Online portfolios
I thought I’d point out that one of the reasons for the whole static website revision was moving from html based galleries of images to PDF portfolios.
When I was sorting out what I wanted these PDF portfolios to be like, there was a fair bit of interest but I was reluctant to share until I was fairly set.
You can see what I ended up with at http://www.butzi.net/portfolios.htm. Feedback welcome, of course.
Most modern browsers will display the PDF directly, but if your browser won’t give you an uncluttered full screen view, I think you’ll find it better to download them and view them in a decent PDF viewer that gives an uncluttered fullscreen view – I use Adobe Reader, which is free. If you’re on a Mac, you’ll find that it’s more pleasant to view these in Reader than in the Mac’s Preview app.
I like big prints, I cannot lie…
(with sincere apologies to Sir Mix-a-Lot)
I confess, I am a big print fan. I like big prints. When I was a kid, made 8″x10″ prints, and I always lamented that the Speed-EzEl had fixed 1/4″ borders, so that I couldn’t eke out a slightly larger image. And then years later, I printed routinely on 11″x14″ paper, and then on 16″x20″ paper. Only the cost of paper larger than that, and the hassles of either running prints in drums or setting up a larger tray line restrained by desire to make prints bigger than that.
And when I plunged into digital printing, naturally I got a 40″ wide printer, and I made some truly large prints. It was relatively easy, and a lot of fun. Sadly, it turns out that there are not very many places I can hang a 36″ x 45″ print, so I didn’t make too many. And now I have only a 24″ wide printer, so the largest print I can make is something like 22″ on the short side. Still pretty big, that is.
But my trend seems to be heading smaller. Having made a number of Blurb books (in the roughly 8×10 landscape size), and done a bunch of online PDF portfolios (limited to the size of the screen, which might be small but might be large), I find myself thinking about both books and portfolios of loose prints.
If you haven’t seen them, you might look at what Brooks Jensen has done with what he calls ‘Folios’: http://www.brooksjensenarts.com/foliodesc.html
I think these folios are interesting, because they seem to offer an interesting sort of blend between book-ness and print-ness. So I’m thinking of making a few of these. Naturally the next question is “What size?”
I have, essentially, two sizes of paper for my printer – 17″ wide rolls and 24″ wide rolls. In my imagination, I’d mark the images I want in the print portfolio in Bridge, apply an automated photoshop action, and go for a walk with the dog. When we returned we’d find a bunch of prints in the printer basket, cut to the right size, and I’d just gather them up, pop them in the cool paper cover, and I’d be done. Whoot! Of course, in reality, I’d need to flatten the prints, which means another step.
But a portfolio of 14″x17″ prints would be pretty big. You probably wouldn’t sit down in your comfy chair next to the crackling fire, glass of wine close at hand, and go through a folio of 14″x17″ prints. You might do that with prints sized around 11×14. Jensen makes his prints 8″ x 10.5″.
My fondness for big prints rebels at the idea of making prints that small. My desire to make something that can be held in the lap and enjoyed that way insists they must be that small.
There’s this outfit: http://www.danecreekfolios.com/ that sells pre-cut folio covers. They make them 8.5″x11″. It would seem sensible to make a few at that size, as an experiment. 8.5″x11″ is a convenient size for me, since I can print two up on 17″ wide paper and then cut the prints apart with minimal hassle. So I’ve gone ahead and ordered a few of the folios; I’ll report back on this when I have them in hand.
Comments/suggestions/insights on appropriate size for folios from readers would be most welcome.
Fuzzy
In a comment on my post Visual Field, Bob Wong wrote “Finally some liberation from the dogma of composition.” Bob is touching on the heart of the matter.
Not long ago, I read a post on a blog, talking about things you can do to improve your photography. It was, in essence, a list of things you can do, at the time you make the exposure, with the goal of improving the photo you’re about to make. It was full of the conventional advice, such as “is this the strongest composition you can find?” and “pay attention to edges”. You know the list. It was an ‘Aesthetic Checklist’. I read it, and in my mind, I envisioned photographers, camera in hand, about to make a photograph but delaying releasing the shutter until they had run the checklist.
That led me to think that, perhaps, all we know about ‘composition’ is stuff that’s derived after the act. We look at a photo and we say “Oh, great composition, I love that strong diagonal element”. Or we might even look at a lot of photos (mine, for instance) and say “Oh, that Paul Butzi, he loves to compose photos with strong diagonals”. And this train of thought inevitably leads to thinking that someone might profitably think about such things at the time the exposure is made.
There’s a problem with this line of thinking, though. The problem is this: I have never, ever looked at a scene and thought “Oh, look, here’s a long log, I’ll use that to create a strong diagonal composition”. Ok, that’s not strictly true, because I have done it on occasion. What I have never done, though, is engage in that sort of thought and had the result be worth more than the little pile of dead flies that collects on my studio windowsill. Frankly put, I am just no damn good at all at making photos by assembling the composition from the available elements. I can only see the elements in a sort of post hoc examination.
Sure, I know. I can assemble photos that contain just a few discrete elements. I can arrange three circles on a plane, and I can arrange a line and a circle. I can arrange a single circle. Those are pretty limited skills. I am not a compositional dynamo.
Yet, despite this, I manage to make some photographs that I like where I know the photos exceed my meager ability to construct a composition. I can recognize the good ones and bad ones after I make them, but I can’t build them.
And that leads me to the conclusion that perhaps the ‘rules of composition’ are very vague and hard to articulate, or they’re very complicated and interdependent and thus hard to articulate. There are not very many books on composition, and the ones that exist always seem to lead me back to arranging discrete elements on a plane, and I already suspect that although this is a good way to post-analyze photographs it’s a cruddy way to make them. There’s a Weston quote in the back of my brain, the thrust of which was essentially this: if you’re thinking about the ‘rules of composition’ when you are making a photo, you have failed before you started. Following a checklist is not the path to strong compositional skills.
To me the good news here is that a) this explains why trying to read about composition does not seem to work for me, and b) despite the fact that humans are not very good at articulating things which are very fuzzy and vague, humans (me included) have a pretty good mechanism for dealing with things that are fuzzy and vague. In some sense we’re nothing more than a big fuzzy neural net. Dealing with fuzzy and vague is one of our strong points. The problem is not dealing with fuzzy and vague; it’s reducing our fuzzy and vague process to an unambiguous bit of language that’s the problem.
And at last I come to my point – articulating something is really important if you want to teach it, or if you want to have someone teach it to you, because in that case language serves as the intermediary between your thoughts and someone else’s. But this highly specific, unambiguous articulation is not needed if you’re just training yourself. You just learn it, and if the understand defies being expressed in language, well, that’s unfortunate but sometimes life is like that.
How do you train a fuzzy neural net? You present it with lots of inputs, and you tell it “this one is good” or “this one is bad”. How do you train your fuzzy neural net brain to make good (for any desired sort of ‘Good’)? You make a lot of photographs, and then you look at them and you tell your fuzzy neural net brain “This one is good. Make more like this. This one, though, that’s not so good. Don’t do that as often,” and you don’t waste time with trying to articulate why this one is good or that one is not so good.
Or at least, that’s my current working theory.
Static Website Archive
Since going online with the much reduced static website I’ve gotten email and comments that run along the lines of “Hey, I was reading that stuff, it was useful, why’d you take it down, put it back.” In general such email/comments seem to suggest that I am doing the world a great disservice by not leaving all that stuff up on the web and I’ve got some vaguely articulated obligation to put it back, soonest. Some of this email has been somewhat less than completely polite.
I will just observe that for the past five years or so, essentially ALL of the stuff I’ve gotten rid of had a paypal button on it, and a bit of text that said “Is this article useful to you? If you think so, please consider a voluntary donation.”
None of the people complaining about my getting rid of this stuff donated.
So I propose the following simple plan. If someone wants me to dig something out of the archived old website and put it up on the new one, I’ll be happy to do it. All you need to do is make a small but reasonable donation to show me you’re not just valuing my time and energy at zero. That is, put your money where your mouth is.
Please send your donations to my local food bank (http://www.hope-link.org/takeaction/donate) or to my local branch of Habitat for Humanity (http://www.habitatekc.org/). Email me a copy of the confirmation or receipt, and let me know which page or pages you’d like resurrected. Let’s set the rate at, say, $10 per page. If you have some objection to those two charities, let me know and we can negotiate some mutually agreeable charity.
Visual Field
With the website clutter mostly cleared away, I’ve been going over my photographs from the last year, trying to sort them into thematic groups so that I can make a few PDF portfolios.
One group that stands out is one I’ve mentioned before – a set of images that have little or no composition but are more just a cluttered visual field. Nearly all of those photos are bad. But the ones that are good I like a lot. To make things more interesting, if I arrange them chronologically, I can see that they evolved from being only loosely composed and gradually drifted toward no compositional organization at all. I don’t know what to call these photographs, so I’ve been calling them ‘visual field’ photographs, which isn’t really right but is better than calling them something which is definitely wrong.
Like my ongoing fascination with gates, I’ve no real idea of what’s going on with these photos. But it’s interesting all the same.
Apparently, art has been a verb for some time now.
“The word ‘art’ is very slippery. It really has no importance in relation to one’s work. I work for the pleasure, for the pleasure of the work, and everything else is a matter for the critics.”
-Manuel Alvarez Bravo
I don’t know that I have a whole lot to add to that sentiment.
Static website
My new, slimmed down and redesigned static website has been online at http://www.butzi.net for about 20 hours now.
leave a comment