Crying Out For Silver

Last night, Mark Miller hosted a critique session at his school. (I have mentioned Mark earlier in this blog). Each person put up a few paintings (I brought inkjet prints of photos) and Mark, who has an extremely keen sense of composition, critiqued the formal aspects of each. I had never had a critique session for any photo or other work I have done.

The critique was great learning. Mark has an amazing ability to isolate what is not working in each piece. Even good paintings often have problem spots, and one of the hardest things is identifying them (fixing the problem is often relatively easy).

The thing that really struck me in the feedback to my photos was what Mark said about pictures like this one:

Snowfall, Kyoto

February 2005

Digital

He said that the pictures are "crying out for silver" - meaning they would look really good printed with the traditional analog process.

I took the picture in 2005, and did not start learning silver gelatin printing until about a year ago, in 2012. When I did, one reason was that I could not get my digital pictures to print satisfactorily with inkjet printers. It amazes me that, it took Mark 10 minutes to understand what had taken me seven years. Seven years are a long time (yes: life is short, and the craft difficult).

There are cases in which we have an idea in mind of what a painting is supposed to look like, and to try and paint it, we ignore the much better painting that is trying to happen on the canvas. This has happened to me many times as a beginner. Going slow and looking at things for what they are is a useful life lesson I have learned from painting (and Mark was the one who pointed this out to me).

In this case, however, I think I was just ignorant. I have had limited exposure to photography, and I am ignorant of technique. I just had no idea certain things were out there and I could use them.

HCB

Another thought on cropping, back to the idea that inside of each picture there is a smaller, better picture trying to get out.

Not everybody agrees. Some of those who disagree are very good photographers indeed.

Apparently, some believe you ought to compose pictures in the camera, and they go as far as printing photographs with the edge of the negative showing, so that they can prove that there was no editing. They call this margin, I believe, "verification margin" (of course, nowadays it can easily be faked on a computer), and are very proud of it. People of this persuasion track their lineage back to Henry Cartier-Bresson (I am trying to find out if he really expressed the idea attributed to him - I will write more about this when some books arrive from the library).

This view of begs a question: if you have taken a picture, and it is not great, should you throw it away? What if you could save it through a bit of cropping? What if you could save it by dodging and burning?

Here is a memorable picture by Stieglitz:

Alfred Stieglitz

Winter on Fifth Avenue

1892

and its much less memorable full negative:

More cropping

Maybe this is obvious, but the cropping frame just does what visual artists have done for a long time.

In Old Master drawings,it is not unusual to see rectangles drawn to isolate a part of a bigger composition.

The obvious thought is that photography and painting must have a lot in common in terms of the mental processes involved.

In fact, there are a few examples of people who went from one form of art to the other. Henri Cartier-Bresson started as a painter.

Mark Takamichi Miller, who taught me painting, told me he started as a photographer. He told me once that his process was to shoot random pictures, without even looking through the viewfinder. At the end of the day, he would go through the prints, and there would always be at least one perfectly composed frame.

Later, Mark did a series of paintings based on random photographs that he asked other people for in drugstores.

Mark, by the way, is a fascinating character. His way of teaching painting is all about mental process: pay attention to what happens on the canvas, and do not get carried away by what you are doing is a precept that I remember. The underlying idea, I think, is that what we imagine is not always the best idea, and the messiness of what happens will offer nuggets that we should be ready to grab. Which, I guess, is a great philosophy of life, too.

In the process of writing this post, I found out that Mark, whom I had not seen for years, now runs his own art school. I am looking forward to catching up with him again.

Break

Today I took a break from everything, and I did like this guy:

and this guy:

I rented a chainsaw, and did some cleanup in the backyard. It was cold - there was frost on the ground all day, but I was in my shirt and sweating pretty soon.

When the sun got low, I went back in, and made a stir fry with some sliced cabbage and garlic. Winter vegetables on a winter day - it was delicious

Jim's Gift

When I discussed cropping and composition with Jim, I shared my frustration about the lack of a method to create successful compositions. I guess what I was trying to express was that we had just seen evidence that that inside of each frame, there is a better, smaller picture that is trying to come out (see the previous post in this series). I will need to go back to this later.

He seemed to think for a moment, then, "from the recesses of his mind" he asked if I had a cropping frame. Then he went upstairs and came down with an actual cropping frame in hand:

There are two sheets of cardboard that slide past each other. Each sheet has a clever trapezoidal opening, so that when you pull the slide in one direction, you get rectangles in 8x10 aspect ratio, and in the other, in 5x7 aspect ratio. The opening can be made of any size, up to the maximum allowed by the size of the frame. It is really a clever tool.

Jim not only is a genius and a sexy man, he is also very generous and he gave me the tool!

Yesterday and today I sat down with a few contact sheets and tried it out. It definitely helps visualizing the effects of a crop.  I think I will need to figure out a routine to make the most of it. Maybe a good approach is to set the frame to about 1/4 of the print on which you are using it, then move it over the picture to survey the possibilities. Look what is in each of the four corners, and what is in the center. I will have to try this a few times to see if it works.

A side note: there are many articles about cropping on the internet. All of them describe how to crop using software tools (Photoshop, obviously, is a favorite). Very litte refers to the discipline of doing good crops. One would imagine that easy-to-use software would have freed us from having to worry about the tools, so that we could focus on the creative aspects... but we seem to focus on writing about the tools instead!