The World

I think most folks have a drawer in the kitchen where you throw all the stuff that doesn’t belong in some specific place. You go to search for the scissors, and you’re stunned to find no scissors but instead nine loose AA batteries of unknown vintage, a 15″ length of nylon twine, two bullet levels neither of which you remember buying, a doorstop, the leftover screws from an IKEA bookcase, two nails, and a thirty year old packet of thumbtacks. Every time you open the drawer to look for something, there’s a different collection of stuff in there.

My mind apparently has a place like that drawer.

For reasons I don’t understand, occasionally this drawer in my mind pops open and something flies out. Imagine you’re in the kitchen scrambling an egg for breakfast, and suddenly your junk drawer flies open and a packet of blue tack hurtles across the room and lands on your foot – it’s rather like that. I’m sure a psychotherapist could have a field day interpreting this random stuff and telling me what my subconscious mind was trying to tell me.

Anyway, this morning I woke up to find the following had leapt out of my mind’s junk drawer and landed with a thump in my consciousness – it’s one of Wordsworth’s sonnets:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

I have no earthly idea when or where or why I managed to commit it to memory, but there it is.

The Problem Remains the Same

There have been several interesting posts that captured my attention on Mike Johnston’s The Online Photographer, here and here and here. It’s true. Technical mastery is hard, and it does not help when the rate of advancement in manufacture of camera gear is so rapid that your mastery doesn’t last long before you need to refresh it.

But, as I am fond of saying… And yet. And yet.

Amidst the fundamental problems of rapid advance in capabilities as cameras evolve, computers become faster, printers expand in color gamut, and papers advance in longevity, I am reminded of something I learned in a workshop – technical mastery is about learning to drive, and although it’s hard work, it’s not the end goal. The hard part is not knowing how to use a spot meter and the zone system, or how to expose to the right on your digital camera, or even how to do focus blending in Photoshop.

The hard part has always been the same – which way do we point the camera, when do we let the shutter go. Interestingly, this has been the case since the very first photographs, and it remains the same today. Amidst all the technological game changing in photography, from plates coated with tar through wet plates and dry plates and roll film, through Polaroid and Kodachrome and C-41 and E-6 and digital capture, this one thing remains as the unchanging foundation.

That’s because photography is not about cameras. It’s about making photographs. It’s not about what you drive, or even how you drive. It’s about where you’ve decided to go, and whether you’ve decided that for you the value is in the destination or the journey.

Thoughtless Cameras

A long time ago, when I re-entered the world of photography after a break of many years, I bought a Canon EOS Elan. The Elan was a very nice camera, but I immediately noticed that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had enjoyed that old Pentax Spotmatic. The Elan could do more things in more different ways than the Spotmatic could. It had more controls for me to play with. But somehow, the photos were not as satisfying as I had remembered the Spotmatic photos being. At the time I sort of chalked this up to rosy nostalgia.

After the Elan, I bought a Canon A2e, with even more whizzy features. Eye controlled autofocus, for pity’s sake. Again, nice, but again, not an improvement in satisfaction.

So I switched to large format, buying a very nice Wisner field camera. No whizzy features. Much more satisfaction. The field camera was good, but soon I switched to a Linhof Technikardan, a monorail/field hybrid camera that looks like a chinese puzzle that moves. And although operation of the Technikardan was more complicated than the Wisner, all the controls were right where I wanted them, and I *loved* that camera. I made a few very good photos with it, a surprisingly large pile of ok photos with it, and a staggering pile of not very good photos with it, enjoying myself immensely the entire time.

And then I got a bee in my bonnet, and bought a Leica M6, and rather to my surprise, I loved it. It had what I’ve come to think of as “Spotmatic-ness” – the property of being so simple that in practice you never think about it. Your brain thinks “faster shutter speed” and your fingers move the control, and that’s that. Your brain thinks “wider aperture”, and your fingers do the work, and there’s no fussage to it. And again, I *loved* the m6.

But the stingy little postage stamp negatives from the M6 periodically drove me back to the Linhof, which remained a favorite.

And then I bought the Canon EOS 5d, to be a fast, easy to use tool for *scouting* locations in advance of going there with the Linhof. And I loved it. It almost instantly became my primary camera, and the Linhof started to gather dust, and the Leicas started to gather dust. At the time, I thought it was about the image quality, and going digital, and all that.

And just recently I upgraded from the 5d to the 5d mk II, and I love the 5d mk II even more. Oh, sure, the image quality is better, but not by much. The no dust thing is brilliant after the dust heartbreaks of the 5d, but that’s not it either.

What it comes down to is that both the 5d and to a larger degree the 5d mk II have that ‘Spotmatic-ness’ to them. They are thoughtless cameras, which sounds negative but is oh so positive. They’re thoughtless because when I am out with them, either on the tripod or in my hands, I never think about them. I see possibilities, and the photos get made, but I don’t ever seem to be thinking about driving the camera. There’s a certain transparency to the process when you’re using a thoughtless camera. What I had been calling ‘Spotmatic-ness’ is actually more properly called thoughtlessness.

This thoughtlessness is, I note, a property of the Leica M6 as well as the Linhof Technikardan. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

Before some enterprising camera designer starts questing, here, I’d observe that many people find the M6 to be thoughtless but others are driven insane by it, and that apparently I am one of 5 people on the planet who has never had trouble unfolding or folding a Technikardan 45s. So the Leica m6 and the Technikardan are thoughtless for me, but not necessarily for you. And that’s almost certainly true of the EOS 5d and EOS 5dmkII as well. I love them, but I’m certain there are people out there who, faced with the challenge of using them to make a photograph, would pronounce them instruments of Satan.

The sad thing is that the only way I know of to find out if a camera is really thoughtless or not is to buy one, and use it for a while. Sometimes there’s a shortcut when you go to the store, hold one in your hands, and feel an immediate urge to tie the camera to a cinderblock and throw it into the nearest body of deep water. But usually there’s no warning until after you’ve taken it home and tried to use it. How frustrating.

On the bright side, you can have a very frustrating camera, and switch to a camera very comparable in features but made by a different company, and switch from an instrument of Satan to a thoughtless camera, just like that. Amusingly, although the internet is full of writing about lens sharpness, feature set, mirror lockup, frames per second, megapixels, etc. those things are, at most, only tangentially related to thoughtlessness.

Failure

There’s not much that’s more frustrating than a photo where you can clearly remember what motivated you to let the shutter go, and what your hopes were, and then when you actually see what you’ve got, none of that is there and you’re left wondering “What the heck made me think this was going to work?”

This is one of those photos. It is superficially similar to other photos I’ve made recently which I thought worked, but this one just… doesn’t.

Untitled

My fascination with trees continues.

Untitled

Aperture

As yet another one of my “it’s a sort of experiment” things, I have for months now been going on my more or less daily walks with the aperture on the lens set to wide open (usually f/2.8 or f/4), and leaving it wide open regardless of subject. This has been an interesting learning experience. It’s not clear to me that this results in a larger number of satisfying images than, say, setting the aperture to f/11 and leaving it there, or even the usual practice of stopping down when you think you want depth of field, and opening up to some optimum when you want it, and going wide open when you want shallow depth of field.

Mostly this has been an experiment to see whether my seeing adapts to a priori decisions about equipment (lens selection, say, or aperture).

My conclusion is that I do adapt. What’s more, imposing this sort of arbitrary and capricious limitation on your daily photography can be a rewarding way of expanding your photographic vision.

Legacy

Tim Parkin comments on my trend toward spending less time on processing each image:

I’d rather have a back catalogue of a small number of good images than a huge archive of images. I suppose if I post process 8 images a month it’s a pretty good output. This still means about 100 images per year or 5 books per decade! How many pictures do you want to be remembered for? (r.e. Opportunity cost – I’d rather spend ten times as long on one composition than take ten versions of it. Although I know I’ll get it wrong sometimes, at least when I get it right I know I will have fine tuned it all I can)

There was a time where I really wanted to get my work out there, really wanted to get shows, really wanted to succeed as a photographer. In short, I thought hard about things like how many pictures I wanted to be remembered for.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if there’s value to the photography I do, it’s in the doing, and not in the having done. I think if there’s no value that I experience in the making of the photographs, it’s very likely that the photographs have no value at all, and in fact probably have negative value since I’ll have tied up resources to make things like cameras, paper, lenses and so on, and I’ll have used up energy to make the photos.

The simple fact is that not only is it unlikely I’ll be remembered for any photos I’ve made, it’s exceedingly unlikely I’ll be remembered at all much beyond the span of my life. Or, to put it in a more positive way, some people would like to achieve immortality by doing things for which they’ll be remembered. I’d prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.

Perhaps because of this view, I’ve come to question the idea that it’s not worth spending vast quantities of time tweaking image unless the part of the process you’re enjoying is tweaking the images.

My attitudes on such things swing back and forth. No doubt sometime in the future I’ll be back to obsessively dodging, burning, and the like.

Untitled

The Too Precious Image

Back when I was working in large format film, I spent a lot of time on each image I printed. It was all about getting everything just right.

There are still times where I spend a significant amount of time on a single image, but it’s pretty rare. Part of that is that I’m much faster in Photoshop, and I can get the overall curves adjustment the way I want in a very short time. But I do a lot less local adjustment of curve shape to balance get things the way I want these days.

Part of that may be that I’m just making a lot more exposures, and if I sit down at the computer, often I’m limited not by how many images I have on which I want to work, but by the number of hours I’m willing to spend at the computer instead of outside with the camera. If I come up against an image that I can’t seem to get right, I mark it as ‘interesting problem’ and move on. Someday, maybe this winter when the weather is inhospitable, I’ll go back and tackle those. Or maybe not. There’s such a thing as working too hard trying to save the ‘too precious’ image. Sometimes it’s better to let go.

I struggle with this, still; there’s a sense of regret when I imagine what I wanted when I let the shutter go but I find that it’s just not going to work out.

There are an infinite number of images out there for me to capture. For right now, it seems more productive to look at the image I really wanted but which just is not coming together, and think “So, what’s wrong, here?” for a few minutes, extract the whatever lessons I can from the failure, and then just let it go. There’s the same scene tomorrow, a day older and with different light, and with me being a day older and perhaps more clever. Or perhaps not.

The one thing I do know is that there will still be infinitely many photographs for me to make, tomorrow. It’s not as if flogging a dead horse today is some sort of dues I have to pay so that I ensure an ample supply tomorrow.