I hope that you enjoy listening to Emmet Gowin talk about his life in photography as much as I did! Check out the videos below.
Emmet Gowin: A Life in Photography, Part 1 / 4 from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.
Emmet Gowin: A Life in Photography, Part 2 / 4 from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.
Emmet Gowin: A Life in Photography, Part 3 / 4 from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.
Emmet Gowin: A Life in Photography, Part 4 / 4 from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.
The way that I was brought up, this time of the year would be a time to have a handful of New Years Resolutions that would see you through the year. In time these were replaced by goals, and then SMART goals, essentially dressed up New Years Resolutions . Often times these were health related goals – if yours are check out the video below from Equinox
I agree with the sentiment here – goals shouldn’t be set at the beginning of the year and not looked at until the end but reviewed regularly and course corrections made as needed.
But what if there was another way, a way that took the whole goal thing out of the picture? One that gave you a system for living for the year that would allow you to focus on a few essential areas. I think that Chris Brogan’s idea for three words to be touchstones for your year ahead is a brilliant idea. I wasn’t thinking about New Years Resolutions or such like when I saw this mentioned in Chris’s weekly newsletter but I think it’s an interesting idea and one worth trying out. So here goes – my three words are:
Healthy: I’ve had some health issues over the last year, the product of a lifetime of thinking that being fit and exercising regularly doesn’t matter. Wrong! Perhaps it’s too late to reverse the damage but this is to remind me that I should be trying.
Creative: I feel at my best when I’m solving problems and making things. This is to remind me that filing emails isn’t being creative.
Minimalist: Clutter in all it’s forms is an enormous hindrance to creativity. This is to remind me that I need to reduce the clutter.
What are your three words? Feel free to share them below.
Unless my skills with the google are failing me, there are surprisingly few interviews (I couldn’t find any!) with British photographer Martin Henson. Spend some time reviewing his galleries by clicking on the link here and you, like me, will wonder how that can be.
Martin is based in Leeds in the North of England and, from what I can tell, much of his photography is essentially local. Excursions to the nearby coast and the Yorkshire dales – places that I’m reasonably familiar with – result in photographs that really do give a sense of what raw and wild these places can be.
I hope that you enjoy exploring the work of Martin Henson and I’ll leave you with another favorite of his images below.
I was thrilled to be accepted into the exhibition ‘What I did on my summer vacation‘ curated by Jim Fitts, Founder of PhotoWeenie.com and Anne DeVito, Co-Owner of Panopticon Gallery. The exhibition opened in the private room at the Panopticon Gallery September 12 and runs until Jan 14. So there’s still time left to look at the selected images.
I really liked where the photo was placed in the room, in a little alcove as shown below.
The opening was quite a scene. A couple of artist talks and tons of people. Really overwhelming.
The people that I feature in these Friday Inspiration posts are artists whose work I enjoy looking at and so it’s natural that I follow what they doing. I particularly enjoy Thomas Joshua Cooper’s seascapes and was quite pleased to find a longer video of him talking about his atlantic basin project. Check it out below:
While I was looking for videos of Cooper talking about his work I found another video, a conversation facilitated by Roger Wilson between Chris Wainwright & Thomas Joshua Cooper about their work, the journeys that they take and what it is to be an artist. Well worth a look.
When I originally wrote about using presets to explore the potential in my images I had intended on providing the final black and white preset that I made as a downloadable file. Unfortunately I couldn’t quite figure out how to do it. Should be easy enough right?
I continued to use the preset and have used it on all of my black and white images that I’ve posted here over the last few weeks, including the one above. Then finally I figured out how to provide the file.
Click here to download the preset and instructions on how to install it.
Installation of the preset is quite easy:
1. Open Lightroom
2. Navigate to the ‘Develop’ module
3. Find ‘User Presets’ in the presets panel on the left hand side.
4. Right click or control click on ‘User Presets’ to open a menu.
5. The menu has 2 options – New Folder and Import. Click import.
6. A file browser will open that will allow you to navigate to the preset you downloaded. Click on the preset you wish to import and then click ‘Import’.
7. That’s it! The preset should now be loaded into the ‘User Presets’ section of the Lightroom develop module.
To use the preset is easy enough. Select the image you want to work with, open the develop module (I usually just hit the ‘d’ key), under the user presets click on the B&W Preset. Done!
Of course sometimes you might be done, other times you might want to work the image a little more. The most common additional edits that I do are: apply lens correction, change the vignette – which is found under the effects panel on the right hand side, and to change the grain characteristics – also found under the effects panel.
You might want to do other things but I hope that this serves as a solid jumping off point. Let me know if you like this, how you’re using it, what works, what doesn’t. I’d appreciate the feedback.
I’m back home again after a a family holiday at the beach. I don’t know how you travel but for us we always have somewhere to be and while our trips may take us through gorgeous parts of the country we’re always too time crunched to stop to explore. As we zipped across Shelter Island, somewhere I’d like to explore further, the image at the top of the page came to mind. It’s a view across Crescent Lake. I was obviously drawn to the reflections in the mirror smooth lake. At the time I was zipping down to Forks but decided that since there wasn’t any pressure to be in Forks at a particular hour I’d stop. I spent probably 20 or 30 mins photographing at this spot, working out of the back of my car with the music blaring. Most certainly a good time. I never saw the lake flat enough any other time during my visit to the Olympic National Park for this kind of reflection. If I’d done what I was thinking which was to ‘get it on the way back’ the shot wouldn’t have been there.
What was also cool was another photographer pulled in behind me and introduced himself – Jack Graham – a very familiar name to me. I’d looked at his guide to photographing in washington state and at his workshops as part of my researching potential ONP workshops. At the time I ended up going with Art Wolfe but having met Jack and emailed him a few times afterwards I’d recommend his workshops any day.
This experience not only underscores the need to get the shot when you can but also that by getting off the usual rails that we run on we may stumbling into interesting opportunities.
In looking to see how other people have documented the Pacific Northwest I came across the book ‘Beneath Cold Seas‘ by photographer David Hall. While this is not the kind of photography I usually gravitate towards the photographs are undeniably compelling. I particularly like the juxtaposition of what’s going on below and above the surface as in the photograph of sockeye salmon above. Photographer Hall completed this body of work over a period of 16 trips to British Columbia between 1995 and 2010. I can only imagine how technically challenging this type of photography must be, managing both scuba gear and bulky camera equipment that’s made even bulkier by the underwater housings that you need to protect them. Then of course the water’s cold.
What is striking to me is how colorful much of the marine life is. Something I thought that you had to go to the tropics to see. To see more of David’s work visit his website – www.seaphotos.com and watch the gallery of his images below.
When I was poking around on Bainbridge Island recently I did a quick tour of most of the interesting shops on the main drag, Winslow street. I wasn’t looking to buy anything, my bags were perilously close to the 50lb limit imposed by the airline as it was, but rather looking. Looking for inspiration, looking for things that I could use later. In Bainbridge Arts & Crafts I came across a book by Mary Randlett called Landscapes that I thought was amazing.
Mary’s photography came to the notice of the public as the person who took the last photographs of the noted poet Theodore Roethke. She then went on to photograph Roethke’s students and other Northwest artists (including one of Johsel Namkung who I’ve written about previously), their artwork and architecture. As I understand it (from one of the essays in the Landscapes book) Mary’s landscape work was ‘personal work’, photographs that she made for herself and shared with friends as christmas cards. These photographs eventually were published in the Landscapes book.
What particularly appeals to me about Mary’s work is that there is little of the grand landscape here. The feeling is much more of someone who had spent time with the landscape, enough time to let the landscape reveal itself.
To see more of Mary Randlett’s Landscape work I highly recommend the Landscapes book. The University of Washington has some of her work online in their digital collection. As always let me know if you find a good resource that I missed.
People always tell me that interesting photographs are made when there’s interesting weather. I’m not sure that rain falls into the ‘interesting’ category but we’ve certainly had a lot of the stuff in the last couple of weeks regardless of which coast you’re on. Going to a location to photograph and getting rain the whole time you’re there leaves you with some choices but essentially, wait for the rain to stop or get out in the stuff and make the most of it.
I’ve definitely been one to wait for the rain to stop, particularly when it’s cold. Who needs to be wet and cold? For shooting in forests in the spring, overcast weather, perhaps a little drizzly, is ideal. But that also means you have to deal with how to prevent your gear from getting too wet. Part of my reluctance to photographing in the rain is that, since electronics and water do not mix, it just doesn’t make sense. Now I know that many DSLR cameras have some degree of ‘weather-proofing’, and generally the higher up in the range the better the weather proofing but nothing is ideal. Art Wolfe tells an amusing story of how he encouraged a group of his workshop students using Canon 5Dmkii cameras to keep shooting even though it was raining and all their cameras stopped working while his 1D kept going.
So you’re committed to shooting in all weathers what to do? You could of course use an umbrella like the photographer in the image above. The classic approach that many workshop instructors will advise is to use a hand towel placed on top of your gear. It absorbs the rain and you can wipe your stuff down too. It seems to work quite well and hand towels are readily available, especially if you’re staying in a hotel! You could perhaps compliment this with one of the disposable shower caps that you can often find in hotel rooms which would cover up the back of the camera.
An alternate to this approach is the use of rain covers. There are an number of such proprietary covers that fit every budget. I have an aquatech basic cover, shown below. The one odd thing about this rain cover is that it also requires a special eyepiece that’s specific for your camera. The eyepiece is neat, large and spongy, perfect for someone like me who wears glasses and so I keep it on the camera full time. It’s a bit of a wrestle to get the cover on but it works great.
My friend Jen showed me how to improvise a serviceable rain cover from a couple of items you can find in the produce isle of the local grocery store. Check it out in the image below.
To make this you need one of the plastic bags that grocery stores provide for loose vegetables and a sturdy rubber band. I’m told that the rubber bands that hold bundles of asparagus together are ideal, although I like the ones that hold Andy Boy brand broccoli together. Then all you need to do is put the bag over the camera with the open end towards the camera body. Use the rubber band to hold the bag in place around the lens and then once the bag is firmly in place tear out the bottom so that the lens has an unobstructed view. I know many people would advise against it but I have skylight filters on all of my lenses and so ‘tearing the bottom out of the bag’ is really a matter of running my finger nail around the groove between the filter and the lens which is generally enough to neatly tear the bag. For those old enough to remember CDs, I used to do something similar to open the CD package – run my finger along the groove that the hinge of the case between the top and bottom parts. I must admit that this improvised cover works just as well as my aquatech cover. Something to consider if your caught out.
