Blog #82 The Purpose of Art
What is the purpose of art? Does life imitate art or does art imitate life? What is the function of art across culture and time? These and similar big picture questions have been asked time and time again across the ages. I find it fascinating to contemplate these as they relate to my personal philosophy or style in making images.
In this week’s blog post, I will share with you a few quotations so that you may think about your own work as an artist [photographer] and perhaps come to some greater understanding or clarification on why you do what you do. Understanding the reason behind your creativity might propel you forward and give food for thought or, er, creativity, for that matter.
Read on…
I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today's existence.
Robert Mapplethorpe
If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.
Robert Mapplethorpe
Anybody can be a great photographer if they zoom in enough on what they love.
David Bailey
An artist is a man who seeks new structures in which to order and simplify his sense of the reality of life.
John Szarkowski 1966
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Pablo Picasso
There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.
Ernst Haas
I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera.
Saul Leiter
One of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.
Steve Jobs
The light is always right.
jhg
Images in this blog post were made during a charitable event where a group of Harbour School students passed food out to elderly folks in the Sham Shui Po Housing Blocks during Mid-Autumn Festival Oct 2017.
Casual Photophile Tip & Techniques No. 001 The Subject is the Subject
The Inspired Eye Photography Magazine Issue #40 (full interview)
Hong Kong Free Press: HKFP Lens
Blog #47 Composition, Composition, and More Composition
Blog #65 Summer is for Travel (Hanoi)
Blog #67 Risks, Rules, & Restrictions
Blog #68 Photography is a Gift
Blog #72 Living the Creative Life
Blog #81 Talent is Nothing
In this week’s blog post, I would like to address the topic of talent. Every once in a while someone like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart grazes us all with his presence. True genius especially in the creative arts is rare. Nevertheless, there are many talented artists. When we gaze upon the work of Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, or Alex Webb, to name a few, we can’t help but use the word talented to describe these photographers.
What happens next is that we falsely conclude that these folks were born with some sort of instinctual ability to make gorgeous draw-dropping images with a camera.
“You either got it or you don’t”, we conclude.
Some thing critical is missing from our simple analysis. These folks got to where they are through tons of hard work. Upon seeing a finished work of photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, or novel we are completely removed from any understanding or appreciation of the years and decades of elbow grease that inevitably came before and resulted in the piece in front of us.
We do not see the thousands of behaviors and long nights that lead the artist to that point in their creative career. It’s all there, you just can’t see it. Therefore, we conclude, incorrectly, that talent is what caused this artist to create good art.
Talent is a null word. It’s the summation of countless hours of literally blood, sweat, and tears. How do Olympic athletes get that way? They work their asses off for it, that’s how. Hard work breeds success. Talent is nothing.
The light is always right.
jhg
*The images below are original and from the September 2017 Distinguished Gentleman's Ride in Hong Kong, a fund raiser event for Men's Health and Prostate Cancer*
Casual Photophile Tip & Techniques No. 001 The Subject is the Subject
The Inspired Eye Photography Magazine Issue #40 (full interview)
Hong Kong Free Press: HKFP Lens
Blog #47 Composition, Composition, and More Composition
Blog #65 Summer is for Travel (Hanoi)
Blog #67 Risks, Rules, & Restrictions
Blog #68 Photography is a Gift
Blog #72 Living the Creative Life
Blog #80 Give it Away, Give it Away, Give it Away, Now
What I've got you've got to give it to your mamma
What I've got you've got to give it to your pappa
What I've got you've got to give it to your daughter
You do a little dance and then you drink a little water
These lyrics were famously penned and performed by none other than the
Red Hot Chilli Peppers in 1991 from their song titled Give it Away Now.
You might have guessed that this week’s blog post is about printing and sharing your images. In Blog #68 titled Photography is a Gift, I advocated for sharing images of friends and family. This can be accomplished through social media outlets of course but is ultimately more effective when images are brought into the real world and printed.
Printing doesn’t have to be a complicated process. I bought new ink jet printer recently in wide format meaning that it takes A3 sized paper [297 x 420 mm, 11.7 x 16.5 in.]. Of course there are bigger [and way more expensive versions] but for a reasonable price, I picked up this baby and dragged her home. This thing is huge but for just shy of $200 USD it’s really pretty cheap. Printers have come a long way and most regular jobs can be done on this machine with photo quality paper. The results have been really good so far. The model is an HP OfficeJet Pro 7740. If you’re in the market for a new printer, let me share this pro tip:
If you ask nicely, the salesman might throw you a pack of A3 photo paper for free as well!
Good luck lugging this thing home it’s about the size of a large microwave oven. Wifi means that anyone on your network can print from any device pretty much, a really useful feature.
Sharing images is a great joy that every photographer should indulge in from time to time. For example, some friends had an awesome beach wedding party recently and I made some pictures that I shared [and will be printing and framing] for the married couple. I view this gift as something special since they cannot buy it or make it themselves.
If you don’t give away your pictures, “You’re a punk!”, says LA street photographer, John Free. I love that guy!
The light is always right.
jhg
Casual Photophile Tip & Techniques No. 001 The Subject is the Subject
The Inspired Eye Photography Magazine Issue #40 (full interview)
Hong Kong Free Press: HKFP Lens
Blog #47 Composition, Composition, and More Composition
Blog #65 Summer is for Travel (Hanoi)
Blog #67 Risks, Rules, & Restrictions
Blog #68 Photography is a Gift
Blog #72 Living the Creative Life
Blog #79 Black & White vs. Color, Revisited.
The subject of black and white or colour has been a lively topic since the start of commercially available film started around the late 1960’s early 1970’s. I’ve blogged about this before in Blog #13 titled B&W or Color? and presented a splash of history of both films and concluded with a verdict of using both rather than an emphasis on either or.
I find myself shooting colour & black and white although mostly colour for commercial work and usually [but not always] black and white for personal work. I think that the world in general, prefers color. Of course the world is in color so it should be presented that was in pictures, yes? Well, sometimes, yes.
The subject and environment [image itself] should dictate the presentation. A photographer might prefer to shoot in black and white to focus the viewer on the shapes, lines, textures, emotion, gesture, and overall subject of the image. Black and white pictures that work [even paintings or drawings] are very strong when they accomplish this. They are timeless.
In the news recently, two artist’s work in particular are worthy of note, and both are outstanding examples of both types of pictures. Sadly, we lost one of our light-catching brethren, Pete Turner. Check out his absolutely outstanding colour work and give homage to this true master of color.
Thankfully still alive and well is a terrific street photographer named Dotan Saguy’s who presents his black and white work using a Leica M Monochrom.
Another interesting topic surrounding this issue is one of presentation. Can a portfolio, series, or otherwise collection of images be presented in both black and white or color? Does a collection have to be in all black and white or all color? Many purists would say yes but then again, rules are meant to be broken. One suggestion is to present all of the black and white pictures and then all of the color pictures. That is, if you insist on presenting both within a collection. I have no substantial reason for this suggestion other than it tends to work better.
Lastly, film or digital, black and white or color, wide angle or telephoto, there are so many decisions to distract us from making awesome images. At the end of the day, let the decisions come you rather than forcing them and the results should take care of themselves.
The light is always right.
jhg
Casual Photophile Tip & Techniques No. 001 The Subject is the Subject
The Inspired Eye Photography Magazine Issue #40 (full interview)
Hong Kong Free Press: HKFP Lens
Blog #47 Composition, Composition, and More Composition
Blog #65 Summer is for Travel (Hanoi)
Blog #67 Risks, Rules, & Restrictions
Blog #68 Photography is a Gift
Blog #72 Living the Creative Life
Blog #78 How Do You Make Better Pictures?
There are many many options out there for those who aim to improve their photography. How do we sort through the information jungle? Learning to make pictures is similar to learning other skills or crafts, except that each image that we make is essentially different. Mastery of skills that are involved with in various occupations such as carpentry, electric work, auto repair, teaching, and others come from simple steps.
The first step is to learn the background of the field, its history. This is not necessary to make good pictures but it is important for comprehensive understanding of the field. Next, we learn about the basics, then the advanced techniques. Knowledge in most fields is cumulative and needs to be delivered in a sequential manner because the basic information is a prerequisite to learning the more advanced. In photography, we don’t teach students about bracketing until they understand basic exposure for this reason. These days, skills such as website design, post-processing, and business marketing including social media are required for success as a professional.
I’ve written in previous blogs about self improvement and living the creative life. Here, I will add to those lessons by including an emphasise on foundation skills and having fluency over your foundation skills before real improvement can be achieved. Foundation skills include but are not limited to:
Basically, these skills needs to be practiced, over and over. Having an idea of a series or project is also helpful, of course. This list could be expanded to include post-processing (yuk!), editing, marketing, public relations, social media, and other business-related skills but that’s a bit much given the title of this blog post.
These skills need to be fluent and automatic for more complex skills to emerge. This is basically true of learning to do anything. How do we teach these skills to mastery? Good question? I don’t think anyone really does when it comes to making pictures. We read books, take classes, work on projects but we don’t actually drill and practice to a predetermined criterion or level of achievement. What would that even look like?
Goal 1: Make 100 images with perfect exposure using a fully manual camera with a light meter, then without a light meter.
Goal 2: Take 100 pictures in 5 minutes or less all in perfect focus using a manual focus lens, then using autofocus.
Goal 3: Make 20 images using one of 10 different compositional techniques, everyday for one month (i.e. leading lines, rule of thirds, size, blurred background, etc…).
Is this sounding like photography boot-camp? Where do you sign up you ask? I’m not sure that all of that is entirely necessary, albeit it would probably be helpful to master.
Instruction from books or people can be helpful. For more on that, click here. What people need regardless of the source is consequences for the photos that they are making. In short, we all need critique. Critique is basically a process of description. It’s not a question of whether you like the work or not but rather if the work, well, works!
Critique is a process of reviewing, and describing images and stating
“This image works because…”, or
“This image does not work because…”.
Of course we’re all subjective people but some of us have a education in photography and therefore a vocabulary that can be helpful in describing images in this manner.
So, there it is. Practicing component skills and critique be equal improvement. Now go for it.
The light is always right.
jhg
The images herein were made on a rainy day in Hong Kong with a Nikon camera, 35mm lens, Kodak TRI-X 400 ISO 35mm Black and White film pushed one stop to 800 and developed at home in Bergger’s Berspeed developer. They were scanned on an Epson V600.
Casual Photophile Tip & Techniques No. 001 The Subject is the Subject
The Inspired Eye Photography Magazine Issue #40 (full interview)
Hong Kong Free Press: HKFP Lens
Blog #47 Composition, Composition, and More Composition
Blog #65 Summer is for Travel (Hanoi)
Blog #67 Risks, Rules, & Restrictions
Blog #68 Photography is a Gift
Blog #72 Living the Creative Life