Seeing

Photographic seeing is not easy.  The eye and the camera are not the same, for many reasons I may someday write about.  And using the photographic medium  to reveal what else you see is something altogether more complex, requiring one to not only see and to see photographically, but also to overcome several technological hurdles to get from the camera to something that someone will look at.  Ansel Adams said that photography is an art form in two equal parts, the creation and the presentation.  

As most of you are aware by now, I’m re-learning my photography skills.  Much of it is learning new technologies, part of it is practice, but the most significant part of it is seeing again.  Seeing the world in ways that bring understanding, awe, beauty or joy, and brining to that seeing the technical skills to know how to capture it photographically.  Unfortunately, I’m not in an environment that promotes frequent photography (a lot of reasons for that, but the societal ones regarding being in someone’s photograph without being paid for it is a big one!).  Still, I am trying to hone my development skills, using the blog in part as an excuse to photograph anything at all and trying to shoot as much as I can on vacations and trips, and learning the tools of digital photography as I can.  It is a slow process.  Like any craft, it takes practice.  Lots of it.  And part of the process that’s frustrating is, to paraphrase Ansel, there’s nothing worse than the perfect execution of a poorly conceived idea in photography.

Those of you who have been around me in my shooting forays since I’ve started back on this journey know that I’ve complained the most about my images.  Something seemed missing from them - I wasn’t capturing what I was seeing, or maybe I wasn’t seeing at all.  Most decent images were just pretty pictures.  Those who have listened to me gripe about it know that I think I’ve really only made one photograph in the past 4 years since I’ve started shooting again.  And even that one I still don’t have the skills to optimize, so it waits….

This frustration with not seeing has led me to spend a lot of time studying the work of photographers I respect, and some other artists as well.  So last weekend I bought an Ansel Adams e-book, 400 Photographs (we live in a wonderful age - I was able to download it even in Liberia).  I’ve spent a good amount of time this past week looking at several Ansel classics, but more importantly many images I’d never seen before.  Reading passages about select images and snippets of his wisdom.  

Studying his book made me remember my own tradition and the path I chose to follow with photography.  It is a tradition of straight photography that strives to present a subject in as straightforward a manner as possible, as Ansel put it to “make the photography as clean, decisive, and as honest as possible.”  Looking at his images (and my own 4x5 contact sheets which I now have with me here in Liberia), I realized that my older work was not about the overly dramatic, knock-out beautiful super-wide-angle landscapes that fill landscape photography magazines and books.  It’s about seeing things in ways others do not see.  It’s about craft, detail, and precision that came, in part, through working with large format equipment, but that also arose from personal discipline in the process of seeing.  

Then earlier this week there was a confluence of events that shook my world (well, my photographic world).  One was Ann commenting that I should revisit the photographs I made at the John Day Fossil Beds back in June 2011 given that my lightroom skills are getting a bit better.   Then, the following morning I was looking at Ansel images while eating breakfast, going through the thought processes (what type of filters did he use to get that effect [in black and white film you can shoot with colored filters to do things like darken skies, lighten foliage, etc.], where did he likely burn and dodge the print and why would he do that) I do when I’m studying his photographs.  At one point I turned the page and there was an image before me, nothing spectacular in the subject matter, but the composition, light, texture, attentiveness to detail that at once grabbed my attention and then led me to say, “That’s what I was trying to do at the John Day Fossil Beds!”  

So for the past couple of days I’ve revisited those photographs, pretty much one by one and asked myself, “If I were photographing this in black and white, how would I have manipulated the exposure (what filter red-yellow-green might I have used) and then how would I have processed a print (what contrast of paper, where would I burn and dodge) of this image.  It’s been too long for me to know in my head what the results would be, so I had to flip things on in black and white in lightroom and then make the changes I know that correspond to those old techniques I knew.  And I added some new skills I’ve learned in the meantime to push the image to what I was seeing when I pointed the camera at it.  

My results follow.  They’re sequenced in the order I made them, with the exception of a couple digitized film images made with my Contax 645, and then the final image.

The first couple of images compare the color images (enhanced with some tweaks to make it decent) as well as the corresponding black and whites.  Mostly you’ll just see the black and whites.  

Here is an example of what I’ve been talking about.  Here is a black and white image that  has some lovely qualities to it.  Yet when you see it in color . . . well, it’s lacking.

Not that it couldn’t be improved with a bit of post-production work, but it’s just not a color image.  As I used to say when I was a professional photographer, I don’t see in color, I see in black and white.  Color I shoot for money, black and white is for myself.  I guess that hasn’t changed much over time, even though it’s been decades (literally) since then.  [And don’t think that it’s as simple as, “Oh, I’ve got a crappy color shot, bet it looks great in black and white!” - doesn’t work out that way.]

The above is an image that utilized both my former knowledge of black and white photography, and my new knowledge of how powerful Lightroom 4 can be.  I dare say I won’t be shooting digital in black and white only mode - there is so much more one can do if you start with a full-color raw original.

Now here’s an example of where I can’t quite tell whether one is better than the other:

Now the next one is an image I had worked on in color and, while it was fun to play with the different sliders and I got a very dramatic image, it wasn’t what I saw at the time - and I knew it.

This was more like it.

And this is a different take of the same scene.

While we’re at different takes, here’s another one that should be familiar - I’m not sure why it’s later sequentially than the other one, unless we stopped twice at this place.

It’s not all just landscapes - large or small - that I photographed.  There’s also details of the world, to include rocks, especially rocks in interesting locations.

And landscape abstracts that are real, but . . .

So look at the above.  It works in black and white.  Now look at the color version . . .

It just doesn’t work in color.  Perhaps you can now understand my frustration when I originally looked at the images on my monitor.  Anyway, B&W has a way of allowing for interesting landscape abstractions in a way that color doesn’t to my eye.

Now, not all the images I worked on were successful when I looked at them in black and white.  Some of them were complete failures as images period.  Others, I came to realize were indeed color images.  Compare this:

with

As I thought about some of the color images, I realized that several of them were experiments (or playing if you wish to call it) where I really had no idea what the result would be.  Those tended to work out better in color (I think because it was often the color that attracted me).  Playing really is the best form of learning!

But time and time again, I looked at color images and wondered what I was thinking.  Even ones I would improve, fell short of when I reexamined them with B&W eyes.  Here’s another example:

Really, the painted hills are so rich with opportunities.

But you have to stop somewhere.  So I moved on to images from the next day, taken at a different unit at the painted hills.  Again, several images that in color (though interesting colors) left something to be desired, yet in black and white reminded me of why I lifted the camera in the first place.

There weren’t any vast landscapes on this later day, so the day was full of details and medium distance shots.

In my old B&W printing days, I’d be able to take an image like the one above and give it life.  Print it on a good bromide paper, grade 3 and tone it in selenium.  Looking at it, one would feel like it was vibrating, the texture is so rich.  For some reason, the color image loses that.

Speaking of texture . . .

And I did not totally abandon the idea of giving one a sense that this is a real place.

Yet the walk out gave me one last opportunity for an abstract:

The John Day Fossil Beds trip was my first real photographic trip in nearly a decade.  One where I went for the purpose of photographing, not somewhere interesting where I might make take some pictures.  My trip to Zanzibar, and in particular the morning wandering through the streets of Stone Town, was another.  It’s hard just to “snap” good photographs.

I guess the lesson I’ve learned from these past few days are that I have not totally lost my ability to see, and that I am beginning to develop some of the skill I will need to bring out what I see in photographs.  I need to give more intention to my  shooting, more thought into the process of what I am doing whether it is in color or in black and white.  I need to find a way to introduce into the digital process, the craft, patience and precision that I used when I was using a 4x5 camera.  And I need to remember that something in my subconscious knows when something is out there and that sometimes I need to just shoot it without knowing what “it is.”  Then I need to explore those photographs to continue to learn what it is I “see.”  The example of the red door, and these images from the John Day Fossil Beds are examples of why I need to keep working at it.

So I’ll leave with a couple more images.  The next one is a scanned (poorly done) image from the negatives taken with my Contax 645.  The scanned colors are horrible, no where near accurate, however when converted to black and white . . .

And for Ann, the one true photograph that competes with any I have ever made, a re-worked image that is worth printing: