Standard Lenses

I don't much care about the whys and the details of this lens versus that. But since I went to the trouble of calling Ming out yet again, I got to thinking about it.

I shoot a little long almost all the time. Mainly because I love this one lens on this one camera, it's so damn fine, blah blah. But I can rationalize it by remarking that I print small, 6" to 12" on the diagonal, and I put prints in books which I read at 16" to 30", let's say. So "Standard" should be a bit long. It's perspective-accurate, more or less. That really means something like neutral, it doesn't feel weird, it just looks like a picture.

Project I'm fuckin' around with from time to time is about peering out, about hiding and looking out. A little claustrophobic, a little fearful. Turns out the 300mm lens on the crop body with some out of focus crap in the foreground more or less framing the view does a nice job here.

I can't manage wide. Too much crap in the frame, I don't know what to do with it. Same like color, I am just lost.

Anyways, my advice is to know what it looks like to use this lens or that lens, and then think about that when you're trying to figure out how to handle some idea. Don't spend a lot of time on "well, a wide lens emphasizes the foreground more" or whatever, just know what it looks like, and see if that helps to make sense of whatever you're trying to do. A wide lens, a long lens, a standard lens, they all can do 100 different things in terms of your pictures. A wide lens might emphasize this, or distort that, or it might not. The point is that it looks wide.

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.

Photography is Easy

John Camp made a very simple but ultimately wise remark, elsewhere. He said, this may not be an exact quote, "Photography is easy".

It is. You don't have to muck about learning to weld, or how clay works, or how to use a chisel. You don't need to learn how to mix colors, or what the difference between painting wet on wet and wet on dry are, and all this technique so many of the other arts demand. You walk around a bit, you point the damn thing, and you press a button. It's just not that hard.

The trouble here, though, is that you cannot baffle people with your technique. You're gonna have to scrape up an idea, someplace, or at least something pretty to look at. An idea is probably better, in the long run.

It's just you and your muse, and you're buck naked. Go.

Of course, you can try to baffle people with your technique. You can rattle on about resolution and color this and Zeiss Otus that and ergonomics the other thing. But it's all just bullshit, and if you're doing it, you probably have a little nagging voice somewhere in the back of your head saying "you suck, better distract your audience with some bullshit about microcontrast or the ineffable look of medium format."

Ultimately, if you're paying attention, that microconstrast and the ineffable look of medium format don't mean a goddamned thing. Yeah, they're real effects, to some extent. You have to be a bit careful, and people do tend to fall headfirst into a sort of audiophile world of 1% science and 99% crap that's not real but still is very very expensive indeed. But what do they accomplish, in terms of the idea? Not one thing. Most people can't even see this stuff, not even the parts of it that are actually real, visible, effects. Most people will see your idea, if you deliver it with a blunt enough stick.

Our internets are awash in people who want to buy expensive shit, and fool around trying to wring the last erg of technical cocksucking out of their expensive shit. Then, because they know in their heart of hearts that they're barking up the wrong tree, they attempt to justify it in terms of the Art They Want To Make. "My vision", they will say, "my vision cannot be realized without the incredibly wide color gamut of the Phase One DICKSUCKER 1200" and then they show us pictures of Antarctica which is, let us review, pretty much white. With occasional penguins (black).

These people are trying to complexify a simple task, and they are doing it because they are laboring under a 100-year-dead idea that Art has something to do with Hard To Do. Suffering under this idea from the Victorian Stone Age, they feel the need to show that photography too has tons of hard technique in it, just like carving in marble, or ballet, and that therefore their work is Art.

Wake up and smell the Duchamp, sheeple!

Art doesn't have to be technically hard. Photography is easy. Ideas are hard.

Go scrape up an idea, point your camera (whatever it is) and press the button. You may whisper "click" as you do so. It's ok.

At That Rate...

An inherent problem with being an internet-famous photographer is the rate at which you have to churn out new work. This is always one of the more daunting obstacles to my occasional plans to go scam the plebes on Flickr or wherever.

If you're internet-famous, or want to be, you've gotta have a feed. Whether you're posting on Flickr or Instagram, or on some forums, or on your own blog, new content is king. If you're just putting out a new portfolio of six pictures every few months, it doesn't matter how many people you follow. You have to generate, at a minimum, a couple new pictures a week. Better if you can do a little group of three or four about every two days.

The is absolutely opposed to being serious. Nobody has new ideas at that rate. Therefore you are pumping out more or less the same ideas, or no ideas at all.

The best you could do, in terms of being serious, is to continuously share out work in progress. Ideas as they evolve, half finished, half baked work, tossed out there at the most vulnerable moment. This is the time when you're groping for the final form, trying to find the ultimate expression, or at any rate your best try at it. This is probably not the best time to let the masses start helping out, unless you're after some crazy internet/collaboration thing.

Commercial and retail people do a lot better here, by there way. They're grinding out the same ideas over and over, but that's kind of the job. And then they can talk about the gear they're using, and the new gear they're gonna buy, and so on. It totally works, there.

Two Ways Of Life

(I am being cute in the title. Google it if you want to learn a little history of photography)

There are people, lots and lots of them, who are trying to technique, to gear, and to think their way to great photos. They treat it as a rational process. A problem to be solved with methods, tools, and thinking. Ming Thein's recent photo essay on trees is a great example. He's trying really really hard. He's got the gear. He's got the theory. He's even got some ideas. They are essentially rational ideas, ideas that he can express in words and then attempt to execute as-is. I think. I mean, he could be just twitting us, but let's be charitable.

Then there are people, often people who have just picked up the camera, who want to just feel their way to greatness. Perhaps their natural talent and freakishly sensitive depth of feeling will show them the way.

Both, of course, are wrong.

You need, of course, both. I advocate for more-or-less infinite use of thinking and skull-sweat, rational methods to an absurd degree, but even I know that's not the whole answer. It's just something to do while the real answer is in process.

Thinking about things, practicing, looking at pictures, even buying and owning gear, all this can be worthwhile. It creates a fertile ground in which your inspirations can grow. But ultimately, some non-verbal part of you is going to have to grind out something visual you can use. A visual ideas that expresses, here and now, what you want to say. Perhaps your id merely makes as affirmative grunt to some idea you're consciously tried out.

Still, that non verbal part has to get involved, otherwise you're just shooting what you can verbalize, and then, well, why not write an essay? Words are a marvelously efficient way to express verbal things. If you can think your way through to it, then so can someone else. That is, arguably, the entire point of rational processes -- someone else can arrive at the same answer with the same methods.

Rational processes are marvelous for science and engineering, where being able to agree on truth is of some importance. They are arguably anathema to Art, where the point is something about new truths, personal truths, truths which shift and change as you absorb them.

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."

Why Isn't It Hot?

There's a whole genre of photos I think of as 'affluent white guy goes to Thailand.' You probably know the ones.

Small ancient woman in funny hat selling colorful things.
Guy in funny hat in rice paddy. Maybe with ox.
Solitary monk looking serene.
Line of young monks. Saffron robes.
Distant mist-enshrouded hills/ridge beyond green fields.

Etc. The theme is generally serenity with a bit of the mystery of the east. Look how foreign and strange. Look how serene. How strangely beautiful. You can shoot these things outside of Thailand, obviously, and you needn't actually be white to do it. But here's a question for you: why isn't it hot in these pictures?

I've never been and don't have a lot of interest. But every single written or spoken description of the area says: chaotic, loud, often squalid, and mind-destroyingly hot. I literally cannot bring to mind a single written description of anywhere in southeast asia that suggests anything of serenity.

The pictures and the descriptions seem to be from completely different places. What on earth is going on?

I'm pretty sure that when amateurs go to Laos or wherever, they're not really there to take photos of Laos. They're there to crank out the pictures they've seen online or in magazines of the Mysterious Orient. And so we get nothing of their impression of Laos at all, nothing of their experience, nothing new, nothing true. Just copies of copies of copies of false pictures.

See also Havana, Cuba. It is apparently also not at all hot in Havana, but all walls have a patina of peeling paint and yet none are freshly painted and none are bare. The Communists, one is left to assume, have perfected a way to preserve paint eternally in a picturesquely peeling state. One wonders if all the beautifully preserved Chevys are part of this strange alchemy.

And so it goes with the various photo-tourism spots. It's devolved to trophy hunting, and that's a shame. You spend ten grand or whatever getting out somewhere really interesting, someplace about which surely, if you have more sensitivity than a melon, you have some strong reaction, impression, idea. And you squander that by shooting the Trophy Photos instead of something personal, something meaningful. Something, one imagines, perhaps even important.

People are different, and I know I am slower than most. Still, a major reason I never consider going on some photo safari is that I know I cant'd do anything in three days. Chuck me into Vietnam or Nigeria on a whirlwind tour, and I'd be lucky to crank out a couple trophies. There's just no point in shooting, unless I've got a month to sort through the impressions and develop an approach. I might go, but I wouldn't shoot. Well. Snapshots. My wife in front of the Eiffel Tower, my children in front of a charging lion, that kind of thing.

On the one hand, I can see that there is pleasure in producing even lame Steve McCurries, but on the other hand, what a waste.

Are you serious, or are you just noodling at a piano you cannot really play?

Ephemera

I am back and forth on this one.

On the one hand, most contemporary photography is ephemera. Something to post to my social media presence, liked or ignored, and then we're on to the next thing. Photographs persist, but down the timeline, where they might as well not.

On the other hand, perhaps one should aspire to do something else, something not ephemeral. I make prints, and I stick them in to books. That's more permanent, more solid. Wherever the book is, it's a present object that is there, not lost in some digital history, 17 clicks out of sight. It's right there on the shelf. I can see the spine of it.

But still I embrace the ephemeral nature of it. Ultimately, despite the best efforts of Ansel Adams, selenium toning, and archival washing, we're making pictures on paper, a substance not really well known for its properties of longevity. Sure, a couple hundred years or so, if you're careful. But the stuff rips, it burns, it doesn't like getting wet. We're not talking bronze here, it's not marble. It's paper.

Books? Also paper. Also flammable, don't like getting wet, and so on.

I use a lot of machine prints from down the street, 19 cents a copy. The print will look fine, most likely, when the book bites the dust. And if it doesn't? Well, that's OK too. The point is to have made it, not to have it endure forever.

So I continue to waffle, or perhaps to straddle some line. Ephemeral, but solid, physical. Ephemeral, but not too ephemeral.

"How do you capture emotions?"

I ran across a thread entitled "How do you capture emotions?" in a forum I skim from time to time.

The stock answers to this and all other essentially artistic questions, all questions which don't resolve to some immediate technical solution, are:

• Practice, practice, practice!
• Horizontal lines create feelings of... yellow makes people feel... etc

Regular readers will be able to predict accurately that I think these are bunk. Well, not quite bunk, there are germs of truth.

To address the first one, undirected practice is almost completely worthless. Even focused practice, where you shoot and examine your work, is nearly useless. To get places efficiently, one can go quite a bit beyond that. Spending 10,000 hours taking 'properly exposed' photos from eye level will teach you very little.

To address the second, well, these things are all neat ideas, but presenting them as fixed rules is quite harmful. They are not fixed.

The correct answer is directed practice. You want to try things out, specific things. You want to learn what the visual effects actually are of the technical things you can do. What does this cactus look like up close? in B&W? What if you shoot it dark? Bright? In the morning? From far away with a very long lens?

This develops a visual vocabulary. By doing and looking, you learn at a visceral level what is possible, visually. You may learn some trends about horizontal lines and the color yellow along the way, but more usefully you will develop an intimate photographic idea of what it looks like when you do that, or that, or this other thing.

Practice thus, look at lots of other photographs (and maybe some paintings), and you'll develop a deep vocabulary of what is visually possible, together with the technical mastery to employ that vocabulary.

Now look at the thing you're trying to shoot, and think about what you're trying to say, what emotion you're trying to capture. Riffle through your vocabulary "words" of visual effects, and visualize roughly what they look like. You will, with luck, get a couple ideas. It's possible that you'll suddenly see that enhancing the yellow colors will make the place feel cold, and that the horizontal lines will make it feel dynamic. That's not usually how it goes, but maybe it's just what will happen with the rock you're trying to make feel happy.

So, the first one is true, as well as false. Practice, but don't just go poke keys on the piano at random. Learn your scales and chords, and listen to them.

So, the second one is true in a way as well. It's about knowing what diagonal lines, dark shadows, and the color red look like. They're gonna do something, it's up to you to see what they're gonna do.

There's a bunch of exercises over on my Introduction to Photography thing that might help here. They're supposed to.

Making Archetypes, Imagining Workshops

Every now and then I resolve to go shoot a pile of those awful archetypes that clutter up Flickr and 500px. Generally street/urban, so I don't have to drive all over tarnation and wait for the damned golden hour. My idea varies. A portfolio cranked out one afternoon to prove how easy this shit out to grind out. Sometimes I'm going to open a Flickr account and work my way up to thousands of followers which I will then monetize or whatever.

It always ends the same way. I go shoot for an hour. I load up 150 shots on the computer and sift it down to an A list of 3 or 4 or 8 or whatever, and a slightly larger B reel.

Then I can't bear to look at them any more. Usually I've got a small handful of photos that would serve. 'Process' them a bit, edit the EXIF so they look like they were taken with an expensive camera, and I'm good to go. I dunno if I can grind out terrible landscapes, but I can produce urban observational quasi-street at a rate of probably 3 or 4 an hour. Counting 'processing' and so on' I'm confident that I could pump out 2 an hour more or less forever. Except that I'd kill myself.

I just can't do it. It's not that I'm an honest guy and can't bear to go through with a scam. I'd love to scam a bunch of people on 500px. I can't bear to look at these photos. I can't bear to spend my time polishing these pigs up in the approved fashion. They're pointless stupid photos, by design.

So the whole project goes in the dumpster and I go back to something that's just going to cost money, with no chance of making any.

What makes this thing something of interest to me is that I have no problem at all doing precisely this at the piano.

Grinding out a decent rendition of Bach's Prelude in C (a very beautiful, very easy to play, piece of music) gives me great pleasure. I'm not trying to express anything, I'm just trying to bang the right keys in the right order, with a respectable approximation of the force indicated on the sheet music. Grinding this thing out respectably is, surely, pretty close to the same achievement as crapping out some terrible Urban Contemporary photograph.

There are a few differences.

Nobody listens to me noodling at the piano and suggests that I ought to take it up as a profession. People looking at photographs are notoriously wont to make just that suggestion, based apparently on the observation that your pictures are "clear" whatever that even means.

I do not kid myself that I might someday become a professional piano player. That simply isn't going to happen. I don't know much about piano playing, but I do know enough to visualize the vast gulf that exists between me and the lowest paid piano player.

I do not kid myself that I can teach the piano to anyone else. Sure, I have a few simple suggestions for the genuinely ignorant, based on memories of my own lessons, but it turns out that teaching piano is a profession in its own right. Again, I am aware of the vast gulf, etc.

Photographers are weirdly unaware of the same vast gulfs. They'll cheerfully start offering up workshops, and even more weirdly other photographers will sign up for them. Most workshops appear to be travel to a beautiful location and take an metric fuckton of snapshots while there, and every night get together with a bunch of like-minded twats to drink and "critique" one another's work. In other words, it's not really about learning anything. It's about hanging out with other gearheads on vacation.

There are no workshops offered in Bellingham, WA, although there are 100s of workshops being offered to photographers every single day of the year. They're all in Venice, or Hawaii, or Antarctica.

I try to envision the same thing for piano players. Go to Vienna, and hang out at the Bösendorfer factory, noodling away on pianos with other people who also cannot play very well, while receiving lessons from some dope who has no idea either how to play the piano, or how to teach people how to play? Then go get drunk?

Doesn't that sound awesome?

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?

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.

How Do I Find That Photograph?

So you're looking at something, and you think there might be a picture there.

A lot of people point their camera at it and push the button and they're done. Or they think for a second about shit like leading lines and isolating the subject, or whatever. They make some compositional choices based on what they know, and they do that, and then they push the button.

That will certainly expose a sensing system of some sort, but it's only going to make a photograph by accident.

Why do you think there's a picture there? How does it make you feel? What should it make you feel? What could it make you feel?

Let's say you see a gorgeous landscape. Great.

If you're a 500px photographer looking for upvotes, you're going to get a tripod, go somewhere hard to get to in hopes that your picture won't be an exact copy of someone else's, you're going to screw your Lee Big Stopper on the lens, you're going to take about a 60 second exposure. Then you're going to clean it up to the nines, push the greens to the limit, and post that piece of shit. And maybe you'll get a bunch of upvotes.

If you're me, maybe you take a few documentation shots just to remember what it looks like for later. You're going to think about it. What could this be? Could this be a gothic nightmare? A sun-drenched fairyland (see also: 500px photographer)? Is it majestic or bucolic? Is it beautiful, mundane, or both? Is it a maze of cliches? What's my concept here?

If there's no concept, there's no picture. Screw that. I have better things to do than make copies of photographs. I could, sure. But what would be the point?

If there is a concept, what am I going to need to make it happen? How do I present gothic, or bucolic, or cliched? How am I going to shoot that landscape, instead of the one I see in my documentation shots, instead of the ones I see on 500px?

What technical and compositional choices can I make to produce something that might hit the concept? What equipment will I need to execute those?

Then, if you're me, you go out and you do that. Probably you try several times. Quite likely the concept does not survive, but mutates, and becomes something related to the original but different. Sometimes the concept mutates into something non-viable, and it dies. That's OK too.

This is how Ansel Adams worked, essentially. Sometimes it took a couple years to get the shot that carried the concept. It worked out pretty often for Ansel. He was pretty stingy with the shutter button.

This is how Henri Cartier-Bresson worked, but it never took very long. And a lot of the time it didn't work out. Henri was pretty button-happy.

That's how you make photographs instead of copies of photos, or just random crummy assemblages of color.

At any rate, it's one way to do it.

I'll be breaking down the process a bit more in upcoming posts. I have more to say.

On "Workflow"

Digital photographers seem to obsess, sometimes, over this idea of "workflow". This is the work that occurs after the shutter press and before the final result, whatever that is. There's a lot of "here is my workflow" or "what is your workflow?" floating around out there. People write up their workflow, "Step 3: Level the Horizon" and 17 other absurd tiny steps.

It's not that this is a terrible thing. The great leap forward digital has given us is the ability to do a bunch of stuff after the shutter press and before the final result. That's a good thing.

I see two things that are bad about it, however.

The first thing is the obsession over it. It's just some stuff you do, it's not the heart of your creative process. Your art isn't in your "workflow" unless you're a digital painter. If you're a photographer, the workflow should be secondary, it should enhance your photography. A common workflow will tend to create similarity between photographs, which is great for a portfolio or other body of work which is supposed to be coherent.

Which leads to the other problem. If you standardize your workflow, then you apply it to everything you do, whether the process is appropriate or not. All your landscapes look the same, whether they're supposed to or not. Your portraits looks kind of like your landscapes which look kind of like your still lifes.

Standardize workflow as appropriate. It's just a tool, use it as such. When a tool suits the job at hand, use it. When it does not, set it aside and take another tool, a tool that does suit the job.

Do you make bespoke wooden furniture, or are you a chisel-user?

On Critique

I am on the record, several times I think, as being in favor of critique. Over the last year or so, my thinking has, shall we say, evolved. Mainly because I've been watching the process as it plays out on the internet in some detail.

I still believe in it. How can I not? If Art in general, and photography in particular, is about communication, how can we not devote some effort to testing and refining our ability to communicate?

Now, though, I think one must take at least a two pronged approach. Really useful critique of an individual piece has to be a conversation, you have to probe a little. This means that you need to find someone who will put up with a conversation, who is willing to be probed a little. Good luck with that, they're out there, but they're wildly outnumbered by pompous asses who want to force you to comply with local norms.

This does not mean that you should ignore the pompous asses and their local norms. The little bits of local dogma that circulate in one context or another (and they are local, they'll always cite Rembrandt but that's a bunch of rubbish) are based on something and it's not a waste of time to work out what the something is. You can add that to your little store of ideas, of things people like. Occasionally you can add it to your list of things not to do.

In any case, when you're dealing with the tribal behaviors of a camera club or internet group of some sort, keep in mind that you're not there to "learn" what they tell you. As a general, albeit not universal, rule they have nothing of interest to tell you. You are there to unpack their belief system, and to get at the underlying ideas of it. That's actually interesting.

So, just smile, nod, and think "idiot" very very quietly to yourself. And keep your eyes open for someone who's open to a conversation.

At some point I'm going to investigate paying for portfolio review. With the right person, I suspect this might be useful. Mostly, of course, the people offering to do it are charlatans, but I'm pretty sure they're not all.

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.

The Pictures You Take Before The Pictures You Want To Take

I have railed against this before, but I'm going to take another stab.

Lots of people who imagine themselves as serious about photography seem to be stuck practicing. They're taking the pictures they feel they need to take before they can get to taking the pictures they actually want to take. They're testing, they're shopping. They're getting together the gear and the skills they're going to need to take the pictures they actually want to take.

Some people do this forever.

Stop it.

Do you want to take aerial photographs? Stop mucking about shopping for the right lens, and discussing what the best camera is. Go get your pilot's license, buy a drone or a kite, or learn to skydive. Do it now.

Do you want to shoot erotica? Stop shopping for lights and modifiers, stop arguing about scrims versus beauty lights on internet forums, stop reading strobist and making tests with a basketball. Hire a model who will get naked, and take some pictures. Do it now. Get on modelmayhem or onemodelplace or whatever, find a model you like, and make contact. Contact 3 or more, in fact. GO.

Do you want to take large format photographs from the top of the Burj Khalifa? You will need to buy a large format camera, a plane ticket to Dubai, and you'll need to figure out how to get a permit. Go get started. Stop reading up on what the lightest field camera is, just go buy something that's in your budget, and GO.

I see people, even quite good photographers, posting pictures with some commentary along the lines of I was out and about and I saw this and I thought I'd shoot a little series and it makes me sad. You're pretty good, and you're wasting your time and talent taking pretty good pictures of .. stuff .. for no apparent reason except to post them on the internets so people can look at them and, maybe, tell you that you're pretty good.

Figure out what you want to do, and do that. If you don't know what you want to do, then stop farting around and figure out what it is you want to do. And then go do that.

Take the pictures you want to take, not the pictures that come before those.

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.

Weightless

This is a theme I've visited a few times in the past, here, for instance or here. The label "social media" will turn up a bunch more.

Time was, pictures had weight. Paintings, of course, were for posterity. They were for the unending future, for tomorrow but also for future generations, a permanent object. Photographs, on film, were also for the future. A instant was frozen, so we'd have that to look at next year, ten years hence, or when we were old. We took pictures of the kids so we'd have those moments in the future, and so our kids would have those moments to look back on when they were grown.

Pressing the shutter button cost something. A few cents for film, a few cents for processing, a few cents for a print. A factor at least as important and perhap moreso: the print bore the weight of permanence, of time. Susan Sontag remarked, glibly, that we did not photograph important moments, but that moments became important because they were photographed. While there's some truth to that, there was still a minimum bar of inherent importance the moment had to pass. We did not photograph our lunch, our coffee, that guy's hat. At least, not very much. There's a burden imposed on us when we commit some scene, some viewed object, to the permanent record, and we felt that as much as we felt the literal cost of film and print.

I've said most of this before.

With the idea of "use" in hand, though, we can push a little further. In past times, especially in the era of film, the "use" for a picture was almost always tied up in permanence. We made pictures because we wanted to use them, in some long-term way. The idea of taking a picture so that we should show a picture of a thing to our friends, and then throw the picture out, was absurd. Photographs might not be oil paintings, but they were certainly not so lightweight that we'd use them once and then discard them.

Besides, with the delays inherent in processing and printing, it would have been far too tedious.

Now, taking a picture is free. Sharing it is frictionless and instantaneous. And as a consequence, we are freed from the weight of time and of permanence. Photographs are free to be ephemera. They are an extension of our sight, we share a photograph thoughtlessly, trivially, not as an object in its own right, but as glimpse at the underlying thing. When a photograph is weightless and frictionless, the "use" can be anything at all, however trivial.

Mike, over on ToP, asks if we're in the middle of a new fad for photography. I think we're in the middle of something much bigger and more important, a sea change in the way we relate to photographs. Photographs are weightless and frictionless now. They float, they move, the appear and vanish. We are OK with that. This younger generations treat that as normal.

As artists, we seem to lean toward making things with weight. This probably explains, to a degree, the minor trend toward film, wet plate, and other permanent methods. It's a backlash against that weightlessness and ephemerality. The artists seeks to distinguish his work from the ephemera, to distinguish his work as permanent, as massy, as not trivial.

Here's a closing thought for the day: Why? If modern art has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that art need not be permanent. Ephemeral is OK. Tino Seghal, Banksy, many others. What can you make of that, in your own work?