Shooting in The Covid Part VIII: The End of Summer and Photography as Art

The photographs I am including in this post were taken from the middle until the end of the summer. I returned repeatedly to the places that are close to home and where I feel safe. My focus is on the Olentangy Trail and the Columbus Metro Parks. It was a beautiful summer in central Ohio. My immersion in the beauty of nature always feels like such a stark contrast to the suffering that is occurring all around us; and all around the world. As I concentrate on the natural world for moments, I can forget about the chaos that remains as a constant beat of despair, anxiety, and fear. I am so grateful for my hikes and for my camera. I am isolated, for the most part, from my family and friends. I don’t feel safe to go to museums or restaurants. I shop for food when necessary and do as much as possible online. I hate Amazon and totally depend on it.

Olentangy Trail

In some of the following posts, I’m going to write about my photography. In this post, I am going to write about my approach and thinking about photography and art.

Boyer Nature Preserve

Inniswood Metro Garden

Orange Park

Backyard Garden

Hocking Hills: Cedar Falls and Old Man's Cave

Pickerington Ponds

Woodbridge Green Park

Highbanks Metro Parks

As I’ve noted in earlier posts, I’ve always been interested in photography. I have taken lots and lots and lots of photographs. I purchased my first camera in 1976 just before I left for the Fort Belknap Reservation. I was going to be teaching social studies at a Jesuit Mission on the reservation and I was going to be doing my dissertation research in cultural anthropology. I purchased a Canon FTb at Cord Camera on High Street across from the OSU campus. I also purchased 50mm, 35mm and 135mm lenses. I probably did about 90% of my shooting with the 50mm lens. I’ve never been in a dark room and I never took a photography course. I was making $50 per month from my teaching and I was given room and board. I was sending my film to be developed at a Kodak center in Palo Alto, California. A significant portion of my monthly salary was going toward developing film. I was shooting with Kodachrome 64 film for my outdoor photography and I used Ektachrome indoors. I never shot with a flash because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Kodak was able to push the speed of the film for me to help with exposure when they developed the slides. I have digitized all 3,500 slides I took during that experience with a Minolta slide scanner. It took me two years to complete this insane task.

When I returned to Ohio, my photography was focused on family. I enjoyed taking photographs of nature while on family vacations, but I had no formal education about photography. I had no idea what I was doing. My first digital cameras were Canon Powershots and I did all my photography on autopilot.

I retired when I was 60 years old and began taking photography classes at Columbus State. In Ohio, when you turn 60, you can take classes for free at a state university so long as there is space in the classroom. Columbus State has an exceptional photography program. My purpose for taking classes was to learn Photoshop so I could try to ‘improve’ my collection of 3,500 slides. I wanted to clean up more than 40 years-worth of dust and scratches and to do something with all of the problems that arise when you take lots of photographs and have no idea at all what you’re doing.

I have taken several classes on Photoshop, as well as classes on Lightroom and Premier Pro. These are very complicated, sophisticated, and powerful programs from Adobe. You have to use these programs regularly to learn them and to develop skill with them.

It didn’t take long (a couple of semesters) before I decided to enroll in my first digital photography class. I had a wonderful instructor. She was a graduate of the Columbus College of Art and Design and an excellent photographer. Almost all the instructors from this program are professional photographers who teach part time to supplement their incomes and because they love to teach. I have learned so much from each of them, and I am grateful for the opportunity.

My ignorance about camera technology, photography, digital imaging and about art was just staggering. As I’ve learned more and more, the worse my lifetime of photographs looked. I work on those 3,500 digitized slides on a regular basis, and sometimes just have to shake my head at the way they are composed. I often have to ask myself what that 25-year-old idiot was thinking when he framed the image. He placed the horizon in some pretty strange locations, portraits cut off body parts in weird places, and trees show up out of nowhere. There are distractions in every direction. The value of these photographs is not seeing them as art; their value comes from documenting the lives of some of the most wonderful people I’ve met in my lifetime.

I’ve taken many classes and plan to continue with my photography education. I also do lots of reading, I subscribe to photography magazines and newsletters. I’ve subscribed to several photography websites and regularly study other people’s work. And I’ve recently joined my first camera club. There are some exceptional shooters in this group. They have a monthly competition with different judges each month and it is a great way to have your photographs critiqued. I consider myself a photography student and plan to spend the rest of my life enjoying the education process. I consider it a blessing that I don’t depend on photography to make a living. I have no doubt that I would stop enjoying what I do if I had the stress of trying to sell my work. Having other photographers critique my work is one of the most important ways I grow and learn. It is so important to be able to listen to and learn from the experience and perspective of others. To have my work judged by the size of my revenues would be demoralizing for me. When I go to art fairs and review the work of professional photographers, I always go out of my way to compliment what I like and I tell them why I like their work.

One of the more interesting experiences for me has been the consideration of photography as art. I grew up in a family of amazingly creative artists. It was very easy for me to settle in on the notion that I had no artistic talent whatsoever. My father did excellent pen and ink drawings and was an exceptional craftsman. When I was young, I had a habit of banging out rhythms on the kitchen table during dinner. I loved the sound of the silverware vibrating against the tabletop. My father made me a set of bongos to offer me a creative outlet and to encourage a less rhythmic dining experience. My father did beautiful woodworking and could make just about anything. My brother was a very talented artist in so many different media. Of all of us in the family, my brother’s creativity and skill outshined everyone. My sister used to do ceramics and wood carving and has now turned to paper cutting as her creative outlet. All I had to offer was to try to be a nice person.

I didn’t know from art. I enjoyed going to art museums but didn’t understand anything more than having some sense of what I liked and what I didn’t like. I never asked myself why. I’d never taken an art appreciation class.

Early in my formal photography training, I took my first class in aesthetics and design. Fact is, you learn aesthetics, design or composition in every photography class. But in this particular course, aesthetics and design are the explicit focus. The instructor is an artist and had been an art teacher in a public-school system for more than thirty years. I took the class twice. I also had this same instructor for a night photography class and took that class twice, as well. I loved the books we used for both classes. I learned a ton about composition, and began to appreciate how and why photography is an art.

Before I took these classes and was influenced by the teachings and approach of this instructor, my photography was always about capturing as closely as possible the image I had framed in the camera. I didn’t give myself much creative license. Capturing the light and textures and colors as closely as possible to what I remembered the scene to be was my strategy. Both Photoshop and Lightroom give you the tools to change just about everything in a photograph. That wasn’t my purpose. What I learned in my first digital photography class was to study an image and ask oneself, is there anything wrong with the image that can be improved with a digital fix? That’s what I was asking myself when I used these editing programs. Did I need to fix an exposure or reduce highlights or bring up shadows or was the white balance off or did I need to remove a street sign in the middle of a nature shot?

I avoided moving too many sliders or using too many menus in editing my photographs. Stay true to the scene you captured.

My art teacher changed my thinking and approach. As I learned the rules for composition and as I read and studied the work of professional photographers and artists, I began to develop a much greater appreciation for creativity in this process. For the first time, I heard the word ‘vision’ when thinking about my photography. Do you have a vision of what you are attempting to capture? One of my instructors once noted that every photographer has their shtick; an eloquent way to convey a similar concept. Once you’ve done a lot of photography and do lots of experimentation, there is a tendency to settle into seeing and capturing similar subjects or capturing them in similar ways. I know this has occurred for me. When I am framing a shot that I’ve relied on many times before, I often think, well, this must be my shtick.

When I was in graduate school in cultural anthropology, I was encouraged to specialize; to glom onto a specific theoretical school. I wasn’t very good at specializing and considered myself a generalist. I selected from different theoretical schools depending on the issue at hand. I approach photography in much the same way. I dabble in just about everything. I love nature and landscape photography. I enjoy doing portraits (particularly of family and friends), abstracts (in nature and in urban settings), night photography, street photography, documentary photography (mostly for the Siegel Rare Neuroimmune Association) and close-up and macro photography. My photography is all over the map. I love what people can achieve with drone photography. I'm considering getting myself a drone. Unsurprisingly, so many of these images are abstracts.

If I were making a living from photography, there would be more pressure for me to select a particular style, to develop a mastery of that style, and to promote my work in it. I am grateful to have the freedom to do what I feel like shooting at the moment. I rarely go into the field with multiple lenses and I also rarely schlep around a tripod. I have pain everywhere from arthritis so carrying lots of equipment just isn’t possible for me. My approach involves going out with my camera (Canon 5D Mark III) and a lens. The lens I bring often dictates the photography I’m going to do. I spent a good part of this past summer hiking around with a 100mm macro lens. If I am going to shoot long exposures or do HDR work, I’m going to bring the tripod. A durable and light tripod is on my wish list.

One of my ah ha moments regarding art came in my night photography class when skies started appearing as orange or purple in long exposures. I was hit over the head with the possibility that a night sky didn’t have to be black. My work started to evolve. Changing light to create a mood. I started to do more dodging and burning. Increasing sharpness or texture. Softening a color or the saturation to get a more pleasing image. I look for it when I shoot, but it can often be improved or enhanced in the editing process. My portraiture class helped me better understand and taught me how to light a subject. I can’t express just how important that learning was for me. I found the technology underlying the class to be very challenging. There was too much math for my very small brain. But in many ways, intuitively, I started to find light in nature the same ways we were learning how to light a face in a portrait. I actually started to love shooting photographs of my grandchildren in museums because I could arrange to light them in the same ways we were learning to do in the studio by my positioning them under and next to lighting that museums use to light artwork and exhibits. I was learning all new ways to think about and to arrange light in my photography, including in nature. I look for that light when I position trees between the sun and the subject. I often use the sun to backlight subjects. There are different ways to find and to move light to enhance the scene and to achieve your vision.

I feel the greatest sense of creativity when working my abstracts, because, by their very nature, I can move reality to my aesthetic preference. As the subject is often removed from it’s meaning, I am able to create a photograph almost entirely from my mind’s eye. For instance, I love impressionist paintings and can work the reflections in water to seek that direction. No one is going to be offended by the surreal nature of an abstract.

I also use cropping as a creative tool much more often than I would in the past. Cropping can be a challenging proposition because the aspect ratio of my cameras doesn’t match those of standard printing sizes. When I started learning photography, I was educated to ‘fill the frame.’ If there is negative space in an image, it should be purposeful. You are also encouraged to find unique perspectives when shooting; don’t just shoot everything from eye level. That’s all fine and well if you can get down on the ground and manage to get back up and if you have any cartilage left in your knees. I can often see a more creative approach to an image but am discouraged from capturing it because I avoid poison ivy, I don’t want Lyme disease, and I can’t climb rocks as when I was young. Nature doesn’t arrange itself for photographers, and it doesn’t make life easy for old photographers. As it is, I spend time cleaning off cobwebs and removing sticks and dead branches from scenes before I shoot. It’s easier and quicker than Photoshop.

Cropping is also easier to do because if you are showing most of your images on the internet as opposed to printing them, you can do some creative cropping and not worry about standard print sizes. If you use a professional printer, you can print whatever dimensions you desire. I do reluctantly crop images to get standard print sizes when using a mass production company.

Creative and artful photography is an evolving process for me. My work is constantly changing. I find new ways to see the same scenes. I find different ways to use depth of field. I discover that shooting flowers and leaves with water as a background provides a very different appearance and feel than shooting the same subjects against the sky. These subjects are also very different when the background is blue sky or clouds; or finding out of focus backgrounds that are colorful and filled with exquisite bokeh. Every experiment sends me in different creative directions. And this experimentation is magnified by the power that exists in these editing programs. It is absolutely mind blowing how efficient and effective Photoshop can be for removing unwanted objects from an image or adding a texture and mood to an image.

There is a thing called fine art photography. It is about conveying a message, a meaning, an emotion – just like art. Photography is art. The challenge for me is going to be thinking of myself as an artist.

And as with all of life, it is easy to overdo everything. You can become addicted to enhancing texture to the point where it looks overdone. Or you can soften a scene until it looks fake or unnatural. I love creativity. But when I work my images, I always try to have the result look like it wasn’t worked at all. If I shoot a purple flower, I might reduce the saturation or the luminosity; I’m not going to make the flower yellow. If I want a yellow flower, I’ll start by shooting a yellow flower. Even when I shoot HDRs, which I don’t do often, I work hard at making them unidentifiable as an HDR photograph, i.e., I try to increase the dynamic range while keeping the scene natural. I’ll explain what HDR is and why I use it one of these days. I took an entire course on HDR photography. Many photographers don’t like it. To me, it is a very useful tool for capturing an image that has a very bright sky and a dark foreground without having to sacrifice either part of the image. When reviewing my 3,500 slides from big sky country, I am often so disappointed at my blown out white skies because I exposed the image for the ground. HDR allows you to capture both as you see it with your eyes. It is also possible to intensify textures by using HDR. I’ve used that approach in the past, as well. I appreciate what I am able to do with HDR photography.

I'm putting the time and energy into developing my craft. I am in lockdown and afraid to wander too far from the house, and I’m retired. I go out to shoot three or four times a week, and I work on photographs almost every day. My goals are to enjoy what I'm doing, to continue to learn and to try to improve my skills. The rewards for me come from self-satisfaction and from my family and friends appreciating my work.