Been there, Done that, Grokked.

Restating the obvious

I'll tie this into photography in a minute, but first... I'm going to use motorcycling as an example.

If you don't ride a motorcycle, you may have trouble understanding this. Bear with me while I try to explain it. One day while riding in a place called "Deal's Gap", or "The Tail of the Dragon" (Google it and watch some videos. You have to see it to understand what "318 turns in 11 miles" means). I pulled over at the end and said to my friend, "I just figured out: you have to look where you want to go!". That's probably the most basic skill in motorcycling, you have to grasp that to ride.

I taught the motorcycle course at Humber College for about 12 years. I had literally thousands of students over that time. But I'm not ashamed to say that teaching was (is) my forté, not riding. I'm the perfect embodiment of the expression, "those who can, do. Those who can't, teach" (there's another phrase on the end of that, "those who can't teach, write about it" but we won't go there!).

"Look where you want to go" was a litany that we repeated time and time again. If you didn't get it, you couldn't pass even the basic motorcycle skills test for your license. I taught it to thousands of people. So I should know it, right?

But it was like an epiphany for me. I finally grokked in fullness what that meant. That day, it finally sunk into my head, like an explosion in my mind. Am I making any sense?

So how does this relate to photography?

I visited the Ansel Adams exhibit at the McMichael museum earlier this week.

Ansel Adams

What can one say about him that hasn't already been said? Not much. I've seen his images in books, online, reproductions... but there's something about looking at a print that the master himself made with his own hands. And while I was there (for much too short a time: I didn't know they closed at 5:00 pm!) I had an epiphany.

More than one thing made him the Master. You know all the theories, you've studied and practiced the Zone System but how the HELL does he get those deep, rich blacks? The smooth, perfect tonality? Adams' skill in the darkroom is legendary. But when I looked at the works that were exhibited, something struck me like a thunderbolt.

"It's all about the Light".

Adams' composition skills were exquisite. But when I looked at his prints, "Redwoods, Bull Creek Flat" and "Birch Trees", what struck me was the lighting. In the Redwoods, especially, Adams intent was to get the viewer to look at the texture of the trees and he did that by shooting in perfect light. Now I grok.

Here's my attempt at replicating an Adams-type image:

I shot this in front of the McMichael Gallery after they closed at 5pm.  

Here's another shot from that afternoon, nothing to do with Adams but I think the landscaping at McMichael was done with the photographer in mind!

It's an HDR, of course.This is about textures, and drawing the viewer's eye from lower left to upper right. I'm not that happy with the sky so I may come back and rework it.  

A cool place to hang out

There's a great online forum that welcomes new and experienced photoenthusiasts alike. It's a small group, but there are members from all over the world! We especially need new people who want to make use of this great resource. If you're ever stuck with a question you can't answer, or looking for a better way to do something, this is the place for you!

A little history: some time ago, a bunch of us became disgruntled with the way another forum we belonged to was being run. What had been a friendly place had become uncomfortable and commercially motivated. No point in identifying them...

So we left and started a new place to hang out. The activity level has become a little low and we were trying to come up with why. Someone pointed out that the old forum was a busy place because a lot of people asked advice about photography in general, Photoshop/Lightroom, even such topics as copyright issues, suppliers, etc. They went on to point out that the members of the new group are all experienced and knowledgeable so these questions didn't come up. We need new members who have questions about stuff!

So we have a place where there are about 100 experts (and me. I'm not expert...) who love to share their knowledge and their work, who are all friendly and non-judgmental, who would like nothing better than to help answer any and all questions. Who love to see people's work and provide gentle critique (if it's asked for) and suggestions, who like playing photography games like the ongoing "Battle" where you start with a common image and do whatever you want with it creatively, or the monthly "Rally" (soon to resume) where you have a week to shoot and submit pictures on a specified topic, or even "Where is this?" where you do whatever you have to, to answer that question about a photo submitted. Marco is quite devious, but they're all solvable!

So you're all invited to join. It doesn't matter about your experience level, whether you want to ask questions or try to answer them, or just join in the banter and fun, and enjoy images from the members in the "Show and Tell" threads. You don't have to post, you can just sit back and read but it's more fun if you do.

Here's an example:

Remember the picture of "The Angels & Mini-Me" that I put up last week? I really wanted to do something like this with the face image on the wall but couldn't remember how. So I asked on the Forum and got a quick response from Philm Phalm that reminded me how to use "Displacement Mapping" in Photoshop. 

So where is this forum? What's it called? How do you join?

The forum is called "The Imaging Forum" or "TIF" (you can't say "The TIF Forum", that would be repetitious redundancy!)

You access it here: http://www.suitehound.com/forum/ and joining means just registering and supplying a login name and password. All you have to agree to is to be friendly!

See you on TIF?

While we're at it, there's a monthly "Rally" that I host on TIF. Basically you are given three topics or categories, you have a week to shoot the pictures and then submit them, then everyone votes on their favourites. The winner gets the undying adulation and respect of their peers, and gets to choose the topics for next month. Go to TIF, then look for "Battlegrounds and Rallies".

A great weekend shooting!

We had 8 or 10 people show up for the Photowalk in Algonquin last weekend. The dawn shoot at the Frost Centre was outstanding, here's one of my shots from there:

That's Ben and George. A misty sunrise on St. Nora Lake. By the way, this will look different in different browsers, the foreground is supposed to have no detail in it, just a silhouette. I have to do some more work on it before it's finished.

And here's a completely different treatment, shot by my friend George who ventured all the way up from Toronto for this photoshoot:

Reproduced with permission. This is an outstanding image, a full 36Mp frame from the D800. It certainly won't look as good here as an 800px wide image, but you get the feeling. I'm encouraging George to make a large scale print, this is a real winner! 

The Photowalk went really well, with one or two glitches. The bakery we intended to go to wasn't open that early so we had to find another place: then we got confused and split up and a couple of people couldn't hook up with us later. By the way, Algonquin Park was a real zoo as expected. When we drove out around 2pm, there was a lineup of cars at least 5km long at a dead stop, waiting to get in the West Gate. Fortunately we were going the other way!

I didn't have my "A-Game" with me. I hit a bit of a flat spot and was really not happy with my images that day — I predicted it, though: I don't like shooting in bright sunlight. No excuse, I could have done better.

The next day, I went out on the morning "Loon Excursion" with Mike Bertelsen. I'm going to save some additional pictures for the next blog post, but here's one for your enjoyment.

This is a 3-month old Loon chick about to take off on his very first flight. I have some shots of that epic inaugural voyage, but you'll have to wait until next week to see them! 

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New Directions?

As I sit writing this stuff, I get to wondering why I write what I do. Two reasons, I think: to document my travel along this mortal coil, and to share my experiences so that others may learn something by it. Sometimes what I write is trivial to all but one or two people but I like to think that if one looks at it as a gestalt, there's a consistency that others might take as a learning experience.

It's like the concept of ongoing TV series'. A number of people I've talked with recently say they don't 'get' the Big Bang Theory show but you have to watch it enough to get into the characters before you can appreciate it. Or reading the first page or paragraph of a novel: you can't know if you're going to get something out of it until you read a bit more. 

So, dear readers, thanks for sticking with me. My goal is to share ideas and directions so that you'll go off exploring on your own. I've had over 15,000 discrete hits this year: substantially less than I hoped for but more than I expected. Please share the link to this blog with those you know. Maybe they will also enjoy this smorgasbord of ideas and images as they taste it one small lighthearted bite at a time. 

If you don't already receive my "blog update" email, or if you want to add someone else to the list of people who get a quick notification that there's something new posted here, please click on this link.

New Directions

Like your birthday, New Year's day is just another way of benchmarking time. You know: "I'm 'x' years old today and here's how I'm going to change my life in the next 12 months". Or "it's 2013 and I'm really going to make this an awesome year".  Why should that start today? What's the significance of the first of January or in my case the 8th of September (I give you permission to note that date in your calendar if you want to wish me happy birthday. OK, I'm a hypocrite!)?

What I'm really saying is, "why wait until a coincidental orientation of dates to improve your life?" The world is FULL of people who make and then virtually instantly break, new years resolutions. Every year, people say "I'm not doing that this year". And every year, like clockwork, they do. The gyms and fitness clubs LIVE for those resolutions. People join a gym and, I heard yesterday, 80% of them stop going within 6 weeks. If I owned a gym, I'd find a way to rent exercise machines for a couple of months, then close down and go on vacation for the rest of the year!

So did I make a list of things I want to do this year? Of course I did, like everyone else! I mentioned some of them a couple of weeks ago.

• Consider where I am as an artist
• Monetize
• Explore other media
• Travel
• Work on relationships

Nice list. It reads more like a "To-Do" list than resolutions, though. Good, because I won't keep resolutions. I have a better chance of achieving something with a To-Do list. I've already started creating a hierarchical breakdown in some of the categories.

Artist stuff

I'll be the first to admit that I still haven't figured out where I am, artistically. Every time I think I've discovered my 'style', I change my mind. And I'm really fickle and impressionable. HDR's, for instance: for a while I really liked kitchy, cartoony images with huge saturation levels and detail coming out of the yin-yang. While I still think that technique has a place, I'm ready to get much more subtle. 

A couple of people whose opinions and knowledge I respect have commented on my work recently. My art is starting to overshadow pure technique, which is one reason I'm not turning in winning images to club level competitions any more. That's good. That's where I want to go.

I'm doing a presentation on digital HDR at the Richmond Hill Camera Club in February. If you're a member (or even if you're not!), come on out. I've not completed it in detail yet, but you can expect me to talk about the 16 Zones that negative film can give you (yes, 16. Maybe even more. Not 10), how to approach a shot, how to process it with several different programs or plugins, what to watch out for. Should be fun. If you're not a RHCC member, email me for details.

Great Book:

I'm reading and re-reading a book I found as an eBook at the library: The Art of Photography by Bruce Barnbaum. Then I bought a hard copy of the book because I was so impressed. Here are links to it on Amazon:  Canada USA When I first started reading it, I thought there was a lot of inapplicable stuff because a good deal of the book focuses on (a) traditional negative-and-paper photography (and I've been purely a digital guy for 15 years) and (b) black-and-white. But almost everything the author says is applicable to digital, so don't skip those sections when you read it! Also there are some absolutely outstanding images in the book (much bigger and better than on the iPad!). Each one leaves you thinking, "boy, I wish I could do that!". Read it.

A little recognition...

If it's still January while you're reading this, wander over to "The Imaging Forum (TIF)" where they selected my image for the banner. I used the same shot for the cover of my Winter Wonderland eBook and was going to use it here on the blog, but since they chose it, I decided not to. I'll find another image (hard to find stuff that fits in 950 x 200 px!)

Pet Packaging Peeve

You know exactly what I'm talking about. You buy something and take your life in your hands trying to open the damned blister packaging. First of all, the plastic they use is so stiff and thick that you need a sharp knife to cut it. And once you do, and you don't cut yourself doing so, you're almost guaranteed to bleed when you try to pry the product out, unless you cut all the way around.

Here's the WORST example I've ever seen. I bought a 32Gb Sandisk Ultra SDHC card at Costco (awesome price, $20! But 'Ultra' is slower than 'Extreme'. Transfer speed 30MB/s compared to 45MB/s. Still, $20...). Anyway, it came in a thick cardboard/plastic blister package that measures 10" x 15", and you know what size an SDHC card is: about the size of your thumbnail. Even worse, when I got it out of the packaging, I discovered it doesn't even come with a little plastic case! Just 3 coloured labels you can write on, which I wouldn't use for fear they would peel off inside my camera.

Bananas are there for size comparison. The packaging must have cost them $1. It has what looks like not 1, not 2 but THREE of those security anti-theft RFID tags in it. There has to be a better way. (iPhone photo)

A couple more scanned images

This was a shot of my ex-wife in May, 1973 (40 years ago!) just before my daughter was born. North-facing window lighting, what else? This one stands the test of time, in my opinion. The original is again, a 35mm Kodachrome 25 transparency. I made some slight adjustments because I could! All in Lightroom: dropped the clarity a bit to smooth the skin, spot-removed a couple of blemishes, whitened teeth and eyes, and got rid of Big Bird's left eye which was half-hidden and distracting. And the vignette.

Reisting, Northeast of Munich, was built by Siemens (my employer in the '70s) in 1967. Given Moore's Law, I'd imagine the technology would be laptop sized today! I thought the juxtaposition of the gigantic other-worldly Earth Station and the ancient church was worthy of this September 1973 photograph. I added grain and texture and converted it to black-and-white with Silver Efex Pro and Topaz adjust. 

Back to work on my HDR presentation!

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