Book Project

I have finaly taken the step to get a book project of the ground. I have wanted to do a coffee table photobook for years and now it is finally happening. I am currently working on the first draft. There is an enourmous amount of proofing, cutting and selecting to do. From wittling the hundreds of potential photos down to the best of the best to pruducing the text to colour proofing etc. And I am hoping to hit the local shefves before Christmas

Rememberance Day

It is time to remember again. The low gray overcast skies, the early November rains and the beginning of the darkness of winter are all pointers to the nearing of the day where people everywhere gather in front of cenotaphs, memorials and museums to remember. We remember the sacrifice that previous generations had to make to give us the freedoms we often take for granted.

I recently bought a second hand book of Photographs of World War 2 at our annual library sale here on Bowen Island. This is by no means the first war to be photographed. None the less, it is compelling to view these haunting images from the past of young men and women in the most destructive of all wars in human history.

I think most people have seen images from WW2. It has become part of a collective memory that resides in our sub-conscious. We have a mental image of that time which is based on no single photograph, but a blend of them all.

If I think of what images defines WW2 for me, it would be the contrast between the photos of destroyed towns and abandoned concentration camps filled with emaciated souls, taken by Allied photographers like Elizabeth Miller and Sam Gilbert, and the propaganda images of Hitler and the Nazi's taken by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the will and Olympia. The difference between fanatic idealism and the harsh realities it left in its wake.

May the images made by those brave photographers remain in our minds. Let us never forget.

The music of Ansel Adams

Many people don't realize that Ansel Adams started his life aiming to be a concert pianist and was gradually drawn away into photography driven by his passion for Yosemite valley.

The image above is the famous photograph of the Halfdome in Yosemite that marked a major turning point is his development as a photographer. He had spent the day climbing and taking pictures with his friends, it was close to the end of the day and he had only one glass plate left. With the convenience of our current technology it is easy to forget that men like Adams had to use large format camera with prepared glass plates to make their images. It was tiring and gruelling work to carry the large camera, heavy wooden tripod and the glass plates, especially if the photographer was climbing a mountain.

So he had only the one plate left and it was the end of the day and he had spent the day climbing with his gear. One can imagine that he was probably tired and ready to wrap things up. Up until this moment he had been struggling to make photographs that he felt lived up to the grandeur and beauty of the Yosemite. It suddenly occurred to him that he could really darken the sky if he placed a deep red filter over the lens. He exposed the glass plate and the result was this amazing image with the sky almost black and the massive rock face looming overhead. For the first time he had captured the sense of the imposing size and overwhelming presence of the Halfdome. It was the break through he had been looking for.

It is easy to assume that Ansel simply printed his Photograph from the negative and that he got it all exactly the way he wanted on the glass plate. But nothing is further from the truth. Ansel likened the process of making photos to his background in music. He often said that the negative is like the music score and in a symphony and that the development of the image in the dark room is the performance. People who witnessed the process said that it was like watching somebody doing a dance as he moved around in the darkroom in front of the enlarger dodging and burning the print. It would often take him a whole day of solid work before he found the right performance of the negative and was satisfied with a print.

Ansel spent a lot of time working at extracting from the negative what his mind's eye had seen when he exposed the glass.

Documentary versus Conceptual Photo art.

There seem to be a general division applied to photographic artists, you are either in the documentary or in the conceptual tradition. Generally speaking, documentary photographers are concerned with accurate and true representations of reality as they find it without modifications and embellishments. Conceptual photographers generally pre-visualize a concept which expressed in a photographic image that could be abstract, staged or heavily modified sometimes to the extent that the image is assembled from elements that does not even exist in reality. Now if I can narrow the discourse a little bit, in terms of art photography of landscapes, photographers like Ansel Adams (his famous image of the Tetons shown below) and other modern landscape artists of the kind that get published in the National Geographic are generally lumped with the documentary camp. It has a tradition that stretch back to the Photo Secession of Alfred Stieglitz.

Artists like Anne Brigham and Jeff Wall (An octopus and some beans shown below) are in the conceptual artist camp. The tradition of conceptual photography really stretch back to the beginning of the medium in the successful struggle to gain recognition as a valid artist medium. It has really come into its own in the Post- Modern era and the fast majority of Art photographers who break into the big leagues today are conceptual artists. This is no accident, the whole art world is currently dominated by conceptual art.

The sad fact is that with the rise of conceptual art there has been growing a parallel disconnect with people who do not become to the artistic elite. The average person who views a piece of conceptual art is left, at best, feeling disconnected and unmoved by it, and often feeling that it is trivial junk that anybody could have done. Within the art community this is viewed as a barbaric perspective which speaks of a lack of culture and education and that if people would just educate themselves more they would see how profound it all is.

To me this is one of the saddest things that has happened in the art world. The self conscious superior artist who disdains the public they are dependant on and the public who has all but given up on art as anything useful to society. I recently had a member of one of the most famous Architectural firms in Vancouver tell me that he is yet to meet anyone in the general public who likes the buildings they design, and this is in spite of the fact that their reception is filled with Governor General medals and other honours. It is simply tragic for both sides.

I am hoping to move away from purely conceptual work and in my art create images of beauty that speaks to people in a direct way while giving the serious art aficionado something to chew on as well. Essentially, although my landscape work looks a lot like documentary work and I find much in the documentary tradition that appeals to me, it is more than an attempt to portray the world as it is. I am far to aware of my own subjective perspective to seriously believe in my own ability to objective portray anything. My work is therefore a conscious attempt to capture the emotional impression and the Genius Loci or spirit of the place that I find myself in. In this sense I have more in common with the conceptual tradition.

Beauty and truth

The Vancouver art museum currently has an exhibition of the pictorialist photographers entitled "Truth and Beauty". I have spend the last few weeks slowly working my way through the very dense exhibition in small bits. I have also watched a PBS documentary on Alfred Stieglitz as a result of seeing the exhibition. I thought I would share some of my impressions from both of these. Stieglitz apparently said "photography is my passion, searching for truth my obsession" That resonates with me. What struck me most about his approach was that he moved beyond the obsession with the mechanism of making images and the emphasis on self conscious technical processes that dominated the late 19th century world of photography. It was a young medium and it seemed that most people were still stuck on the process. Stieglitz focused on the subject of his images and made beautiful images of beautiful things with the techniques to make them being a mere tool in the process of getting to what he wanted to express. It strikes me that we are currently again in a phase in photography where the technical mechanism has become more important than the subject with the advent of digital image making. I think we can learn some lessons from Stieglitz. Whether it is a digital negative and an electronic darkroom is secondary to the content of the image. Self conscious attempts to showcase the technical possibilities is merely that and will fade away quickly like all fads do. Making a memorable and lasting image has to touch something of the universal in the human condition and resonate with us on a much deeper and existential level. The second thing that struck me was the sheer beauty of contemplating the actual print. There is something mysterious in seeing a sheet of paper that was physically held by the photographers which we admire. The artifact is more than an image, it holds the memory and emotion of the artist in its fibers and slowly reveals it if we take the time. I fear that we are loosing something with electronic displays, their cold precision and their visual clutter. It struck me how dark most of the prints seemed in real life. I think that our perception of colour and light is shifting with illuminated displays on LCD and plasma screens. We are getting used to images that glow and shout at us with super realistic and intense colour. We consume these images like fast-food without even tasting what we consume, flipping from one to the next with utter ease and barely looking at what we see. When we look at a print it can seem flat and dark in comparison. But we are mistaken, there is a subtlety in the printed photo which is difficult to describe, in the same way that a good bottle of wine or single malt has a subtlety that it reveals only to the educated palate. It does not shout, it whispers, it is about quality instead of quantity, about craftsmanship and passion and taking time to create something that reveals beauty and meaning. It is subtle and refined and it demands that we slow down, contemplate it and absorb it. When we do it has the power to inspire, uplift and change us.

Getting lost in the moment

Two weeks ago I decided to head out in the early morning to September morn beach here on Bowen Island. I have never been to this particular beach but had heard great things about it and I was desperate to get out and make some photos.

I got there at 08h00 which was a little later than I had hoped since sunrise was at 07h15. However I was not disappointed. The tide was in and the beach area was therefore relatively small. The light was unusual. The sun was hidden behind mist which covered the ocean and the beach was bathed in a soft warm filtered light. I was alone, so I put my camera bag down and immediately felt drawn to a rocky outcrop with some driftwood on it. While I started to frame some test shots I heard a ferry blasting it fog horn in the distance.

Suddenly a series of waves appeared out of nowhere. I need to explain something here. Bowen Island is located in Howe Sound which is sheltered to such and extend that the sea looks more like a lake than an ocean. Waves of any size are pretty rare. However, I did not reckon with the wake of a large ferry. All of a sudden I found myself in the ocean with this series of six or seven large waves crashing into the driftwood on the beach. Since I was busy framing my first shot as the waves started rolling in, I simply kept shooting while I tried to move up the beach to get out of the water. I am very pleased with the results and will probably add one of the series of images to the 4th dimension limited edition series.

I was so taken with the moment and carried away in shooting images that I did not even think of my camera bag. When the moment had passed I lowered my camera, took a look at my shoes and pants that were soaked and turned around to pick up my bag when I realized that it had disappeared together with my 16-45mm wide angle zoom which was in it. The magnitude of what had just happened sank in with a cold sweat when I noticed the now very wet bag lying high up on the beach.

My preferred bag for landscape shooting is a “Crumpler” shoulder bag. It is small, tough and lightweight. It is just big enough for my camera, one lens and my filters. The bag closes with a flap and Velcro pad and has no zipper, so it is not waterproof even if the material it is made of is water resistant.

I was convinced that the lens was destroyed by the salt water. I grabbed the bag and opened it, and to my utter amazement found the lens and my filters with nothing but a few drops of water on them. The bag had protected them from the impact of being tossed onto the driftwood and from the salt water.

The moral of the story is this. If you want to get lost in the moment, get a good camera bag…

Up close and personal with a tree

On Friday I picked up a new Pentax D-FA 100mm f2.8 macro lens. I have been playing with it for the last few days. On Saturday afternoon I took my son (he got a compact digital camera from Santa in December) and we headed into the forest near Killarney Lake on Bowen Island to see if we can find some photos.

The weather has been very cold and wet over the last few weeks and though the sun emerged on Saturday and had been shining for quite a few hours once we were inside the forest, everything was still dripping with moisture

This is part of what I love about the coastal temperate rainforest system. The forest has its own microclimate and it own sense of place. It is simply teeming with life and atmosphere. Once you enter under the canopy, everything goes quiet. There is an almost oppressive stillness that overwhelms you. Initially the forest seem somewhat monotone, with two or three large tree species dominating the scene and a tangled and messy forest floor to offset the simple vertical trunks of the trees. If you allow yourself to slow down and to adjust to the gentle and slow rhythm of the forest, your senses and perception adjust. Then the beautiful and fine grained details of this place emerge and present themselves.

We did not have to go far, in fact after two hours of shooting images we had barely gone 200 yards into the forest.

The first image I uploaded is an image of the bark on a Douglas fir trunk. It is easy to walk past these beautiful giants and to admire them on a grand scale only. But if you stop and slow down you may get a different perspective and realize just how many organisms make these trees their home and how many layers of colours, textures and life come together to create the bark that covers them.

The second and third images are close ups of the moss that covers the roots of the same tree. Normally moss is furry and lacy. But if you get close enough and enlarge them enough they start to resemble ferns. In fact, once you look, you notice that there are numerous textures and colours of moss in the forest. And that is only one type of plant once you add the lichens, ferns, berries, trees, leafs etc, the complexity is infinite. The brown twig in the third image is a dead leaf from a tree. It reminds me of scales on a reptile at this magnification.

I find that as I allow this little island in the Pacific to touch me and as I open myself to it, that the forests and nature that cover it gradually reveals itself in ever deeper ways. To me that is part of loving this place ever more deeply and of finding the Sacred beauty which is so easily lost on us in our hectic daily rhythms. These forests have a value far beyond the obvious economic and environmental debates. Our spirits are fed by these places and they put the temporality and smallness of our existence into perspective.

The ethics of image making

I wanted to delve into the question of the ethics of photo manipulation a bit more. It seems that since the advent of digital photography and Photoshop this is an issue that has become very topical. The most basic expectation from most people is that a photo is somehow a moment in time captured and objectively represented as opposed to a painting and drawing which is clearly a created representation. Critics of digital photography will often say that it is not real photography because it is made with pixels and can therefore be manipulated so easily. In fact real looking images can be created from almost nothing. I was leaning strongly towards this side of the argument until a few years ago. To be honest, I think it was mostly based on the fear that digital photography spelled the end of the craft, and therefore the destruction of my passion. I enjoyed the craftsmanship that went into creating a photo on emulsion and extracting it in a darkroom. There was a tactile magic in seeing an image appear on the white paper in the developer. But, logically the argument that traditional darkroom is the only valid form of photography because somehow it is more honest than digital imaging does not hold water. Jeff Curto's History of Photography podcast recently featured two images which I would like to use, to explain why I say this. First off the ethical question of what constitutes a real photo is almost as old as photography itself. The method of capturing images has also changed dramatically since Niepce first started his experiments in the early 19th century. In 1857 Oscar Rejlander published a photo entitled “Two ways of life” This image had a composition and feel that resembled a painting. However, the controversy around this image, and many others like it, that developed amongst photographers, was that it was created from numerous negatives in the darkroom. In fact most of the people in this image were not together at all and there was therefore no moment in time like this. This really does show how big the myth is that images coming from darkrooms are more honest than images from computers. Imagine this image was assembled from 30 odd photos in a darkroom over 150 years ago! The second point I would like to make relates to the expectation of objective reality captured on photos. This notion has gradually been challenged at ever deeper levels over the last century. In 1858 there was deep shock when “fading away” was published by Robinson. It was a photo that was assembled from multiple negatives and that portrayed a woman on her death bed by models. People thought that it was a real image of a real dying person and thought it was intrusive for a photographer to take a photo at such a private moment.

At the time visual culture was in its infancy and people did not understand what they saw. Today it is difficult to imagine that people would really believe in the objectivity of images because we are so used to being bombarded by fictional imagery. However, I suspect that deep down many people actually still do expect it, even if they do not really believe it anymore. I suspect that we blame the computer age for the demise of honesty in imagery and we long for a return to a place where we can believe what we see.

The truth is that it is not a technological question. It is rather a case of a maturing understanding of the meaning, limitations and risks of images. Photos have always been subjective. The photographer always chooses an angle of view, decides to exclude certain things from the view and put emphasis on others. It has always been a personal and subjective view of reality. This is especially true in fine art photos where the artist specifically attempts to communicate a unique view of the world.

So why did I decide to limit my manipulation of images in the computer?

It is a matter of personal integrity.

I love the hunt for and the thrill of finding and making a good image in the camera. This is the one aspect of the craft of photography that has not changed at all. Secondly I am trying to reveal my personal view of Existence with the Sacred in Creation. To find and reveal the inspiring, uplifting and beauty of this place while my journey here lasts. I chose to do that through a medium where I capture glimpses of time and place of this temporal world. My images is a portrait of my personal journey of stumbling towards a grounded and meaningful sense of “Being” in this world. To me it would be dishonest to create an “artificial” reality in a computer to portray that search since it would be disconnected. The final reason is simply that I have no passion for computers and would rather spend my time with a camera in nature, than in Photoshop under artificial light.

The ethical boundary should be defined in being honest about what the artist did, rather than how it was made. When images are meant to deceive they are unethical, when images portray the artist’s intent honestly they are ethically fine. There is nothing wrong with creating “artificial” photos in a computer and to sell it as fine art, if the artist honestly states that it is an artificial image and if it is integrated into their view of the world.

If you are interested in umderstanding the Histroy of Photography better, I would encourage you to listen to Jeff Curto's podcasts. Especially his History of Photography series. It can be found in Itunes by doing a search fro his name.

Introduction

Welcome to my photography blog where I will discuss how I made some of images and any photography related issues that interest me.

By way of introduction I would like to discuss an image I took Aug 15 of 2007 and which is one of my current favourites. I took this image with my Pentax K10D with the 16-45 F4.5 wide angle lens.

The image was captured at Tunstal Bay on Bowen Island. Tunstal is located on the Western side of coastline and is one of my favourite beaches to photograph. Bowen Island is located in the Howe Sound in the Pacific Ocean , but the water is mostly almost lake-like because of the sheltered location. On this particular day there was quite a strong wind which had managed to whip up about 18" (45cm) high waves. The beach is littered with driftwood from the surrounding forests and I knew that there would be some interesting action on the beach between the water and the wood. I waited for the end of the day, hoping for an interesting sunset. My plan was to get some wide angle shots of the beach and driftwood in the foreground and the sunset in the distance.

When I got there I realized that I was out of luck for a dramatic sunset. The wind had swept the sky clear of all clouds and I was confronted with a dark blue sky with the sun on the horizon.

However the location of the driftwood on the beach had a lot of potential. The interesting thing about driftwood is that it creates a new scene every day as the tides jumble them around.

The log in the foreground of the image was being lifted and rocked by the waves as the tide was coming in. I ended up positioning my tripod in the ocean and I took my shoes of and went into the water up to about my knees. I switched my Pentax to the infrared remote shutter to avoid camera shake.

In order to capture the movement of the water I needed a slow shutter speed. I added the polarizing filter to stop the lens down by 2 stops. It was a bright and sunny day and although the sun was already on the horizon and hitting the scene almost horizontally, I still had a real struggle to get my shutter speed slow enough. The Light was shifting fast and as it got darker I got closer to my desired shutter speed of more than 1 second. I had to start to compensate the exposure as it got darker to stop the camera's light meter from artificially lightening the scene to 18% grey

The EXIF data from the camera indicates that I took the image at 8:16PM with a focal range of 16mm at F22 with a shutter speed of 1.3 seconds and exposure compensation of -1 stop.

To get the right effect I had to time my shutter to match the rhythm of the waves. I took about 30 exposures before I took the final one. As I clicked the shutter and watched a particularly large wave crash over the log, I had that sudden feeling where I just knew I got the shot I was looking for.