Inspiration – Page 11

Category: Inspiration

Making Art On Vacation

One of the benefits of being a photographer and going on vacation is being in a place you don’t experience every day. On the other hand, one of the obvious problems in visiting a vacation destination is trying to make something new in a place that everyone shoots! No other place defines that issue more to me than Disney World. You can’t take a step without seeing someone with a camera up to their eye. From cell phones to the most expensive DSLR’s on the market, it’s a safe bet to say that Disney World is the most photographed vacation destination in the world. So how do you make something new while visiting a place like that?

I look at a place like this as a great way to further define your style, because that is the only thing that will separate your shots from the tens of thousands of other shots taken every day. What can you inject into a scene that makes it yours?

It can be overwhelming when you start to think that you are photographing a mostly man-made environment – how are you making art out of someone else’s art? That is what photography is all about! Capturing images of life the way you see and interpret them. You’re telling a story with your own voice, even if it’s a retelling of another person’s tale.

Adding your loved ones into an interesting background is a no-brainer, but how about making them a part of the artwork by composing them as an element in it?

I personally like to look for shapes and textures in a place like this – especially during those harsh mid-day hard-lit hours. You can shoot in every type of light, but you need to work within its limitations while exploiting its positive points.

When looking for design elements, you can always make a decent picture much better by adding an element that sticks out, such as people. I started shooting this scene and even though I loved the color and angles, I was bored with it until I asked my daughter and her cousin to sit off on the side of the wall.

As I’ve stated in previous posts, I also love to shoot in low light. I composed this shot and used the guard railing inside Space Mountain to brace the camera as my son awaited the last ride of the evening (and our vacation).

This photo was made by holding the camera steady against the fender of the car/table directly in front of my family’s seats at the Sci-Fi Diner.

When you don’t have anything to act as a makeshift tri-pod, you can get low to steady your elbows on your legs, shoot wide open and crank up the ISO. This shot was done at f/2.8 and ISO 1600. I had to take quite a few of this scene to ensure that at least one of them would be acceptably sharp. It’s digital, it doesn’t cost you anything to let the shutter fly, but you can loose everything you’re trying to say if you’re not generous with your disk space in extreme shooting conditions such as this.

There are plenty of opportunities on vacation to relax and stretch your creative mind out while behind the lens. Go ahead and try new stuff while opening your eyes a bit wider to find the shots that most people might skip over. I still haven’t shown you my favorite shot that I took on this trip, but I have hundreds of photos to go through. I promise to share it with you this week as I get more time – the sucky part of returning home from vacation is all of the work that piles up in your absence, so I’ve got a busy week ahead of me.

Go Big!

Reflecting after Thanksgiving, being away from my day job, and having some time to generally rest my brain has been a cathartic experience. I run so fast through each week and am amazed at the beginning of each month that I’ve passed through the previous one without even a chance to settle into it. It has me thinking that I need to keep growing my craft. Time is of the essence and I can’t settle, I need to go big.

Ever since I identified photography as my creative outlet a couple of years ago, I’ve been on a steady climb with my ability, focus, and style. Within this past year, I’ve been giving myself personal projects, stepping out of my comfort zone, and really putting myself out there. I’ve completed a 365 project, which was a huge task (just look at how many start on Flickr, but never get finished – it’s not easy) and after that I started this website. I’ve also been published in Charleston Magazine a couple of times, including their Last Page feature, as well as various other publications such as Australia’s Hysteria Magazine, and I’ve been featured on blogs and news sites such as The Digitel. I actually received an award for one of my pictures, and I got the opportunity to lead a photography related session at BarCamp. I’m super excited about the upcoming Help-Portrait sessions because it is something much bigger than anything I could ever do on my own. In particular, this Help-Portrait project really has been inspired.

I need to keep climbing this mountain ahead of me, and there is no time for plateaus. I need to push my ambition into overdrive. The question is what next? I do hope to keep the Help-Portrait idea going for more than just this December, but other than that, I need to do something big in a different way. Up until now, I’ve been what I consider an amateur – someone who does this for the love of it. I don’t want to ever lose that affection for photography. But, my wife has been yelling in my ear lately that it’s time to get paid. I get a little scared of that, because if I get paid, then it’s a job. If it’s a job, then it becomes something you have to do. If I have to do it, instead of wanting to do it, I will resent it. But enough of this silly rationalization. I see now that my own fear is making up excuses. I need to prove to myself that I’m worth it. I need to get hired and deliver above an beyond what I’ve been asked to do. It’s not about the money, it’s about the accomplishment.

Right now, the creative part of my mind is an open book. A journal that has been written into randomly and needs to be organized into a cohesive work. I’m very open to your suggestions, in fact, I would truly appreciate your input on this one. So please, whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, or right here – please shoot me some thoughts about going bigger. How do you see someone like me best contributing to the world of photography?

Painting With Light

As I stated in Friday’s post, I love shooting after the sun goes down. One of the coolest techniques you can use to spruce up your long exposures is called painting with light. Basically, you use a flashlight to paint in the object you are trying to photograph in order to make it stand out in the frame. In the image above, there was a lot of ambient light on the right side of the College of Charleston Observatory dome, so I used my Fenix E01 pocket flashlight to fill in the left side.

An alternative to the E01 if you have a camera phone with an LED flash such as the iPhone 4, which is just as bright when using one of the countless flashlight apps available. A step up would be something like the Fenix LD15, which is capable of 117 lumens versus the E01’s 10 lumens (Hint to anybody who’s reading).

What about a much larger object? A puny pocket flashlight can surprisingly make a huge difference, but sometimes you want to really light up a structure, such as this lighthouse. In this situation, a car was parked on the side of the lighthouse and the owner was kind enough to turn on its headlights to illuminate the whole side of the Sullivan’s Island Lighthouse. Even still, I used my pocket flashlight to fill in some of the lighthouse’s left side.

Day 166 - Sullivan's Island Lighthouse at Night

Photography is all about capturing light, so anything that you can use to manipulate or create it is another item in your mental bag of gear. Whenever I shoot something like the photos above, after I compose the shot and take a test frame, I always think of way to improve it while I’m there. You should rarely ever shoot and think about how you can fix it later. In most situations, post processing should be about maximizing the information that you caught, not about changing it completely. Having a flashlight in you pocket that is just a little bit bigger than a AAA battery is a helpful tool to have for more than finding your keys in the dark!

Industrial Roads

In contrast to yesterday’s post, today I snapped a shot of the docks off of East Bay Street in Charleston, SC. I have driven past these docks plenty of times before, and I always wanted to stop and take a shot of them. Today, I decided to practice what I preach and pulled the car over. I walked up and down the street looking for a good shot. I was intentionally trying to frame it to show only a man-made landscape. When the worker walked through the frame, It morphed the whole idea into something new for me.

Look at the grandeur of what we as humans can do. Items such as the shipping containers which see much more of this world geographically than most of the people who create them. Their bold colors, stark texture, and patternless arrangement like giant building blocks line the coast with giant cranes replacing Palmetto trees and a magnificent suspension bridge carving out the skyline like a pair of mountain peaks. In the foreground, instead of grass, lay the train tracks that will eventually cart those boxes to the mainland. Walking through it all is a man. Man, who created this landscape, is strolling through his domain. It’s as if the creator of the world was caught walking through a valley and someone snapped a photo of it.

Every element in your work matters. To me, what started out as a shot to simply show an artificial landscape turned into a nearly spiritual representation of creativity with the addition of one small but meaningful element. It’s the little details that can define a bigger picture.

Country Roads

Every so often I get the pleasure of driving out to Wadmalaw Island. For anyone who’s never been out there, it’s about 40 minutes outside of Charleston and it’s one of those drives that makes you want to crank up some rootsy music, roll down the windows, and breathe in the fresh air.

When I lived in New York and commuted into Manhattan everyday, I used to look forward to the train ride on most days (the days when they were late or broken down were not a treat). It was a time to relax, listen to music, read books, meditate, or just take in the quickly changing landscape as you travel from the suburbs into the crossroads of the world. It was a fantastic commute if you were able to look at it that way, and that’s the way I look forward to the occasional trip out to the far reaches of Maybank Highway on Wadmalaw. The best part? When you get out there the cell phone stops working! I know I have a very good excuse for unplugging from the world for a while because I have no choice – just like when the Long Island Railroad heads under the East River on its final approach to Penn Station.

Ryan Bingham has a knack for hitting the nail dead on the head. He captures what I’m trying to convey in song perfectly.

It ain’t that I can’t see,
Or find my way home,
It’s just that I like to breath,
Out on country roads.

I love when music and photography are speaking the same language. Where do you find your moments of Zen in everyday life?

Do Something That Scares You

For the longest time I was scared to take photos of people (and I still am to a certain degree). I’m not alone when I say that when I started to really get into photography, I concentrated on scenery, still life, and designs. The more I shot landscapes and shapes and other non-human subjects, the more disconnected I became from shooting actual people! As I became more aware of my craft, I began to doubt my ability to create an artistic shot of a person because a tree never voiced its opinion of my art, but a person sure could. When I’m shooting a still life of a pomegranate, there’s no fear that it will be disappointed with the end product – I can only disappoint myself, which is much safer than upsetting a human.

At some point I remembered that my favorite photographs before I really got into photography were of people. I needed to get back to what I first recognized as the appeal of this art. I started reading books by the likes of great people photographers Joe McNally and David duChemin, and scoured YouTube for videos of portrait sessions, and read up on lighting blogs. Eventually, I built up enough chutzpah to photograph a wedding! Since then, I’ve been seeking out opportunities to do portrait sessions. But not just ordinary pictures of people smiling. I’ve been looking for more artistic elements using what I learned from shooting all of those inanimate objects, and combining that with the unique energy of a person.

That photo of the worker on the sign up above really inspired me this morning. I was driving down the road when I saw that guy working on the billboard and two things came to mind; 1) The color and shape of the elements of the billboard against the sky really came together when a person was standing up on it, and 2) That guy’s job looks scary as hell. I’m not entirely sure what he was doing because he really hadn’t started working yet, but I imagine that it is not for the faint of heart. After I pulled into a parking lot next to the sign and pulled the camera up to my eye, the symbolism of the scene I was trying to capture hit me. You need to constantly challenge yourself if you want to move forward. You need to scare yourself. Not just in art, but in every aspect of life. I know it’s not a new idea, hell, “Do Something That Scares You” is probably trademarked by some motivational speaker somewhere (maybe it belongs to Jordan Chase), but to see something in everyday life that reminds you of it can be a moving experience.

With that said, my next big project, which is in the planning stage and could very well fall through before the deadline I have set for it, scares the piss out of me. It’s a huge undertaking and I may know by tomorrow if it will be happening or not. I will need a lot of help, but it will be well worth it to everyone involved. The best part is that I will include my awesome wife in this ongoing photography obsession of mine because it involves something she is equally obsessed with. I’m really hoping that the stars will align with this one, and if not, we do have a backup plan (but it would still be really cool if we can get this pulled off). Check back tomorrow night and I will hopefully be able to spill the beans!

My Theory On Post Processing

I wanted to focus my philosophy on photo editing before I give my session on developing photos in a digital darkroom at BarCampCHS this weekend. To me it is an important element in photography that is often skipped by many. I don’t know if it is because people feel that it is too difficult or too time consuming, but since when is anything worth while easy? OK, here goes…

When I was a musician and my band recorded our first CD, we didn’t know anything about mastering. It was something that we cheaped-out on and the sound quality suffered because of our ignorance. We put all this effort into making a record, but didn’t put the right icing on the cake! Post processing is like sound mastering. You don’t need to change the product, you are just trying to enhance it – polish it up and make sure it looks the best that it can look.

This doesn’t mean you should ever shoot with the mindset that you can fix it in post. You should make the best digital negative you can in the camera. The ideal post processing situation is one that takes only minor tweaks to establish your final product. Proper exposure means a clean digital file, and good composition will yield you the highest possible resolution. These are skills that still need to be mastered, but the skill of post processing is just as important.

For my realistic editing techniques, I’m looking to make the photo pop, or stand out. The edits are subtle, and for most people they are not even noticeable, but they are very deliberate. I want to enhance a point of focus, or guide the viewer’s eye through the photo to drive home whatever point the photo is trying to make.

For more creative editing, when I’m trying to create a certain look, I start out by experimenting with different techniques while capturing the image that will allow me to successfully manipulate the file afterward to make my vision a reality. Sometimes there is a fine line between photography and digital imagery. It’s up to you how far you want to take the editing process. I sometimes will dabble in the unrealistic representation of a subject, but I would much rather leave the subject in tact and use the editing tools to further define a feeling or meaning though saturation, dodging, burning, contrast, etc. Most of the time that mood or feeling was there when I made the photo, but sometimes you want to smack the viewer over the head with it. That is completely OK, because there are no rules to this!

Lets take a look at a self portrait I made yesterday for my “No Shave November” personal project. I want to show you the original file first. I shot this in RAW (which is the file format you want to shoot in if you plan on editing your photos). RAW doesn’t show you all of the fancy in-camera optimizing magic that your camera is capable of doing when you shoot in JPEG. It’s the raw data that your camera sees. it’s a digital negative. So here’s the RAW file of my giant head from yesterday (converted to JPEG for the web in iPhoto):

I chose this photo to show you because the shooting method I used to capture it was done deliberately to capture a specific look that I wanted to realize in Lightroom. I was standing a few feet in front of a wall, and there was a wireless Nikon SB-600 flash on a stand right behind me pointing at the wall. In front of me is another SB-600 shooting into a Photek Softlighter umbrella. I shot at f/4.5 at 250th of a second and ISO 200. There was a lot of light going on. I wanted to cut the ambient light and only capture the light from the flashes, so I shot at the fastest speed possible and adjusted accordingly. Admittedly, I could have adjusted it a bit more to get an even better exposure, but doing a self portrait is a pain in the ass, so I’m happy with what I got!

I brought the photo into Lightroom and made some heavy deliberate tweaks to achieve the look I was going for. The major changes are illustrated here in the basic panel of Lightroom’s develop module:

The other panel I wanted to show with you here is the Tone Curve panel. Notice the very strong “S” curve. This is a typical high-contrast curve. The beauty of a program like Lightroom is that you can visually tweak this curve to your taste. There is no mathematical formula to this, it is purely an exercise of taste.

Also, as part of my project, I limited myself by only using a square crop, so this is my final image after I cropped it and did some other minor tweaks such as lightening my eyes and diminishing the bags under them:

As you can see, the integrity of the image itself has not changed at all, but the quality of it is much better. Sure, if I shot in JPEG, the image would look better than the RAW version I showed you straight out of the camera, but the edited version not only looks better to me than anything my camera could do for this type of shot, it also looks exactly the way I envisioned it to.

On Saturday, I plan on shooting some photos in the morning at the conference, and then I’ll walk you through the editing process for three different techniques for developing them. It should be fun and I’m excited for it – I hope you are too!

Bringing Up Old Stuff

I just re-watched this video from last year and I really think it conveys an important message about perseverance. I sometimes get upset at Zack Arias because he comes off as a negative guy on his blog and on twitter. It can be a bummer to take input from a guy who doesn’t seem happy. But, when I watch this video, I realize that he knows he’s got issues, but works though them and has been coming out on top in spite of his apparent seasonal affective disorder. He’s a pro. It has little to do with his body of work that defines him as a professional, it’s his perseverance that makes him stand out (the awesome pictures don’t hurt though). His clients obviously love him and they should.

Some days, I get really frustrated at being an entrepreneur and I have to get out of my head and look at some of the other shitty jobs I’ve had in my life. When I was in school for my second go at it I was working during the day for an electrician. That in itself was not shitty, but the places we worked in were. Every day we were in a different nursing home, being reminded of our own mortality. I was in my early twenty’s and that was the time when the invincibility juice that every teenager is filled with begins to run dry. So, to make that chemical transition into adulthood while witnessing hordes of people in their final stretch of life is downright depressing. I moved on from there into much better environments, but even when I was working a job that many people would die for at MTV in Manhattan, I still had the fear of being outsourced and the constant reorganizations which made every quarter more stressful than the last. Working for someone else sucks, no matter how good the job is.

So, I salute you, Mr. Arias, for your perseverance and honesty. I thank you for reminding me that no matter how stressful my work can be, I’m in control of it and I ultimately set the tone for my own life. Every once in a while you need to look back to move forward.

F**k Auto

So you went out and bought a fancy DSLR camera, or possibly one of those newfangled micro four-thirds cameras with interchangeable lenses because you’ve decided that you want to upgrade the photos you make by getting a better camera. You slap on the lens, pop in a memory card and then start taking pictures. Then the buyer’s remorse sets in because the photos don’t look all that much better than the ones on your little Kodak point-and-shoot! What happened? Well, like most people who own a camera, you left the camera in auto mode and expected it to interpret the photos you see in your mind into the photos that show up on your computer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually work out that way. Taking better photographs involves much more than an expensive camera. It involves a bit of knowledge, a dash of skill, and an eye for composition – none of which a camera can accomplish on its own. Let’s talk about making the switch away from auto mode.

Take a good look at the photo at the top of this post. That’s 14 time Grammy Award winner Ricky Skaggs and his band. There they are up on stage, acoustic instruments in their hands, singing their hearts out – these guys don’t know the meaning of “Auto”. I bet they all drive using manual transmission. You might not like bluegrass, but you can get the metaphor. I took this shot at the fair this past Tuesday. Here’s the camera info for this shot: I used my Tamron 17-50mm lens at 35mm, at 1/125 of a second with a f/4 aperture and ISO 800. I set this up manually on my camera during his first number and pretty much used the same settings for the rest of the shots I took of them.

Do you see all that negative space in the top and bottom right corners? Auto hate’s that. Auto is prejudiced against darkness. I hate prejudice, hence the harsh title of this post. If I took that shot and let Auto drive, the damn flash would have popped up so fast and punched this band right in the face with awful direct light that they probably would have stopped playing and kicked the camera out of my hands (well, not really, considering the amount of fans that were shooting pictures with their flashes on, illuminating only the back of the head of the person in front of them). Do you see all the color on the back of the stage? Auto wouldn’t. It would have blown that right off the photo. Auto is a dick. It only cares about the closest thing it can focus on. The rest of the scene is meaningless to Auto. Color? Dynamic range? Contrast? These are all enemies of Auto, yet they are some of the most important aspects of a good photo.

OK, so now you have a good reason to hate Auto, what are you going to do about it? You really need to learn about exposure and there are books on the subject, or you can google it and find a lot of really great articles on the subject, so go ahead – I’ll still be here when you’re done. Once you know what exposure is, you need to understand the basic relationship between the amount of light you let into the camera (aperture), the length of time you let that light in for (shutter speed), and the sensitivity of the sensor that captures it (ISO). It doesn’t have to be a geeky math nerd understanding, but at least an understanding of the aesthetic effect that those three factors have on your photography.

I know what you’re thinking – how am I supposed to capture a great moment and be expected to figure out what ISO setting to be on, what aperture to use, and what the proper shutter speed should be? By the time I flick one dial the moment has passed! Well, most cameras come with really good training wheels! There’s “Program Auto” mode (or P Mode), which lets you control the ISO, the flash, and the white balance, but it still chooses the aperture and shutter speed. P Mode still sucks, but it’s a start. I prefer “Aperture Priority” and “Shutter Priority” modes. They allow you to have control of the same things P Mode does, but you can either set the aperture if in A Mode and let the camera pick the best shutter speed based on the aperture you choose, or the shutter speed in S Mode which lets the camera pick the best aperture based on your shutter speed. You can also set the ISO, or program an auto ISO range when using one of these modes, so that you can limit the amount of possible digital noise in your photos. In a lot of situations, you can leave the white balance setting in auto WB as well, as it does a pretty good job of setting itself. In situations where you are using multiple light sources or there are extreme colors you want to enhance or diminish, then manually setting the white balance is a good idea. Some other settings you can manipulate in these modes are the type of metering and the exposure compensation. Both of these settings let you trick the camera’s built-in light meter into doing what you want – further giving you control of your vision. If you find yourself messing with the metering and exposure values a lot, you need to just shoot in manual and compensate with your shutter speed and/or aperture!

I realize that there is a lot to understand here and I’m just giving you a basic overview, but with time these things become second nature. I still spend a lot of time in aperture priority mode, because I like to control the depth of field in my work, and it usually serves me well in a pinch. Lately though, I’ve been making a conscious effort to hang out in manual mode and it has allowed me to do creative things much easier and more consistently than in A mode. When I recently did a series of portraits for a Halloween party, I set the camera manually to create consistent low-key exposures:

If I had used A mode, even if I were to adjust the exposure compensation, each shot would meter differently because of the color of their costumes and how the meter would read them. In manual mode, each photo will be exposed the same way. Another example is taking high-key photos like this one:

In any other mode but manual, the camera would try to “fix” this shot because it’s deliberately over-exposed. Shooting in manual lets me further realize the images I want to create. This allows for artistic control – you are the one making the shot, not the camera. This is why when a photographer is told that they “must have a nice camera” when someone comments on one of their photos, they get pretty steamed! The camera would have screwed it up if it was in control!!

I don’t usually dabble into the how-to realm on this site, but I think it’s important that people understand how much work goes into making a photograph, and while I think it’s even more important to share the “why”, understanding the “how” lets the reader appreciate the “why” all the more. Now you know why I hate Auto and have a better understanding of how to stop using it, so go out and make some shots in M mode and further realize your artistic vision.

Charleston Magazine’s Last Page

I mentioned in a post last month that I had some exciting news from Charleston Magazine, and today it came through. The photo above was selected for “The Last Page” in the November issue. The Last Page is a feature that showcases artwork from a local artist.

I’m especially excited to be involved in this month’s issue because it is Charleston Magazine’s first ever music issue. Music is a big part of my life, and if it weren’t for music, I wouldn’t have met my wife or enjoy the life I have today. It inspires me most out of all of the art forms, and it’s a big part of what drives me every day. To be included in this special issue as a photographer is a real wake-up call to my ambition as an artist.

Just last night, I was watching this video from the keynote of the 2010 PDN Photo Plus Expo by Chase Jarvis. He brought out a group of creative leaders connected to the world of photography and their stories of how they got to where they are in their careers made me realize that I’ve been somewhat blindly meandering down a path that sounds very similar to these very people that I admire. At some point, I’m going to have to make a choice to either grab the bull by the horns, or sit out on the sidelines.

It’s quite a difficult thing to even consider. I like my current career, but it leaves little room for a right-brained soul like me to breathe. I got into photography as a creative outlet. I walked away from my career in music because it was becoming a job and it was losing its ability to be that outlet (and the pay sucked). I don’t want that to happen with photography. I also don’t want to think that I could have done something that I consider meaningful and let it go because I was too chickenshit to pursue it. The most depressing thought in the world is of how many great ideas, paintings, songs, or photographs weren’t released to the world because somebody didn’t have the balls to see it through.

Over the next couple of days, I’m going to explore some of the themes that drive me artistically, so please check back soon to join me on this journey.

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