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I have a show coming up in March at Old Soul in Midtown Sacramento. Details as follows:
Local Landscapes
Old Soul at The Alley
1716 L Street, Sacramento, CA
March 6-April 8, 2014
Reception: Saturday, March 8, 6-8 p.m.
We'll be at Old Soul on Second Saturday, March 8, from 6-8 p.m. We'd love to see you there!
American River at Effie Yeaw
"To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them."
– Elliott Erwitt
“If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it."
– Lyndon B. Johnson
According to a study conducted at San Jose State University, the release of heavy metals into the environment by retail photo processing labs declined by 73% between 1996 and 2006. This is an obvious result of the decline of film and the ascension of digital photography.
My current process is digital up to the final step where I outsource to a hybrid digital/silver pro lab. I've often wondered about the environmental impact of continuing to use a silver-based printing process. Though it's impossible to get precise information from the labs regarding their disposal procedures, it's clear that those chemicals eventually end up somewhere, most likely in our rivers.
With that thought in mind, I've been considering going to an in-house pigment-based printing process; in other words, I'm thinking about purchasing a pro quality inkjet printer. If I do so, my process will be 100% digital from start to finish, and I'll have control over the waste products (at least until they go to the recycler).
The other factor is that black & white inkjet has finally fully come of age with the advent of Jon Cone's Piezography ink sets. Piezography's varying shades of gray ink are formulated specifically to replace the color inks in an inkjet printer. The result is a dedicated black & white printer capable of producing exceptionally subtle tones and gradients. Using these inks, black & white inkjet prints have the potential to surpass even the best traditional darkroom silver prints.
Stay tuned...
We live in an area dominated by California Oak Woodlands. From Wikipedia:
California oak woodland is a plant community found throughout the California chaparral and woodlands ecoregion of California in the United States and northwestern Baja California in Mexico. Oak woodland is widespread at lower elevations in: coastal California; interior valleys of the Coast Ranges, Transverse Ranges and Peninsular Ranges; and in a ring around the California Central Valley grasslands. The dominant trees are oaks, interspersed with other broadleaf and coniferous trees, with an understory of grasses, herbs, geophytes, and California native plants.
These woodlands signify home and figure prominently in my mind and in my artwork.
"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."
– John Muir
Back in the day, the most common way to view a photograph was as a printed image (or occasionally as a projected slide). With the ubiquity of electronic screens today, we almost forget that prints (or the printed page) were always the final destination of any photograph worth keeping. Now, a very high percentage of photographs never make it to print and are only viewed onscreen. Consequently, those who came to photography in recent years may have little interest in the finely crafted photographic print.
I divide landscape photographers into two general camps: print-makers and image-makers. Print-makers are those photographers who have the final print in mind when they venture out, while image-makers are primarily concerned with sharing photos online, giving little thought to how the photo might eventually be printed. I'm over-generalizing here, but a print by a print-maker is likely to have certain qualities such as heightened detail and sharpness, delicate tones, and smooth gradients that are not likely to be present in the print by the image-maker, who is, after all, only mildly interested in the print as an art object.
When I came back to photography after a long hiatus (20 years or so), I came as an image-maker in the digital age. More recently, I've taken a deeper interest in the print as the ultimate destination of my images. While I'm still concerned about how an image looks onscreen, my primary concern now is how the image looks as a fine print under glass.
If an artist submits their work to juried exhibitions, they should plan on having their work rejected a fairly high percentage of the time. And if they make a serious emotional investment into the work, they should also plan to feel the sting of rejection fairly acutely. No one, even well established artists, has their work selected for every show they enter. There are just too many subjective variables at play to expect every juror to single out your work for inclusion. Besides the fact that your work may not be stylistically appropriate for a particular exhibition, jurors inevitably come to the judging table with a truckload of biases. Sometimes those personal preferences work in an artist’s favor, other times they don't. If your work is rejected, the important thing is to shake it off, learn what you can from the experience, and keep plugging away at it.
"At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect - a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus defines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”
– Robert Adams
In the days of film, much of the creative work that went into a print happened in the darkroom. From Wikipedia:
During exposure, values in the image can be adjusted, most often by "dodging" (reducing the amount of light to a specific area of an image by selectively blocking light to it for part or all of the exposure time) and/or "burning" (giving additional exposure to specific area of an image by exposing only it while blocking light to the rest). Filters, usually thin pieces of colored plastic, can be used to increase or decrease an image's contrast (the difference between dark tones and light tones). After exposure, the photographic printing paper (which still appears blank) is ready to be processed.
Today, the bulk of the creative work happens in what is called the “digital darkroom”. Computer programs such as Lightroom, Photoshop, and Silver Efex mimic the tools we used in the darkroom, while also extending our capabilities far beyond what was ever imagined in the past. The challenge today is not so much what we can do (which is nearly limitless), but how we should limit ourselves so as to not over-process our images.
In the digital realm, the act of printing is essentially a push button operation (once the initial technical hurdles are cleared, which are not insignificant). Because the creative work happens in the computer prior to making the print, the final step is primarily a technical challenge. Ansel Adams described the negative as the score, and the printing process as the performance. Today, the digital negative is the score, post processing in the computer is the performance, and the act of printing is only the echo after the final note of the symphony.