Musings on Photography

For years, I was a member of a group I started that was called the Monday Night Group. The group met every other Monday night to review new work. It was a great thing for me. When I was participating, I got a lot of great feedback about prints - lots of suggestions about how to fine tune individual prints.

That is, individual prints were the focus of the group, and the focus of the feedback. That’s a good thing, but in the time since I stopped attending the Monday Night Group, my interests have drifted somewhat. I’m still interested in prints, but but my focus has shifted from singular to plural. That is, I’m interested in bodies of work that extend beyond single prints. Collections of prints, sequences of prints, groups of prints.

In that usual synchronistic way that things work, as I was thinking about this, I got to have lunch with a friend of mine, who’s been pondering what he’s been getting out of his participation in a print review group. And it turns out that he, too, is more interested in feedback at the project level rather than feedback at the print level.

So I’ve been spending time lately thinking about ways to get feedback at the project level. Another review group, with periodic meetings? Maybe it’s the case that it’s not quite so important to get to view prints, and more important to view the sequences and thus it might be done online. There are a number of photographers whose work I follow online, and it does seem like that’s not an unreasonable way to get a feel for a body of work as it slowly evolves over time.

There’s a lot to think about there. But I really want feedback at a higher level than prints. I want it a lot.

Ok, maybe it’s not on the scale of the Punic wars. And God knows, I’m not Cato.

But my darkroom (built when I moved, at considerable expense) has been idle for a long time now. By ‘long time’, I mean a very very long time. And I simply cannot foresee a day when I might go back to doing traditional gelatin-silver darkroom printing.

From a usage point of view, the darkroom is already gone. Heck, half the space in there is being used to store bits of various decommissioned computers (all powered down and in kit form) and two Mac Minis currently acting as servers. Oh, and a bunch of uninterruptible power supply units.

And the reason is that over the past few weeks, I’ve been printing up a storm, and among other things I’ve made best effort toned B&W prints on the HP z3100 on matte surface papers like Crane Museo Portfolio, and on the current crop of baryta papers like Harman Gloss FB Al and Ilford Gold Fibre Silk. And, to be honest, the range and quality of the prints is better, by a considerable margin, than anything I got in the darkroom. I think that the baryta papers have finally closed the gap between gelatin silver prints (if your aim is the ‘air dried glossy’ look) and inkjet prints.

So, from a print quality point of view, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to keep all that darkroom stuff hanging around.

Furthermore, although I recognize that there are a lot of photographers who would sooner gouge out their own eyes than work at a computer more than necessary, I’m not one of them. I’m having more fun than I ever had in the darkroom, and that’s really saying something because I found working in the darkroom to be a lot of fun. I spent a lot of time in the darkroom. I remember, particularly, that November and December of 1996 were particularly dim and red, and there are quite a few other months which were very similar to those two.

So I think that means the darkroom is getting taken out of mothballs and parted out. Better to sell it all off, and get the money where I can use it and get the equipment where someone else can use it.

One bit of advice that you hear all the time is ‘avoid cliches’. This advice is repeated so often that it’s become something of a cliche itself.

I’ve never really understood it, myself. You’re standing before a glorious sunset, and you’re moved to take a photograph. You might be moved by the beauty of the scene, or by the unusual nature of the sunset, or by the desire to have a token to help you remember the moment. But, no matter, sunsets are cliches, and thus must be avoided. The world has enough photographs of glorious sunsets. Put down your camera, lest the cliche police take you away.

I think not. The risk of cliches when photographing isn’t so much that you’ll add to the extant collection of sunsets or puppies, or kittens in brandy snifters. The risk of cliches is that, because we’ve all been inundated by these ‘cliche’ images, often (but not always) if you’re making one of those photos, it’s because you’re making a kneejerk response to a scene instead of trying to get a bit deeper. If all of your photos are cliches, it’s probable that’s happening because you’re not getting past the superficial.

That’s not always bad. Sure, the world is supped full with photos of children blowing out the candles on their birthday cakes. You know it. I know it. And yet, the world is NOT suffering from a surfeit of photographs of YOUR CHILD blowing out the candles on his birthday cake on HIS THIRD BIRTHDAY. To anyone else, it’s a cliche. To you, it’s a significant image. If everyone else thinks it’s a cliche, why should you care? Answer: you should most definitely not care at all.

My thinking on cliche photography runs like this: when you catch yourself in the moment where the only image you can see to capture is the cliche, go ahead and take it. Film (or disk storage) is cheap. Take the photo, and then move on to the next one. The easiest way to get the cliche image out of your consciousness is to let the shutter go, and then move on. If you’re like me, if you don’t let the shutter go, that cliche image will just clog your mental pipe and in a weird sort of target fixation sort of way, the only image you’ll be able to contemplate is the one you don’t want to take. Just go ahead, take it, get it out of the way, and then try to move on beyond it. It’s the only thing that works for me

I’m never sure whether it’s better for me to answer questions in the comments right in the comments, or in another post.

Anyway, these questions seem to be more general, so I’ll just write another post.

Sean asks

How often do you print? And are you finding the time between printing sessions longer than they were? I find it too easy to accumulate digital images and do little or nothing with them - unless I load them up on the web.

Related to this, how would it work if the digital images you took were modified and displayed on the web in a manner that approached the way in which they would print out?

I try to make prints at least once a week, because that seems to keep the printer happy. But that’s not really what you want to know - what you want to know is how long does it go before I have a printing binge. Generally that’s about once a month. That’s about how long I would go between runs of darkroom sessions as well, although I generally fired up the darkroom every couple of weeks just to keep in practice - yet again keeping the printer in trim.

I like prints, and so far I haven’t gotten to the point where I’m willing to live without them. There are a lot of limitations to web display, let alone to display on a big monitor.

Paul, I’d be interested in what you have to say w.r.t. your enjoyment of the different phases. Particularly since you mention that you need to be in the mood to work well.

Oh, I enjoy it all. I like being out with the camera, and I like sitting at the computer editing images even more than I liked working in the darkroom - and I enjoyed working in the darkroom quite a lot. The only part of the photographic process I’ve never liked was processing film - it’s a perfectly horrid combination of being deadly boring and requiring great care to avoid mistakes and get the best possible results. Processing film is a task for which robots are admirably suited, and if I could have justified the price and space, I’d have bought an automated Jobo to process all my film.

The thing of it is that the various tasks are different, and I’m often in the mood for one when I’m quite definitely not in the mood for the others. The fact that I can let work accumulate at any stage definitely works in my favor.

When I was doing still developing film and printing in the darkroom, I usually had the stereo going in the darkroom while I was in there. There’s nothing more boring than processing film, and so the music would relieve the boredom somewhat.

When printing, though, the music served a different purpose. I rarely make straight prints, and one of the things I found helped getting the dodging and burning sequences right was playing music while I printed. Some music is good for printing, and there’s other music I like but didn’t play when printing. Some prints I worked out while playing some particular album or song, and now that song is linked with that print. In some cases my printing notes actually specify which music to play, to help get the dodge and burn sequence timed right. For example, the burning and dodging sequence for this photo is pretty complicated, and on my printing notes is a line that indicates that the easy way to get it right is to make the print by starting Rob Ickes recording of “Watermelon Man” on his album Slide City.

It probably means something that the print can only be made while listening to a recording of a Herbie Hancock jazz standard being played on dobro. I just wish I knew what that meaning is.

These days, though, it seems like I get more done by opening the windows and listening to the birds. It’s hard to know how much this is a result of moving to a quieter, more secluded place and how much is due to the change from printing in the darkroom (where timing and physical performance are issues) to printing digitally.

It’s easy to think that, in some simple way, photography is just one thing - making photographs. But for me, running all the way back to the very earliest photos I made when I was a kid, it’s always been a sequence of things: making the exposures, developing the image, making prints.

And one of the things that I very much like is that these things are loosely coupled; that is, I can go on a tear, and make a lot of exposures, and just let them pile up. When I was using 35mm film, I often let the film pile up until I had dozens of rolls of undeveloped film, and then one day I’d get up in the mood to process film, and I’d develop and contact print the film in one big film developing orgy. By the same token, I’d also let the processed film pile up, and then go on a printing binge, printing day after day after day. The flexibility to allocate effort to the different tasks is one of the things I very much like, because I’m one of those poor unfortunates who only works well when I’m in the mood.

Switching to a digital workflow has blurred some of those boundaries. I tend to download everything off the memory card as soon as I’m done with making exposures. It’s just a habit; I’m not even sure where it came from, but I’m not comfortable until those photos are duplicated in at least two places. And naturally, when I download them, I take at least a quick peek at what I’ve got.

But I’m still in the habit of letting the ‘undeveloped’ (by which I mean that I haven’t worked up even a rough treatment in Photoshop) images accumulate into a heap before I sit down at the computer to work through them. Although I now make the odd print when I really want to see what it looks like on paper, I’m still letting the printing pile up and then sitting down to crank out prints in a one day effort.

I’ve gotten little done this afternoon. I got sidetracked trying to figure out why my laptop (recently upgraded to OS X 10.5 ‘Leopard’) didn’t see my z3100.

After considerable fiddling about with network hubs, replacement network hubs, etc. it finally occurred to me to see if my desktop machine could see the printer. Ah, that’s actually hard to tell. Fiddling about with the HP apps to control the printer led to every attempt to launch the various apps resulting in the same app (Printer Utility) launching. Hmm.

So I went to the printer, and thought “I’ll just see if the PRINTER thinks it can see the network. And it said it was trying to get a DHCP address. Hmm.

Power printer down. Power printer back up. It launches into it’s power up calisthenics, complete with checking the filesystem for the disk in the printer. Hmm. Not normal. Apparently my printer crashed.

It takes a surprisingly long time for a z3100 to boot, especially if it has to run fsck on the filesystem.

As God is my witness, I am not a luddite. I have steadfastly advocated for improved technology in the world of photography. But when I can’t make progress on photography because my damn printer had a seizure, and it takes half an hour for it to power off and power back up, it makes me want to say really rude words.

Loudly.

It’s been raining, raining, raining. And although I’ve picked up the camera (or tried to) most days since I’ve finished my SoFoBoMo book, it was all dreck and it all felt forced. I kept telling myself, over and over, “The only way out is through.” But it has been sounding a little hollow this past week.

And then, this morning, I picked up the camera and Kodak and I wandered down to where our driveway crosses the stream, just to take a photo of how much water is in the stream - just documentation. The rain had pretty much come to a temporary halt, and the sky was solid overcast, and it wasn’t very bright out.

On the way down the driveway, Kodak got distracted by the smells left behind by something, either the bears or the deer he chased last night. I got distracted by the plants along the way. Everything was wet and glossy, and the sky was a huge softbox, and it all looked mighty fresh and nice, so I started taking photos.

It took a long time to go the 150 feet or so to the stream. It took a pretty long time to come back, too. But it sure felt good.

It’s sometimes hard to remember that it just feels good to be out with the camera in my hands. I’m grateful I was reminded today.

A while back, Starbucks was promoting the movie Akelah and the Bee. At the time they were handing out little cardboard cards with various unusual words, like the one in the photo above. (side note: I didn’t find most of the words all that unusual.) Anyway, one day the word of the day at the local Starbucks was ‘elucubrate’, which I liked so much that I brought the card home and taped it to the cabinet above the spot where the tea kettle lives, in the hopes that having it there would prompt me to get more done by working harder and longer. It worked for a little while, and then the card faded into the background and I forgot all about it.

But a couple of days ago, I noticed that my photo output had dropped off considerably. About the same time, the card caught my attention again.

I just need to get out more with the camera - work harder and longer. I need to elucubrate.

But there are so many distractions. Here are a few more:

Matt Alofs, whose photography I greatly admire, has a very much worth reading post on his blog, about whether we actually WANT photography to be considered art.

Paul Lester has a post on daily practice. It’s an older post, but it touches fairly directly on my current situation.

Gordon McGregor has a wake up call, touching on a host of issues like talent, style, intuition, high energy particle physics, and intergalactic ballistics. Ok, not those last two. I’m having trouble writing a cogent description of Gordon’s post, and it’s short, so you should just go read it.

Over on seeing… thinking… photographing…, a post about the gap between the art we want to make and the art we end up making instead.

Somehow there’s a thread running through all that. It has something to do with not worrying about what the outcome is, but instead focusing on the positive benefits of the process.

And on that note, I will now step away from the computer, pick up the camera, and take the dog for a walk.

A friend of mine once claimed that there are are two kinds of thinking and that most people pretty much only use one. One kind of thinking he called ‘grinding’ - where you work toward the goal in very small increments, step by step. The other kind he called ‘leaping’ - where progress is made in big intuitive leaps, and then you go back and fill in the details. I am, for whatever it’s worth, a leaper. I work on a problem by working on something else, and some part of my brain works things out, and then all of a sudden I get the entire picture in one great flash. I’ve absolutely no ability to figure out how I’ve gotten from one point to another; introspection of the process just isn’t possible. I have to go back and fill the blank by grinding toward the intuitive solution.

And now I can hear everyone thinking “Yes, Paul, that’s all very nice and perhaps even vaguely interesting, but what the heck does it have to do with photography?” The answer is that, if you happen to be a leaper, and you happen to be a photographer, you might find that blogging is a good way to fill in the gaps. It’s even a pretty good way of provoking a leap.

I don’t know what it is about writing things down, but it’s an act of enormous impact for me. There’s something about the act of trying to get an idea into words and then get all the words to stand up straight and mean only one thing that helps me sort things out in my own head. It’s often the case that I sit down to write about something on this blog, and just as I start to get to the end, I realize that I’ve changed my mind, and I go back and rewrite it all over. Writing orders and clarifies.

I have no idea if that’s true for everyone. But it’s yet another reason that, validation aside, blogging about photography might be something you want to try.

[side note: if you want to know if you're a grinder or a leaper, or you want to know what it's like to be a leaper, go to Amazon.com for this book, and use the 'search inside' feature to search for 'sailboat', and click on the link for page 142. Read that chapter; it's only three pages. If, when you read that, you understand exactly the experience of the protagonist, you're most definitely a leaper.]