Where am I at?

First let me address the title of this blog post: grammatically horrible! I was torn between that and "Who do you make pictures for?", equally bad! It's just that "For whom do you make pictures?" makes me sound like a high school English teacher and "Self Assessment: an analysis of one's personal growth" is just plain boring and pedantic.

The Question

"Where am I at (y'all)?"!

Here's where I'm coming from. I recently submitted a couple of pictures to the RHCC monthly competition and while the scores were predictable (not great), one judge's comment put me on this track. It was innocuous: "Looks like new paint program from Topaz". But it got me thinking about something.

First of all, let me digress for a second. Judges: remember your training. You're there to judge the image,
not how it was made. 

My friend Ron asked me a while ago whether I was going to put some serious entries into the competitions, and I nodded and smiled and was deliberately vague. Probably not. Because the big question is, "for whom do you make pictures?". Not for them. Not any more.

So I got to thinking (Gawd, what's wrong with my grammar today? LOL) about where I'm at. I'm writing this for two reasons: (1) by writing it down, I might be able to understand myself more clearly and (2) to get you, my faithful readers, to think about your own place in the world.

The Answer

I want to say that I'm making pictures to please myself, not other people. I would be lying, of course, the world isn't black-and-white and it's gratifying when people say, "Wow, you must have a really good camera!" (photographer joke). Sure, it's nice to be appreciated. Maybe one day people will look at my body of work and say, "he was an artist". 

When I make a picture that works for me, I'm satisfied. Why? Because my standards have changed, I've grown and when I meet or exceed my new standards, I know I'm doing well. By the way, a corollary to that is that I hate my earlier work. I've said elsewhere (maybe not out loud!) that a lot of it is amateurish and just plain banal. 

As we speak, I'm working on a Blurb book, my "Best of 2013". I don't hate all the pictures in it, but I certainly think I've grown since then. It's a lot of work, I'm about ¾ of the way through. A few more days work.

I have two goals: to make pictures that convey what I pictured in my mind when I took it and when I finished it, and to increasingly improve what I'm trying to convey. Does that make any sense? Let me give you an example.

Sunset shot from the Schuyler's Island Causeway and rendered with Topaz Impression. FWIW, I started with one of the Da Vinci presets, added back some colour and some other minor adjustments. Click the image to blow it up.

Some background. Cheryl Goff was up from Oshawa and we went off in search of a sunset. We tried several locations, and I wasn't really satisfied with any of them. Sunsets are hit-and-miss, of course, they may not work out and I figured this was one of those nights. Then we saw the way the sun hit the trees across the water, the reflections, the clouds.

When I viewed the scene, I got to thinking "if I was painting this scene instead of photographing it, what would I do?" This. And I took the picture with this in mind. No, not the 'da Vinci' brush strokes, the composition. Framing it with the foreground plants. Capturing the reflections in the still part of the water. The leading lines created by the clouds. The balance. I'm really quite satisfied with this composition and happy that I was able to make it work.

It's interesting that when I joined the Richmond Hill Camera Club a decade or more ago, it was with the intent of learning more about composition. And yes, I used to enter competitions with the goal of getting peer approval (not peer: my betters!). Now I have more confidence in my own vision. So what would a real artist  say (see? I still don't think I am one!)? Would they agree about the composition? 

What about the brush strokes? They're just fun. Why do I like this "Topaz Impression" plug-in so much?  I am definitely a frustrated paint media artist who still can't draw if my life depended on it, but I think I'm getting closer to picking up a brush and giving it a try. 

Where am I at? About halfway to where I want to be. Better than where I was yesterday. 

Guest Photo

Here's a rare picture taken by someone else. Photo credit goes to Fred Pyziak, VP of the Haliburton Highlands Camera Club. It's a picture of me and Steve Hill, curator of the Haliburton Museum. We were at the museum and I was taking his picture. Why am I posting it? Because although it's a great photo, the caption is what tickled my funnybone. Well done, Fred!

Going door to door selling photography is a tough sell up here in the woods 

Yesterday wasn't such a great photography day.

But it was a good day. I managed to spend a little time with some people I enjoy, I did get out to shoot some pictures and share the odd bit of knowledge, but none of the pictures worked out except for the sunset one above. I even stopped at a spot that intrigued me after dark, on the way home and tried a little light painting but it didn't work out and I discarded the whole batch. But in doing so, I figured out why they didn't work and perhaps what to look for and do next time.

Thursday was, though. That's the day Fred took the picture above, we were at the Haliburton Museum and Steve Hill was kind enough to play blacksmith for us. I got a few pictures I liked, one of which I'm very satisfied with.

Another one of those Topaz Impression, "Da Vinci" style images. What I like about this one is the composition and the dynamic of the light.  

This is what the HDR process was made for. The crisp detail is brought out, there's a depth created by the lighting, and the bright exterior in the window and doorframe are retained. I think it's a good technical image although it lacks some artistic impression (should I add brush strokes? Hmmm...) 

And finally, this one. This is exactly what I was going for when I came out on Thursday. 

If you're a photographer, I'd like to direct you to a tutorial-style writeup that I did about what went into the making of the Blacksmith image. I think you'll find it instructive. If you don't care how the picture came to be, well, just enjoy it for what it is! Here's the link, I put it on my Tech Blog so as not to bore my non-technical readers.

Onward and upward. I noticed that this is my 301st blog post, not bad! I do go on, don't I?

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Pictures of Rocks (Not!)

It has been said that I take great pictures of rocks. And trees. In fact, when we did the Rob Stimpson workshop, I was told several times, "no pictures of rocks!" Not only by Rob, but also by the other participants!

The purpose of the exercise was to move out of your comfort zone. Definitely, I'm not comfortable taking pictures of people. So I've been working on it. Here are some examples, I hope you like them.



I took this picture of "George" at the Deep Gorge Center near Lake Placid New York where we stopped for some photos. George was having lunch and I commented how much I liked his beard, and asked if I could photograph him. I got him to stand near a window and used natural light.

The exposure was handheld at 1/25 sec (thanks, Nikon, for VR!), one stop underexposed so that I didn't blow out any of the detail. Really the only PhotoShop work I did was to blur the background (easy to say, not so easy to do: I "extracted" his image and put it on another layer), and some small hue/saturation adjustments.

I only took one image, interestingly.



Nella is a motorcyclist, she's a member of the Acme Motorcycle club. They went on a ride today and I met up with them for lunch in Coboconk. Afterwards, I took a few pictures including this one of Nella.

People think I do too much Photoshopping. Maybe, but I like it and I think I'm getting better at it. This picture only needed a little work, because Nella's skin is soft and smooth, the lighting was great, she has a great smile and I love her hair. Still, I sharpened the eyes, desaturated the whites of the eyes, fixed up a few blemishes and did some work under her eyes. I softened the skin with a blur layer although I didn't really need to. I liked the above image, Nella didn't see it, I hope she likes it. She saw the next image on the camera and said she liked it so I worked on it as well.





Vanessa is Nella's cousin. She was along for the ride (as a passenger, her first time on a bike, BTW) and I tried to get some shots of her both inside and outside the restaurant. Not that successful, until I got home and saw this one on the computer. It was taken inside the restaurant at an ISO of 1600, which made it very grainy/noisy. Also there was some kind of lighting from her left side (stage right!) that was green in colour. So I managed to colour correct that (hue/saturation adjustment layer, select "greens" instead of "master"), then I looked at a crop of the image and loved it. I worked on the whites of the eyes a little, desaturating them, and I turned up the sharpening on the eyes. I also lightened their colour a little.

Before finishing the photo, I looked at it blown up and didn't like the noise on the lips. So I selected them and applied a gaussian blur to smooth them. The same for the whites of the eyes.

Speaking of her eyes, I loved them so much that I had to do a tight crop. Like it?





One more: This is Tom, the blacksmith at Fleming College in Haliburton. He cooperated with us for our workshop, acting as a model and we experimented with various lighting solutions. I used a Gary Fong diffuser on my SB-600 flash, but set it a couple of stops down so that it would act as a fill light not overpower the image.

Wde also ran into a couple from Toronto on that weekend, who coincidentally handed one of us a point-and-shoot camera and said, "would you take our picture for us?" Sure thing, since we were working on "outdoor portraiture"! I haven't worked on those images yet, so I'll have to put them up later.

Reminder: you can see most of my work on my gallery site here, or click at right.

L8R...