Occasionally one runs across people who worry about developing a personal style, or who talk about their personal style, or who think it is important that a photographer have a personal style. Adam Marelli has a pretty insightful essay here.
Style shouldn't be about you. It should serve the picture, or the portfolio, or the show. The style should support and clarify the idea, the meaning. And by the by, there should be an idea, or some meaning, of some sort.
If you do develop a personal style, it's because the work you do tends to cover some of the same ground, in some sense, over and over. It's because the meanings overlap, and therefore the styles which support those meanings overlap, and therefore the work tends to look similar along certain stylistic lines.
If you're just doing the same thing over and over because it's your thing, you're not an artist with a distinctive personal style at all. You're a one trick pony, and that is a different thing entirely.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Sunday, January 26, 2014
By The Way
If you cannot grasp the difference between these two sentences:
It is possible to take excellent pictures with any camera.
Every excellent picture can be made by any camera
then you need to get off the internet and think about it until you can. If I see another "does equipment matter?" "no it does not!" "but you cannot take a picture of an eagle's nose hairs with a kit lens!" discussion I shall scream.
It is possible to take excellent pictures with any camera.
Every excellent picture can be made by any camera
then you need to get off the internet and think about it until you can. If I see another "does equipment matter?" "no it does not!" "but you cannot take a picture of an eagle's nose hairs with a kit lens!" discussion I shall scream.
On Creativity
Yet another dumb thing we see given as advice is to simply shoot. I've talked a little about that here, quite some time ago. There's a variant in which one is given or invents little assignments. These are supposed to inspire you or something. Sometimes they're pitched as a way to break through a creative block. Go outside now and shoot every red object you see!
This is all well and good, and it even works as far as it goes. It is closely allied to the advice given to the blocked writer: just write, jam words into the page, any words at all. This works, and it works very very well. The difference is that the writer is going somewhere. The writer may have something in mind, perhaps 2500 words on the Chesapeake Bay bridge tunnel. Even if not at the beginning, the writer does not aim to simply have a bunch of words on the page. The end goal is something coherent, an essay, a short story, an article, a novel.
The corresponding advice to the photographer essentially leaves that hapless soul with a bunch of words. Yes, you took a bunch of pictures out the window of a moving car, and now you feel ever so inspired. What now? That feeling of inspiration will only take you so far, eventually you will realize that you still don't have any ideas, except perhaps to take pictures out the car window.
Inspiration is not a stand alone concept. An inspiration, a eureka moment, contains the solution to a problem. It is not some bullshit state of mind in which suddenly everything you do is awesome.
This is not to say that you must start with a clearly stated question or problem. Inspiration is no more an oracle than it is a state of mind. The point is that, eventually, a problem of some sort is solved. The inspiration might contain the problem and the solution all in one, or like Archimedes in his bath, it might contain only the solution to a precisely stated question, or any number of other variants.
If no problem is solved beyond "how shall I make myself feel better about owning this expensive camera" then we're not really talking about inspiration.
These little projects like take ten pictures in ten minutes within ten feet usually do nothing but increase the shutter count on the camera. Ditto P365 and so on. You cannot reasonably approach the problem of getting inspired from a blank state of mind, a state of generic enthusiasm, or just because you bought an expensive camera. You've got to be going somewhere, you've got to have some reason for wanting inspiration. Without a target to aim for, your unconscious mind can't actually do any of that inspirational magic for you.
What are you trying to work out? Is it simply that you don't know what you like? That's a pretty common one. If you haven't got a direction to go then perhaps you should approach the problem as one of finding a direction. If the inspiration you seek is a blinding flash of light which reveals to you what you like, then perhaps you should work on that. You don't need a camera at all for this. Indeed, a camera will probably get in the way, producing endless reams of crap that you don't like. Instead, look at pictures. Look at pictures, think about them, think about whether/why/how you like them. Then take a break, take a nap, take a shower. Repeat.
Eventually you will discover what you like. Now you have at least some chance of applying the same methods to discovering what kinds of pictures you want to make. They're probably some of the pictures that you like, but not every kind of picture that you like. Work at that for a while. After a bit, with luck, you'll have a short list of kinds of pictures you might like to make. Ideas you might like to express. Feelings you might like to invoke. "Looks" you might like to emulate. Now you have you have a direction, of sorts.
Once you have a direction the problems refine themselves into problems of how to proceed in that direction, problems of whether the direction should be modified, and so on. Eventually you drill down to very specific problems of how to make a very specific picture, how to express a specific idea, how to distill a particular feeling into a picture.
Great work is a synthesis of inspiration and hard work. Inspiration provides ideas, hard work refines them, sharpens them, breaks them into multiple ideas. Ongoing episodes of inspiration, ideally, driven by the work and by your ongoing process of looking at pictures (you're still looking at other people's pictures, right?) and struggling, direct and focus the labor.
And around and around it goes, inspiration begets perspiration begets inspiration.
This is all well and good, and it even works as far as it goes. It is closely allied to the advice given to the blocked writer: just write, jam words into the page, any words at all. This works, and it works very very well. The difference is that the writer is going somewhere. The writer may have something in mind, perhaps 2500 words on the Chesapeake Bay bridge tunnel. Even if not at the beginning, the writer does not aim to simply have a bunch of words on the page. The end goal is something coherent, an essay, a short story, an article, a novel.
The corresponding advice to the photographer essentially leaves that hapless soul with a bunch of words. Yes, you took a bunch of pictures out the window of a moving car, and now you feel ever so inspired. What now? That feeling of inspiration will only take you so far, eventually you will realize that you still don't have any ideas, except perhaps to take pictures out the car window.
Inspiration is not a stand alone concept. An inspiration, a eureka moment, contains the solution to a problem. It is not some bullshit state of mind in which suddenly everything you do is awesome.
This is not to say that you must start with a clearly stated question or problem. Inspiration is no more an oracle than it is a state of mind. The point is that, eventually, a problem of some sort is solved. The inspiration might contain the problem and the solution all in one, or like Archimedes in his bath, it might contain only the solution to a precisely stated question, or any number of other variants.
If no problem is solved beyond "how shall I make myself feel better about owning this expensive camera" then we're not really talking about inspiration.
These little projects like take ten pictures in ten minutes within ten feet usually do nothing but increase the shutter count on the camera. Ditto P365 and so on. You cannot reasonably approach the problem of getting inspired from a blank state of mind, a state of generic enthusiasm, or just because you bought an expensive camera. You've got to be going somewhere, you've got to have some reason for wanting inspiration. Without a target to aim for, your unconscious mind can't actually do any of that inspirational magic for you.
What are you trying to work out? Is it simply that you don't know what you like? That's a pretty common one. If you haven't got a direction to go then perhaps you should approach the problem as one of finding a direction. If the inspiration you seek is a blinding flash of light which reveals to you what you like, then perhaps you should work on that. You don't need a camera at all for this. Indeed, a camera will probably get in the way, producing endless reams of crap that you don't like. Instead, look at pictures. Look at pictures, think about them, think about whether/why/how you like them. Then take a break, take a nap, take a shower. Repeat.
Eventually you will discover what you like. Now you have at least some chance of applying the same methods to discovering what kinds of pictures you want to make. They're probably some of the pictures that you like, but not every kind of picture that you like. Work at that for a while. After a bit, with luck, you'll have a short list of kinds of pictures you might like to make. Ideas you might like to express. Feelings you might like to invoke. "Looks" you might like to emulate. Now you have you have a direction, of sorts.
Once you have a direction the problems refine themselves into problems of how to proceed in that direction, problems of whether the direction should be modified, and so on. Eventually you drill down to very specific problems of how to make a very specific picture, how to express a specific idea, how to distill a particular feeling into a picture.
Great work is a synthesis of inspiration and hard work. Inspiration provides ideas, hard work refines them, sharpens them, breaks them into multiple ideas. Ongoing episodes of inspiration, ideally, driven by the work and by your ongoing process of looking at pictures (you're still looking at other people's pictures, right?) and struggling, direct and focus the labor.
And around and around it goes, inspiration begets perspiration begets inspiration.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
100,000 Negatives
So you have a chance to buy 5 or 10 thousand rolls of exposed 120 film, shot by some unknown photographer.
What could be on here? Well, the photographer could just have been some obsessive, and it could be 100,000 pictures of his penis. It could be 100,000 willfully bad pictures; I am pretty sure that many photographers have bad ideas that they carefully put in to every exposure. So, for example, if it's all attempts to copy Ansel Adams, it's probably worthless.
But what if it's something else? What if it was someone working in a picture-rich environment, say, a city, and shooting at least as well as random? At least as well as I did in my experiment with randomness, to be precise? 100,000 is about 239x larger than 420. Let us, for now, accept my assertion that I took 2 pretty decent street photographs out of 420. This suggests that such a large archive of negatives might contain 478 pretty good street photographs.
We can fiddle around and say that perhaps some random shooter would have done better, because the 100+ unusably blurry things I shot would mostly not be there, so maybe there would be 600 good ones. Perhaps our subject would not have shot all that architecture, so there might be 700 or 800 decent street photographs. On the other hand, perhaps our hypothetical photographer would have been less lucky than I, so there might only be 200. Regardless, it seems at least credible that in an archive of 100,000 negatives shot more or less at random by some not particularly talented photographer, one might find 500 really quite good pictures.
Just to put this in perspective, we've seen something like 300 pictures from Vivian Maier, the current darling of street photography as fine art, from an archive of something like 140,000 negatives. There are probably more Winogrands out there under the public eye, but a strong argument can be made that a lot of those are crap.
Should you buy a giant collection of exposed film?
If you can, develop a few rolls in advance, and see what you've got. If it's all pictures of the same penis, you might want to reject the deal. If it seems to be willfully bad, again, you might reject the deal. If it seems like random photographs in some promising genre, or genres, you might want to pick it up.
Now you've got a giant logistical problem. You'll want to develop and contact print (or equivalent) the whole lot. Then you're going to pick out the top 1% of the pictures, the top 1000. This should be pretty easy, really. Just be ruthless. Now you've got a 1000 pictures ranging from superb down to 'eh, not bad' with about 500 'hey, that's pretty good' pictures. Go over this collection, and pick out the best 50 to 100.
Now you have some myth-making to do.
You have to impose style on this collections, by pulling together stylistically similar pictures. If you're lucky, your photographer has some sort of style, but you'll probably need to at least refine and focus it, and you may need to create it entirely. You're creating an imaginary photographer who worked in a particular genre, and used a strongly defined style. Look to your best 50-100 pictures for guidance here, you're going to want your created style to have as many of these superb pictures as possible.
You have 1000 pictures to choose from, this should not be terribly hard. Again, it is at least credible that you should be able to pull together a couple hundred loosely related pictures, built around a core of a couple dozen truly excellent ones that are strongly in the same style.
Now you can release a book or something, with 50-100 pictures in it, liberally salted with the excellent ones. This creates the myth that we're dealing with a superb photographer. The next 100 pictures aren't as good, but that doesn't matter as much, the myth is already in place. The Public knows that this is a fine photographer, and therefore the second book also contains superb pictures, because they were shot by a superb photographer.
The 99,600 negatives that never see the light of day might also be excellent, but they might all be crap, too.
I'm certainly not accusing the curators of Vivian Maier or Garry Winogrand of constructing a completely imaginary great photographer by sifting an immense morass of pictures. I am merely pointing out that it's possible. It's not even very hard, given the right sort of mass of negatives to work from. Perhaps relevant is that we've seen a couple books of street photographs from Maier, and the curators have already moved on to Self-Portraits. This might simply be because they want to go broad, rather than deep. One cannot help but wonder, though, if it's because they've already shown us the best of the street photographs.
Just to put the numbers into perspective: If Maier took pictures for 40 years, a rough guess, she shot on average about a roll of film per day during that time. Generously, what we have seen from her represents about 1 picture per month of the work in that period, at a time when we can estimate she was shooting about 350-400 pictures per month.
It's definitely work, make no mistake. There are logistical problems with developing and archiving 100,000 negatives. There are indexing problems. There are issues of taste and style and judgement in play. In order to make this work, the curator has to be a kind of an artist. This doesn't remove the artist from the equation, it just obscures the artist's identity in favor of a good story.
It also, and this is important, does not make the work any less. Process doesn't matter, what matters is the result.
An excellent picture is excellent whether it was shot by a genius, or by a terrible but prolific photographer. This is the miracle of photography.
What could be on here? Well, the photographer could just have been some obsessive, and it could be 100,000 pictures of his penis. It could be 100,000 willfully bad pictures; I am pretty sure that many photographers have bad ideas that they carefully put in to every exposure. So, for example, if it's all attempts to copy Ansel Adams, it's probably worthless.
But what if it's something else? What if it was someone working in a picture-rich environment, say, a city, and shooting at least as well as random? At least as well as I did in my experiment with randomness, to be precise? 100,000 is about 239x larger than 420. Let us, for now, accept my assertion that I took 2 pretty decent street photographs out of 420. This suggests that such a large archive of negatives might contain 478 pretty good street photographs.
We can fiddle around and say that perhaps some random shooter would have done better, because the 100+ unusably blurry things I shot would mostly not be there, so maybe there would be 600 good ones. Perhaps our subject would not have shot all that architecture, so there might be 700 or 800 decent street photographs. On the other hand, perhaps our hypothetical photographer would have been less lucky than I, so there might only be 200. Regardless, it seems at least credible that in an archive of 100,000 negatives shot more or less at random by some not particularly talented photographer, one might find 500 really quite good pictures.
Just to put this in perspective, we've seen something like 300 pictures from Vivian Maier, the current darling of street photography as fine art, from an archive of something like 140,000 negatives. There are probably more Winogrands out there under the public eye, but a strong argument can be made that a lot of those are crap.
Should you buy a giant collection of exposed film?
If you can, develop a few rolls in advance, and see what you've got. If it's all pictures of the same penis, you might want to reject the deal. If it seems to be willfully bad, again, you might reject the deal. If it seems like random photographs in some promising genre, or genres, you might want to pick it up.
Now you've got a giant logistical problem. You'll want to develop and contact print (or equivalent) the whole lot. Then you're going to pick out the top 1% of the pictures, the top 1000. This should be pretty easy, really. Just be ruthless. Now you've got a 1000 pictures ranging from superb down to 'eh, not bad' with about 500 'hey, that's pretty good' pictures. Go over this collection, and pick out the best 50 to 100.
Now you have some myth-making to do.
You have to impose style on this collections, by pulling together stylistically similar pictures. If you're lucky, your photographer has some sort of style, but you'll probably need to at least refine and focus it, and you may need to create it entirely. You're creating an imaginary photographer who worked in a particular genre, and used a strongly defined style. Look to your best 50-100 pictures for guidance here, you're going to want your created style to have as many of these superb pictures as possible.
You have 1000 pictures to choose from, this should not be terribly hard. Again, it is at least credible that you should be able to pull together a couple hundred loosely related pictures, built around a core of a couple dozen truly excellent ones that are strongly in the same style.
Now you can release a book or something, with 50-100 pictures in it, liberally salted with the excellent ones. This creates the myth that we're dealing with a superb photographer. The next 100 pictures aren't as good, but that doesn't matter as much, the myth is already in place. The Public knows that this is a fine photographer, and therefore the second book also contains superb pictures, because they were shot by a superb photographer.
The 99,600 negatives that never see the light of day might also be excellent, but they might all be crap, too.
I'm certainly not accusing the curators of Vivian Maier or Garry Winogrand of constructing a completely imaginary great photographer by sifting an immense morass of pictures. I am merely pointing out that it's possible. It's not even very hard, given the right sort of mass of negatives to work from. Perhaps relevant is that we've seen a couple books of street photographs from Maier, and the curators have already moved on to Self-Portraits. This might simply be because they want to go broad, rather than deep. One cannot help but wonder, though, if it's because they've already shown us the best of the street photographs.
Just to put the numbers into perspective: If Maier took pictures for 40 years, a rough guess, she shot on average about a roll of film per day during that time. Generously, what we have seen from her represents about 1 picture per month of the work in that period, at a time when we can estimate she was shooting about 350-400 pictures per month.
It's definitely work, make no mistake. There are logistical problems with developing and archiving 100,000 negatives. There are indexing problems. There are issues of taste and style and judgement in play. In order to make this work, the curator has to be a kind of an artist. This doesn't remove the artist from the equation, it just obscures the artist's identity in favor of a good story.
It also, and this is important, does not make the work any less. Process doesn't matter, what matters is the result.
An excellent picture is excellent whether it was shot by a genius, or by a terrible but prolific photographer. This is the miracle of photography.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Maddening
There is so very much on the internet about photography, and so very much of it is technical. When I do stumble across something about the creative process, about how to inspire oneself, about how to create/find one's own style, I jump on it! It's so exciting!
And nearly every time it's some stupid horseshit about "buy a new gadget, gadgets are inspiring" or "try macro photography!" or "be a kid again!" It's almost always either advice to spend some money, or a bunch of words that really mean "the way to be creative is... be creative!"
The truth is, most of the people writing about this stuff don't have the foggiest idea how to be creative, how to fuel that inner creative beast. Mainly they don't know because they don't care. Many of them are selling something, usually some shitty class in which they'll urge you to try macro photography and tell you how to use a neutral density filter to make a really terrible landscape that looks just like theirs. The ones that are not selling something are generally gearheads making some nod toward this other thing they have heard of, which isn't gear, so ultimately whatever who cares all that much I'll just blat some crap I cribbed from someplace else.
Creativity isn't all that complicated. A few web searches on the relevant cognitive science turn up some interesting stuff, just be sure to leave any mention of photography out of it lest you wind up at some doltish web site urging you to try colored filters or HDR.
And nearly every time it's some stupid horseshit about "buy a new gadget, gadgets are inspiring" or "try macro photography!" or "be a kid again!" It's almost always either advice to spend some money, or a bunch of words that really mean "the way to be creative is... be creative!"
The truth is, most of the people writing about this stuff don't have the foggiest idea how to be creative, how to fuel that inner creative beast. Mainly they don't know because they don't care. Many of them are selling something, usually some shitty class in which they'll urge you to try macro photography and tell you how to use a neutral density filter to make a really terrible landscape that looks just like theirs. The ones that are not selling something are generally gearheads making some nod toward this other thing they have heard of, which isn't gear, so ultimately whatever who cares all that much I'll just blat some crap I cribbed from someplace else.
Creativity isn't all that complicated. A few web searches on the relevant cognitive science turn up some interesting stuff, just be sure to leave any mention of photography out of it lest you wind up at some doltish web site urging you to try colored filters or HDR.
Monday, January 20, 2014
Another Blog
I'm not 100% sure I'm going to keep reading it, but I like this guy's approach. Worth checking out, anyways.
SMOGRANCH - reporting from the edge of the creative world
He's the photographer at large for Blurb, the vanity press/print-on-demand joint for photographers (I use blurb, they're pretty good). As such he is liberated from, as far as I can tell, all constraints. This gives his viewpoint a little something different.
SMOGRANCH - reporting from the edge of the creative world
He's the photographer at large for Blurb, the vanity press/print-on-demand joint for photographers (I use blurb, they're pretty good). As such he is liberated from, as far as I can tell, all constraints. This gives his viewpoint a little something different.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
An Experiment
Recently I performed an experiment. I had to run an errand downtown, a twenty minute walk away. I took my camera, set up for auto exposure and good depth of field. I simply pointed it anywhere I thought a picture might be and mashed the shutter button over and over. At no time did I stop walking. I avoided looking through the viewfinder. I just pointed roughly, and mashed.
The result was about 420 exposure of random crap. Perhaps 100 were unusably blurry or otherwise useless. In what remains after straightening and cropping there might be dozen or so passable pictures and two or three quite good ones.
I heartily recommend this experiment to everyone, by the way. Its quite liberating and you shoot stuff way outside your comfort zone. Outside in the daytime, try aperture-priority, ISO 400, aperture f/8. Inside, go up to ISO 1600 and down to f/5.6, or thereabouts.
A few interesting conclusions:
I wound up with pretty good results in something like two or three distinct genres. There's some New Topographics style architecture. There's shadow play, with street markings and repairs. There's something like street:
I am not convinced that good Decisive Moments can occur this way. There's not much suggestive in my little sample, at any rate. Maybe one thing with a faint sniff of a Decisive Moment. If that. There are a number of decent or mildly interesting pictures of people, though, the kind of thing many people think of as street in these degenerate times
In terms of style, well, it was all over the place. It was possible to group pictures into styles, but this is really just lumping together pictures which randomly share certain elements. Of course all shared the fairly deep depth of field, black&white, normal-lens setup I was using, but to get beyond that the results were more or less randomized. Nonetheless, style could be imposed. The dozen or so half-decent pictures can be lumped into 3 or 4 groups which are recognizably connected stylistically.
How random was this? Could anyone go do this and get the same degree of success that I did? I rather think so, but I am not sure. It's possible that my sense of where a good picture might be helped me out here, I suppose. Mostly, when there were people, I pointed the camera and them (roughly) and mashed. When there were no people, I pointed at things that I thought "might be interesting" which might have something to do with the half-decent architecture pictures.
The photo above does suggest that at some level I know that there's a sub-genre of street that's about reflections, but I think I was just thinking "look, there are people in there, clickclickclick."
A final remark, I suspect that some photographers might actually be worse than random. My suspicion is precise: by peering through the viewfinder and thinking furiously, some photographers are at some pains to put what turns out to be one or more bad ideas into every frame. They end up shooting consistently bad pictures, rather than a random assortment of pictures, some good. I might be among these photographers.
The result was about 420 exposure of random crap. Perhaps 100 were unusably blurry or otherwise useless. In what remains after straightening and cropping there might be dozen or so passable pictures and two or three quite good ones.
I heartily recommend this experiment to everyone, by the way. Its quite liberating and you shoot stuff way outside your comfort zone. Outside in the daytime, try aperture-priority, ISO 400, aperture f/8. Inside, go up to ISO 1600 and down to f/5.6, or thereabouts.
A few interesting conclusions:
I wound up with pretty good results in something like two or three distinct genres. There's some New Topographics style architecture. There's shadow play, with street markings and repairs. There's something like street:
I am not convinced that good Decisive Moments can occur this way. There's not much suggestive in my little sample, at any rate. Maybe one thing with a faint sniff of a Decisive Moment. If that. There are a number of decent or mildly interesting pictures of people, though, the kind of thing many people think of as street in these degenerate times
In terms of style, well, it was all over the place. It was possible to group pictures into styles, but this is really just lumping together pictures which randomly share certain elements. Of course all shared the fairly deep depth of field, black&white, normal-lens setup I was using, but to get beyond that the results were more or less randomized. Nonetheless, style could be imposed. The dozen or so half-decent pictures can be lumped into 3 or 4 groups which are recognizably connected stylistically.
How random was this? Could anyone go do this and get the same degree of success that I did? I rather think so, but I am not sure. It's possible that my sense of where a good picture might be helped me out here, I suppose. Mostly, when there were people, I pointed the camera and them (roughly) and mashed. When there were no people, I pointed at things that I thought "might be interesting" which might have something to do with the half-decent architecture pictures.
The photo above does suggest that at some level I know that there's a sub-genre of street that's about reflections, but I think I was just thinking "look, there are people in there, clickclickclick."
A final remark, I suspect that some photographers might actually be worse than random. My suspicion is precise: by peering through the viewfinder and thinking furiously, some photographers are at some pains to put what turns out to be one or more bad ideas into every frame. They end up shooting consistently bad pictures, rather than a random assortment of pictures, some good. I might be among these photographers.
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