SERIOUS Flash photography

Well, actually it was just a few minutes screwing around with camera, tripod, flash, off-camera cable, a compact Lumiquest softbox, and my own ugly mug. I've never been much into flash photography and honestly (in my mis-guided thinking) kind of looked down on strobe work as a crutch. Well it isn't a crutch, and in fact can greatly enhance many photographic situations. I'm not sure what brought me around to this thinking, but I believe it has something to do with the resurgence of my artistic sense in photography. I've been reading up on small flash photography, spending time reading the Strobist blog, and reading Joe McNally's new book : The Hotshoe Diaries. The latter is an excellent read. Joe 's writing is funny and entertaining but most importantly extremely useful. It isn't an instruction manual per se, rather he tells stories of how he made the images in the book. But there is little doubt you will come out at the end a lot more capable of making great light.

I also spent a few hours on Friday evening shooting a National Championship Nordic ski race. Tricky, fast, work in bad, overcast light, but I got a few decent images, I think. Look for a few shots in the near future.

Open North American Championships

Each March Fairbanks hosts one of the major sprint mushing races of the season. Mushers from across the country show up for the three days of racing. It is also one of my favorite events to photograph. Mushing, like any fast-paced sport is tricky to photograph. Focus is major challenge so I take a lot of photos to make sure some of them have the right subject in focus (generally the musher or the lead dogs). This year I shot for two days, Saturday and Sunday. The image above incidentally is Egil Ellis who has now captured the record for most wins by a single racer. His team is made almost entirely of hounds instead of huskies. Damn fast though. Here are a few images I think worked out fairly well:

OK- Bird Photography

Beware! The following is a long, opinionated, and possibly blatantly wrong series of thoughts on the art of bird photography.

Arthur Morris. There you go. That name says a lot about the current state of bird photography. Artie, as he calls himself, is an extremely talented photographer who has made his reputation with his own “brand” of imagery. His trademark is close shots, often portraiture, of wild birds in low angle, over the shoulder light. Very sharp with clean even backgrounds. It is stylish and simple. It WAS a distinctive look. I emphasize the word WAS because Artie’s work has become so synonymous with good bird photography that it seems every photographer shooting birds is doing their damnedest to imitate his style. Close. Sharp. Clean. As a result (and this is where my opinion rears its ugly head) run of the mill bird photography has become very, very, boring. The birds are beautiful and photographed in nice light they are usually in profile (ideally with the head turned 15 degrees toward the camera). The images are technically perfect and they all look exactly the same.

This striving for the “ideal” shot has led to a remarkable reliance on Photoshop. The program is used to clone out distracting elements (even very minor ones), to clean up non-uniform backgrounds, to remove unwanted parts of the image (other birds, evidence of humans, etc.), and even, in the more extreme cases, to replace parts of the bird that are not shown in ideal conditions with parts from other images. Thus it is possible to find shots of birds where a closed eye has been replaced by an open eye from the next photo in the series. A clipped wing may be replaced with one copied from the opposite side, feathers re-arranged, dirt removed from bills, feet placed in more aesthetically pleasing positions… WHERE DOES IT STOP?

At what point have we stopped portraying nature as it is and turned it into what we want it to be? I don’t think this is just a philosophical question. Nature photography has been criticized in the past for portraying nature as an ideal and not as reality. The late, great Galen Rowell received a scathing critique from an art critic who said that he was misleading the public through use of “colored filters” to believe that nature was a bright and colorful place when in fact it was mostly, brown, green, and gray. That critic was obviously wrong and I pity them for having spent so little time outside not to have seen the colors the world can produce. But if Galen’s true to life images could give that impression, what would that critic say about the kind of manipulations now common in bird photography?

But Dave, you say, we are talking about art not reality. In which case I say “touché…BUT…” photography is different. I’m sorry, but it just is. People, the viewing public, look at photography very differently from other forms of art. People BELIEVE photography in a way they don’t with other art forms. And when it comes to nature photography, well, I think nature should be appreciated in all its diverse forms, and our images should represent this, not just showing all the rare moments when our avian subjects appear in perfect light with clean backgrounds with their bills pointing exactly 15 degrees off of perpendicular. OK that was an off-subject tangent. My point is not that bird photography shouldn’t be viewed as art, but rather that bird photography shouldn’t all look the same.

The strange part is that I think many bird photographers recognize this in their gut. Because when the rare image appears on the Bird Photographer’s Network that has truly broken away from the formula like this one HERE. It gets rave reviews. Others, that I think are rather stunning with hidden textures and surprises like this one HERE, get notably mixed reviews because, in the eyes of many photographers, the image is close enough to being “correct” that it is wrong.

Now, after I wrote all this, I must acknowledge that I do love a good clean bird photo. These shots are easy to appreciate, and given the right situation and equipment are technically easy to execute. They illustrate the written word very well, but they are rarely memorable. The simple, the clean and sharp, may be the bread and butter of the wildlife photographer, but it should never be the only images made. As photographers we must remember to expand our vision beyond the normal. It is outside of the norm where we will find the truly exceptional.

Rant over.

Opportunism

Some more candy today. I've developed what is beginning to seem like a network of folks keeping their eyes open for cool bird photography opportunities. And today, before I headed into town, a friend called to tell me she had a flock of Bohemian Waxwings hanging out in the choke cherry trees behind her house. So I made a short detour on my way in this afternoon and spent a half hour shooting from her deck. These images are just quick and dirty post-processing of the jpegs. I haven't dived into the RAW files yet, perhaps I'll have a chance to work on them a bit more this evening. Then I'll post a few of the "finished" images so you can see the differences. This should give me the chance to start talking a bit about bird photography. I've got some thoughts on the subject, so beware.

For your viewing pleasure here are a few more:

Thoughts on a new book

I'm in the first pages of a new book: Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. It is certainly a book on psychology, but it offers a lot of insight into the creative process. I imagine over the course of the next week or so that I'll be writing more about it. The book has immediately provided me with some food for thought. Last night as I was trying to keep my tired mind concentrating on the book I found a short passage that talked about how age relates to expertise in different disciplines. The author (god forbid I have to spell his name out again) notes that skill and problem solving abilities in mathematics (a science with discreet, known, rules) peaks in the mid 20s. Skills in many other sciences, (chemistry, economics, physics, etc.) which have less distinct rules takes until the mid-30s to peak. But disciplines that have few rules like literature and philosophy take until a person is late in life to master or reach the best of their abilities. It seems that life experience is vital in these disciplines. There is a clear progression.

Where then does photography fall on this line? No doubt that photography has a technical side, even a scientific side, but much more importantly it is a creative endeavor. I venture then that I can spend a lifetime and still progress as a photographic artist. This realization is great big bag of mixed blessings. It means that as long as I work at it, I will continue to improve. But it also means that that true mastery is perpetually out of reach.

Thoughts?

Ice!

Yes indeed the answer to the previous day's mystery photos, which no one even attempted to guess, is formations of ice. I happen to live on a small creek here on my Alaskan ten acres. The creek, during the summer anyway, flows beneath my driveway through a large culvert. In winter, that culvert ices up, all the way to the top and the overflow ice floods out along the valley floor covering my driveway in a thick layer of ice that builds up as more water spills out onto the surface. Now, nearing spring, the ice covers an area the size of a football field with several feet of rock-hard water. This is a hassle to say the least, but it makes for some very interesting photographic subjects. The images of the past couple of days show the layers as they are forming, one inch on top of another on top of another, forming what look like miniature mountain ranges, alluvial fans, and flood plains.

Needless to say, I won't be sad to watch my photographic subjects melt away over the next couple of months.

A couple more of...What?

Well the lack of guesses on my quiz give me a hunch that I've stumped you all. So here are a couple more. And a hint: think water. I'll provide the answer tomorrow.

What?

Photography is often considered truth. What ends up in the image must have been in front of the camera, right? Well of course, digital photography has entirely changed that. But what happens when the image shows only the reality the photographer chose to portray, or the subject is unknown to the viewer? For example, is this image and the one below, a moonscape? A lava flow? Death Valley? A landscape from space? Or something else entirely?


My point is that truth is subjective. Common subjects can be hidden in their details and the truth can be hidden behind layers of unknowns.

So what are these images? Any one have any guesses?

Back to something different

It was a strange foggy morning here in Fairbanks. Usually I would have stayed in during such weather and worked on the computer as the fog burned off. But this morning, the gray light and naturally black and white landscape lured me out to some agricultural fields. Images were forming in my mind, as they often do when I'm inspired, and I went in search of them. The image above is one that I successfully found.

I'm going through a period right now of major inspiration and enthusiasm for photography. I want nothing more recently than to be exploring with my camera. I hope this period lasts because my work is spinning off in new directions, directions that I like, that are pushing me and, I hope, making me a better photographer.

Back to the basics

For all my blather about art, vision, and the creative process. I still really enjoy just taking my camera, my big lens and and finding a nice cooperative bird to photograph. It doesn't take a lot of effort to frame, compose or light. You just arrange yourself in the best possible location for the sun, think about the background and the depth of field and start shooting. It's a bit like eating candy. Fun and easy to consume, but too much of it will make you sick. Still, for me, wildlife is a big part of my income. Many of the magazines I write for are birding and wildlife publications and these straight-forward images are the best accompaniment.

Anyway, this shot of a Great Gray Owl, I made yesterday afternoon about two miles from my house. The bird was very cooperative and perched in the same tree without flying for the hour I spent with it. I would have liked to get some flight shots, or something with a bit better background than the hazy blue sky, but I can't always have everything I want.

Something in the Water

What is it with creatives right now that everyone seems neck deep in artistic introspection? David duChemin is spending the week re-evaluating his photography, shooting things way out of his normal range and not mentioning one word about gear. Zack Arias recently posted a widely viewed video on his inner struggle as an artist (I posted a link to this a few days back). And I've been tearing through books on the creative process and doing my best to see things...differently.

In one of the final chapters of The Photographer's Eye, the author writes about the kind of image we are trying to create and asks: Are we making an image to appeal to the most people or making an image that is unconventional and pushes the viewer? For a long time, I've found myself in that first, group. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that, but it IS stunting. Of course I want people to like my images, but I don't want them to be liked because they've seen them before. I once had a comment on one of my images where the viewer said, in a very complimentary way, that the shot looked like an Ansel Adams. But, I don't want my images to look like an Ansel Adams, I want my images to look like a David Shaw.

But what does a David Shaw image look like? Now that's tricky because my vision is constantly shifting and I don't want my images to look how they do right now, I want my images to look how they will be when they are the best I can make them. Thus I'm trapped in a viscious circle of constantly trying to be better than I am. This circle is a dangerous, often frustrating, but at times glorious place to be. As I spin in my circle, pushing my photography, I accumulate thousands of really, really bad images and a few that allow me to spin off in a new and better direction. With those few, I get to see things differently, see things better. And the more I push, the clearer my vision becomes.

Now all of this is not to say that I think we should ignore other artists to pursue our own vision. That, I'm sure, would lead us into a very dark place. Rather we need to see the images of others, explore them, learn from them, even emulate them. But the moment we start immitating them we've lost our own art. I know, I 've fallen into that trap and while down in the hole, I had lots and lots of company.

We need other artists to provide feedback, to be honest, and not ingratiating. We need the community,and the spirit that comes from being among others of the same mind. We need expertise, in our fields, and to constantly push ourselves to see the world with greater clarity.

Monday Morning Inspiration

For those of you who haven't yet discovered the TED talk series. I encourage you to explore them. TED is a program designed to bring talks by scientists, creatives, politicians, and others important in their field to the general public. There are hundreds and most are around 15 minutes. You could easily spend a day on the site exploring and learning. Today however I encourage you to take a look at this one: by David Griffin, the Director of Photography for National Geographic. He isn't a terribly dynamic speaker but his presentation on what makes a great image a great image, and more importantly what makes a photographer great is worth watching. When the man in charge of images for magazine most associated with great photography speaks, you should listen.

Jpeg Photo Essay

I just posted a quick photo essay with my recent images from the World Ice Art Championships on the great online photo magazine, JPEG.

Check it out here:

Different Directions

As a photographer (and writer for that matter) I have a tendency to get too comfortable. To do what I'm good at, to forget to experiment and play with my art. Last night I didn't let myself get comfortable and instead made some images that are outside of my normal style. And you know what? I really like what I ended up with.


A friend and I went and shot at the World Ice Art Championships that takes pace each March here in Fairbanks. The multi-block competition is underway and the sculptors are working long hours to get their pieces in order. We spent an hour and a half shooting the artists as they worked and it was way too short.


It is good to break out of the norm every so often.

Intent

I've been working my way slowly through "The Photographer's Eye" (which, incidentally, is improving by leaps and bounds) and last night I read the chapter on intent, which got me thinking about the concept. Since I've got this spinning around in my head, I thought I'd try to dump some of it out here:

The success of an image, (and here I'm writing about my own images) depends heavily on whether what I intended actually appears in the image. Another viewer may see the image and enjoy the subject, light, or whatever, but if it doesn't show what I wanted, the way I wanted, the image will often end up in my hard drive's trash bin. The intent can be very simple, such as showing a play of light or a pattern on the landscape. It is when the intent becomes more complex that the image itself becomes far more complex. This complexity is particularly important in the making of the image, but can be as well in its viewing.

Let's use the image above as an example. I made the shot last May in Florianopolis, Brazil. The shot was taken out of the window of an oyster restaurant. The lagoon is just inches out of the frame on the right side of the image. It was just past sunset. What drew my attention was the way the straight parallel lines of the roof contrasted with the jagged edges of the chipped paint and the curved top of the shuttered window. Showing that pattern and the light on the subject is about as far as my intention went. As far as it goes, I think I succeeded, simple intent resulted in a simple image.

Now let's jump on to the viewer's perspective. This is where things get fuzzy. Because you see, when the image isn't accompanied by text, it is completely open to interpretation. And as I try to look at this as a third-party viewer I could see this interpreted in numerous ways: the pattern of rooftop and cracked paint I intended, a statement of poverty, age, decay, or third-world lifestyle. I'm sure there are others.

What I'm getting at as I explore all this, is that what the photographer intends is not necessarily what the viewer will receive. So what is the point of intent? Perhaps most importantly it provides motivation for the photographer, thought, and mindfulness. And more than just about everything else, more important than our equipment or our location is the thought that goes into our images. When we put in effort, our images are get better, regardless of how they are interpreted.

There is more too it than that, of course, but this is as far as my head spinning has gotten. More later.

March Desktop

Just click on this image to enlarge, then download and set as your desktop.

The image by the way was taken on a dock in the lagoon in Florianopolis, Brazil in May of 2008.