What is Photographic Art?

Every so often I ponder the question, “What is photographic art?” I realize it’s as contentious as “What is folk music?” but it’s a question that keeps returning. I often wish the term “art” had never been attached to photography. It warps our thinking about photography as a craft medium.

Unlike art art, which is created by an artist, photography is a recording medium. As such, it’s good for recording things like objects, moments in time, and people. It’s a democratic medium — something that has been Kodak’s pitch since the heyday of film, and is still being pitched by makers of digital cameras. There are few families that don’t have snapshots taken by family members, or portraits of family members taken by professionals in a photographic studio.

But these are not the images that become associated with photographic art. The difficulty with definitions is that photography often seems more than a simple recording medium. Even at their most realistic, in the photographs of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Eliot Porter, the things photographed are more than mere recordings. Theirs are images that touch us at a deep level of awe or appreciation.

In the hands of skilled photographers, simple slices of human life become “the definitive moment” as has been applied to much of the work of Cartier-Bresson.

The photographs of these masters might be best described as “the art of photography” rather than “photographic art.” They are superb seers, who are able to translate their seeing into well crafted, recorded images. Both Adams and Weston are famous for their darkroom work, post processing their images to bring out the full impact of their visioning.

Then came digital photography and Photoshop. The ability to manipulate images became much easier than it had been in a wet darkroom. It was suddenly much simpler to do complex processing. People who were good at Photoshop techniques created plug-ins and specialty programs that helped in achieving the best look an image could have.

It didn’t stop there. Every photo editor has special effects features that do everything from creating a watercolour look on an image, to adding a digital frame. The plug-ins made difficult things easy, which has made them more democratic.

I’m all for democratic. I’ve loved photography from an early age, and the more people who participate and experiment in the medium, the happier I am.

So, why am I not blissed out? Because I also see laziness. I know a photographer who tweaks up the colour saturation of every image to painful levels, and often uses a plug-in called Topaz Adjust to work in a kind of faux-HDR on most images. I do this at times myself. There are certain images that work well with extreme treatment.

But I’m seeing an increasing number of photographers who apply these techniques to every image, thinking, I suppose, that this creates photographic art. One of them, when asked about it, claims it’s his or her “style.” Style? Technique maybe, but it’s not a style. Style comes from seeing, not from manipulation.

On Flickr, and elsewhere, I often see heavily manipulated images that are stunning. Some of them truly fall into that thin boundary area between art and photography, especially composite image creations that express a vision.

I also see heavily manipulated images that simply don’t succeed. I often think these are produced by photographers who have not spent the time and energy on learning the basics of photography itself, or who try to turn a mediocre image into an exciting one by amplifying the colour.

For me, it doesn’t work. Like any skilled craft, photography requires an apprenticeship. But hard work and apprenticeship to a craft aren’t especially popular these days. It’s easier to use a plug-in.

The new wave of would-be photographic artists I call The Tweakers remind me of people who think they “have a good book” in them, but don’t want to do the hard work of writing it. Or the wannabe poet who never cracks a book on writing poetry, or even a book of poems.

That’s not the way it works.

So I return to wishing that “art” had never been attached to “photographic.” The term too easily serves as a self justification for laziness in seeing and post processing.

Experimentation is good. It’s healthy. But it’s no substitute for photographic vision.

Winter Ice

Unlike many of the eastern states of the US, we’ve had a dry winter. Very little snow, but plenty of cold weather. While this has robbed us of “winter wonderland” shots, it has provided the next best thing: ice.

I like shooting ice. In ice patterns I discover crystalline abstracts or jigsaw puzzle chunks that make photogenic forms.

What keeps me interested is that ice patterns change, often dramatically, overnight. Every day I walk to the harbour, the ice has a different look, a different personality. The overnight weather, combined with currents under the ice, rearrange the extent of the ice cover as well as its shapes.

I like ice shooting best on overcast days when there’s enough light for modelling, without too large a dynamic range. In this light ice presents subtle dark and light patterns, which can later be accentuated in post processing, or left as is.

On bright days the challenge is finding just the right angle to backlight ice crystals and floes without blowing important highlights.

We’ve had a few light snowfalls — dustings of fresh snow on the ice surfaces. It’s then that the hidden life of the harbour emerges. Duck prints, goose prints, mink tracks, even squirrel tracks appear on the surface. Sometimes you see skid marks where a goose or duck has come in for a landing and slid to a stop. Occasionally you see a wingbeat impression where one of the waterfowl took flight.

The ice forms, melts, and reforms, according to overnight temperatures. At this point, late in the winter when the sun is getting stronger during the day and the temperatures more moderate overnight, the ice begins its annual retreat. At the winter’s coldest, the river ice extended out to the mouth of the harbour, into Lake Ontario.

Today it has retreated up river to the north of the auto traffic bridge. As the weather fluctuates, it will retreat and advance, but gradually lose its hold until it breaks apart into chunks of ice floes that are carried downstream by the current. These too provide good shooting, especially when you nab one with riders aboard, such as ducks or pigeons. Bird rafting.

Like all local photographers, I look forward to spring, with plants, flowers, insects, and green parks, but winter doesn’t rob us of photo opportunities. While not as exciting as living things, ice offers a kind of photographic purity — the shooting of shapes, light, and shadow. Or, to paraphrase Robert Frost, “ice is nice, and will suffice.”

There are additional ice shots in my Flicker Winter Set.

Snow

Finally, some snow to brighten a dry winter. It’s been cold — cold enough to form a respectable layer of ice on the river — but snow has been rare.

It’s disorienting. Seasonal weather is what binds us to the year’s cycles. When there’s no snow in Ontario (in this southern part of it), and there are heavy snowstorms in Washington, DC, and Richmond, VA, it feels wrong. If it happens once in the winter, it can be passed off as an oddity. When it happens three times, and your friend in Richmond jokes about moving north where the winters are mild, it’s spooky.

And so today’s snow, wet and sticky though it be, is reaffirming, or in that new modernism, validating.

Kids of all ages yearn for snow because they know snow’s secret: snow is for playing in. While adults shovel driveways and curse the driving conditions, and weather men measure snow’s depth, kids are busy. Making snow angels, snowmen, trying out the sled on the hill in the park, throwing snowballs. If nature hadn’t intended us to throw snowballs, why does snow pack into such perfect balls for throwing?

And you wonder, what does any of this have to do with climate change? Maybe a lot, maybe nothing. Climate Study 101 tells us that weather and climate are different. Weather is capricious, uneven. It sometimes has small cycles of a few years, even decades, that become warmer, colder, drier, wetter. Climate is about long-term patterns. Trends and history that can only be measured statistically.

And that’s why climate science is rife with argument and disagreement. Argument and disagreement, of course, are the crucible of scientific advancement. You have to defend your hypothesis, strengthen it, convince your peers, and even abandon it, if the evidence changes. But if your hypothesis stands the test of peer review, and of time, you’ve moved closer to truth of things.

While climatology has advanced enormously over the decades as more data filters in, climatologists will be the first to tell you that predicting climate change is difficult, uncertain work. No honest climate scientist can say, “this is definitely what’s going to happen.” Instead, they say “evidence for climate change, collected from a wide range of data sources, suggests the climate is warming, and that this warming trend correlates to an increase in greenhouse gases that enter the atmosphere primarily through human activity, in the form of automotive and industrial exhaust, and the general burning of fossil fuels.”

When a majority of climate scientists who have examined each other’s statistical studies find themselves in accord on the basics of climate change, and what this might mean for the future of humankind’s tenure on the planet, they find various ways to getting this message to the public, and to decision makers.

Unfortunately, climate scientists, like any group of people, have members who are opportunists — who take advantage of the shift in awareness of climate issues to try for additional grant money and positions of influence. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it makes them vulnerable to, sometimes justifiable, criticism.

While I don’t presume to know if climate change is as drastic and concerning as some climatologists would have us believe, there is one recent development that bids me pause.

In the US, the Republican Party, which in my mind is synonymous with the Religious Right, has begun attacking climate scientists with the fervor they normally reserve for abortion clinics and the teaching of evolution. They are launching well-funded smear tactics, the kind they use in political campaigns, against climatologists, or those who represent them, in positions of authority.

They are working hard at discrediting climate studies, attacking the statistics, and citing other scientists, most of whom are not climate scientists, who question the stats.

What is most telling in this, is that they present no fresh alternative studies, no fresh alternative data that tells a different story about climate change. It’s always ad hominem, ad statisticum.

I’m not a tree hugger or a whole-earth advocate, but when I see this type of attack against the interpretation of the data, yet see confirming evidence that the polar ice at both poles is melting, I don’t think any amount of smear tactics will make the evidence change.

So, on the whole, until I see something scientifically different, I think the climate is changing, warming. Will it have drastic effects? Maybe yes, maybe no. If it changes unabated, then probably yes. The problem is, we don’t know enough about climate change to know if the earth itself has balancing methods and cycles that might deal with it. If it does, the balancing cycles might be measured in geologic, not human time. It would be prudent to accept what appears to be solid, peer-reviewed, evidence that global climate change is upon us.

In some old, and wise, words, “As ye sew, so shall ye reap.” I don’t know about you, but I’m working on shrinking my carbon footprint and will support any of my government’s efforts to do this on a large scale. I rather like living on this planet, and I desire future generations to it as well.

The issues are too important to be obscured by special-interest snow jobs.

Privately Printing a Journal

Journalling is an exploration. An attempt every day to slip into a mindstream of passing thoughts, ideas, events, memories, and feelings. It’s mindfulness of the flow of consciousness and netting a few fish from the stream. It’s looking below the surface and finding both wonderful and disturbing things. Here be dragons. Here be visions. Here be here.

A year’s worth of daily journalling amounts to a lot of recorded events, hopes, disappointments, and occasional victories. It’s fascinating to look back on the previous year and dip into moments of then which become relived moments of now.

Looking at scribbles in a notebook or browsing through text files doesn’t have the same quality of experience as holding and reading from a book, so it occurred to me that since I already had all the text files for the year, it would be fun to print them in book form — a private printing of a few copies for my family and me.

I’d used Lulu.com before and knew that this could be done if the book were prepared as a PDF or Postscript file. Choosing which tool to use to prepare the file was the first step. After looking at various options, I chose LyX and LaTeX because of the beauty of the typesetting. They’re also free.

I’d previously used them in Linux and was a little surprised to find that they worked so well on a Mac. The procedure is to first install MacTex, then the Mac version of LyX. This combination installs all the tools you need to typeset files.

I chose to print my 2009 journal in 6×9-inch format with perfect binding. Using the “child document” feature of LyX, I edited each month as a separate .lyx file, bringing them together in a master document. LaTeX offers a variety of book styles. I used Memoir.

I gave each month a quick edit for things like typos that escaped the spell checkers, missing words, and I occasionally rewrote a particularly awkward passage. For the most part, though, the entries were printed just as they were written.

When I had edited all twelve months, I output a Postscript file and uploaded it to Lulu. Then, using a pre-existing Lulu template, I created the cover, using my photo montage of a swan, an enlarged moon, and a textured background as the cover illustration.

The total cost, to me, was under $15 a copy, so I ordered three. Shipping to Canada was a bit of a stinger, as always, which is why I ordered three copies at the same time.

About three weeks later the books cleared customs and arrived in the mail. It was a special moment to see a year’s work printed as a book. It felt good in the hand. It looked good on the shelf. It encouraged me to keep journalling.

Due to time constraints, I didn’t index my 2009 journal, but because I intend to print 2010 in the same way, I’ll edit and index each 2010 month as I proceed through the year.

Privately printing my journal is one of the best morale boosters I’ve ever experienced. If you’re a writer, nothing gives you the same rush as seeing your rambles printed as a book.

I Lied

I really meant to quit. Cold turkey. Chuck it. Nuke it. Get it over with. Sayanora Baby. Bam.

I’d been going through one of my episodes of self-doubt and low self-esteem. Then I began to feel a bit better and realized that I like writing Silver Bullets. Besides, “Silver Bullets” is engraved on my iPod Touch. I can’t let down my iPod, can I?

So, first thing to talk about? Well, the iPad, of course. The press conference is finally over, we know what Apple’s latest gadget is, and now the questions begin: is this thing another industry shaker?

My first impressions of the iPad are ambivalent. The technology looks gorgeous. It will support Apple’s BlueTooth wireless keyboard plus a docking keyboard. It’s open enough that I expect to see a lot of third-party accessories for it. For reading certain kinds of e-text, it looks splendid. Colour illustrations and maps could scarcely be reproduced better. It, smartly in my opinion, supports the ePub e-book format.

So I ask myself, why am I not excited?

I think the main thing that strikes me, aesthetically, is that the slab looks awkward to use. It weighs too much to hold comfortably in one hand for reading. Unless you purchase the protective carrying case with it, it doesn’t have any kind of built-in tilt. As a writer, why would I want something that lies flat on the table? How is this thing better, overall, than my Dell Mini 10v netbook?

To me, the most disappointing part of the iPad is that it’s nothing more than the iPhone / iPod Touch OS with a larger display. I offers no multitasking, no easy task switching. Why limit it so? Why not put in an embedded Mac OS X and really open it up?

I’ll admit, I may just not understand it. It may turn out to be the hottest consumer electronic device of the year. Experienced IT people are often the last to grasp a paradigm shift. I certainly wish it well.

But I’m feeling a sad sense of disappointment about the iPad. The kind of letdown I feel sometimes when a book by a favourite author isn’t as good as I thought it would be, or a movie with a great cast turns out to have a feeble, undermining script.

I’ll be tracking this one to see if Apple has hit a home run, or has connected for a long foul ball, just missing the pole.

Last Post

After several years of indulging in personal blog writing, I’ve decided to call it quits. It’s been fun to come up with topics and I’ve greatly enjoyed your many comments.

I’m moving on to more content-oriented writing and might, if my plans work out, start a blog on Exploring the Credit, taking day trips along the length of the Credit Valley from the harbour to the headlands, and sharing that information in blog format.

I feel myself getting stale in thinking up personal topics and my personal posts have become more infrequent and, consequently, less interesting. There are so many personal blogs out there that the absence of this one won’t be noticed.

Thank you for your kind support.

Gene

Winter Blahs

The winter blahs have hit. After a cold spell it’s warmed up a little, but it’s not to be trusted. Weather in February and March can be capricious, not to mention vicious. A January thaw is nice, but undependable.

The worst part about this winter is the lack of snow. People north, south, east, and west of us have had a snowy winter, thank you, but all we’ve had is cold weather. On the plus side, it’s made walking and driving easier, but snow is essential for good winter photography.

One thing that’s made winter a little brighter is the Micro Nikkor AF 55mm f/2.8 lens I acquired from my friend Peter (Aurora_Photog on Flickr). It may possibly be the ugliest lens Nikon has ever made and was quickly replaced by the excellent, and very pretty, Micro Nikkor AF-S 60mm f/2.8. Optically, though, the 55AF is right up there with the best of the Nikkor macro lenses, which is high praise. Because it retains a manual aperture ring on the lens, it can also be used, in manual-focus mode, on my Panasonic G1. The fact it has a plastic tube around the outside of the lens and a two-stage trombone-looking extension can be readily forgiven. As Han Solo once famously said of the scruffy Millennium Falcon, “She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid!”

I wish I had more things to take macro shots of. I wish there were more snow. I wish I were as smart as those of my friends who planned vacations to warm parts at this time of year. I could wish all day.

The thing is, we take life as we find it, just like the ducks and geese in the harbour. So, for the time being, I’m doing less photography and more video watching, snuggled indoors holding a cup of warm green tea.

Life could be worse.

Developing a New Photo Workflow

When I changed platforms from Windows to Mac, I left behind the three tools I used the most in my digital photography workflow: Adobe Photoshop CS3, Downloader Pro, and Irfanview.

I picked up Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac, and while it’s not quite as complete in some areas as full Photoshop, it’s close enough that I don’t need more. Elements comes with Adobe Bridge, a product I never warmed up to in the past, but not having the handy Downloader Pro around anymore, I explored Bridge as a substitute and was surprised by its versatility.

It does a good job of grabbing images from my SD cards and putting them in a workspot on my HD away from my permanent files. The batch renaming feature is close to being as good as the one in Downloader Pro, and its view mode substitutes quite well for Irfanview, both for culling images and for adding information to the filename. Bridge does a great job of batch adding and editing IPTC data too. I’m converted.

The plugin I most missed from Windows was Nik Silver Efex Pro. When I saw the plugin existed in Mac format, I downloaded and installed the 15-day trial and tried my registered key. It worked, and I now have my all-time favourite utility at my disposal again.

I had similar good luck with Nikon Capture NX2. I downloaded and installed the Mac version, and my registered key worked on it too. NX2 is an excellent image editor with some features that are better than Photoshop, and it can’t be touched for extracting the ultimate from a Nikon NEF (raw) file.

Now that my toolkit is in place and I’ve learned where features are located in Elements, my workflow is up to speed again. I especially thank and congratulate Nik Software and Nikon on their enlightened licensing policies. Adobe should take lessons, rather than charging for a platform change for its products.

New Year’s Resolution: 4288 x 2848

I started the New Year with a purchase: a Nikon D90 DSLR with, yes, 4288×2848 image resolution.

For those who follow my blog, rest assured I’m not getting rid of the lovely Panasonic G1 4/3 DSLR. It’s a keeper, and one of the most versatile cameras I’ve owned, with its ability to host a wide range of non-Panasonic lenses, including rangefinder lenses. The D90 complements the G1.

The main reason for acquiring a D90 is to use my existing Nikon AF lenses as AF, something the G1 can’t do. And, to be honest, I miss having a Nikon body in the kit. For me, Nikons are the most ergonomic of all camera brands. From the original Nikon F SLR film camera to the present DSLRs, that “feel right in the hand” heritage continues.

I really liked the D60 I sold to a friend. The only problem I had with it was that it couldn’t autofocus my older AF lenses. It required the newer AF-S lenses for AF. The best camera I ever owned was a D300, which I sold only because it proved too heavy for me, after some cardio hiccups.

I told myself that next time I got a Nikon (it was never in doubt) I’d get one of the mid-tier models that would AF my AFs but weigh less than the upper-tier models.

In going mid-tier, I give up the D300’s ability to meter with manual lenses and record the info to EXIF. I’ll miss that, but the weight factor is more important. Besides, I don’t have this ability with the G1 either, and it’s not bothered me much.

The D90 has a movie mode, though my reading of reviews tells me it’s fairly primitive. “Crappy” is a more accurate description. I’ll give it a try, but I suspect my Panasonic FZ35 will run rings around it as a video cam. What the D90 is is a very good still camera.

So I’m starting 2010 the right way: doing my duty as a consumer to keep commerce humming. Isn’t it nice to belong?

Time for Reflection

I spent last week in hospital. Some angina-like pains in my chest were sharp enough to convince me to call 911 for an ambulance to make sure I wasn’t in cardiac distress.

The immediate tests and bloodwork showed no sign of heart attack, but because of my coronary history, I was admitted for tests. After a couple of days waiting, and lots of blood work later, I took an electrolytic stress test. The results indicated an anomaly so I was next scheduled for an angiogram in order for the cardiologists to take a look inside.

The angiogram results were good news. No new blockages, and all the plumbing from my bypass surgery looked great. The anomaly turned out to be a small branch artery that had been blocked by an earlier stent. Arterially it isn’t important, but it’s blocked just enough to cause me some angina pains when I’ve exerted myself harder than usual.

Because it’s a little branch, or twig, artery, I’ve dubbed it “Twiglet.” As in, “Twiglet’s complaining again.”

Whenever I spend time in hospital, it feels like a reprieve when I’m home again. A time to reflect and be thankful for family, friends, home, and generally good health.

During this holiday season, allow me to wish you the best of all these things. May your life be blessed with love, comfort, imagination, and joy.

– Gene