Disorganized notes on photography

or
how my pictures get here, with incidental 2-bit philosophy

Terminology:
First off, I'm not going to follow the obnoxious trend and pretentiously refer to my photos as 'images', as if that makes them (and me) fancier - and if somehow the old word is obsolete since there's so much newfangled gadgetry involved now that the future demands new words. Horseshit! - marketing demands new words, and these pictures are free. Photograph is still the word. Pictures is also a word.

Photo scene to computer screen:
The photos are the end result from my film photography, some digi-photography, darkroom film and print processing, film scanning, a little flatbed scanning, and digi-image processing. Usually I'll do only minimal stuff in scanning, and a little more zappification in photoshop or whatever, but don't like to do that too long - often I'll move settings back halfway from whatever I've changed since I'm afraid of the photo getting weird without my noticing (look around the web, you'll see this is epidemic).

Usually I'll take no more than 5 or 10 or 15 minutes in photoshop before I decide it's enough or too much; often at this point I figure I might've gone too far based on time alone and revert and start over. Usually I'll cut myself off sooner and call it enough. Anyway, most have very minimal post-processing; mostly dust/scratch fix, some contrast, curve, and/or minor color cast changes, etc. Some stuff I just ignore since it's unimportant for the quality of a website, though in printing I take a lot more care. Cropping is minimal to none (since I try to compose on the shoot and like to think of the result as somewhat final).

About 2/3 of the film I processed myself (some I had others do, incl. all the Kodachrome and most C-41).

Thus these might not be perfect, or maybe they are more perfect than some of the overdone stuff around. Anyway, I like them anyway and hope you do.

Where I find ideas:
I've been 'into' photography for about 30 years now. Despite learning a few things on my own, I still rely a lot on seeing what other people have done to help me along.

My favorite photographers include Eliot Porter [1], Ansel Adams (really a genius - photographer, writer, conservationist - and good at all), the Blacklocks; especially Nadine [1], RG Ketchum, Galen Rowell, Ernst Haas, Bruce Davidson, Vasily Peskov [ 1 2 ], George Tice, Charles Steinhacker, Wayland Drew, Gisele Lamoureux, Masahisa Fukase [1 2], recently noticed some early 70s John Chang McCurdy that I'd somehow overlooked for too long. There are others, too.

There are some less famous 'contemporary' landscape photographers I like too; Steve Brimm [1] for one.

I have those favo(u)rite photographers, but looking through the flicker website, or nearly any newspaper I get distraught that there are so many great photographs (thus possibly even some competent photographers) and I am insignificant in such a vast sea. So, as with literature or music, one of the few benefits of living in the future is that there is an overabundance of good photographs to enjoy, and tomorrow there will be more. It's all too much.

On the other hand, there are/were few 'giants' of photography who have made such great work, and though I am continually trying to follow those examples a little bit, there is a slew of bad photographers trying to get noticed nowadays, and that's increasing even faster than the good. They often use ridiculously over saturated or manipulated colors or other perversions of reality - rather like the tammy baker of photographs. There are zillions of the over 'made' photos, and its getting harder to see anything resembling subtlety or nuance in recent photography, esp. on the web... And editors (lax, in my opinion) are starting to use really bad photos in books!

That disastrous fad of 'hdr' (photoshopping areas of a scene together with entirely different exposures to pretend that everything could be exposed similarly at the same instant in the same frame (thus not needing to even know or care about exposure even if it looks like shit), and its hellishly freakish results is a good example. of course the ultimate 'hdr' photo would look like a gray card, and that'd be an improvement.

So some of my favorite photographs are the result of something I saw (or felt?) at the moment, or even unschemed experimentation, others are from me thinking of how some aspect of a photo maybe resembles what I've seen in another person's photo that I liked. Of course the result won't be the 'same' in any way recognizable, but something has been learned. Thus I think people ought to try more of this subtle copycatting in photography to make more original photographs. Trying to actually reproduce as much as possible an existing photograph would be even more educational (if less expressive), and a hell of a lot more work. I haven't tried it.

I'm not sure if there's a term for it, but the things I photograph I consider to be, usually, intrinsically attractive in themselves (sometimes under-appreciated), and my goal in making the picture is to present the beauty, not create or 'interpret' it. Nature is beautiful, and that's a lot of what I shoot - but a picture isn't nature, and some decisions have to be made regarding how the abstraction of photography will be exploited to tell something about the subject in a language different from the original.

I like a few good painters, illustrators, etc. too, and that also makes me think about how a photo will (or could) look. I like some of the Canadian landscape painters a lot - the Group of seven/Tom Thomson et al., and what I refer to as 'mid 20th century natural history illustrators', including but not limited to Francis Lee Jaques, Charles Schaefer, Bob Hines, Henry B. Kane, Les Kouba, and others.

Other shooting details:
These days I usually meter externally (Sekonic L-508, would be lost without it, I guess), usually use a tripod (sometimes monopod, sometimes set the camera down on something, rarely handhold), and use as few filters as possible, though often a polarizer for color or a red or yellow filter for b/w on clear-sky days. I tend to 'use' a UV filter on nice lenses sometimes, too.

See a little more about my camera collection, film prefs, and so forth here

On the look of photographs:

Most of my photography is analog (film); I used to say all of it, but a year or so ago I decided, rather abruptly, that I might buy a digital camera and learn something about it so, if possibility arises, I make some money with it (the fast turnaround vs. film being an advantage there). But mostly I shoot film - it does what I like, I understand it well, the physics and chemistry involved keep it tied somewhat to the scale and world I can relate to, as well as to the actual scene and time of the photograph (every slide I look at from 1992 Minsk, for example, was there with me in my hand at that time, so long ago), and the long turnaround forces one (me) to understand (pre-visualize, to use Ansel Adams' term) what you want as the final output and thus to understand how to get a decent exposure.

Contrast this to digital, where there is often a reliance on shooting lots and lotsandlots & then looking at them immediately to see if any happened to 'work'. Of course there's a lot to be said for having the fast feedback, to see what you're doing right or wrong and how that effects your photos, and digital cameras can provide that. But I'm not alone in noting that the less automatic the camera, the better the per-shot photo result. Me, I shoot fewer photos per time unit with a 35mm camera than with my d700, and fewer still with my 6x7 medium format, yet the quality is better - per photo and often per time spent. Having to prepare the camera for the shot, as with my Mamiya RB67, gives a sequence of steps, some time, and a deliberation that causes me to think about other aspects of the shot as well.

I also vastly prefer how film looks!

On the ergonomics and culture of cameras:
And there's the hardware itself. I prefer to use mechanical or electromechanical cameras from the late 1950s to the early 1980s ( a few earlier, a few later), since they are made to function and last... Back when the primitive idea of pride of work still existed, when a company wanted it's reputation to be based on the quality, usability, and persistence of things they produced, vs. the 'lifestyle image' the ad men push onto consumers nowadays. Quality, not quantity. Functionality and performance, not false 'innovation' and 'specifications' as measured by computers and dodgy bullshit indicators. To put it in an old-fashioned way, manly cameras, not the girly toys sold today.

Cameras you could hammer a nail with, or that could get shot or dragged through the mud and still perform, like the Nikon F (look that up). Cameras that didn't crash or need 'upgrades' or run out of battery power when you need them. Metal and glass, not telephones and twitter (' the fuck?)

Thoughts on post-processing:
If you look at the internet photography enthusiast sites and the consumer photography magazines (and all of the ads of course) you'd get the idea that you must spend hours and hours in photoshop (only the latest sub-version of course) focused on every minute setting and technique or you aren't a photographer. That's bullshit of course, and any good concept of perfection is a moving target anyway. Ansel Adams knew what he was doing every step of the way but I'll bet he wouldn't have been so obsessed by computer program settings the way people seem to be these days!

I'm afraid that people've been hoodwinked into believing that "in order for anything to appear to be the real thing, it has to be an exaggeration of that thing, since as we all know everything in the future is better and better"... this is yet another manifestation of the overwhelming force of advertising psychology on society and individuals!

In other words, there has to be some limit on the idea that a photograph is something technology does for us.

I'm all for photoshop, especially for useful stuff like correcting for dust, scratches, and the like and doing minimal changes, but these days there are a lot of freaky, unrealistic looking photos around, with the weirdest of colors - OK if you're trying to make something that doesn't portray 'reality' (notice the quotations; of course photography is always an abstraction of reality), I suppose, but not my style.

Most of the photos here have very minimal post-processing. I don't do much - mostly dust/scratch fix, some contrast or minor color temperature changes, etc. Cropping is minimal to none (since I try to compose on the shoot of course), though despite great effort and many years of trying, I still shoot far too many landscapes with a ~5 degree tilt! Very few of the pictures here have more tweaking than that, many have less. Occasionally to get the pix onto the website hastily, I used only Irfanview. Some flaws might be that I don't pay much attention to sharpening or smoothing (scanning tends to accentuate graininess) to get the web page displays to look so smooth.

I'm apt to spend a fair amount of time on darkroom work, though, but that's a lot more intuitive and connected to something I'm doing, not the blackboxing of photoshop!

Then there's the technical limitations on my end - scanner quality, condition of the originals (I regret to say that some of my film suffered from being stored in an uncontrolled facility for several years after I went to Alaska in 2002 because I couldn't afford otherwise), time willing to spend, and knowledge of scanning and photoshop (which is reasonable)!

And one more point - you're looking at these on the computer screen, and that makes perfection even more futile... there are all sorts of variables on your end (monitor and adjustments and how old or broken it is, room light, computer settings, size...) that weigh far heavier on how these look to you that much of what I can do on my end.

So, these photos are mine. They're my attempts at film (and some print) scanning, a little digi-photography, and some image processing. Thus they might not be perfect, and many are far from finished, though I like them anyway and hope you do.

* * * *

Recent activity (as of spring 2012).

I was doing a lot of film scanning last winter (2010-2011), and resolved to get my photo pages further in order - whatever that means. I did scan and add tons of pictures in early 2011, and have been looking through files of old scanned stuff and adding some of it too.

I haven't been doing much shooting since I left Alaska fall 2010. Something may change that, hopefully (like getting back to the Laks Superior country), but for now I'm not seeing much 'inspiration' in Idaho. I did shoot a bunch when I was back in the UP - including my last rolls of Kodachrome - on thanksgiving 2010, at Vermillion.

In summer and fall 2011 I was 'shooting my cat' around the yard and house, and taking some bicycle photos, that's about it!

Then to make matters worse, in Fall 2011 some asshole broke into my home and stole all my best Nikon lenses, my $3000 D700 digicam, my light meter, several Nikon film bodies, etc., etc. That ended the easy days for sure. The local sherrif deputies revealed themselves to be inept, at best, I found in the after-the-fact dealings.

So in future any new stuff will have to come from film, which goes pretty slow for me. The archives still have a lot to add, though... And I've got trillions of frames already shot on film to scan.

The only stuff added here between 2002 and 2009 was some "documentation" (thus not great) photos you'll see in the Eureka section, taken with my ridiculous camera-phone and my great Olympus XA on print film, developed and scanned at the store. I believe you'll be able to tell between the two.

So the newer stuff - lots of Alaska, the Upper Peninsula, more Baikal and Superior, weird USSR stuff (including plenty of slides shot on the great old East German Orwochrom UT18 and UT21!), loads of Crimea photos, some super-macros with my Yashica Dental-Eye camera, pictures from bike trips, maybe even eventually some of the fabulous 'acquired' slides from people I never met.

First things first, though. Lots to add besides the stuff from ca. 2002 and then all the stuff I've added 2010-2011. The archives are full, as they say...