Here's a thought…

HT2642 - Compositional Sleight of Hand

Layers are one of the most powerful tools in digital processing. An often overlooked use of layers is their abilities in composition. Want to move that car a few feet to the left? Not a problem. Cut it to a new layer, move it where you want it, then use AI to create the new background. This is a bigger deal than might be obvious because of a fundamental change that has taken place in image making

HT2643 - The Problem with Canned Slide Shows

Over the last 20 years, I've seen quite a number of photographic slide shows. The first was a multi-projector affair, with a musical sound track accompaniment in the 1980s. Recently, software has made assembling a slide show a snap. Too often, I find these presentations too metronomic, predictable, uninteresting after the first few images. Too bad, because they don't have to be. Today, a slide show is not a slide show; it's a video. It's not a sequential presentation of still images, it's a living, breathing visual experience.

HT2644 - An Entirely New Vision

The creative idea might appear in an instant, or it might also require years of gestation. I was recently looking at a large collection of images and I had photographed in 2012 in southern Utah. From nowhere I can determine, an idea about how to process these RAW captures suddenly appeared. I could not count the number of times I've looked at these RAW files with no interest at all. How, then, does a wonderfully creative idea suddenly appear? I cannot over emphasize the value of working our image archives so long-dormant ideas have an opportunity to emerge.

HT2645 - Trust Your Gut

Yesterday I was discussing the 270 image captures of the rock walls of Capitol Reef that I photographed in 2012. I described how I only recently discovered a possible processing for those images. There's an interesting aspect of this story that is not obvious. In reviewing the 270 images, I found 37 that worked with this new processing idea. How do we know? What prompted me to reject the other 233? I think of Edward Weston and "the flame of recognition."

HT2655 - Do It Again and Again and Again

The difference between a hobbyist and a professional is that a hobbyist practices until they get it right. A professional practices until they can't get it wrong. For some reason that advice seems to make sense for athletics, but in creative endeavors we often assume that all we need is the initial effort. This shows up particularly, I think, in travel photography. It's easy to assume that once we've visited a location and photographed it we don't need to go back and do it again. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ansel Adams wasn't lucky photographing Yosemite; he was persistent.

HT2656 - Big Things Are Made from Little Things

One of the great lessons from my dad who was also my coach, is an approach to making progress. He used to say that "inch by inch is a cinch, yard by yard is hard." Doesn't this equally well apply to art making? If you want to create a big thing like a book, an exhibition, a digital publication, a lifetime of creative output, the path to do so is one capture at a time, one processed image at a time, step by step, accumulating little successes one at a time. Aim for the Big; work the Small.

HT2657 - Guiding Their Consumption

I know, that's sort of an odd title for this thought, but there's an important issue that demands our attention. Imagine you want to assemble sizable project of 100 or so images for a book or PDF. Selecting images is one challenge, but not the biggest one. How do you organize those images in the finished presentation? Sequential by date? Alphabetically? Location? Subject? Genre of photography? By which camera you used? Time of day? Time of year? Weather conditions?

HT2658 - Seducing The Eye of the Beholder

Said another way, a way that can bypass the numb response to a cliché, art appreciation is an act of free will. Extending that thought even further, people look at your artwork because they've made a decision to do so in anticipation of some rewarding or beneficial experience. Where does that anticipation come from? What is our responsibility as art makers to build that anticipation so they are motivated to spend the time to see what we've produced?

HT2662 - One Grain of Sand

It's difficult to admire one grain of sand while we are standing on the beach. I offer this as a metaphor for photography today. You and I sweat bullets to make a photograph we can be proud of, but if we look about a bit, we see trillions of photographs being made every year here in the digital age. Even if our masterpiece is spectacular, it is difficult to get it noticed in the tsunami of images being produced every day.

HT2663 - How Each Image Contributes

Although they are both forms of music, listening to a piano recital is a completely different experience than listening to a fully orchestrated symphony. The same can be said when comparing the single, standalone image and the multiple-image project. In the orchestra, each instrument contributes its part to the whole. In the multi-image project, each image contributes its uniqueness yet still exists in harmony with all the others. This is the key to selecting the images to be included in the project.

HT2664 - Our Attachment to Stuff

In the early 1980s, I fumbled a lens swap and dropped an expensive view camera lens into the Pacific Ocean. I grieved then and still grieve to this day. Why is stuff so important? Every photographer I know has a piece of gear they lament selling — or losing. Isn't it silly that we can be so attached to stuff? I used to think this had something to do with the loss of potential, but now I'm not so sure. I once had a client who owned a Western store and I learned a great deal about stuff and our sense of self-identity from that experience.