Decisive Moments

Lots of people write about The Decisive Moment, with all manner of ideas and analysis. It's not very complicated. When you're looking out at the world, from time to time a moment will arrive when the scene forms a picture. That is, a picture as opposed to an uninteresting jumble of stuff. What follows is roughly a worked example. The result is not the greatest street photograph ever, but it should be illustrative, and that is after all the point.

Some caveats. I am not a street guy. I don't shoot street much, I just take a swing at it every now and then. I recognize and enjoy it, I like the little design and geometry puzzles in Cartier-Bresson's pictures in particular. It's definitely a bit of an acquired taste.

I happened to be sitting in a bus in Vancouver, BC, waiting for the bus to leave to Seattle. The bus had about a half an hour to wait, so I amused myself by taking snaps of what I saw out the window. Across the street was a hair and nail salon, and every now and then one of the employees would step out onto a sort of deck-like structure for a smoke break, or whatever. At the same time, people walked by along the sidewalk.

It occurred to me that there was some potential for an interesting visual interaction between people walking along the sidewalk with people on the deck thing, or maybe with the signage, or something of that sort. I was mainly just idly snapping pictures of people walking on the sidewalk. Mainly girls. I like girls.

Here are some of the snaps:

Most of these are not pictures. They're random assemblages of stuff, including a pretty girl. But wait. That one in the middle:

Note the echoed lines of the legs, echoed in the two sides of the sandwich board. It's not perfect, but it's not terrible. Note also that the man on the deck, the girl, and the sign, all form a triangle. The design, the geometry, isn't great, but it's not terrible. Now if only there's some content.. Ok, there's some stuff with posture and attitude and motion going on. Again, not great, but it's there. Then there's some little details in leaves and things, gives a viewer a little reward for looking.

The main problem of course is that the picture which is present is just a part of the frame. Also, the elements are not particularly well eludicated. So we have to crop and pull things out, emphasize some things, de-emphasize some others. The result isn't gonna be any Henri Cartier-Bresson, but it should be recognizably a product of that school.

Here it is:

As with all of my rare and mildly successful efforts at street, I was looking for something specific, but pretty small. In this case a pedestrian and a man above, in some sort of visual interaction. What I got was that, and fair dose of serendipity. If I'd shot this one stride later, the geometry would have been stronger. Or, if the man had stepped backward 18 inches, my triangle would have been perfect. Some minor changes in his posture would have been nice as well, although I would not change hers for all the tea in China. It would have been great if that car had been positioned differently.

This is, I think, how it really works. You're looking for something, and you get that something, or close, and then luck grants you a bunch of other things in addition, and you end up with something pretty good.

The decisive moment is when there is, for an instant, a picture. In that half hour in Vancouver, I took a bunch of dull snaps, and came quite close to taking a picture. I got close enough to be pretty pleased with it.

A Picture

It took me most of a year, off and on, to make this picture:

To be fair, the "work" involved was sitting around in a coffee shop drinking fancy coffee drinks, keeping my eyes open, and occasionally pressing a button.

It should be obvious, but this is about that moment when a pretty girl walks into a coffee shop. Men glance at her. Just for a moment, but there's a particular way that glance looks. Ultimately, I made this on my birthday when my birthday present was several hours to do with what I pleased. I was pleased go drink coffee. I made one exposure, without looking at the camera, in that 90 minutes of coffee shop time, and this is it.

It's a Winogrand street shot, complete with tilt, shot with the exact opposite of Winogrand's technique. It was possible, for me, because this is a moment that occurs over and over, every 10 or 20 or 30 minutes. The problem is where to sit, and when to press the button. The moment will happen again if you miss it.

So what?

This is a good picture, but it's useless to me. It's a single instance photograph, which is basically a copy of someone else's pictures. I can't do this sort of thing often enough to pull together a coherent portfolio, and having made this I don't feel any particular need to shoot any more street photography. Can I print this and hang it? It doesn't really fit in to my decor, such as it is. It's not clear it fits into anyone's decor. Could I sell it? Is it journalism?

I don't think it's any of those things. This is a picture without a home.

That's a shame, because it's a good picture. One of the better ones I've ever made.

Making the Pictures I Want

This is a followup to the previous, a little discussion of my personal journey, which might shed a little light on what I mean in the previous essay. I'm linking, in here, to quite a few pictures I have shot. Enjoy. Or not.
I've been mucking around with cameras for.. a while. I literally cannot remember when exposure was a puzzlement, it would have been 30 years ago or so, and I suppose I had to struggle with it a bit, but I have no memory of that. The technicalities of making a properly exposed and in-focus picture hold no mysteries for me. I flatter myself that I have long been able to take a decent picture of a thing. A picturesque picture of a shack or a mountain, a moderately flattering picture of a girl, and so on.

About three years ago I embarked on one of those stupid P52 things. I tried to take a decent picture every week for a year, and mostly succeeded. The result was an incoherent mass of mostly decent pictures. I learned a few things, started to get more serious about using flash, and discovered a couple of "looks" I sort of liked.

Somewhere in there I started shooting nudes, experimenting with outré lighting idioms and so on. I learned a few more things about looks that I liked. Those pictures are extremely private. Sorry.

The year following my interesting but uninspiring P52 project I made several abortive attempts at portfolios. I was beginning to understand that the portfolio is really what I wanted to be aiming at. I started shooting people walking dogs, which I think is definitely a good subject. I discovered that I am not, or at any rate was not, the artist to make much of anything of that subject. There was, and still are, occasional feints at street photography. I'm also not Henri Cartier-Bresson, it turns out. None of these subject/method based ideas really seemed to go anywhere. I was not satisfied by the work, I did not feel that it was going anywhere. It seemed banal and uninteresting after a handful of moderately successful pictures.

I don't think that, I can see no reason why, a subject based idea isn't good. I just haven't been able to make one work yet to my satisfaction. I did recently shoot a subject-based mini-portfolio which pleases me moderately well, but this is mainly because I approve of the content so much. The pictures are OK, but the meaning is something that matters to me.

What has worked best for me started with a single visual effect. I ran across a description of how to digitally simulate an enlarger diffusion effect. This effectively "flares" the darker areas into the lighter ones, to a variable degree. It's absolutely dead sexy when applied to nudes, especially female nudes. Holy cow. Yum. Probably at random I applied it to a picture of a flower. Boy oh boy did I like that effect.

At this point I started to shoot flowers in the way I had been shooting nudes. Mostly quite dark. A lot of snoots, a lot of lighting from underneath or behind. Always, enlarger diffusion to taste. A little later, I started to apply the inverse of enlarger diffusion to high-key pictures, and finally I started to airbrush all over everything in a late pictorialist fashion, although possibly with a lighter touch. I shot a lot of these things, and wound up with a coherent portfolio of 27 pictures that I quite like. I am satisfied with them.

What worked for me, here, was to start with a single visual motif: the flower, shot like a fine art nude on black. I inverted the ideas, I modified them, I extended the theme out from there in coherent and sensible ways. With some fits and starts, Quite a lot of things didn't work, but some things did. The result is a coherent set of visual motifs, applied to a common subject. The result is a little portfolio of work that "means" something for me, that satisfies me in a way that previous work has not.

Notice that this portfolio was built with a bunch of stuff I had picked up over the previous years: use of flash, outré lighting idioms, general styling from nudes, enlarger diffusion. It is very reasonable to view this satisfying work as the direct result of a bunch of less satisfying labor. It is reasonable to view this as a successful effort which occurred in the natural process of trying ideas out, and building visual vocabulary, in a series of fits and starts which eventually found a path through to some satisfying place after failing for several years of concerted effort.

As of this writing, I am continuing to pursue these ideas. Can these visual motifs be applied and extended to other subjects, in a similarly coherent way? Can I make something else look like my flowers? Obviously I could shoot some nudes in this style, and that might make a good addition to the portfolio. There might be something to be said about the relationship between flowers and nudes, perhaps. Perhaps there are other subjects out there that are less obvious, but which would extend the body of work further, but in a coherent and structured way.

The point of the process I sketch here and in the previous essay is not that it always works, or that it works easily or quickly. The point is simply that this is the only process that I have been able to discover that works at all.

Personal Journeys

This post is largely about me, but the plan is that my personal tale will provide some sort of more widely applicable ideas. It is in some ways a followup to this post.

Here is a picture I took:

I put it out there for "critique" on some random photography forum, where it was quite well received. There's some things to quibble about with it, for sure, but basically it's a very likable picture and people like it. I made it that way. I went out with malice aforethought to take a likable picture, and Seattle graced me with a good dose of luck, and here we are.

I don't like it it. At all. I hate myself a little for shooting it. That picture looks like anyone with a modicum of color and design sense could have shot it. Pictures just like it show up on flickr's Explore, and in every other photo sharing site's Trending, Hot, Buzz, Whatever lists. It's likable, and extremely generic. Pictures like it are shot by the thousands every day, and many of them don't have the technical quibbles this one is saddled with. Normally when I see a picture like this, I raise the camera to my eye, and then lower it. It's just not interesting to me.

This doesn't mean that it's bad. It's not bad, it's pretty good. It's very likable. It just doesn't look like something I shot.

Here is another picture I shot:

This was also offered for critique. Same forum. Boy was it not liked! Nobody liked it. I made it with a lot of formal structure, and I happen to think it's interesting, and I like it. Everyone else sees a big confusing dead space of nothing right in the middle and can't get past that. They don't like it, at all.

Ok, so that makes it bad, by my own standards. If more or less regular people just can't stand to look at your picture, then you're not connecting, you're not communicating, you're not garnering a reaction. The work isn't good. So be it. I still like it.

This picture looks like something I shot. It's too much to hope in this world of a trillion pictures that an aficionado could look at a picture and say a priori that it is a Molitor. It is not unreasonable that the same aficionado could look at it after learning that it is a Molitor, and discern clearly that it is consistent with Molitor's other work. It is not unreasonable that my work could be a coherent and visually related body of work.

I want to shoot things that look like I shot them, and that people like. So far, not a lot of luck. It's hard to do, since people mostly like things they've seen before, and things they've seen before don't look very individualistic.

Lots of people have no such ambitions. Some guys just want to duplicate Ansel Adams photos, and that's OK. More power to 'em. Lots and lots of people just want to make pictures that hit flickr's Explore, or similar. That's OK too. They're both technically and artistically challenging things to do.

That's just not what I want to do.

A Brief Interlude of Vanity

I've been working in Mountain View this last week, staying at a hotel on Fairchild Drive and walking down Fairchild every morning to catch the train. This morning, I took the camera along, and made this little portfolio of what there is to see on this half mile stretch of this piece of road. The name is storied, Fairchild meant a very great deal to Silicon Valley. The street itself is, well, look at the pictures. It's an interesting study in contrasts, let's say.

Fairchild Dr, Mountain View, CA.

I make neither claims nor excuses for these pictures.

Hello Readers!

I have been peering at the stats for this blog and I seem to have a pretty regular community of readers, somehow. A year ago it was pretty much just robots.

Greetings, hello, and welcome. I hope I occasionally say things that are interesting! Feel free to comment, I do have moderation turned on, but I will let anything through unmodified except just straight out insults. Feel free to disagree with me, that's not an insult at all. That just shows you're plugged in.

There is no schedule for updates, and in fact updates will likely be thin specifically for the next couple weeks as I am travelling.

My Book!

As remarked in an earlier post, I wrote a book.

I have sold twenty copies of the thing! That is about 15 more than I was expecting. I only know for sure who bought two of them, although I suspect another few copies have gone to friends and acquaintances who are too discreet to mention it. If I sell about another 125, amazon might cut me a check! Also, I have garnered two reviews, both 5 stars (i.e. excellent). I am irrationally pleased.

See also the Schwag page off to the right, if you would like to join the groundswell of enthusiasm.

I wrote a book

It's called Intermediate Photography and you can buy it for Kindle (or compatible device) by clicking here.

Nothing in it will be surprising to regular readers of this blog, but I do expand on some things and clarify others, and I bring in a bunch of material from these 19th century books on composition and painting I've been reading. It's essentially a book about composition for photographers.

There are not very many pictures in it. It's short, novella length. There is one color picture, so if your eBook reader isn't color, that example will be pretty much lost on you.

I don't expect it to sell well. To put it mildly. But by golly it's out there, so now there's no excuse for all the crummy rule of thirds golden triangle rubbish!

Portfolio

I shot a portfolio: a bunch of flower pictures.

After determining a few months ago that I was a dilettante and simply not well suited to staying on task enough to actually shoot a coherent portfolio of material, of course I immediately got an idea and starting shooting one. It's not a great essay on man's inhumanity to man, but I think there's some pretty nice pictures in it.

This was also a little voyage of discovery for me. It turns out that I am a pictorialist of sorts. This might be related to ny constant plugging of Henry Robinson lately.

I'll probably reward myself with a blurb book soonish. Maybe I'll even let members of the public buy it, so I can be astonished at the complete lack of reception. After all, now that I am up to dozens and dozens of hits a month on this blog, perhaps it's time to start monetizing it!

A Photo

This is one of mine.

It's not a technically strong photograph, prints bigger than about 5x7 would look all fuzzy and icky. It was shot with some 8 megapixel point&shoot up in Tuolumne Meadows.
Anyways, it's one of the better photographs I've ever made. It has good balance of forms, some nice echoed shapes and, of course, a good subject rendered according to the visual ideas of Ansel Adams. Not, I hasten to clarify, that I consider this photograph on par with his, merely that my handling of the composition and final rendering are clearly informed by a lot of Adams' photographs. In particular, the relatively high contrast (far outside what was actually present in the scene) and the deep shadows.
The dark shadows, high contrast, and especially the high local contrast in the clouds and the rock, give a sense of drama. The low viewpoint, looking (as one must) up at the great rock formation, enhances this. If you're interested, feel free to save off a copy and see what happens when you reduce the contrast, or do some "perspective correction" to reduce that sense of looking up.