The promised book review

The Art of Photography, A Personal Approach to Artistic Expression, by Bruce Barnbaum.

Let's start by remembering my difficulty with many instructional books. They exist on a spectrum, ranging from utterly simplistic, such as the various "X for Dummies", up to tomes written by experts containing extraordinary amounts of detail on everything that is known about that topic. One needs to be nearly an expert to read them. It seems to be difficult to find books in the sweet spot between those extremes.

This book is well towards the detailed side of that spectrum, and there's lots of room for details. This is a big book, 25 x 25 cm, and 388 pages. It's actually too heavy to hold up and read. I usually propped the spine on the arm of the chair. 

But the main good point is that it's not about gear, and it's (mostly) not about software, and it's not about the so-called 'rules' to produce a good photograph. It's about finding your artistic expression through photography. Finding subjects that you related to, and can express that in a photograph.

He makes it clear that he's all about B&W film in a 4x5 camera printed in a darkroom, and digital for colour work. He makes that point several times, so I'm wondering a bit if the chapters were assembled from other work. No real matter, it's just a bit more detail along the way, and it's his way of ensuring you know where he's coming from.

As a digression, even in my limited time in photography, I've seen that too many people seem to be more interested in tearing down the work of other photographers, or getting hung up on minutia of gear, than getting out to take their own photos and find what works for them. Barnbaum is unapologetically clear what his interests are, and how he goes about it, and if the reader does something different, that's fine. 

The how he goes about it, is the important part of the book, and there's lots of detail. Oh my goodness there is detail. Anyone interested in fine art done old school on B&W film printed in a darkroom needs to go and buy this book. Stop reading me for a moment and go order it. The publisher is Rocky Nook, and it was $61.95 in Canada. Just do it, you can thank me later.

If you're a digital colour photographer, which so many of us are, the purchase decision is a little more nuanced. Absolutely get it out of the library. Go put a hold on it now. If you see it in a book store, give it a really good browse. It's probably worth buying, knowing that you can probably re-sell it to Fair's Fair.

He goes into a lot of detail about editing images intended as artistic fine art. His artistic vision, which will almost certainly be different than yours, or mine, or any other photographer. The whole process starts in his head as he is looking at the scene, envisioning the final print. That drives the details around exposure, (and yes he goes into the zone system in detail), and development, and then editing, both old school and in software.

The overall process will be applied differently to every scene and every image, and thus driving specific decisions that affect the final image. And no, he's not all about pushing the sliders around willy nilly for dramatic effect. Subtle is the name of the game, and how the various controls interact with each other. I'm paraphrasing here, "If the viewer can tell how and where you edited the image, then you did too much." There's some re-reading I need to do there, and make some notes. 

Before I forget, a Curtis serendipity.

A mountainous serendipity, though I think I've blogged it before.

Of the Day

Driftwood

Flower

Peony

Lily

Landscape

The beautiful golden rolling landscape of SW Alberta, totally overshadowed by an inversion layer. 

Tombstone, but first an artsy serendipity that I had somehow overlooked from our last trip to New Zealand.

It occurred to me as I was doing a final read over before hitting the publish button, that this photo would work better if I swapped it horizontally, so the lines lead down and right.

Celina

The clicking of the camera woke her up.

Caribou

Lynx

River Reflections

Film

Back to minus WTF again

How quickly we forget. We had a late start to summer, and then a long golden autumn. Today it's -24 C outside, the sun is shining hard, and there's about a foot of snow everywhere it hasn't been shovelled. And there's been lots of shovelling.

Supposedly it's going to warm up later this week. They say. I'll believe it when I see the slush. Perhaps I'll go snowshoeing while it's good. This seems to fit the bill for today's blog, sunny, but cold.

Of the Day

Driftwood, but first a double related serendipity. Northern lights from the first two trips to Yukon. The first is from Sundog Retreat near Whitehorse, the other is above Dawson City.

Landscape

Flower

Peony

Lily

River Reflections

Tombstone

Film

Completely by accident I've got two really similar photos for you. They were not intended for comparison purposes, and I can't really tell for sure, but I think they were both taken within a few minutes of each other and might even be from the same spot. There were several photos from about that spot, about that time, with two different cameras and perhaps several different lenses.

Green Fools

Caribou

Lynx

Lots of thinking happening

 I've been musing about photos for a while. Thinking about getting some printed. Thinking about the kinds of photos I have taken, and would like to take. There's a school of thought that says to get better at taking photographs, you need to concentrate on what you're best at. Anything else dilutes your time and effort.

I'm not so sure I believe that. Capturing good photos is a matter of seeing it in the world around us, and knowing how to capture it. The better you get at seeing potential photographs of any genre, the better you'll be at your chosen genre. No matter how passionate you are about a subject, capturing other kinds of photos will give you a break, refresh you.

I've been having fun posting photos on VERO. This is one way of looking back at my previous work, in particular, the ones I've marked with 5 stars. To recap, normally 3 stars mean I edited a photo, 4 stars mean it's much better than the rest of my work, and 5 stars make me go wow. I've been looking back at the 5 star photos, and some of them don't hold up as well as I'd like.

Something I just figured out on VERO. You don't need the app to see what I've posted there. You can follow the link here. I'll put a perma link in the sidebar. It isn't just previous work there, sometimes it's something from the recent trip to Yukon, but mostly it's been the best (or what I think is the best)  of my older photos. The VERO community isn't as big as the Instagram one, but it's actual real people, no bots, no algorithm. I've followed a bunch of people, and I find the photos I'm seeing in my feed are worth the time to scroll.

I am chugging through The Tome, as I think of it. I had it out several weeks ago and got about half way through at best, but had to take it back because someone had a hold on it. I got it back again. I will do a proper review of it.

The local community craft sale was a fun photo event this morning (ask I write). Chatted with a bunch of people I know, collected many photos, and put 130 up on the community page on my other blog.

The winter projects are beginning to call my name, but first I need to excavate the workspace. Things have been gradually piling up on, under, and around it since last winter. I don't even know what all is there anymore. Some of it belongs, but some of it I really need to deal with. Like the old Cube computer and Cinema display monitor. Back in the day, like early 2000's, the Cube and that monitor were pretty amazing. Now of course, they are thoroughly obsolete. I tried putting lots of photos on a USB stick, and have the computer shuffle between them. That didn't go so well. Maybe it was too many photos. Maybe I should have another go, with fewer photos. But where to put it so it's not in the way? Decisions decisions.

In any case, I feel sort of nostalgic for it, and don't want to take it to the e-recycling place. Neither do I want to put it in a box and kick the decision down the road. The last time I seriously thought about it, I was house sitting for some friends on vacation in Hawaii. He has a Cube and I'm pretty sure I saw part of the display stashed away on basement shelving. I actually thought about sneaking mine in there and not telling him. He might not figure it out for a decade or more, and wonder how he came to have two of them. Or three of them, I would not be astonished to discover he already had two. Anyone want to buy a Cube and Display? It worked the last time I tried it, and has the most recent OS that it will run.

You can't really see them, but much of the table space is taken up by glass paperweights. I'd done some macro photos of them, using the box you can see at the bottom of the photo. I cut a hole in it and directed the light up through the bottom of the paperweight. I was going to do more with that idea, but then got distracted. Now I have to recreate that idea.

Of the Day

Driftwood

Flower

The last of the mint this year.

Peony

Lily

Landscape

A bit of careful walking required in South Glenmore park.

Green Fools

The clowns analyzing everything that wrong during the wedding.

River tour reflections

Tombstone

Caribou

Lynx

Film

There was another taken with the same film camera a day later that you can see here. Light makes all the difference.

Still behind the times

One of the things about me is that I always seem to be a bit behind the times. Not in the sense of being late to events. If anything, I'm early most of the time. (That noise you hear is Linda rolling her eyes really hard.) 

Much of my so-called career I was working with obsolete databases, mostly to pry data out of them for migration to a newer database. Sometimes writing custom reports to present information that the canned reports wouldn't show. Sometimes extending the life of a database so they didn't have to buy upgrades because something else was coming along, just not quite yet.

Those keeping up with the story know that I recently starting using old film cameras for some photos. One was made about the time I was in high school, the other shortly after I was born. Both work perfectly well, except for the light meter in the older one, but I knew that when I bought it, and it's an expected thing. Working perfectly well for film cameras, of course. I mostly don't check the back of the camera any more to see what I have. 

We don't have cable for TV. The wire comes into the house and dead ends. For a while it amused me to argue with the cable companies accusing me of somehow stealing their content. They didn't believe that anyone wouldn't have cable. Now, of course, with high speed internet (ours comes over the phone line, in an arrangement that the cute door to door sales people have difficulty understanding) one can stream content from any number of services, and are probably able to find any TV show or movie ever made.

We like to discover 'new' content at the library. They have a big bin of discs that contain TV shows and movies, and they let you borrow the discs for a week for free. Imagine that! We'll see something that mentions a show and we'll get the first season out to see if we like it. If we do, we might buy it. There's been any number of times we 'discover' a show after it's been cancelled, and we buy the entire run. We're currently in the middle of one of these, just finishing up the first season of Medium. 

I'd never heard of it till recently, but it popped up while looking at something else and I was a bit curious. Then I was at Fair's Fair, and saw a bunch of it on the shelf, and I had some credit there, so I thought, what the heck. We quite enjoyed it, but we were wondering a bit about the time frame, given the phone technologies they show in use. Then we realized that the show was actually 20 years old. Once again, behind the times. We'll probably go and get season 2. 

In a recent blog I alluded to the pace of life being much quicker than previous generations. This pace seems to be accelerating. Used to be that appliance lifetime was measured in generations. Human generations. In economic terms they were called durable goods. Now it's mayfly generations. Get 10 years out of a washer or dryer and you're doing well. 

There's two parts to this. Manufacturers have been building in obsolescence for a while now, to encourage us to not repair it or be buying something new, so as to increase their profits. Plus most people like buying new things. They don't want to be seen driving a car more than a few years old. They see a buddy with a new gadget, and they have to get one as well. But generally the new thing isn't even as good as the old thing, and has been bloated up with 'features' to increase the apparent value. Most software changes now are an example of bloat. And is a dedicated rice cooker really a necessary thing?

I can recall one new genuine improvement that amazed me at the time. I mean flat out jaw dropping amazed. It was a table saw with a safety device that could sense when it was starting to cut into a finger, and then it would stop the blade in 1/1000 of a second, and drop it below the table surface. It's hard to express how fast that is. Our fastest eyeblink is about 1/10 of a second. Someone pushing their finger into such a blade might not even need a band aid. And yet, the manufacturers of such saws refuse to implement the technology, saying it's too expensive. Which it isn't, even in monetary terms, and that's to say nothing of all the amputated fingers that happen without such a safety feature. But when the bean counters are looking at pennies per unit to cut costs or increase profits, such an addition is anathema to them. 

The same has been true of many other changes. Most of my readers will remember cars that essentially didn't have seat belts, and the fuss that was made when seatbelt legislation was enacted. Or airbags, the manufacturers screamed about that one. Or fuel injected engines. Crumple zones. Anti-lock brakes, and disc brakes. I think back to the cars of my childhood, and in particular the 66 Falcon that was my first car, and shudder to think of what a deathtrap that was. Given what an idiot teenager I was, it's a miracle I survived.

Some change is good. We have the life we lead now, because of change. But I'm thinking we should be  asking ourselves more often, does this change actually make things better? All too often, the answer is no, it's just change for the sake of change, to make it look new. This paradigm of ever increasing growth is eating our planet.

Just a random unblogged photo.

Of the Day

Driftwood Serendipity from 2017, then the driftwood.

Flower

Peony

Lily

Landscape

Green Fools

They crossed the abyss, and are trying to figure out how to deal with the next obstacle.

Tombstone

Caribou

Lynx

I'm pretty sure that Curtis thought of himself as a at least a lynx, at least some of the time. Not a true serendipity, in that this photo has been blogged, but when Curtis shows up with the same file number as the lynx, how could I not blog it?

Film

Another view of Tombstone valley. I never tire of this view.

October Image of the Month

Normally I think about Image of the Month in terms of what's the best photo in that time. Best, of course, has many possibilities, as those of you that have read my many dithers on the topic will know.

But this morning, as the snow is falling, for only the second time this season, I'm looking at the photos and thinking how unusual the selection is. Normal for August, unusual for October. I was still recovering from the photo overdose of September and didn't get out much for new photos, even with the lovely fall weather.

First Runner Up

This is the first year for these roses. Linda wasn't sure anything would happen, suspecting they would settle in, grow roots and leaves, and get used to the view. But the blooms were spectacular, and hanging in despite some snow impressed me even more.

Second Runner Up

I never did get around to spending some time chasing bees or dragonflies this year. The best I did was after Linda had watered the lawn, which perked up the mint, which brought out the bees again. I had some time one sunny afternoon, and decided that it was now or next year. It didn't take long, and I got a couple of nice photos, but no actual macro bee portraits. Still, any photo of a bee in focus gets onto the short list of photos to consider for image of the month.

Image of the Month

A surprise dahlia. We hadn't expected any of them to bloom. There's something about the textures and colour combinations that call me to this one.