Here's a thought…

HT2489 - Processing for the Medium

There now exist so many different media we can choose for the output of our photographs. These choices imply that we need to process our images with the output medium in mind. An image intended for a small scale phone/screen presentation is likely to require different processing than if we intend to make a large scale framed print. We could possibly have a dozen different completions with any given image, each produced for a different kind of presentation.

HT2490 - The Competition for Attention

Here, deep in the age of media, doesn't it seem obvious that there is a raging and ever-present contest for our attention. Consider the next hour of leisure in your life. What will you do with that 60 minutes? Watch TV? Read a book? Listen to some music? Go shopping? Spend time with your friends or family? Or, will you dedicate those 60 minutes to looking at art, especially photographic art?

HT2491 - Craft Becomes Obsolete, Art Does Not

I'm not sure the title of this commentary is actually true, but it does point to a thought that can be helpful. In essence, how we make pictures is constantly changing since the first days of photography. Technology marches on, continually, relentlessly. The content of what are photographs portray, the artistic content, remains relevant and possibly even innovative even after the passage of decades.

HT2495 - Wishing For More

A large part of the production of fine art photographs involves a frustration that we wish our images were better. We'd like them to be more. The implied question is what more could you add to your photographs that would make you happy? More sharpness? More audience? More exotic locations? More print sales? If you could wave a magic wand, what precisely would you bring into your photographic life that would bring you satisfaction?

HT2496 - Transportation and Photography

With very few exceptions, my photography is thoroughly dependent on my ability to transport myself from one location to another. The only time I don't use a car to go photographing has been my trips to Japan and China. Even there an important part of my success in photography relies on an effective transportation strategy. I never used to think about this in my youth, but now a transportation strategy has become a huge requirement I dare not ignore or take for granted

HT2497 - The Unhealthy Pursuit of Perfection

We've been watching a television series in which one of the main characters is constantly getting herself in trouble by pursuing perfection. She then finds herself in difficulty because the perfect is never attainable. She pushes people to unreasonable extremes, is constantly dissatisfied no matter how successful her actions are, repeatedly makes irrational decisions that cause her best intentions to collapse. Where is the line between pursuing excellence and an unhealthy pursuit of perfection?

HT2498 - The Natural Look

Like I often do with my morning coffee, this morning I watched a few YouTube videos on processing in Lightroom. I've learned a lot from these people, but not always the ideas they think they are teaching. By coincidence, all five videos I watched today were about making images look natural. Why is this the objective? I know I keep circling back to this point, but is photography a substitute for human vision or is it a medium for artistic expression?

HT2502 - Believability vs Truthfulness

The other day I was looking at some of the photo essays done by W. Eugene Smith and published in Life magazine. They're fantastic examples of the integration of image and text, and as such are worth taking the time to study in some detail. In the process of looking at this work. It occurred to me that my underlying assumption in all his photo essays is that they are truthful, that is to say, documentary not fiction. But would it make a difference to my response if they were fiction? Art is full of fiction, and I see no overwhelming reason why photography should avoid the storytelling capabilities of fiction.

HT2503 - Managing Results vs Managing Work

Last year I became frustrated that I wasn't getting done as many photographic projects as I had hoped to finish. My old goal-directed business training kicked in and I decided to set goals for myself. It didn't help. And then I remembered one of the earliest lessons from management training: Don't manage results, manage the work. Set another way, goals are a result, not a tactic.

HT2504 - Searching for Threads

You've set aside an hour to work on your photography and find yourself sitting at the computer looking at images. At such moments, it is so tempting to spend your precious creative time on a search for images that have potential and then processing them to the best of your abilities. That's not the only option. Alternatively, you might try using that precious time on a different search, a search for the threads that can bind a group of images into a project.

HT2505 - Buried in Lightroom

One of the most dramatic impacts of digital photography is the volume of captures that now reside on all of our hard drives. It's not uncommon at all for me to hear that a photographer has tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of images in their catalog that are, essentially, inaccessible to anyone except the photographer. So much creativity buried in our hard drives just waiting for their turn on stage!

HT2509 - Where DOF Fails

A while back I did a research project looking at almost 10,000 raw captures in my Lightroom catalog. I wanted to determine what caused a failed image to fail, technologically. I did not consider aesthetics but rather the mechanics of photography. My hope was that I could eliminate or at least reduce those technical failures. Two primary failures dominated all others. The number one failure was camera movement, easily resolved with faster shutter speeds or tripods. The second most common reason for failure was related to depth of field, and in a surprising way.

HT2510 - The Extremes

Like many other human activities, photography can easily evolve into an extreme sport. Will your photographs be visibly better with that 100 megapixel camera? Or that 10 gigapixel stitch? Do you really need 60 frames per second in order to capture just that perfect instance? Can you not succeed in wildlife photography unless your lenses is long as the elephant's trunk you are photographing? What is there about extremes that become so seductive in so many walks of life?

HT2511 - Our Inescapable Reliance on Stuff

Just as a thought experiment, what would you do if you could no longer purchase ink for your printer? What if the three big printer manufacturers (Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Cannon)suddenly decided to stop manufacturing printers. What if you could no longer purchase film, batteries, or lenses for your camera? We are so dependent on materials whose manufacturer is beyond our control.

HT2512 - Vacuum Dust

A while back I shared some ideas about dealing with the dust that makes those big out of focus blobs in the sky in our images. Here's a companion idea thanks to podcast listener Rob Motta of Boulder, Colorado.

HT2516 - The First One to Do It

The history of photography is filled with people who didn't make the best but who did make it first. Matthew Brady wasn't the best war photographer in history but he was the first. William Henry Jackson is not the best landscape photographer ever, but he was one of the first. Other examples abound. This implies a not so subtle premise that is easy to be seduced by in our creative efforts — be first or be forgotten.

HT2517 - Yesterday's Limitations

My first digital captures were made with an 6 megapixel camera that had a tiny sensor. They were primitive, noisy even at its base ISO, and fell far short of what I could produce with my film camera. Nonetheless, I kept those image files just in case future software improvements might make them useable. I was right to do so.

HT2518 - Print-on-demand Artwork

Here's an idea that's been floating around photographic circles for the last 25 years or so. What if we were to publish our finished digital files in a way that allowed consumers to print our work on their own printers, with or without a purchase agreement to do so? What would we lose by allowing them to do so? What would we gain by allowing them to do so? I find this a scary idea, but I'm not sure why I feel that way other than the habitual assumption about intellectual property and copyrights/commerce.

HT2519 - Stretching the Image

What do you do if, after cropping an image, it no longer fits the aspect ratio of all the other images in your presentation? Do you let that image just be different than all the others or do you re-crop it within the aspect ratio to preserve consistency? There is a third option I've never considered, but it's recently come to my attention and I'm not sure how I feel about it. That third technique is to stretch the pixels to fit the frame, also known as non-proportional cropping.