Lunar Eclipse 2011

I suppose it’s no coincidence that lunacy is a derivative of lunar.  Why else would a group of photographers who probably number in the thousands all get up in the middle of the night and drive to some select spot to photograph a lunar eclipse?  The spouses of our little band deemed us crazy.  That is all but one of them who accompanied us.  We stood around in 14 degree weather to capture shots of this rare event.  That scene was being duplicated by untold numbers of shutterbugs so it wasn’t as if we were going to have an exclusive image.  So why bother?

All of us had a specific vision of what we wanted to capture.  In my case I really wanted to experiment with time lapse photography under field conditions.  That’s geek-speak for wanting to see if I could set up time lapse in the real world.  I failed miserably which is often the case with first attempts at anything.  This wasn’t a money shot so failure was an option and I did get a bunch of nice images along with several million others photographing this event.

So what was the upside to this experience?  First and foremost I got to hangout with other equally crazy photographers and compare notes and discuss photography.  Secondly I did become expert at using the internal intervalometer in my Nikon D3.  I learned what I didn’t know and I came home and practiced and read until I can now set up this function in my sleep.  And a bonus learning experience was that the battery in a D300 could last over 6 hours in weather that had encased it and the lens in frost!

Are we all crazy standing around losing a night’s sleep in freezing temperatures?  Perhaps but sleep is overrated.

Course Description:

Where: Cascade Center of Photography – classroom and studio

When: Date To Be Announced

Length of class:  3 hours (approx.) 6-9pm

Fee: $49

Equipment required: Your normal close up gear with tripod

Simple aspects of color management

Course description: If you have been plagued with colors that never seem to look right when printed or people complain that files you send them don’t look right or you suffer from prints that are much darker than what you see on your monitor than this is definitely the course for you.  In this program you will be exposed to:

-An introduction to color theory

-A down to earth explanation of color management

-How to optimize your workstation for color management

-Demonstration of calibration equipment

-Learn the secret of why your printer prints dark-Optimizing the printing process

Where: Cascade Center of Photography

When: December 14th, 6-9pm

Fee: $49

Equipment Required: Note paper and pen

Go to this website to register for this class - http://www.ccophoto.com/color-management-photo-workshop/

My first assignment was to learn what these guys were doing and why their seminars were so successful.  The seminars turned out to be great fun.  The “trainers” were highly skilled performers who had an unending library of jokes and stories.  Their training aids consisted of world class action photography and video of on and off road racing.  They sweetened the pie even further with numerous raffles giving away everything including a car.  All the meals were downright banquets and no one could go home without letting their belts out a notch.

I kept a very low profile and quietly asked participants what they thought of the seminar.  The answer was unanimous. It was great!  I followed with a second question, “what did you specifically learn that you could take back to your dealership and apply to your business”.  The response was either a shrug or “I can’t think of anything right now but it sure is great training”.

Training has often been used as the cover for some awfully good fun and/or travel by the medical, business and political communities.  I was part of it in my corporate days and I attended far more conferences than I can remember and several times I was even a principal speaker.  Here again, I believe the great majority of people had great fun but had little take home learning value.

The photography world is now flooded with every possible permutation of learning opportunity including the world conference scam.  The training is almost always held in fun places and offers a ton of fun opportunities.  Training can and should have an element of fun.  The trick is separating the fun quotient from the learning and deciding if you received the learning you wanted for the price of the fun.

I’m one of the army of people involved in photography training so I could be shooting myself in the foot.  However, after 30 years in the training world I know that people learn differently and there is no specific great method of learning.  It’s really all about how you learn.

So with a finite budget and time available what is a person to do?  My recommendation is to first determine what it is that you specifically want to learn and remember it’s best to learn in small steps.  Even Tiger Woods has had a progression of learning.  Maybe you don’t care what you learn.  Perhaps you just want to hang out with other photographers.  That’s fine, at least you know what you want.  There is a photo safari out there for every budget. You can hang out with all sorts of interesting people and maybe even learn something.

There are all kinds of classes, seminars, workshops, safaris, conferences, and DVDs quite willing to take your money.  It’s up to you to determine how much fun you can afford and how much learning you expect along with your fun.

In my serious tennis days I attended all sorts of expensive tennis camps around North America.  They were great fun and highly motivational but where I really learned tennis and improved my game was through my local weekly tennis lesson and practice, practice, practice.  But hey, that’s me.  Maybe I’m just a slow learner.

I will never win an award for my organizational skills and I must admit that PCs have forced me into some semblance of an efficient filing system.  Prior to the digital age I was pretty good about filing my slides but prints were another matter.  I subscribed to the shoebox filing system.  I just stuffed my prints into old shoeboxes.  I never threw out a print unless it was horrible.  I figured if I left my crummy shots in the shoebox that through some mystical process they would improve with age.  Unfortunately my digital images follow suite.  I keep a ton of stuff.  It wasn’t a serious problem until my recent upgrade to a 12 megapixel camera.  Twelve megapixels means 75 megabyte files and 75mb files means hard drives get filled mighty fast.   The hard drive storage manufacturers and other media storage manufacturers must be ecstatic over camera manufacturers megapixel wars.   Gee, maybe they even subsidize it?

And now the question that begs to be asked is how long can you store a digital file?  It depends whom you ask or what you read.  The fact is there are only 2 kinds of PC owners – those that have had a hard drive fail and those that will have a hard drive fail.  We can now throw CDs and DVDs into that mix.  It’s just a matter of time.

So given all the downsides what are the upsides of digital?

In my opinion, it’s control.  I have instant feedback from the camera so I can control image output.  I can control all the factors that make a good image through computer software and I can control the printed output with the tweak of a finger right in my own home.  Of course living in front of a computer monitor is not what I call high quality life but in my opinion the image results are worth the time.  Then again, maybe the film folks had the right idea.  They could be shooting while I’m home working and continuing to deny that I have become a computer geek.

I believe it was Sir Isaac Newton that proved through mathematics that it takes more energy to initiate the movement of a mass than to continue the movement once underway.  Drop the “m” in mass and that pretty well describes procrastination.  His math does not cover the amount of energy consumed by the procrastinator in avoiding the initial movement.

My personal photography is not immune from this affliction.  Magazine assignments and commercial work are no problem.  Someone is holding a gun to my head, so to speak.  But getting my “mass” moving for other photo work can, at times, be a struggle.

I have developed some strategies that might help fellow procrastinators.

1. Surround yourself with enthusiastic friends and family who want to join you in your photo adventures.
2. Don’t give yourself a chance to weigh the pluses and minuses of a photo outing.  Minuses always win.
3. Schedule play time
4. Challenge yourself with self assignments
5. Commit to learning one new photo skill a week
6. Don’t wait for the “big opportunity” concentrate on improving the small ones.

An above all recite the Nike mantra “Just do it”.

Not many people are willing to get up in the dark and lug pounds of gear to some forsaken spot on the chance of a good sunrise or to see eagles feeding at first light.  Safety Joe is home having a nice warm, boring breakfast.

Safety Joe doesn’t snowshoe up a snow covered cinder cone to catch the last light of the day on White bark pines and then ski down by moonlight but I know a photographer who does.

There are also huge emotional components to photography.  Photographers were the original geek squad in school and that label stays with you in adulthood.  It takes a healthy ego to overcome the perceived notion that anyone carrying camera gear must be a dork.

Photographers must also have good interpersonal skills.  Even the solitary landscape photographer occasionally has to build a rapport with the locals in order to get accurate directions to some magical spot or ask permission from a private landowner to shoot on his/her property.  This is a big step out of our comfort zone and one that Safety Joe would never take.

Exhibiting your work whether in a gallery or for competition is also a huge emotional risk.  I suspect that most folks prefer the comfortable world of self-delusion to the reality of healthy criticism.  Competition takes time, energy and risk which are terms not found in the vocabulary of the Safety Joes of the world.

While in my corporate life, one of the few executives I both respected and called a mentor had a poster hanging on the wall behind his desk.  It was a cartoon sketch of a turtle.  I try to make the words beneath that image my personal mantra, “Consider the turtle, for he must stick his neck out in order to make progress”.

Being labeled a Safety Joe is a tragic commentary on someone’s life.  I hope it never happens to you or me.

“Photography is not about the thing photographed.  It is about how that thing looks photographed”.

It’s a rare occasion when we actually photograph something we created.  Photography is usually about interpreting a subject and that same subject matter is infinite.  The Eiffel Tower has been the focus of legions of photographers and as a photographic icon the world’s biggest Erector Set continues to be a popular subject.  While the photographers did not create the structure they have found almost an infinite number of ways of interpreting this famous landmark and, in a sense, made it their own creation.

You could make a case that photographers are no more than opportunistic technicians.  We wait for the right conditions or manipulate conditions to our advantage.  Is that art?  Of course it is.  We are interpreting a moment in time and capturing the moment to share with others.  We may not have created the mountain, building or person but that is irrelevant.  Photography is about how that subject looks after being photographed.  The art is in providing a meaningful interpretation of the subject.

Let’s use portraits as an example.  Are the portraits photographed by Richard Avedon art?  Is a mug shot taken during a police booking art?  What is the difference?  I’m not sure there is any.  We are making judgments based on context.  The mug shot with its hard light, numbers in front of the face and the very starkness of the face provide a certain context for our judgment.  Avedon’s beautifully lit portraits of famous people provide another context.  Remove the numbers from the mug shot, matte it, frame it and hang it in a gallery.  Does it capture the spirit of the person?  Is there a stark reality to the image that mesmerizes the viewer?  It’s interesting to consider.  It’s all about how the thing looks photographed.

Every shot is not a great shot even those taken by great photographers.  That would seem obvious to most photographers but what is not obvious is the emotional value you may attach to certain shots.  Your emotional value does not make it a great shot.  As an example, let’s say I just spent an entire day tracking Big Horn Sheep.  Every time it looked like we were going to see a small herd they scurried off.  We were all hot, tired and thirsty.  We stopped for a break, too tired to talk and just relaxed.  The rattle of stones from above our resting spot interrupted our quiet respite.  We looked up and saw a full-grown ram looking down at us.  I quickly grabbed my camera and fired off a number of shots of him silhouetted against the sky before he dashed off.  The ram was only about 30 feet away, but it was mid-day, bright sun and a cloudless sky.

When I got home and reviewed my images I had several tack sharp images of the ram although the sky was over exposed and half the ram’s face was in deep mid-day shadow and the ram was dead center in the frame.  Is this fictitious image a great shot?  I hardly think so but having documentation of a face-to-face encounter with a creature as elusive as a Big Horn Sheep is a great experience.  If I showed that image to serious photographers the accompanying story would have greater interest than the shot.  Our efforts to get a shot do not make a great shot.  Great images are great because they stand on their own without a story.  Effort is not a compositional element.

It’s very easy to confuse your emotional attachment to an image with the true nature of the composition.  I have a shot that has won several different competitions and done well commercially.  When I took the shot I loved the light, I was blessed with some nice compositional opportunities and I knew it matched a vision I had had for some time.  I liked the final product.  I had accomplished a goal but I didn’t think anymore about it.  When I showed it to my wife she gasped and said, “I want it big, I want it framed and I want it over the fireplace.”  I was surprised by her reaction to the image and by getting the same reaction from scores of other people.

I still maintain that you have to follow your own heart and vision but it is important to have others provide a reality check.  You can get too close to your work and not really see its value or lack thereof.  The opinion of others can provide a helpful sounding board.

I can remember early in my commitment to serious photography taking a photograph of a woman and her horse in a shaded glen.  I loved the composition, I thought it was a great portrait and was eager to show a friend who was a very accomplished photographer.  He looked at it and said, “Would you like me to show you how to eliminate the blue cast?”  I was stunned.  What blue cast?  I still have the print, blue cast and all.  It’s another reminder of the importance of feedback.

Competition is a great way to get relatively un-biased feedback.  I don’t always agree with the judge’s opinion on either my own work or that of others but it sure is a convenient way of getting a reality check.  One thing you can count on – all of them can differentiate between a great experience and a great shot.