Serendipity Again

Serendipity, defined as "an apparent aptitude for making fortunate discoveries accidentally," has been a major theme in my photography. I've written about it before, here and here. I keep bringing up the subject because I believe that with some attention and awareness you can learn to use it to improve your photography also. Here are three more ways to cultivate the muse.

           

Go for Bold Graphics

Greenville Museum of Art

Olympus OM, 28mm Zuiko, Kodachrome 64

Even on days when you can't find much to photograph, you can often find subjects that lend themselves to a bold, graphic treatment. As a bonus, the harsh light and deep shadows which make mid-day so inappropriate for many subjects often enhance graphic shots. An assignment to produce a book about the city of Greenville, SC, did not permit the luxury of photographing only in morning and evening light. This view of the Greenville Museum of Art was made in early afternoon with strong light flooding the scene while storm clouds drifted in overhead became the cover of the book.

Make Color the Message

          

Paintpots, Kids Outdoor Art Class

Pentax 6x7, 105mm Takumar lens, Fujichrome 100

 Another way to find photographs when none seem to be available is to look for color: bold color, subtle color, contrasting colors, complementing colors. This is easier than it sounds, and once you've opened your eyes to the colors all around you, you'll be amazed at what you've been missing. The great Jay Maisel is a master at this and any photographer can learn a great deal by studying his work. 

I happened by just after small children at an outdoor art class had left their paint pots and gone on to another activity at the Chattanooga, Tennessee RiverPark.

Look for Story-telling Details

Civil War Bugle

Chickamauga National Battlefield

Nikkormat, Vivitar 100mm lens, Kodachrome 64

          

If you're like me, you may spend too much time looking for the black-buster, tell-it-all-in-one picture and overlook the smaller, detail shots. But very often it's the details which give a real sense of what a place or event is all about. Photographing a Civil War re-enactment, I covered the marches, the camp life, the interaction between the characters. But it is this close-up of a bugle hanging on a tent pole which most completely captures the feel of the event.

I Hereby Highly Resolve. . .

Leslie's Wedding Portrait

Canon 10D, EF 28-70 f2.8L lens

Sorry, I can only show the digital file. The 6x7

negative was probably discarded with other

old wedding negatives some years ago.

. . . that we had enough resolution a long time ago.

Photographers on the (now sadly defunct) Digital Wedding Forum were boasting of making and selling excellent 30x40 prints from four-megapixel cameras such as the Nikon D2H and the original Canon 1D in the early years of this century. When the Canon 1DMarkII came out with eight megapixels, I remember reading a post on the forum by celebrity wedding photographer Denis Reggie in which he crowed that it would no longer be necessary to turn the camera for verticals because with all that resolution verticals could simply be cropped out of horizontal frames!

For myself, I learned early on that huge amounts of resolution are unnecessary for most of our purposes. I made the switch to digital in 2003 with the six-megapixel Canon 10D and, like many, worked it into my wedding workflow over several months, finally doing my first all-digital wedding on June 28, 2003.

My first assignment after acquiring the 10D was a bridal portrait, for which I packed my usual equipment – a Pentax 6x7 loaded with Fuji NPH color negative film. Just for fun, I decided to take along the new 10D and do a few shots with it as well. I wound up shooting every pose with both cameras, and because I didn’t yet know about the advantages of RAW, I shot jpegs in the 10D.

(For those of you who came into photography after the big changeover to digital, I should mention that the 6x7cm -- [2¼ x 2¾ inches] -- was revered, along with its sister format 6x9cm, as giving the highest quality available in a readily hand-holdable camera. The 6x7 format made a negative or transparency seven or eight times as large as the APS-C [half-frame] sensor in my 10D.)

After looking at the files, I said to myself “Hummmh!” I selected a file and a 6x7 negative from similar poses and took them to my local, very good, professional lab and had a 16x20 print made from each. When the lab owner gave me the prints, he said “Hummmh!” Another commercial photographer friend, a Mamiya RZ67 (also 6x7cm format) shooter, walked in just then and when he saw the prints and was told what they were, he also said “Hummmh!”

Then he said “I was saving some money for a trip to Europe this summer, but maybe I need to look into this digital thing!”

To shorten the story, I showed the prints to a number of my commercial photographer friends and several art directors I worked with and asked them to tell me which was which. Only one could tell them apart, and that was because, as I later learned, the digital file had more depth of field.

The fact is that a group of experienced professional photographers and art directors couldn’t tell the difference between a 16x20 printed from a jpeg from a six-megapixel digital camera and one printed from a 6x7 film negative!

I've shown these photos before, but I'll show them again: This is a pair of pileated woodpeckers working on a tree in my backyard, taken with a Fuji X-T20 (with a 24 megapixel sensor about the same size as my old 10D) and the Fuji XC 50-230 lens -- by no means a premium lens. The camera was hand-held at 1/60th second with the lens wide open.

And now we have cameras offering 30--50--60 megapixels and beyond. How much image quality do we need, anyway? We have way more than enough to do just about anything we would ever want to do.

Photographers are like lemmings, eagerly lining up to pay out their money to take a dive over the more-resolution cliff. And then they come back and do it again next year.

Just Looking. . .

Fire on the Mountain!

GA Hwy. 136 at Burnt Mountain Road,

Pickens County, Georgia

Photography is both an art and a tool. You can do all kinds of things with photography, and as a long-time commercial photographer I've been involved in many of those uses. Yet, with all due respect for its other aspects and uses, the photography that most interests me is just looking: the art of observing and exploring the things I see as I go through life and documenting them to share with others or simply to revisit for my own enjoyment.

The very great Elliott Erwitt was an extremely successful commercial photographer, but it's his personal work for which he is best known.  In that regard, we share the same philosophy:

“It's just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop.”

Clinging to Life

GA Hwy. 22 at Covered Bridge Road

Oglethorpe County, Georgia

In this sense, the observant photographer is like a little boy who finds something interesting and wants to tell everyone about it. He runs to his friends shouting "Hey, look what I found!"

Others may have different ideas, of course, but to me, that's the art at the heart of photography.

Hey! Look what I found!

Praying Tree

GA Hwy. 262, Decatur County, Georgia

 

Rise of the Swamp Monster

GA Hwy. 201, Whitfield County, Georgia

Air Mail

Cavender Creek Road

Lumpkin County, Georgia

 All photos are from my book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait.

Changing Systems, Learning Technology

Two Chairs, Hahira, Georgia

Canon EOS 20D. EF 50mm f1.8 lens

Recently my friend and fellow-blogger Dennis Mook, The WanderingLensman, wrote a post lauding the benefits of the extensive menus built into today's digital cameras. I have a different take on the subject.

I bought my first digital camera right around my 66th birthday and began teaching myself Photoshop. It seems that all I've done since then is learn software and camera menus and I'm thoroughly sick of it! All I want to do is make photographs.

Years ago, I had a small book that purported to teach budding photographers how to use a camera. The author used the acronym SAFE: Shutter--Aperture--Focus--Expose. Personally, I don't think all our complicated menus have improved on that.

Before the Great Digital Switch, I used Canon EOS film cameras for about ten years, and before that used the Olympus OM system for 12 or 13 years. Looking back, I'm sorry I didn't stay with Olympus longer. Aging eyes made it more difficult to focus quickly and accurately on the grid screens that I used, but I could have changed to different screens and kept on using the OMs a while longer.

However, Canon EOS models such as the A2 with its menus and automatic features did help ease the transition into digital. I began with the 10D, then the 20D, which was actually a pretty good camera, the 30D, and then, in 2006, the 5D. The menus gradually grew more complex, but not yet burdensome. (Actually, I should have kept the Canon 5D, which I used happily for eight years.)

All this time, of course, I was also learning progressively more difficult software: various permutations of Photoshop, Capture One, and other programs, all of which were apparently essential adjuncts of digital photography.

To make things even more interesting, in 2010, influenced by the writings of master photographer and blogger Kirk Tuck and others, I bought an Olympus E-PL1. Now there was a menu! But I fought my way through it and wound up using a pair of E-M5s as a secondary system for several years. I learned how to dig out what I needed from the arcane menus to set the camera up to do what I wanted quickly and easily.

However, I switched to the Fuji X system in 2017 and still find myself fumbling through their supposedly easier menus. Go figure.

Sometimes, most of the time these days, I would rather just be SAFE. Shutter--Aperture--Focus--Expose.