Tag: art

Edward Weston

“One does not think during creative work, any more than one thinks when driving a car. But one has a background of years – learning, unlearning, success, failure, dreaming, thinking, experience, all this – then the moment of creation, the focusing of all into the moment. So I can make ‘without thought,’ fifteen carefully considered negatives, one every fifteen minutes, given material with as many possibilities. But there is all the eyes have seen in this life to influence me.”  –  Edward Weston

Note:  Not much of Weston’s photographs are in the public domain.  Therefore, I have include links to his more important photographs so you can enjoy them.

Early Life

On March 24, 1886, Edward Henry Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois into an intellectual family.  His father, Edward B. Weston, was an obstetrician and his mother, Alice J. Brett, was a Shakespearean actress.  His mother died when he was only five years old and little Edward was raised mostly by his sister Mary who was fourteen years old at the time.  Weston called her “May” or “Maisie.  They would develop a close relationship which lasted throughout the years.

His father remarried when Weston was nine but neither he nor his sister got along with their stepmother or stepbrother.

When Weston was 11, Mary married and relocated from the Midwest to Southern California, settling in Tropico (later renamed to Glendale).  Once Mary left, Weston’s father devoted most of his time to his new wife and her son.  He had no interest in books or school and dropped out.  He also had a lot of time on his hands and spent it mostly by himself in his room.

In 1902, while on vacation on a farm in Michigan, his father gave him his first camera, a Kodak Bulls-Eye No. 2 for his 16th birthday.  His dad included a note which read in part, “you’ll not have to change anything about the Kodak. Always have the sun behind or to the side—never so it shines into the instrument. Don’t be too far from the object you wish to take, or it will be very small. See what you are going to take in the mirror. You can only take twelve pictures, so don’t waste any on things of no interest.”

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Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz left a lasting legacy on fine art photography. Read a brief history of his life and accomplishments.

“It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes ‘art’ in time.”

– Alfred Stieglitz

New Year’s Day in 1864 didn’t seem at first to be any more unusual than the start of any new year in recent years. It might have been thought to be special because it was leap year. But the Civil War was going full throttle and the United States was split asunder.

In Hoboken, New Jersey a boy was born to German Jewish immigrants Edward Stieglitz, a lieutenant in the Union Army, and his wife Hedwig Ann Werner. The baby boy was the firstborn to Edward and Hedwig and would be followed by five more siblings.

The child was given the name Alfred. There was no way in predicting in those early years that little Alfred would make the name Stieglitz synonymous with the most revered and influential photographer in America.

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Photography’s Struggle to be Recognized as Art – Pictorialism

Photography had a hard time establishing itself as a valid art medium. Read about the first movement that launched this push.

Photography is Mechanical

 

Between 1840 and 1860 the growth of photography was all about science.  The development of light sensitive media was dependent on a few brilliant scientists figuring out how to make them and experimenting with what would work best.  And Kodak was decades away from inventing roll film and the camera it came in.  If you wanted to be a photographer you had to master the chemistry of your chosen medium and in some cases, as we shall soon see, you had to be able to take your darkroom with you.

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Photography as Art – A Brief History

A brief history of photography as art from its beginning in the mid 1800s to the impact of computational photography and artificial intelligence.

Back in the mid 1800s photography was just born.  New advances were made in rapid order.  All those that saw the amazing photographs were struck with their realism.  Painters who made their livings from portraits saw their businesses shrink virtually overnight, replaced by the camera. 

It was the realism that separated the photograph from the other visual arts.  The generally accepted idea was that photographs could never be art.  And yet, some photographers took exception with that.  They contended that photographs can be art and they borrowed techniques from painters to prove it.  In England, Henry Peach Robinson published his ground-breaking book in 1869, Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints On Composition And Chiaroscuro For Photographers, that powerfully and effectively not only made the case for photography as an art form but provide guidelines on how to accomplish that end.  Pictorialism became a movement that swept European photographers and, in the United States, had Alfred Stieglitz as its most influential proponent and promoter. Even Ansel Adams had his Pictorialism period.

While pictorialism was many things, one of the defining qualities was a soft focus to reproduce the effect generally seen with paint on canvas.  Composite images made from more than one negative were also very common and well accepted, even demanded.  But the main intent was to create photographs that went beyond realism and elicited an emotional response in the viewer.

Photography continued to evolve as an art form along with Modernism and the social and intellectual movement it spawned.  Group f/64, founded by William Van Dyke and Ansel Adams in the San Francisco area, rejected the notion that fine art photography must have a soft focus.  Adams, upon meeting with Stieglitz in New York, convince him that photographs of the natural world that were in sharp focus were also art. 

Not only that, but Adams also developed the Zone system that brought a high degree of precision and accuracy, providing photographers with great control through the interpretive decisions they made in each step of the photographic process.  One can get insights into the numerous decisions from Adams’ insightful book Examples: the making of 40 photographs.  The path shaped by each decision they made took them to the final print and what they visualized it would convey.  Each photographer was in complete control of the entire process.

Eventually Kodak and other film companies took over the development and printing part of the process.  This removed the investment individuals would have to make not only in the needed equipment, chemicals and time but also the knowledge and experience required to make the decisions that led to the final print. On the one hand, photographers lost control of a good part of the process but on the other hand the masses gained access to this wonderful new technology and the benefits it provided. They delivered the undeveloped film to the lab or the neighborhood photo store and a few days later received the developed negatives and prints.

Exposure was hit and miss for the general population.  The professional and serious enthusiasts used light meters to calculate their exposures.  But the general public just guessed although in many cases their cameras didn’t give them any control over exposure.  It was only a matter of time, however, before camera manufacturers would incorporate light meters in the camera itself.  The first one I ever saw had a gauge with a needle on the top of the body that would move back and forth as the aperture and/or shutter speed was adjusted.  The idea was to line up the needle with the mark in the middle.   The same decisions used with the light meter were essentially incorporated into the camera. Continue reading “Photography as Art – A Brief History”

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Thoughts on Art – What Is It?

 

What is Art?

I want to talk about art.point_lobos_abstract_120809

Mind you, I don’t claim to be an expert. I’ve done some reading and talked to a lot of people about art and there are a lot of ideas out there on what art really is.

Some say art is a work that is displayed in a gallery or performed on a stage. I can see that (pun not intended; well, actually it was) although I’m not there – yet.

Others say that art is a work commissioned by a patron. Alas, not there yet either.

Still others say a work is art if the artist says its art. That’s fine as long as the artist can get others to agree.

But none of these definitions help me to grow as an artist. They don’t provide any indication of a path I can take to become an artist (other than perhaps bribing someone to hang one of my photographs in a gallery, at least for a day or two).

I’m looking for a definition of art that will provide some guidance in my quest to become an artist – to grow as an artist.

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Four Types of Photographs

Explore four different photographic options from the same raw file.

Something hit me the other day on the way into work. That happens quite often. I mean I didn’t get hit by a car or anything. I got hit by an idea. And the idea this time is that there are four types of photographs. In this blog post I want to illustrate what I have in mind by showing you the same raw file rendered four different ways.

 

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Is That What Your Camera Saw?

Should photographic art be what the camera sees? Or something else…?

Occasionally at art festivals a visitor to my booth will point to one of my photographs and ask, “Is that what your camera saw?”  This question points out a common misunderstanding about the physics and art of photography.

Those of us who are serious about our photography capture our digital images in RAW file format.  That’s a format that does a minimal amount of processing on the image before it saves it to the memory card.  It is more like what the camera sees.

The other format is  JPEG and is not what the camera sees but rather a highly processed image that is controlled to a large extent by the settings the photographer sets in the camera – settings like sharpness, contrast and saturation.  So if the photographer likes saturation he just has to up the saturation setting in the camera.

JPEG is much closer to the photographs that were captured in the wonderful days of film.  Each different type of file had its own unique way of responding to the scene.  Kodachrome film was great for reds while Ektachrome was perfect for blues.  Fujichrome was prized for its treatment of greens and its high contrast.

So what did the film camera see?  The question is really, “What did the film see?”  Was it a faithful documentation of reality?  Not in the least.  The same can be said for JPEG digital files.  They are no more a faithful documentation of reality than film was.

The fact is, RAW files are closer to what the camera saw than film or JPEG files ever were or will be.  And, as one workshop participant put it to me, “I don’t like shooting in RAW because the photographs are so plain and uninteresting.”  There you go.  What the camera sees, exactly what the camera sees, is often plain and uninteresting.

So the physics of digital images captured in RAW format is that the images are the closest to what the camera sees.  But from an artistic point of view, these images generally do not speak to us.  These are documentation but that’s not art; art is interpretation.

Now, a RAW file is the perfect starting point from which to create art.  It is neutral, unbiased and open to the artist to express what she saw, what she experienced that inspired her to set up the camera and compose the image, that led to the decisive moment that the shutter was pressed.

In the days of film we relied on our selection of the type of film that would do the best job of rendering particular situations.  In the digital era we have much more powerful tools that we ever had with film – Lightroom, Photoshop, Photomatix and all the wonderful software that we have access to that allows us to express our vision, our interpretation of reality.

So, are my photographs what the camera saw?  Not at all.  They are what I saw.

We do photography workshops.  Come on out and join us.  Click here to check us out.

You can also check out our photography.  Click here.

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File Naming Strategies

Having an effective file naming convention may not be the most exciting thing but it can sure make your life a lot easier.

OK, so this isn’t a very sexy topic but having a strategy for naming your image files can save you a lot of grief down the road.  Let me run through what I’ve worked out over the years (and believe me, it’s taken several years to perfect this).

So it starts in Lightroom which gives you the option of renaming your files when you import them.  I’m following Scott Kelby’s recommendation here.  Let’s start with a file name as it is created in the camera.  It’s going to look something like this – _SM35116.CR2.  By the way, here’s the photograph that that goes with.

hidden_valley_130119

Hidden Valley (2013)

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Ansel Adams – The Making of 40 Photographs: Nevada Falls

Get insight into how Ansel Adams worked a scene to come up with his flawless and powerful compositions.

There’s so much to learn from studying Ansel Adams’ photographs, especially when you read what he has to say about them in “Examples – The Making of 40 Photographs”.  Each narrative seems to have its own distinct lesson.  The narrative associated with Nevada Falls is a study in working a composition.

nevada_falls

 

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A Conversation about Fine Art

Listen in on a conversation about the nature of fine art photography.

What’s on your mind?

I’ve been thinking about ‘fine art.’

You’ve got to be kidding. I mean there are PhDs that study this sort of thing, masters of the arts that won’t touch the topic. What makes you think you can think about ‘fine art?’

I don’t know. I just wonder about it. I’m trying to be an artist and I wonder what it all means, if I’m truly an artist or if I’m getting any closer.

Ok, you’re a photographer, aren’t you? So you must be thinking about fine art photography. You must be nuts! Nobody agrees on what fine art photography is.

Yea, fine art photography, that’s it. What do you think? Do you have any ideas of what it really is? I mean I’ve heard people say that if you want your photography to be art all you have to do is to call it art and it is so. ‘My photographs are fine art.’ Lord knows you hear that enough. But that seems a bit too simplistic, a bit too easy. It seems like it should be more than that.  I mean, can you snap a picture, run down to Costco to get a large print and call it art?

 

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