Photo Series Project: Crows

My online nickname has been Raven for many years, and I have an interest in ravens and to a lesser extent, their crow cousins. (Though the nickname came before the interest, being based more on my last name than anything.)

Here in Wichita, we have many, many crows, though no ravens. (I've read that there are white-necked ravens out in Western Kansas.) So I'm going to shoot crows for awhile and see what I can make out of that. I live in an area where they're easy to find within walking distance (often in my front yard), so it won't have to go out of my way. Heck, if I scattered corn in my yard, I could probably photograph them from my front porch. And if I'm lucky, I might manage to go out West and shoot some ravens.

I like birds of all kinds, and crows can have, in the right situation, a certain elegance to them. So at the start, my goal is to capture the elegance of the crow. During the winter, that might not be so easy... they're likely to be a bit scruffy. But I'm going to get started trying.

Journal: Where I'm at

Okay, so reflecting on the photowalk and recent events, I realize I really need to be doing this with other people on some level.

Paul Butzi talks about his small critique group, quoting David Bayles' and Ted Orland's Art & Fear:

Operating Manual for Not Quitting

1. Make friends with others who make art, and share your in progress work with each other frequently.
2. Learn to think of [A], rather than the Museum of Modern Art, as the destination of your work.

I thought a bit about that and Butzi's group, and decided to start one for myself. I've received a fair response from the Wichita Flickr group, including a couple professionals, one of which is a photography instructor. Nice, and I'm looking forward to our first meeting. (I'm reading Art & Fear, too... pretty interesting so far, and I recognize myself in it, probably more in my writing than my photography.)

Beyond that, the Wichita Flickr group is really taking off... I suggested that the upcoming photo outing was likely to be in below-freezing weather and proposed something indoors, like a lighting workshop. Before I knew it, we had a space, at least one volunteer model, and several people planning to share lights and knowledge. Amazingly, to me, the primary source is the above-mentioned instructor. I'm sure it's good business sense to cultivate the amateurs, but it sure is generous of him to get involved with us.

And on top of all that, without my mentioning photography at all, one of my co-workers has decided to start a company photo club, since our new HR manager is into photography, as are half of my department. Our first meeting is tomorrow over lunch. We'll see what comes of that... but if the meetings are over lunch, that works out great, because it doesn't cut into my free time.

So all of a sudden, I find myself in the middle of communities forming locally... communities out of which I expect to draw a lot of enthusiasm and energy. This is a good thing.

The Photographer's Eye and the workshop future

The Freeman book is everything I expected. It's a revision of the book I have from twenty years ago... many of the photos and even many of the words are familiar, since I just read the prior book. But there is far more color, it's in a larger format, and it's updated to include digital aspects... panoramic stitching, the recognition that cropping is more easily done and therefor more common. It's a very good book.

But even more so than the original, it's not a "workshop". There are no specific assignments, so if I'm going to use it for my purposes here, I'm going to have to write my own assignments.

But... I'm not going to do that right now. The main point of the workshop format was to get me out and shooting, and it wasn't helping. But now I have an idea for a project that I think will drive me for a bit, if I can manage the weather. More on that later.

Journal: Re-evaluating Hedgecoe

So I've been a bit frustrated with the lack of direction in Hedgecoe's book, as I've noted in all four projects so far. But a lot of my problem isn't just the scant direction... it's the scant substance. Each topic takes up two pages, more than half of which is filled with photos. The text explaining the photos is extremely brief, and the overall text explaining the topic may be as short as fifty words. It's just not saying much. So I don't really feel like I'm learning anything.

Much of the reason I started this workshop series was to get me out and shooting, and even if I wasn't learning lots, it would be great if it were doing this. But the lack of direction has really made it harder. I'm not told what to do with texture, just that I'm supposed to take some kind of photograph in which texture plays some kind of role.

It's possible that I could, as I mentioned earlier, glean direction from his examples and their titles. Such as, in "Project 8 - Restrained Color Usage", I could take photos that show "Deep Shadow," "Sun and Shade," and "Sunlight and Fill-in Flash". So that would help, but even so... I just feel like there isn't much being taught here. It seems that Hedgecoe's idea here is that you'll just go out and take lots of photos and learn something of the art of composition along the way. And if it clearly worked that way, I wouldn't have bought a book, now would I?

Recently, many people have recommended The Photographer's Eye, by Michael Freeman, as the best book on composition ever. I wasn't in the market to buy a new book, but the name sounded familiar. And then someone reminded me why... he wrote the Amphoto Photography Workshop Series book, Image: Designing effective pictures, published in 1988. I bought this book when it was new and it's still in my library. So I started re-reading it, not having looked at it for nearly twenty years. About three days later, I ordered The Photographer's Eye.

While Image is a "workshop" book, there are precious few explicit assignments. Enough to make it obvious that there are assignments, but not enough to really make it a "workshop". But I don't care about that. Freeman talks about the subject, and draws diagrams illustrating the principles... disassembling the photograph visually to explain framing, visual weight, lines and so on. He doesn't make a topic fit into just two pages... he takes as many pages as it takes.

And the person who pointed out Images as being his book says that TPE is even better. I figure it's worth $20.50.

So I'm thinking, if I have to make up my own assignments out of the text, I might as well abandon Hedgecoe and go with a book that actually explains the elements of a good photograph in a way I understand. If I didn't have TPE to do it out of, I'd do it out of Image.

Journal: Thoughts after the photowalk

It was good to go out with other people. I'm still an introvert... I didn't talk much, but I'm not much for crowds. I need to find just one or two other people to hang out with on a more regular basis.

I'm not terribly thrilled with any of the images I got... especially the ones where I think I got an "okay" shot and someone posted a similar photo that is obviously superior to mine. But that's cool... I can look at theirs and see why mine didn't work so well, so it's an educational thing. The important thing was that I got out and shot, and I can see some of the things I need to focus on: remembering my depth-of-field, watching my exposure more closely, and just taking a lot more pictures of the same subject from different perspectives.

Also, I need to take more shots when I am out in general. I'd decided to try shooting RAW+JPG instead of JPG and my 1 GB card capacity went from 256 images to under 60. That's less than two rolls of film, so I lost one of the advantages of going digital... more capacity than I can use in a single outing. If I'm going to shoot RAW (and I am... there was one image that was unusable in JPG, but perfectly good in RAW), I'm going to need either a second, bigger CF card, or a portable storage device I can dump my images to.

Project 3 Results: Texture in photographs

Here we are, back in the saddle. The Wichita Flickr group went on a photowalk in Old Town this morning, and I joined them for a couple hours. A couple of folks lamented the hard light of a cloudless winter day, but I saw it as an advantage for this project.

The goal of this assignment was to show texture.

My favorite is this utility pole covered in old staples... Old Town has a lot of bars and there are often ads for this band or that stuck to the poles. The flyers come down, but nobody bothers to remove the staples. I think what I like most about this picture is the random pattern the staples produce.

I also like this one as an example of contrasting textures. Not related to assignment, but I'm proud of myself for remembering to control my depth-of-field to blur out the unappealing background. There were other shots earlier in the walk where I'd forgotten to take that into account.

Project thoughts:

As usual, there was no clear direction, just a discussion of texture with the assignment implied. It almost seems too easy... bricks, wood, sand, just about anything will give an abstract texture, and I shot plenty of those things. If I'd re-read the project page more closely this time around, I could have given myself more focus with "texture in context" and "contrasting textures" and so on, as discussed in the overview. As it is, I didn't go out with that in mind, but I'll have to dig further in the text to come up with this kind of more focused direction on future projects.

I did manage to avoid, on this second try, what I complained about in Project 2: getting bogged down with "blank canvas" and trying too hard to be artistic.

Journal: What the heck happened?

Here it is, the first day of 2007... it's been over ten months since I last made an entry here, having entirely dropped the ball on the workshop project. I can only remember pulling out my camera twice during that period... once for my son's birthday (I only took a couple shots) to take on vacation (I took a few shots at the Oklahoma City Zoo). I didn't buy this expensive (to me) camera rig to let it sit on a shelf.

What happened? I find myself more inclined to shoot with my wife's new point-and-shoot nowdays than my digital SLR. I think I was taking it all too seriously, as I've mentioned in a previous journal. But I think it's also just something I'm dealing with in my life... all of the stuff I want to work on isn't getting done and I seem to be just piddling away the hours of my life getting nothing useful done.

New year, new goals, all that stuff. I'm not one for making New Year's resolutions, but I can see that there are things that need changing. My approach to photography is one of them.

I'm going to try picking up right where I left off here, with Project 3, and I'm going to tattoo Craig Tanner's words on my forehead: "productivity equals creativity". Time to be productive. (Starting with cleaning up my work room, so I have room to do studio work, since it's below freezing outside right now.)