dispatches

Start the day

When I look over my archive of the year, the second largest category of where I've taken my photos, after my garden, is Montlake Fill, a little birding sanctuary down the hill from my house. Lately it has become a frequent start to my day. I'll grab a breakfast sandwich and an organic coffee from the food co-op and bird and photograph the fill for an hour, after which I'm ready to park myself at the computer for the rest of the day.

I always take a camera, and I often get my Daily Photo done early in the day this way. Sometimes it's my G9, or a body with a macro lens, or a 300mm, or a wide angle. I'm not there to prepare for any eventuality—I'm there to respond with whatever camera and lens that I brought. Today I had my 5D and the 24-105 which, after last week's assignment, felt like a featherlight load. The day was gray and drizzly—the winter light is back. The dry season is done, and so are the spiders and their dew flecked webs. It's snowberry season, and the winter birds are starting to file in.

Today I actually kept a bird list, which started filling in quickly with the usual suspects—Black capped Chickadee, Bewick's Wren, Goldfinch, House Finch, White Crowned Sparrow. Then a familiar v-shaped flock of geese overhead, but the call was wrong, and I identified them as White-fronted Geese, a new bird at the fill for me. They pass through the region on their migration from the arctic, but it's quite rare to see them in the city. They flew over the marsh, then u-turned north out of sight.

The winter contingent of Yellow-rumped Warblers were in, the Savannah Sparrows are out of molt and were everywhere. Then a swoop out of the corner of my eye, a burst of birds, and an adult male Cooper's Hawk lifted up and perched on a snag 30 feet away. No bird in its talons, a miss. Hundreds of finches and blackbirds were in the sky, the chickadees were alarming away at anyone who didn't already know, and then the fill got very quiet.

I saw a second Coopers a little later, an immature, and heard an Eagle. In the channel between the fill and the boathouse I saw a lone Western Grebe, another first at the fill for me, and an unusual bird to see in fresh water. Also Mallards, Gadwall, teal, coots, Pied-billeds, a couple of female Wood Duck. On the meadow I got a Western Meadowlark, unusual for the west side of the mountains, but three wintered here last year, and this may be one of them.

28 species in one hour. Not a bad way to start the day.

People talking about me

Paul Butzi in "Musings" wrote a post using me as a case example (and tripling my visit stats in the process) for how to be interested in things that aren't interesting. In this case, I'm the example counter to the latest hype about convergence of video and photo in the new equipment coming out, in that I write about my process, not the gear. Paul's is a valuable, curmudgeonly and always readable voice for our community.

And Robin riffed off my last posting about turbulence anxiety and how to treat it, in her "Trauma and Attachment Therapy" blog. For a really great read, look at her post, "Why I Love Doing Psychotherapy." There's not much I'd have to change to make it my operating mission statement too.

Where I should have gone to college

Thanks to Derek's comment on my last entry, I decided to fake being a 17 year old college bound youth, and see what the various sites picked as my perfect college match. I used my interests as they were back then (liberal arts, photography, journalism—I started an underground newspaper in high school), my high school academics and interests (lots of advanced classes, president of Student Government) and my SAT scores (pretty high with no prep, but less than my brilliant niece, who got a perfect 800 on the non-math part).

I searched two sites, Collegeboards.com and myUsearch.com. There was no overlap of resulting matches between them.

MyUSearch.com had as my lead Perfect Match the school I actually went to: Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Never mind that the school no longer exists (they need a little database housekeeping) or that I had a horrible time there. Other compelling matches included Franklin & Marshall, Gallaudet College (?!), Lambuth University, Iowa Wesleyan (both United Methodist schools--guess what denomination I was born into?), Simon Rock's College of Bard (this one might have been perfect—I had exhausted all my high school courses by the end of 11th grade, and that's who they admit), Southwestern University (yet another UM school), St. Louis University (Jesuit), and The University of the South. The last is one that I was supposed to have photographed last spring, but a scheduling conflict interfered. Now I really wish I had seen the place. On the "Good Matches" list were two schools I photographed and really liked: Whitman College and Williams College.

Collegeboards' picks were weirder, including a host of religious and military schools (Central Christian College of Kansas anyone?), but also included Macalester in St. Paul, CA Institute of the Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, Fordham, and the US Air Force Academy.

Ah, a bucketful of regrets. Because of  my current photographic niche however, my inner 17 year old gets to have the time of his life that he should have had back then.

Fan mail

I delivered the wedding photographs last Saturday, and boy, did they gush. I asked Katy to put her thoughts in an email for me. Here's what she said:

"I originally asked a friend of mine who is a professional videographer and amateur to shoot photos of my wedding.  She very artfully and quite forcefully told me that I needed to hire a professional!  She was right - having you shoot our wedding really drove that home.
I was referred to several photographers and looked at their websites.  I noticed that the general feel of wedding photos is very "fuzzy" and romantic.  As soon as I saw your website I thought "Wow. He is taking pictures of the wedding, rather than shooting ideal photographs of people in love (not that these are exclusive!)."

"You told the whole story of our wedding day; from the small moments like Rob's family making a train of coolers to the big moments during the ceremony when light was radiating behind the bride and groom while we exchanged our vows.  Your photos captured some of our friends and family in the best, truest sense of who they are.  They were not merely wedding photos, but great portraits of the people we love.  You had a sequence in which you shot, following the slow build-up of excitement, the tension in the moments just prior, the sacredness of the ceremony and the glory and fun following our vows.  There was a beginning and an end, and a thoroughness of capturing the people, the environment and small details that spoke to the quality of the day; the bus that delivered guests, champagne bottles splayed over ice, flowers co-mingled while being arranged in vases, a homespun sign flapping in the wind.

"Viewed as a whole, your photos have the structure of a story, while each one gives insight into the characters involved and illustrate the feel of the event.  They are a pleasure to view, as they remind my husband, friends and family of the many delightful moments that unfolded throughout the day. Your pictures reveal the depth of caring between him and I,  between us and our friends, and between family members.  And they are simply beautiful."

See more wedding photos in this Flickr set.

Like, here's my theory of artmaking

I started to respond to Romanlily's comment on yesterday's entry about the Daily blog, and I discovered I had a subject for today. Which is, how much effort does this daily discipline of finding a photo to post actually entail? You know, not much at all. If I haven't done or been anyplace particularly interesting, I have the garden. It's the default subject. I can pop out there, any time of day (usually I'm ready for a break mid to late afternoon from whatever else I've been doing, usually at a computer), in any weather, and find something. For one week, all I did were the tulips. Lately, the Japanese maple out back has been particularly productive. It's a time when I can dive into the Zone, connect with where I'm standing, and find a photograph.

I like to pretend that I'm searching for something that I haven't seen before. It's totally not true, most of the time. I'm going to be sensitive to a particular arrangement of reality that has sparked the impulse in the past, and will probably continue to do so until I exhaust whatever vein I'm mining. You can look through the archive of Daily Photos and see that I have a regular way of solving the box-around-reality issue that I return to again and again. In a way, and especially for us guys who are making a livelihood from our eye, we have only so many pictures in us that we make again and again. We're whacking away at the same problem in the same way, because we know what works. And because we need to keep at it, for whatever reason. The picture's not done.

A measure of creative growth is how that picture we keep whacking away at changes over time. Part of the benefit of the daily discipline is that, hopefully, I'll have to change that picture sooner rather than later, because I'll get bored with it sooner. I'll want more complexity, or my internal life has changed to the point where I need a new image to make sense of it, or maybe it works the other way around and the need to find that new picture is going to make me respond to my life issues in a different way. There are photographs I used to do a lot that I don't need to make anymore. I'm not the same person I was five or ten years ago. It's pointless to parse out which drives what, because of course creativity and growth aren't limited to the output of an expressive pursuit. My life moves forward with greater awareness and depth because at the core of it is this commitment to a creative engagement with my surroundings.

Finding a new photograph

With situations that I am called upon to photograph frequently, like college campuses, one of the challenges is to keep it new. Particularly so that the work keeps my interest, I want to find photographs that I have not seen before.

The University of Chicago is such that it is hard to take a bad photograph here, particularly during a snowstorm. I know the campus well by now, and I know where the pretty spots lie. This was the fun part of the day, and there's some great material to show for it.

But Crown Fieldhouse, the old athletics building, that was my challenge today. The big gym, where all the action is, has these horrid sodium vapor lights that suck out all the “good photograph here” potential. This was my struggle, and it made for some of those photographs-that-I-haven't-seen-before moments, partially out of desperation.

I try and do most of my work available light, but I do carry a couple of Speedlights and the Canon IR Transmitter. This was my only hope under this light. The other novelty element for me is sports in general, about which generally I know nothing and pay as little attention to as possible.

At one end of the hall they were practicing what I think was hammer throw, which has never, ever before crossed my radar. Superficially, it looks like the ultimate, primal sport. Throw a heavy thing as far as you can. Here was my chance to watch and understand what this strange activity was, and to try and make an interesting photograph out of it.

My lens didn't fit between the netting, but I quickly realized that making the net part of the image added a neat layer of complexity to the shot. I would have to light this situation, and it turned out the netting was perfect for jamming the Speedlights into them at eye level. I put one on each side, and started taking pictures. As watched the throw through the camera, and tried to understand the pivitol moment of the action, I understood that there was truly a lot of technique at play in heaving a heavy ball as far away as possible. Apparently you rotate around the center of gravity of yourself and the ball, you get the centrifugal force to help elevate the ball over your head, and then accelerate and let go at the precise right instant.

I took about 30 shots, knowing that I was beseeching the gods of accident to give me the compelling shot. This is very different than accidentally getting a great photo. I tend to let a lot of room in my process for accident, but I'm very aware of what part of the moment I'm letting accident have its way. As it turned out,most of the shots aren't worth a second look. I knew that would be the case going in.

But in the end, I got one photograph I haven't ever seen before.

A thousand days of photographs

Sometime tonight ( or more likely, tomorrow morning, with my schedule) I will post my one thousandth Daily Photo. I am in Chicago, and tonight there'll be election return parties at the University of Chicago (I flew in ahead of a snowstorm just so I can get stuck here and photograph the campus under white), and I'm sure I can get something more interesting than this view out my hotel window.

(I wonder if I could do a Chase Jarvis and have you guess where I'm staying?)

I am seriously rigorous about this little visited blog (about 30 a day), but it organizes my photographic life. Every day I take a photograph, and I pick one to post that day. Except for one day early on, I have not missed a day. I'm going to do another celebration on the day that I make my one thousandth consecutive post.

A key value for me has been, not those days where I'm busy with my camera and I have a lot to pick from, but when I'm bored with what's around me.  I have to force myself to get into the zone and find an image when there is not one readily apparent. I gotta, there's a photo to post. It's changed how I see, particularly when I get into situations where it is my job to find a compelling photograph. Nothing, potentially, is off the table. There are photographs lying about, no matter where you are.

Eyes on

“You're eyes were really on this morning. It must be because you're thinking about the workshop,” said Robin, as I showed her my take from the morning. Tomorrow we teach together, for the first time, The Photograph Within. As in teaching the workshop for the first time, and also teaching together for the first time.

Before the rain began I went down to the Fill. The ponds at the Fill are frozen, a rare state, so I'm utterly captivated by the novelty of the ice with the sticks, and the globs of air pockets and dead leaves under the transluscence. Sometimes I feel my excitement get a little out of hand, I'm being too indiscriminate in my shooting, so I pause. I sit on my haunches by the pond's edge, and just look, and feel where I am. I notice the density of textures, the play of contrasts in what is usually water, and mess of beaver-felled sticks. I hear a few finches overhead, a chickadee working the alder above me, and see, over the bay, a Bald Eagle wheeling around. It's probably worrying the coot flock out there, I think. More calm now, I move back into picture mode with a tad more deliberateness.

I'm more attentive to my process today knowing that I'm going to have to articulate it tomorrow. Among my “Photo Quotes” page in the workshop handouts is one from Minor White: “Exposure occupies my mind while intuition frames the images.” It's one thing to be in the haze, finding compelling images laying all about your feet, but there needs to be a witness mind to that state, the one who keeps track of the technical minutia and making sure your feet don't fall off the rock. I'm sensing where I need to compensate my exposure for the whiteness of the ice, or the blackness of the deep shadows. It's a dull overcast day, with room on either side of my nicely humped histogram, so I can be a little loose with my exposures and let the leash out on the right brain side that's finding the images.

Before long I feel done. Another Minor White quote: “If he (a photographer) were to walk a block in a state of sensitized sympathy to everything to be seen, he would be exhausted before the block was up and out of film long before that.” 

The Flickr set from the morning is here.

Going deep

Planning for our workshop later this month has made me more attentive to the dialog that goes on in my head when I'm out shooting. Or rather, because I'm planning a workshop, I've started a dialog in my head to try and articulate what it is I'm observing in myself when I'm out shooting.

One of the places I visit a couple of times a week is Montlake Fill, about a mile from my house. It's one of the premier birding spots in the city, a former landfill that has an abundance of shoreline and brushy habitats. I always have my binoculars and my camera when I visit and, although looking for birds and looking for photographs are different ways to be in the landscape, I have no trouble flipping from one modality to the other.

Perhaps it is because I stand in these brushy spots for long periods of time looking for birds, the environment has embedded itself into my brain in a deep way. I  engage the density of the landscape, and I find myself looking for ways to organize the complexity through the viewfinder.

These places pretty much look the same, just another messy, brushy place. Why do I stop at one spot, and not another? What draws me in?

It's not like I do any kind of preparatory ritual before I go out into the world. I don't meditate for an hour beforehand to open up my consciousness or cleanse my chakras. I don't have any kind of practice of that sort. Some people around me wish that I did. Ask Robin—I'm annoyingly absent minded most of the time. What does key me in is the camera, and I can, reasonably quickly and without thinking about it, zone into my surroundings intently just by looking through the viewfinder.

There's a signaling mechanism at work, and the best way I can describe it is that it's visceral. I feel it in my body. It's almost like a gravitational pull, and then I can go very deep, very fast. This arrangement of messy, twiggy brushy places, for whatever reason (and I don't particularly want to know the reason, I just trust that there's something there that I need to work on), pulls me in and I do a short dive into another kind of attention. I may see a particularly attractive combination of textures and that starts it, but I try and quickly move past the obvious photo in front of me. I'm seeing the frame, but I'm not composing exactly, I'm responding to the arrangement of shapes, now an abstraction, almost something apart from the real world I'm obviously engaged with. I feel a signal to press the shutter, and I do. It's like feeling warmer or cooler—this way's better, this way's worse, but I have no idea why.  I let myself be guided by this intuitive directionality about where I should be shooting.

Lately I've been shooting fewer frames than I used to in these brief reveries in the brush, and going in and out of the state quicker.  At the same time I've been consciously directing my attention toward a deeper complexity of form, layering the image, sometimes mashing leaves and sticks against the lens, and letting the image get messier and less coherent. I want to see photographs that I haven't seen before. It means I'm missing the mark more times than I hit it.

Which is fine. It is how I force growth. I allow a lot of room to fail.

The act of shooting is not the time to judge how you're doing. I never look at the screen while I'm taking pictures, except a quick glance at the histogram every now and again to make sure it's humped in the right place. I don't need nor want to know what I just did. I want to be available for what hasn't happened yet, and I cannot if my attention is elsewhere. I don't see the photographs until I load them onto the computer.

I want to make clear that I don't work this way only when I'm out in the landscape. It's pretty much how I make all my photographs, albeit with a lot more attention to making something happen that I know will work when I've got a client footing the bill. I depend on an intuitive, visceral approach for nearly all the work I do.

The life of the work

Face it, mounting an exhibit is a lot of work. Most of the past week I've been engaged in the minutia of preparing one: tending the printer, cutting mat board and foam core, making exhibit labels, buffing out my artist's statement. And it was a long day to hang it, a three hour drive to Portland, four hours to figure out a sequence and adhere the things to the wall, and three hours home. Why, exactly?

This exhibit, at Cameraworks in Portland (just a wall, really, in a college building, but it apparently has a storied past as a long-time photography venue), is the first fruit of my Photo Lucida trial last spring, where I showed my contra dance project. Preparing the work has had a useful impact on assessing the body of material. Out of two decades of work, which are the 25 prints that should function as a summation of the project? Printing the work to size (18” wide) allowed me to see things in the photographs I had never considered before—all that shadow detail gained in significance in ways a 5x7 work print would never reveal. I had to make different decisions on how to print an image once I saw it to scale.

At the gallery I then had to make decisions on the flow of the work. The hanging guidelines of “22 to 28 prints” was wildly optimistic, and I had leave out a fourth of the work I brought. That forced a new line of thought to what should be shown, a harsher distillation, as it were.

And there it was, 18 prints, on exhibit. While I was hanging a few people drifted through. This, I suppose, is the whole point, and a treat for me. Alas, I know too few people in Portland to justify mounting an opening, so the next time I'll see the work will be when I come to take it down in a month. I won't have that evening of conversation and observation which is so rewarding. Nonetheless, the act of giving up control of the work, to allow the opportunity for others to admit the images you've made into their own experience, is reason enough. Art without an observer is a soliloquy with no point.  Just to know this comingling of experience is occurring, my life within the photographs, their associations from seeing them, is fulfillment enough. Being in room when it happens is a bonus.

The details: “Joy Unconfined! Contra Dance in America: A Photographic Journey” is at Cameraworks Gallery in Peterson Hall at 2255 NW Northrup, Portland, OR. Work is up from December 29th to January 26th.