More decay • click to embiggen"'A mere transcript of nature' is one of the stock phrases of the art critic, and many artists of a certain school. The precise meaning attached to it puzzles us; were it not always used as a term of reproach, we should believe it the highest praise that could be bestowed upon a picture. What adds to our perplexity is that the phrase is generally applied by the critic to work which has nothing in common with nature about it: and is used by artists who themselves have never in their lives painted a picture with the simplest values correct, as though transcribing nature to canvas were a stage in the painter's development through which they had passed, and which was now beneath them. The critic must have but a very superficial acquaintance with nature who applies this term, as it is frequently done to work in which all the subtleties of nature are wanting. we have heard of pictures in which no two tones have been in right relationship to one another, in which noisy detail has been mistaken for finish, and the mingling of decision and indecision in fine opposition - the mysterious lost and found, the chief charm of nature - has been utterly unfelt, described as 'transcripts of nature'. Those artists who use the phrase, adopt it as a convenient barricade behind which they may defend their own incompetence." ~ T. F.Goodall

All photographers would do well to lay these remarks to heart. Instead of it being an easy thing to paint "a mere transcript of nature", we shall show it to be utterly impossible. No man can do this by painting or photography, he can only give a translation or impression, as Leonardo da Vinci said long ago; But he can give this impression truly or falsely. ~ from P.H, Emerson's Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art

Cloud bank on Whiteface • click to embiggenI totally agree with Martin Doonan's comment - "There is certainly a lot of good material in Emerson's book." The more I read, the more 'good material' I find.

I am currently reading Chapter IV, Hints on Art, which is like a stream of consciousness list of thoughts about Art. Much of it reflects my ideas and thoughts on the same subject. It is very interesting, and a bit unsettling, to read the thoughts, written 120 years ago, of another that so closely match my own. Throw in the fact that he also photographs with a technique that also is based on exactly the same methodology as mine and it all gets a bit creepy.

A few nuggets mined from Chapter IV:

• Do not get caught by the sensational in nature, as a coarse red-faced sunset, a garrulous waterfall, or a fifteen thousand foot mountain.

• Avoid prettiness - the world looks much like pettiness and there is but little difference between them.

• Do not mistake sentimentality for sentiment, and sentiment for poetry.

• The value of a picture is not proportional to the trouble and expense it costs to obtain it, but to the poetry that it contains.

• The greater the work the simpler it looks and the easier it seems to imitate, but it is not so.

• Art is not to be found by touring Egypt, China, or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it.

• Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her.

• When a critic has nothing to tell you save that your pictures are not sharp, be certain that he is not very sharp and knows nothing at all about it.

• The undeveloped artistic faculty delights in glossy and showy objects and in brightly colored things. The appreciation of delicate tonality in monochrome or colour is the result of high development. The frugivorous ape loves bright colours, and so does the young person of "culture", and the negress of the West Indies, bur Corot delighted only in true and harmonious coloring.

Misted window and red car • click to embiggenI am reading through P.H. Emerson's Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art thanks to a link to the complete manuscript provided by TOP. The book contains a wealth of very good and timeless advice.

How about this challenge? - The fact of the matter is nature is full of pictures, and they are to be found in what appears to the uninitiated the most unlikely places. Let the honest student then choose some district with which he is in sympathy, and let him go there quietly and spend a few months, or even weeks if he can not spare months, and let him day and night study the effects of nature, and try to at any rate to produce one picture of his own, one picture which shall show an honest attempt to probe the mysteries of nature and art, one picture which shall show the author has something to say, and knows how to say it, as perhaps no other living person could say it; that is something to have accomplished. Remember that your photograph is a true index of your mind, as if you had written out a confession on paper.

Or, having trouble editing your pictures for a book? Here's some good advice - Thus it will be seen how difficult it is to produce a picture, even when we have thoroughly mastered our technique and practice, for, to recapitulate, in a picture the arrangement of lines must be appropriate, the aerial perspective must be truly and subtly yet broadly rendered, the tonality must be relatively true, the composition must be perfect, the impression true, the subject distinguished, and, if the picture is to be a masterpiece, the motif must be poetically rendered, for there is a poetry of photography as there is of painting and literature.

Never rest satisfied then until these requirements are all fulfilled, and destroy all works in which they are not to be found.

There you have it. Now get to work making that one picture, and, of course, delete all the rest.

Valentine tulips • click to embiggenOne of the single most mentioned 'critiques' of my ku and related pictures is about the corners of the pictures - what's with the vignette / blur/ darkness? ... you should use a smaller aperture for more edge sharpness ... or, the ever popular, I like everything but the corners. These observations come almost exclusively from the ranks of photographers, virtually never from the 'public' who view my work.

As I have explained a number of times, the corner blurring / darkening, aka vignette, is created in Photoshop by a series of actions that produce what I have labeled my Holga effect. The reason that I started to do this is both simple and complex;

1. simple - I like the results that the Holga camera produces (but not the extreme limitations of the camera itself).

2. complex - human vision is 'centrist' in nature. When the eye is motionless and fixed on whatever is in the center of the field of vision, all that is in our peripheral vision is very indistinct. We can see / sense changes in light, objects in motion, etc. in our peripheral vision but only with a very low degree of acuity.

The camera's gaze tends to render everything within its plane / field of focus equally distinct and sharply rendered no matter where it resides in the frame. This is especially true with digital cameras that use smaller than full frame sensors which effectively create extended DOF. Coming from a life of film and a variety of camera formats where DOF is narrow and selective focus is a technique that helps lend emphasis to the object of the camera's gaze, I wanted to use a technique that mimics some of the traditional film camera capabilities of selective focus / narrow DOF.

After a bit of screwing around (and thinking about item #1), my Holga filter was fait accompli. Since then, I have applied the filter in exactly the same manner and amount to all of my ku pictures.

You can imagine my surprise, when a few years later, I discovered that I had reinvented a very old wheel. While reading / researching the history of the medium, I came across a fellow named Peter Henry Emerson (I have mentioned him before), who, in 1889, in his Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, championed an approach to photography that was remarkably like my present day Holga filter.

He wrote, "... as has already been shown, the eye is very imperfect, and its images are not therefore perfect, and it could not form theoretically perfect images, even if the atmosphere were pure ether and nothing else, for there are other facts in nature which prevent this ... (a) central spot is a most important factor in the Fovea study of sight and art. For though the field of vision of the two eyes is more than 180 laterally, and 120 vertically, yet the field of distinct vision is but a fraction of this field, as we can all prove for ourselves ... the field of distinct vision depends on the central spots for the reason that the central spot differs anatomically from the rest of the retina by the absence of certain layers which we need not specify here. The absence of these layers exposes the retinal bacillary layer to the direct action of light. Helmholtz says "all other parts of the retinal image beyond that which falls on the central spot are imperfectly seen/' so that the image which we receive by the eye is like a picture minutely and elaborately finished in the centre, but only roughly sketched in at the borders".

For Emerson, the net result was that he made a lot of pictures with unsharp edges and corners.

Apparently, like Emerson, I want my pictures to mimic the human act of seeing and looking at that moment when the eye is fixed upon the thing it wants to see. For me, this is so because I want to draw attention, not only to what is the object of the camera's gaze, but also to the very act of seeing and looking itself.

That is, 'seeing and looking' as a human act, not as a photographic one.

Assortment of decay • click to embiggenA question about the most daunting challenge of making a book from Tom Gallione; How about a little advice on editing? I have a project with far too many images ... I'm struggling to cut the portfolio to under 100 ... Beyond the obvious guidelines, i.e. only show your best work and ideas relating to whether or not an image fits in with the theme reflected in the statement, can you offer any advice?

Editing your own body of work down to just a select few pictures - to even as many as 100 out of a very large body - is a daunting and sometimes exasperating task. Most photographers have an 'attachment' of one kind or another to all of those pictures they have designated as 'keepers'.

At the very least, there was a reason why the pictures were created in the first place, not to mention the work invested after picturing to make prints (even if you only viewed them on-screen). It's only natural to like them all ... but, truth be told, they are not all 'winners'.

The only way I have been able to figure out the winners from the also-rans is to make prints and see if the 'magic' is still there. I find that the key to judging your own work is to clear your head of all the whys, hows, what-fors, and where-with-alls and just look at the pictures as if you were seeing them for the first time.

This is not the easiest thing to do, but it can be done. Repeated viewing of the pictures over time seems to help cool your memory / emotion of and for the making process and focus it on the thing you have created. Again, over time, some pictures just seem to seem better and better while others seem less so by comparison. "Less so" does not mean 'bad' - the 'cream' just separates and rises to the top.

DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS ON A MONITOR. MAKE PRINTS. The prints should be small work prints that you can literally throw into piles - 1 marked IN, the other marked OUT. Live with the results for awhile (repeated viewing) and rearrange as needed.

Caveat; YOU WILL NEVER BE COMPLETELY SATISFIED WITH THE SELECTION. NEVER, EVER. There will always be doubts and what-ifs, but, if you ever want to end the editing process, the key will be to figure how to handle and live with the doubts.