Motivation

I happen to run across an interesting set of interviews and tutorials that are sponsored by Epson and directed towards black and white photographers.

First, the interviews.  Each interview is going to be divided into several parts, with each segment lasting 5-10 minutes.  The segments are going to be released sequentially and only the first one for each interview has been released.  The interviews are with photographers John Sexton and Kim Weston.

I have listened to the first section of each and found them very enjoyable.  They are about the art of photography as well as a bit about (as one might imagine (Ansel Adams and Edward Weston).  Definitely worth a listen.

On the same page are a number of tutorials regarding digital black and white printing.  I have just started to listen to them, so I can’t yet comment on their usefulness.

I thought I would share these with you. The ‘whole shebang’ of interviews and tutorials can be found here: Interviews With John Sexton And Kim Weston.

“A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. ”

Richard Avedon

There is no such thing as a photo that totally depicts the truth.  I always enjoy photography quotes that deal with that idea.  My thoughts are here.

A photograph to welcome Spring and Summer…….a wild geranium after a Spring rain:

Copyright Howard Grill

I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine who is a passionate bike rider.  Similar to the way I might go on a week long photo trip, she might go on a week long trip away to go biking.  She was describing to me the ‘zen’ of being out on the road or trail pedaling her bike when she made an interesting statement that caught me by surprise.

“Howard”, she said, “the amazing part is that you could be out there biking with a friend on a trail and be coming up to the top of a hill.  And, even though you might have biked that trail a hundred times before, the light might be hitting a patch of grass or something else on the top of the hill in a way that is different from every other time that you have seen it before so that it looks totally different and so you notice something new on each trip that you’ve never seen before, even though you might have been there many times.”

What could I say?  I just told her that it is exactly the same when you are out photographing.  Maybe the same heightened perception occurs whenever one is involved with something that they are deeply passionate about, no matter what that might be.

Sometimes the whole of an image just doesn’t work, but within it is a portion that does.  Such was the case with this photo from my recent trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  The entire vista contained in the original image didn’t seem interesting enough to hold my attention.  But within it I saw a portion that I liked because of the shapes the lines of the rolling hills made. So I limited the image to what I liked about it.  Sometimes, you just have to know when to crop!

Copyright Howard Grill

For me, becoming involved in social media as it pertains to photography…..in order to share images, see images, and generally connect with people who are passionate about photography as art….. has been less than fulfilling.  Let’s face it, Facebook is mostly for semi-personal communication among friends (despite the artist and company pages), Twitter is for communicating in short half sentences with link sharing, and, somehow, Flickr just never did anything for me.

But I recently tried exploring Google+.  Now, social media may not be the end all and be all, but I was very pleasantly surprised at how the Google+ network works for those with an interest in photography (and I would assume for those with other deep interests as well).

So what are the differences between Google+ and Facebook, particularly when it comes to photography?  In my mind there are lots of them:

1) For starters, as opposed to “Friends” you have “Circles”, or groups of people that you pool together under a single category (and the people in it, while they know you have them in a circle, have no idea how you define that circle). And isn’t that how it works in ‘real life’?  You want to tell some things to your kids, but not to the rest of the family…fine, set up a circle and call it ‘Kids’. Want to announce something to close family members but not to all your friends and acquaintances….fine, set up a circle called ‘Family’.  Want to share your fine art photos with other photographers but not force your friends to see them….fine, set up a circle called ‘Photography’.  The point is that it is VERY easy to  share specific posts, links, images etc with just who you want to and not everyone else. You can share a post with the world or just one of your ‘circles’, or anything in between.  As a result of this, it is easy to make connections with people you don’t know because you and they both know that  they are there for a mutually agreeable reason.  It isn’t a big deal to “friend’ someone you don’t know because they only see what you think is appropriate for them to see and vice versa.

As a result, it is far easier to follow others and to gain ‘followers’ that are interested in seeing your work.  In fact, circles filled with people interested in a specific topic are often shared so you can get ‘introduced’ to a large number of photographers very, very quickly.

2) Storage and display of photographs are, in my opinion, far superior than what is available on Facebook.

3) In addition to the above there are ‘Communities’…..groups of people that come together with a specific interest, like landscape photography or black and white photography, sort of similar to the groups on Flickr

I would definitely recommend giving it a try and I don’t think that you will find yourself going back to Facebook except to send small blurbs to your friends…..and to post that photo of your friend stinking drunk!

If you do give it a try, look me up and put me in your photography circle.   I think you can start by clicking the red G+ sign on the blog sidebar.  I just put it up so I am not sure what it really does, but I don’t think it will wreck your computer :>)

A few posts ago, I recommended a tutorial on processing 32 bit images in Lightroom, which produces HDR type photos that tend to be halo free and more photo-realistic (I know you can make photo-realistic images with Photomatix and other HDR software, but it just seems harder to do so).  Well, I took my own advice and tried it.

My first attempt was actually with an image that I didn’t think would benefit much from that type of processing, but, nonetheless, I just wanted to give it a try and see.  The image was from my post of April 29th, and I have copied the original (non-32 bit) processed photo below.  This was processed from an underexposed image so as to give a more dramatic view of the sky and to silhouette the mountains.

Copyright Howard Grill

The 32 bit processed image allowed me to maintain the silhouette, but pull out detail in the midtones to darks that were not easily extracted before and certainly not without more noise.  After Lightroom 32 bit processing, the image was finished with tonal contrast applied in Nik ColorEfex and some local layer adjustments for the sky.  I also cropped a bit off the bottom for better balance. The result is below and I do believe the 32 bit processing gave a superior result:

Copyright Howard Grill

As you might expect, the differences are much more apparent in larger images!

I ran across this amazing time-lapse video by photographer Dustin Farrell and couldn’t help but post it. Take a look and see just how awesome our planet can be!

“You only get one chance to make a first impression!”

-Unknown-

So says the quote….but what does this have to do with photography?  Well, it is a lead in to something I have noticed.

There are times when I am editing a series of photos and I want to get a quick look at what potential the image holds….what it’s potential is when processed from RAW format.  So I might use Lightroom to make some relatively quick adjustments and export the image to Photoshop and spend a quick five minutes getting the image to look interesting and then save it.

If I ultimately decide that this particular photo ‘makes the cut’ and is worth processing seriously, I will generally go back to the RAW file in Lightroom and go about processing it much more carefully and then export it to Photoshop where I will then work on it, sometimes for a short period and sometimes for many hours.  But then a funny thing generally happens.  If this were one of those images that I had done some quick initial processing on and I then print both the tediously processed version and the quick version, I more often than not find that I like the ‘quick’ version better.  Of course, the quick version is not completed at that point but serves as a better starting point to get the image to what I imagined in my mind’s eye.   It may well take several hours of tweaking to get it just the way I want.  But the point is that the first quick version is often closer to the vision I had for the photo than the more carefully done attempt.

I think I have an explanation, though I am not certain.  I suspect that the first quick version is done in a more ‘unpressured’ way.  There is no need to be worried about getting it to be final and ‘perfect’.  Perhaps this lets the ‘right brain’ come out and work in an unfettered and free-floating fashion without the left brain issuing ‘warnings’ and doubt……and, after all, isn’t that the best way to make art?

I am wondering if anyone else has had similar experiences or thoughts about this?

There was, in the latest edition of Photoshop User magazine, a very interesting tutorial. It spoke about merging bracketed exposures into an HDR file but, rather than tone mapping the file in HDR software, bringing the file into Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw and processing it using the sliders there. This apparently gives a nearly halo-free image with a more photo-realistic effect than that typically attained with HDR software tone mapping.

Shortly thereafter, a friend sent me a link to a very nice on-line video tutorial by Mark Johnson about using this technique. I thought I would share the tutorial link. Just click here.

This is definitely a technique that I will be trying out!