Finding Flow

One of the interesting things about digital photography is hoe technical it is. It’s a misnomer to think that digital photography has made the picture taking process easier. Far from it in fact. When the average family photographer was shooting on film, it was likely that the images would go from camera to lab to family album or picture frame without much of an interlude between. Now however, the image goes from camera to computer, through a couple of software hoops, out onto the net and only then maybe into a picture frame. But this is just the life of the image. The creation of the image has, for the average photographer, also gotten more complicated.

Let’s forget about technical photographers who were concerned with things like the zone system for metering, the scheimflug effect for focusing and other such technicalities. For most people shooting on a 35mm camera system, a modicum of exposure knowledge and judicious bracketing were enough. Digital changed that. For a start, more people now want to be able to take better pictures. The wonder of the LCD screen is the biggest culprit for this in my opinion. The plethora of photographic workshops that now exist is evidence of the desire to be better that is felt by just about everybody. In the 90s you didn’t really consider going on a workshop if all you shot with was a point and shoot camera. Today, I regularly get emails from people shooting on point and shoot cameras enquiring about photography workshops. The irony is that digital promises to be easier than film, but people then get hung up on the technical side of digital.

I for one am guilty of being a technophile. A number of very good photographic friends have pointed out, not unkindly, that my images are always extraordinarily technical in their nature. It’s said as a compliment, but increasingly I wonder if this is perhaps a bad thing. Getting lost in the technical side of the camera can lead to losing sight of the some of the unique properties of the photographic medium. I’m not alone in this guilt. Just about every photographer who has moaned about the low-light abilities of a camera is in the same boat. We moan about a camera that only shoots cleanly to 800 ISO or even 1600 ISO. Come on! Think about it. Ten years ago if we were shooting on film, 400 ISO was pretty much the maximum you could go on 35mm transparency before grain became a central feature of the image. Think about all those images you might have seen in photography books and magazines that were so grainy it looked like they had been printed on a layer of sand. Did we chuck them out as duds. No, we purposely stuffed our FM2s and OM4s (or if you were starting out a K1000) with Kodak Tri-X (3200 ISO) which made created images that looked more like lithographs made of ground pepper (I rather enjoyed pushing Ilford Delta to 800ASA which married a lovely filmic grain with reasonable detail).

I am even more guilty of this when it comes to composition. Like a great many technical photographers I have an affinity with the pre-visualist style of photography that sees photography as another arm of the traditional print arts. Students of mine will know of the hysterical rant that I sometimes enter into when discussing post-visualisation which is more concerned with the unique properties of the photographic medium, in particular the ability to capture an unmediated slice of time from its inexorable march onward. The ‘snapshot’ became synonymous with this school of thought. My problem with it lies not in the style of photography itself, but in the way that young college students get it drilled into them by lecturers. The result is an army of visually talented but technically unskilled photographers who think they are the next Gary Winograd by shooting a roll of film on a Holga. Utter rubbish.

But…there is something to be said of the freedom that comes with letting go of the technical. Freestyle photography if you will. Only, it’s extraordinarily difficult for someone who has learned to be technically refined to ‘let go’. In a way it’s easier for someone who is trying to learn photography. Happy accidents occur regularly. Oddly they start to disappear the better the photographer becomes. The more controlled the photographer, the more disastrous the accidents.

One of the best books I have ever read (I believe it is now available as an app for ipad) is Jim Brandenburg’s ‘Chased By The Light’. His 90 day photographic project, odyssey actually, had him shoot only one frame a day. No others were allowed, not even to ensure the correct exposure. His images are technically flawless (most of them at any rate), but evince something of that captured moment, that is so often lacking from technical images. He is one of the living masters and knows his craft better than most. For him the technical is probably no longer even a concern. Composition and craft are like breathing. So he is now able to concentrate on the moment, of the flow around him, and forget about the technicalities. Or so the images suggest.

The point of all this is really that we should, just for one day perhaps, forget about trying to get everything right in a photograph. We fuss about the details, which is a good thing, but we often lose sight of the beauty around us. Maybe letting go and playing is a good idea. Try that camera phone maybe. Or be like the crazy college student and have a go with the Holga. I personally am eying out some film in the fridge that is long past its expiry date, but would still work absolutely fine in my old FE2. Funny thing is I trusted the meter on the old camera more than I do on my modern DSLR (the joys of an LCD screen to chimp). Maybe finding flow is in not being able to control everything, because in a way that’s exactly what digital has given us. Complete control.

The Lightbulb Effect - February Drakensberg Workshop

Photography like any art requires practice. A lot of it. Then some more just for fun. Musicians continue practicing even after they have reached a level of game that prompts the public to pronounce them masters of their art. Photography is no different. I’m used to seeing the utter frustration in some student’s faces as they try to get a technique right, see a scene in a certain way. Usually the results are less than perfect. It’s how the photographic student deals with that frustration that matters. Do you give up and sell all your equipment while in a huff…or do you plod on, working again and again at the same technique until it finally clicks.

A case in point is my new attempts at interval time videos. The first results have been abysmal. Worse than. I’ve made rookie errors that people would expect a professional photographer not to make. But I’m not going to give up. If anything, it’s made me more determined to succeed. This is a technique I want to not only learn, but perfect (thankfully I don’t have any clients asking for it just yet). 

It’s with some satisfaction that I could see light bulbs going off for some of the students this weekend in the Drakensberg. I’m fortunate that most of the students on the monthly Drakensberg tour are people that I have already met at the Thanda workshop at the beginning of the month (the Berg workshop is a side operation that I am sub-contracted to teach by African Impact – the same group that organize and run the Thanda Photography workshop). This means that I have the luxury of being able to refine techniques with the students with a two week interval between workshops. Questions fly and mistakes are rife in the first workshop. By the end of the Berg trip though, there are less simple questions, or the questions that arise are more complicated and more considered. This is a success for me. It means that the photographers are thinking about what they are doing when they depress the shutter. It’s amazing how few photographers are capable of doing just that…thinking before they release the shutter. The result was a set of image that we looked at last night of which a number were quite simply, breathtaking.

Practice makes perfect. The joy of photography is that you never stop practicing. A photographer who becomes complacent in their art, is also a photographer who stops learning and starts stagnating. A student who doesn’t realize this should consider another hobby or profession. I will never know enough, I always want to learn more.

A little bit of housework as well (need to get my mind back into gear after a brilliant weekend in the mountains. There was perfect weather for once - although I am currently writing this sitting at Witsieshoek in the middle of a cloud). There is one more space available for this coming weekend’s workshop on flower photography. Please contact me asap if you would like to take part. New workshop will also be posted within the next two weeks, so keep an eye on the website workshop page and in the Photo Writing for updates.

Megapixel Madness - Thoughts on the D800

A number of students have asked me my opinion of the long rumored and finally announced (two weeks ago) Nikon D800. So here are some of thoughts, keystroke to screen so to speak.

First off, let me get this off my chest. I think I love the camera, on paper at any rate, as precious few people have actually seen it in the metal. Will I rush off and pre-order the new megapixel champion. No! The D800 is a fabulous upgrade to the D700 and makes a mockery of the resolving power of the D3x. Better yet, it probably has the same low-light abilities of the D7000 (which are pretty darn good - not D3s quality, but good and way above average nonetheless). This is still better than the D3x which has appalling low light capabilities. It even has a faster frame rate than the D3x, better metering and faster autofocus (not to mention a pop-up-flash). All this for substantially less than half the price of Nikon's aging flagship (maybe that moniker should pass on to the D4, but the D3x is currently still being sold and has not been discontinued). So why not rush out and buy it as soon as it hits the shelves. For a start, and to be honest, I simply don't have the money that some internet writers seem to have to be able to afford every new toy. More importantly though, I don't need it. If the average photographer who is yearning for this camera admits it to themselves, they don't need it either.

This is not to say that people shouldn't go and buy the D800 (more sales means more R and D, which means more and better cameras for lower prices down the line). But evaluate the reasoning first. The D700 is still an amazing camera. The D3x is still phenomenal. The equipment we had last year is so good that the camera is no longer the weakest link in the image capture process (neither is it the lens, the software, or the tripod...so what does that leave us with?)

Let's think about all those megapixels. Having more is not necessarily a bad thing, but why do we need them. If it's to have more room to crop, then we either have the wrong lens or are being lazy in the image capture process (it was Robert Capa who said, "if it's not good enough - you are not close enough"....being able to crop doesn't change that).  If you are going to dish out for all those megapixels be prepared to buy more cards and a new computer. When I moved from the D700 to the D3x my entire workflow had to be reevaluated due to the size of the files and sluggishness of my computer. I've only just caught up and I've had the D3x since 2010.

Will I lust after the D800. Most certainly. Will I own one? More than likely, but only after my current equipment gives up the ghost by hurtling down a mountain, drowning in a river, or simply dying from overuse. I know pros who are still shooing on D2x's and Canon EOS 1Ds (the original 11mp ones). their work still looks great. A number of professional landscape photographers are still using the original Canon 5D (and we are now waiting for the mkIII to emerge). New kit is not going to make a better photographer out of anybody. Leran to use your current kit to it's optimum, and if it still hold you back, then and only then buy a newer body. As it is, my suspicion if anybody was being held back by the D3x they would have bought a medium format digital.

But, what the D800 does offer is D3x quality for a lower price. If I didn't own a D3x I would no doubt be checking my bank statements very carefully and working out whether I could afford a D800. Having owned the D3x (which I adore) and with the wonderful gift of hindsight that it has afforded, I wouldn't be as excited about the prospect of more megapixels. But that's because I have owned the D3x. If I hadn't I would still believe that I needed more resolving power (don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the extra resolution of the D3x to the D700, I just know now that I didn't actually 'NEED' it).

If you have US$3000 knocking about and you already own a beautiful set of the very best lenses and can afford to travel on top of the cost of the camera, then definitely, pre-order one and smile. You will be happy with this new camera. You'll love it. I'm sure that I will be recommending it to every well-heeled photographer I come across (after I have actually seen it and played with it that is). But $3000 goes a long way to improving your kit in other ways. Lenses, that tripod that you know you really should be thinking about getting, a better flash system, or how about actually going somewhere to use that lovely gear that you own.

In a nutshell, Nikon have brought out a superb set of cameras in the last few months (the D4 is by accounts astounding and the new 1 system is proving to be just what the financial doctor ordered for Nikon), and there apparently more to come. The D800 is going to be stellar camera. I look forward to owning one someday, but it won't be next month.

Update - 1st July 2013

A year and a half after originally writing this article, I have now become the owner of a D800. To put it in a nutshell, I am extraordinarily impressed with the camera. The resolution is phenomenal, although it has taken me a little longer to get used to the very different colour rendition to that of my D3x. User Interface is also a little different with the movie record button in the most idiotic position possible (exactly the same spot as hte previous generation Mode button).

However, as amazing as the camera is, I still hold with what I wrote originally. Unless, you really need it, the difference in the majority of images one creates is going to be hard to notice. I'm fairly sure that if I were to present an A3 image created by my D3x and one created by the D800, only the most critical of viewers would discern any difference (and no, this wouldn't be from shoddy technique, it would be from knowing the D3x intimately). Larger than A3 and the D800 will probably hold its own...I think. It's something I'll no doubt be testing soon.

Thanda Workshop - Dealing With Frustration

It's not ideal to start a post about a workshop with the title, "Dealing with frustration", but that's just what the students and I found ourselves having to contend with this month. That's not to say that nothing went right...but a lot of the time plans that were made fell apart due to weather, itinerant animals and so forth.



Weather...readers of this site know by now that I have an obsession with the meteorological conundrums that present themselves to photographers. Our landscape shoot at thanda requires a half hour to 40 minute drive to reach a point on "King's Land" that has this amazing 360 degree frield of view of the surrounding reserve and community lands (not to mention an unrivaled, if difficult to photograph, view of the Lebombo Mountains to the east). Sure 40 minutes is nothing. As it is I've had frustrating trips that are a good 2 hours or more to find myself unable to take photographs (okay thap's a poor excuse - you can ALWAYS capture photographs). It's a little different on a workshop though when you are trying to get images with which to teach with (still a poor excuse, but hey, I am human after-all).

So the landscape shoot was a bit of a downer. No problem, we'll wake up extra early and try a different location for sunrise. Except the following day arrives and said location is plug in the middle of a cloud...as is just about every other half-decent landscape point on the reserve. Great, we'll do some really moody portraits of wildlife in the mist...except where the heck as every single animal on the reserve disappeared to (we passed a well hidden Nyala male after about an hour and a half of driving, causing our guide to cynically joke that we do have game on the reserve after-all).

Frustration tends to happen a lot when you are out shooting. On commercial shoots it can be a real killer. I find it difficult to contain my despondency from a client when this happens (this is not a good thing). The problem is I know that the image could have been better. I have to remind myself that the client doesn't know that. I let this slip accidentally in front of a good client the other day. thankfully he commented to me later in on the multi-day shoot that he enjoyed working with me because of my high level of perfectionism (my wife would say pedantic). The point is that if I'd let this slip to another client it could have meant the last time I work with them...regardless of what the images came out like.

So dealing with frustration is a big part of working as a photographer. the light is not always right. The models might not be behaving quite the way they should. The weather is misbehaving as per usual. Maybe the moment has already happened and we are simple too late to capture it. Grin and bear it and learn to work with lemons. My frustration on the commercial shoot, despite my foolishly commenting on it, still bore some decent images for the job. Our mutual frustration on the workshop meant that we got more time to hang out together - which is never a bad thing. So my resolve from the experience is basically to keep my trap shut and keep shooting. There's always something to shoot. Always some way to win the client over...and if life doesn't give you a leopard...then create a damn good portrait of an impala.