I’ve unfortunately neglected this page. Within the next few weeks my daughter will turn 21 and be married. My wife and I are getting ready to build a new house. I’ve been a bit busy. All poor excuses for not taking a few minutes a day to work on this project. So, for your enjoyment, something shot on film.
Need to brush up on your lighting skills? For Free?
I’ve taken a class with Don and trust me you don’t want to miss this.
http://www.creativelive.com/courses/lighting-essentials-don-giannatti
Last night was a good run all the way to Fort Stockton. As usual though is was up at 3:30 so it was an early start. The plan was to make it to El Paso for breakfast. I’ve never been to El Paso before. It was still dark when I got to the edge of town. It looked like a city in a pit. Even in the dark it looked like a place that just eats things, where they get trapped. I wasn’t feeling very hungry looking at it from I-10. The sun had come up enough by the end of town that I could make out what the interior looked like. Darkness looks good on El Paso. So here I sit at the Fork in the Road diner in Las Cruces. Trying to write on my phone. It’s a bit slow and frustrating.
I did make one stop this morning. Van Horn. I have a history with Van Horn. My cousin has some land there and we’ve made a couple trips out there. South of town its like a lunar surface with cactus. Fascinating to a gulf coast kid like me. It was 5am but I had to stop and say hello to a place I’ve come to enjoy. The neon of El Capitan’s sign begged for a picture.
L
ooks like a good day to get out of town.
In a few hours I’ll be setting out on a little road trip to Arizona. If time and available internet allows I’ll try to keep the progress updated on here. Photos may take a bit longer since I have a bag full of film that I want to use. Maybe I’ll break down and give the camera phone a real try.
1189 miles to go.
If anyone is interested, I have some prints being displayed at the Houston Public Library-Downtown as part of a show with the Houston Photographic Society. They will be up for about six weeks. 500 McKinney St.
The sub-title of this blog is The Hockley Photographer, and I seem to not have a lot of content to back that up. So I set out to remedy that a bit this morning. I had intended to get some shots of the lunar eclipse at sunrise this morning, but the clouds had other ideas. Instead I loaded up some film and Donna and I headed into Waller for breakfast at Ranchito. Still grey and dreary when we were done, a quick spin around downtown Waller to look for potential new studio locations (more on that at some other time) killed some time until there was enough light to work with the 4×5. Funny, it didn’t warm up any.
We charged down the road into the thriving metropolis of downtown Hockley. Okay, not so thriving anymore. But there, in all it’s boarded up glory, was Garrett’s Grocery. It’s where I had my first job that didn’t involve being on the farm. I kept that job for several years too until I left for college. It took up most of my days after school, weekends, and summers. Those were the heady days before the bypass took all the traffic away and I thought $0.50 over minimum wage was a fantastic amount of money. I guess in 1991 for a fifteen year old kid it was.
These days, Roy has long since closed the store. It lasted for several years after the traffic left but it was never the same. It was nostalgic looking back and remembering how it was. Not just a store, but the un-official community center, town hall, gossip center, and at the time-parking lot beer joint. All that is gone though; and nothing has really took it’s place as the all ages daily gathering place. I can’t say how or why that happened either. Moving a road shouldn’t move the heart of a community. But Hockley is a ghost town now. Maybe that’s why I’ve avoided the five minutes to drive over there for a simple photograph, my youth is a ghost now. And, not really by choice.
It’s a given that photography as an art form is a creative thing. Even in it’s most scientific and commercial forms some creative license is usually found. But, no matter how it’s being used, photography is a technical skill too. The physics of recording light is always present. The usual path for a photographer is to master the technical so that they con concentrate on the creative. With today’s being sometimes smarter than the operator, the technical craftsmanship of photography is continuously being seen as less important. Personally I think this will be a dividing line in the future between amateurs and professionals. No longer will the price of equipment or how many trucks you can fill with gear be the badge of those who set out to master photography. But that’s a whole different issue for another time.
If you do think you want to reach for a higher level of technical skill here’s something to think about. A job of the photographer is to control the variables within the frame. Everything within that viewfinder is your absolute responsibility. No excuses allowed. If the angle isn’t right; you move or you move your subject. If the light isn’t right, change it. If the exposure isn’t right, it should be. You are also responsible for working within the physical constraints of everything within the frame. If you can’t change it you have to work around it. If there are a hundred people on set you are in charge of making sure that they are exactly where you want them to be when you trip the shutter.
Everything falls into two basic categories; things you can change and things you can’t. You can control you’re shutter speed, aperture, and usually ISO to a point. You can control when you take the photo. That ‘Decisive Moment’ that Cartier-Bresson talked about. Perhaps you can control where you stand, camera height, and camera angle. Flashes and lights can be moved and adjusted. There’s a thousand and one things you can influence. Choose wisely.
Then there are those things you can’t control. Weather, unexpected gear failure, people being late, etc. While you may not be able to really change those things you can usually find a way to work around them if you thing about it. Experience helps ease the process, but you only get the experience by dealing with the issue at some point.
A professional (not just identified by being paid, but by being skilled) controls the things they can control and doesn’t let the things out of their control, control them. Once you let the uncontrollable things take over, you have lost control of your set. If the sun is too bright and contrasty you find shade. If it’s raining you get under cover or inside. You have a backup plan, even if you don’t really know what it is you can make one on the fly. Maybe you have a cheap sync cord for when your pricey radio triggers fail. No matter what, you work around the problems so that they aren’t problems. Perhaps it’s knowing that it’s best to reschedule if possible instead of wasting more resources. No matter what though, you stay in control.
Don’t take this to mean that you have to be a master of every single nuance involved in a shoot. If you’re a travel photographer you’re not expected to fly the plane to get to your destination. Would anyone hire the pilot to take the photographs? But you are expected to gather the people around you that will fill in your weaknesses better than you ever could. You stay in control of you shoot by making sure others are controlling the variables for you. If you try to extend beyond your skill set, you start to loose control again. If you want to learn web design then by all means take the time to do it. If you want a well designed site to promote you photography by next week then you may want to pay someone to do it while you learn on your own. Otherwise you loose control over the quality of the presentation of your photography work because you didn’t work around your lack of skill in building websites.
As your skill set as a photographer expands and improves, so does the amount of things you can control. Late models or assistants aren’t an issue because you’ve built a reliable team; you know how much light you need and where you need it, you already know secondary places to go if something happens at your primary location. You’ve seen trouble and you’ve beaten it. You have the confidence to do it again without breaking a sweat. The average Joe that dropped the cost of a used car so he could have a ‘cool’ camera would be frustrated and clueless. The camera couldn’t outwit the situation for him.
So, plain and simple; learn control. Once you have control you expand the limits of creativity.
If you have nothing to do this Saturday (and really, you should have something to do on a Saturday morning) I’ll be teaching a class on composition in photography for the Martha’s Bloomers Photography Club and Martha’s Bloomers in Navasota. 9am in the Arbor Room if your interested.
You know, what we put into our pictures is not a smart idea. What we put into our pictures is our whole life and our whole intellectual discourse. Everything we know and everything we have done and everything that’s in our history goes into every single picture we take.
– Fred Herzog
http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2011/11/04/what-we-put-into-our-pictures-is-our-whole-life/
J. Kleb Photography Blog 