have left out entirely any discussion of how plastic perceived colors are, and how we will tend to see an apple as the same value of "red" because we know it is a red apple, under a wide variety of lighting conditions -- which translate to a wide range of physical colors.

The point here is that when you get your little ColorMunki(tm) out and calibrate your monitor, and get a custom profile built for your printer, and all that crap, your colors are still wrong. Having a "color managed workflow" isn't a magical system which guarantees that you're right. You can't even get the perceptual colors better than "pretty close" in the most scientific and technical sense.

My favorite example here, by the way, is landscape photographers who go on about this stuff. You're taking pictures of stuff under a light source of wildly varying spectra (i.e. the sun) and you're fussing about hyper-accurate color? Pull the other one, it's got bells on!

Should you give up? No. But you should definitely stop worrying about the technical details, and start worrying about making a good picture. Some of you need more accuracy than a "follow your nose and fiddle with it" process will produce, but not very many, and you already know all this stuff.

If you're the kind of person who harangues other people about calibrating their monitor, and having a color managed workflow, you should knock that off. The people who actually know what they're talking about tend to be pretty vague about this stuff, "well, if you really need accuracy.. ", it's the half-ignorant amateurs who really get excited about it.

If you're really excited about it... well, you can do the math.

Transparent

Susan Sontag was very in to the idea of a photograph as a thing. It was a thing, back in the day. There was a physical piece of paper that had a picture on it. Sometimes it was a little rectangle of colored, translucent, material. It was an object, something you could see and touch and taste. I mentioned this in the previous remarks.

Digital imaging changed that. Almost no pictures are things in their own right now. They're an abstract pattern of 1s and 0s, replicated across the multiple disk drives of some cloud thing somewhere, generally. We render those on screens of one sort or another, a computer monitor, a tablet, a phone, sometimes even a digital picture frame.

There's still a thing, but you can't touch it any more, or taste it, and what it actually is is somewhat obscure and technical.

Worse, we generally render these things on a screen that we've become used to treating as a window. We look at many things on that screen. We don't think about the screen, we think of what we're looking at. In the case of a photograph, we're as likely to think of the thing photographed as anything else. The object or objects shown in the photograph are something real, something we could touch or taste. The photograph itself? It's an abstraction. The screen? Invisible and out of our thoughts.

Photographs have become transparent, as well as weightless and frictionless. When we take a picture, we're not taking a photograph any more, we're simply showing our friends, our family, something, this thing, this object or scene we have chosen to photograph. The act of photography is now, far more often than not, essentially equivalent to pointing a thing out to a friend we're walking with. It's the same thing as showing your friend the object in your hands "hey, check this out", it's the same thing as telling your friend to turn on the TV and flip to channel whatever, because you won't believe it.

I just tested with instagram. It takes 7 taps, and whatever I want to do for typing in a description. With a one word description, it took me 20 seconds, including launching the app, to share a picture of my Nikon FE2, which object happens to be sitting in front of me as I type. Instagram is notable in that I can (and did) select a little "effect", which makes us perhaps a little more conscious of the photograph-as-object. This is slightly more difficult than holding out my hand to show a friend an object, but only slightly. Compared to using film, it's indistinguishable from hold-out-my-hand. Check out my Nikon FE2.

There was always an element of this transparency, with a photograph. The essence of photojournalism is the illusion of transparency, that this is what is real, and you're seeing it. The transparency was never so dominant as now. We have to fight, now, to make pictures that are not just windows onto something else. When we think we've won that fight, then we have to fight to get past the "rule of thirds, we didn't you use fill flash, the highlights are blown out" technical irrelevancies.

I'm not saying you have to print, although a print is way to add weight and to force the issue of a photograph as a thing. I do suggest, though, that if you appreciate the photograph as a thing in and of itself, you've got a fight on your hands.

Language of Photography

Over on Disphotic, Lewis Bush asks "Is There a Language of Photography?" I don't really propose to answer that question here, but rather to shed some light on it.

In any representational art there is the art object itself: the photograph, the statue, the painting. Also, there is the thing represented: the model, the mountain, the landscape. Photographs are, I think, unique in that they at least begin with an accurate representation of a real thing. A painting needs no actual model, although often there is one. A statue need not look much like the model, and indeed tends to be idealized or at any rate altered.

A photograph is like a story that is based on a true story, while a painting tends to lean more toward fiction.

In between the photograph and the model, there are some other concepts. The arrangement of masses and lines, perhaps, might be said to be a thing, something we can name and talk about and think about it. That thing, whatever you call it, is neither the photograph nor the model. Perhaps it's something that lies between the two. One might argue that there's a spectrum of things between the photograph-as-an-object and the model-as-an-object.

More on this later, but for now let us think about language specifically.

What does this have to do with a Language of Photography?

The point is that there's "language" embedded in all these layers, potentially. By "language" I mean pretty much anything that communicates something that we can, more or less, agree on. It doesn't have to translate into words, it can be an emotion, a reaction. When communication occurs, it's simply because the maker and the viewer agree to some extent on what it is that is communicated, and that, I consider to be "language" enough.

Since the photograph is first and foremost, based on a real thing, some of the visual elements are simply real things. The expression on the girl's face is not, first and foremost, any part of a language of photography. It's body language. The artist might be using that somehow, but it begins as a real thing based on a language of its own.

Arrangements of light and shadow might be a better choice, since these, while real, are not generally any part of a language of their own. Here we run into the problem of whether any "language" in play is photographic, or part of a more general language of visual art.

There probably are language-like things in play in some photographs, which are specifically photographic. You could reference other photographs, there are lens effects one can use such as depth of field or more generally managing the plane of focus. See also P. H. Emerson. You can use lens flare. The use of monochrome is not exclusive to photography, but it certainly rare elsewhere. Other things, vignettes for instance, are tropes which could apply to any visual art, but appear almost exclusively in photographs.

Regardless, I think any attempt to pull apart the communicative aspects of a photograph into "photographic language" versus everything else is going to be pretty hard.

There are ways to try to express things you want to communicate, when making a picture. Some of them are about directing the model, others are as much about painting as about photographs, and some are purely photographic. I think it might not be the best use of our time to try to categorize them too much, but it's definitely worth our time to think about them.

The more we know and the more conscious we are of everything that goes into a picture, the better the chance we have, surely, of communicating what we want to say.

P.H. Emerson

For reference, Peter Henry Emerson was a photographer working in the last decades of the 19th century, bringing the ideas of Impressionism into Pictorialism, roughly speaking.

I have run across two or three descriptions of Emerson's ideas of focusing, and how to produce an impressionistic effect in the camera. Writers all copy from one another, not as much as people on the Internet, but a lot. The result is that the references I have seen make more or less the same vague reference to the sketchy theories about how eyes work that Emerson was basing his thinking on, and then state briefly that he used "differential focus" to make his pictures soft. Sometimes they mention putting the subject a little out of focus.

There are a couple of points worth making here. Emerson's procedure is considerably more detailed and sensible than these writers make out, and Emerson was right even if his Eye Science was wrong.

The procedure is pretty simple. Focus on the subject, with the aperture wide open. Then, using a combination of narrower apertures (but use the widest one possible) and swings of the camera back, place everything except the subject out of focus to a greater or lesser degree. The use of the swing back may not be familiar to all photographers, although the use of wider apertures surely is. If you don't immediately know what rotating the back of a large camera relative to the lens does, read up on the Scheimpflug principle.

The degree to which Emerson suggests you should put things out of focus is very specific. It is to reproduce as far as possible the impression you have when looking at the scene. You place things which are not the subject out of focus not because of some theory of the eye, but because you are not looking at those things in the scene.

Finally, Emerson suggests putting the subject itself very very slightly out of focus, and only sometimes, to render it more natural looking. This is arguably an error, but even that is not quite clear to me.

Why is Emerson right?

Emerson's Eye Science may have been wrong, but it turns out that he had a pair of these things himself, could use them, and thought about how it felt to use them to look at things. This, not the flawed Eye Science, is essentially what his method is based on. I assume he put the Eye Science into his book to back up his theory, not as the actual source, but that is naturally just a guess.

When we look at an object we perceive that object as sharp, as clearly delineated and detailed. The rest of the scene isn't soft or out of focus, per se but it is out of our attention. The idea of sharp versus soft isn't really all that meaningful in speaking of what we perceive, in any case. What we "see" is a mental construct, bearing only a loose relationship to the actual image captured by the eye. We "see" it all as "sharp" but the stuff in the periphery is less within our attention, it is more extrapolated, interpolated, and just plain made up by the visual cortex, and we're not looking at it.

Imagine, if you will, an 8x10 print made with a normal lens. This print captures a fairly wide scene, one which if we had seen it ourselves, we would have been filling in a lot of periphery with the machinery of peripheral vision. Much of the scene, at any moment, would have been outside our attention. We take this whole thing, and cram it into a small object, a print, right in the center of our vision, where we can "see" the whole thing at once.

This is profoundly unnatural. Put in these terms, it's a little surprising to me that we can make sense of this at all, but we do. I think an argument can be made that the straight photography guys, and in particular the f/64 people, are characterized mainly by a willingness to embrace this unnaturalness. This is a sort of natural endpoint for photography, we trace nature with total accuracy, and then cram it, in a single chunk, into your visual cortex to see what happens. It's not natural, but it's definitely photography.

Emerson correctly perceived that this presents us with a problem, We're going to "see" the scene in the print all at once, we're going to "see" it much more as a single object, with all the elements of the scene as details of that singular object. Presented with the same scene in the real world, we would "see" it quite differently. Perhaps we would perceive the subject fully, in a moment, and only gradually over seconds or even minutes come to perceive the details of everything in the scene.

Emerson proposed quite an elegant solution with his differential focusing. It's not quite modern shallow depth of field, I think Emerson would have had no truck with bokeh. Things were to be soft, but the structure was always to be preserved. We might not "see" the surrounding scene in as much detail as we perceive the subject, but we are aware of it. We know there's a road to the left, a cottage behind, and a lake in the foreground. We just don't care, because we're looking at the girl. So, the photographer should not throw the rest of the scene into a mass of blur, but only soften the surrounding material, and render it less detailed and less important in the print.

In the modern era, I think we might more closely approximate the effect Emerson was looking for by taking a sharp picture, and then rendering a blurred layer over it varying the transparency of that layer from one area to another. Almost transparent over the subject and almost opaque over unimportant background, but never fully transparent or opaque. It is worth noting that extremely high-end modern portrait lenses do almost exactly this, at shocking expense.

In the modern era, especially the acolytes of f/64, we use other constructs to manage the viewer's attention. The use of contrast, saturation, leading lines, and so on, can also help the viewer sort out what to look at. There are a bunch of principles of composition and design which can help to arrange the masses within the frame in some sort of hierarchy of importance. Degree of softness is but one, but it's a neglected one.

Emerson's solution was pretty elegant, and really nothing like "just make it all soft, you know, impressionistic."

It's a Web Of Pictures

People don't read, on the world wide web.

Well, that's not quite right. Still. Find yourself a context in which people can write things, and other people can reply to those things. Write some sort of thoughtful remark, say 200 words or so. Make sure it's on-topic, that is makes a single clear point, and that it backs that point up with a straightforward argument. Now watch for replies. You might have to do this a few times to actually draw a reply.

Almost invariably you will find that even a direct reply -- someone hit a "reply" button, and perhaps quoted some or all of your text -- will make almost no sense. It won't be a reply at all. You might ask yourself if the replier is insane, since your point was quite clear, and yet the reply seems to be about something else entirely.

People don't read, on the web. They're here to kill time, they're here on mobile devices that make reading text quite a chore. One could probably perform a study to measure the average amount of time people will devote to trying to read and grasp a comment, a forum remark, or any other "flow of conversation" snippet of content (as opposed to, say, a longer form news article). I bet the answer would come out to a small number of seconds.

People don't read. Instead, they skim. They pick out keywords and phrases, they try to guess what your position is based on that. They may slot you into a social group "my side" or "their side" if there's some sort of argument going on. Based on this sort of snap judgement, they will they dash off a reply based not on what you said, but what they imagine someone like you might say.

Ok, so what? Andrew's a damn crybaby, and nobody bothers to read what he wrote.

The important point here is that people allocate a very small number of seconds to some content you post. So, you're best off posting a picture.

If you write: went to a party last night, drank too much, it was awesome. Hung out with Billy and Susie, and laughed and laughed. Now I am hungover. people might read it. They might not. It's an impossibly tiny fragment of impossibly tiny text on their iPhone.

If you post a picture of you and Susie and Billy laughing very hard and visibly drunk, you communicate exactly the same thing, and people reading your social media thing will grasp the idea reliably and instantaneously. There is zero effort involved, no reading, no puzzling out of tiny letters. Instead of engaging a linear/reading part of the brain, what's engaged is the picture-recognizing parts of the brain, which work all-at-once.

Memes are somewhere in the middle. There's a picture, but there's words. What's nice about memes is that the structure of the picture with words on it enforces both a large font (easily read on mobile devices) and a very short lump of text (quickly read). It's not quite as instantaneous as a picture alone, but it is grasped by the reader very very fast indeed. It is a fine way to make some point in, nearly, an instant.

It's a world wide web of pictures. It's what people want, it's what they consume.

Hooray, photography for the win! (as civilization crumbles!)

On Use and Idea

Having thought about the idea of use as part of the process of photography I now see it all over the place, of course.

I tend to print small, usually 8x10 at most. This is partly due to expense and equipment, but I have tried to make a virtue of necessity. It is certainly true that it is fashionable to print quite large and I am never one to bow to fashion. I like the intimacy of little prints, it turns out. To the topic at hand, though, one result is that my subjects tend to be quite simple. If your goal is a print 4 inches by 4 inches, you really ought not be putting in a complex and detailed scene. There can be detail of course, but the picture needs to make sense seen simply.

These days I tend to think more and more in terms of the final disposition of the work, use of the work as a whole. Do I see this as a book? How big? Is this a small portfolio of bigger prints? A large portfolio of tiny prints? My vision of the final product drives the work to a surprising degree. How many pictures am I going to need?. How shall I pace myself? How broad of an area should I be exploring? Do I need to expand my concept, or refine and shrink it? If the prints are tiny I need such-and-such a kind of subject, if the prints are bigger I need these other things. If the prints are to be square I need to think of that as I shoot.

It doesn't matter if the final product ever happens. More of my projects due on the vine than get completed, by quite a wide margin.

The point is that by having that use clearly in mind from near the beginning, my overall concept is dramatically sharpened.

Of course I do not begin with a blank slate, and fill in the subject, rendering, idea, and use all at once before making an exposure. It's an iterative process that begins, usually, by more or less random tinkering with a random snap. The tinkering generates the germ of an idea. More pictures generate refinements and an evolving concept. Use crystallizes along with everything else somewhere in here. then I am, as we say, "of to the races"and know what to do next. This might happen half way through, or earlier, or later.

Then, usually, the project doesn't come together anyways, and I shelve the portfolio-in-progress, and return to the beginning. I snap, I tinker. Perhaps I revisit a previously shelved project.

Sometimes, though, it really comes together. That's nice.