George Barr

George Barr

70-200 F4 L IS, Helicon Focus for depth of field.

George Barr

One of my patients invited me to visit Pioneer Acres, N.E. of Calgary. It's a museum and club and farm and has probably 100 tractors between the club and it's members, plus old trucks and threshers and combines and some thngs which even Tom couldn't identify.

Most cities have something like this, if not displaying farm equipment then mining or steel making or water mill or whatever. Often if they are well out of the city, they have enough land to store the 'somedays', the old stuff that hasn't been rescued yet or is simply being stored as a parts source. This can be a great source of photographic subject matter.

George Barr

Mike Johnston at TheOnlinePhotographer.Com (look for Color Junkies) has written today a deliberate challenge to colour photography suggesting that black and white is almost always better. of course I'm sure he doesn't really mean it - he's simply taking an extreme point of view to get the conversation going.

I was tempted to write back with an example of one of my images in which even a very small amount of colour was essential to the image. To do so, I had to do a black and white convert of the colour image, and as I had remembered; the black and white version was awful. I have, however; previously noted that black and white conversion often need more contrast and so I started to work on the image, and guess what, I quite like the adjusted black and white version.

Above you see first the colour versi-on I have been showing for the last couple of years, the straight black and white conversion and the edited black and white version (involving several layers and painted masks as well as some dodging of highlights and even a little dodging of mid tones at the end.

In a print, the colour image shows more detail and the subtlties work better, but I have to say I quite like the depth to the black and white image. So much for my point.

George Barr

Scenario: you create a wonderful fine art image, edit it with skill and artistry and make a gorgeous print. You don't normally make really big prints, but this image suits it and deserves it so the final image is 20X20 inches.

Now what?

You beetle off to the local framing store, check out the framing and matting options and with care select the best possible combination for your work of art. You even splurge on that new really low reflection glass and without waiting for the price, head out.

A couple of weeks later you get a call, your frame is ready. It looks every bit as good as you had hoped, but My God!, the bill for the framing is $750. How are you going to explain that to the spouse?

You take the image home and having spent that kind of money, you'd better find someplace good to hang it - but guess what - there's no room at the inn!

You end up taking down some other piece of artwork so you can justify this (admittedly very nice) expensive picture.

Well, you won't be doing that again very soon.

Sound familiar?

Fast forward to a year or two from now. Electronic picture frames now come in big sizes, for relatively reasonable amounts, say in the order of $1200.

You can now put a single 24 X 24 inch frame (hey, I can dream about square format can't I?) on the wall and of course images can change at a whim. It's even practical for you to have a different selection than your spouse, or a different selection for when the grand kids come over.

More to the point, do you not think that the fine art consumer market isn't going to do the same thing? It just seems obvious that this is the way to go. No more delicate, expensive, HEAVY framed images sitting at the back of a closet for lack of hanging room.

We're going to have to figure out how to market, price and deliver high resolution files to the fine art image buyer. Boy, sure will make shipping images a lot easier, but now that people can have hundreds of images on their walls, a whole new pricing system will need to be invented.

How will we make sure that our images aren't duplicated? We are going to find ourselves in the same spot as the music and movie industries with pirating issues.

I hope someone is working on the security issues because the technical capabilities are basically here now, and where it was only Bill Gates who could afford to put his art work on large flat screen TV's in the past, I can't see any way that this won't be the way of the future - it's just too darn sensible.

George Barr

Some images are more dramatic than others - they have more 'wow' factor. They grab you through subject matter or dramatic lighting or through contrast. Wow landscape images make great calendars, wow people images tend to be dramatic and the subjects either gorgeous or incredibly wrinkled.

A lot of fine art photographers who take their work very seriously don't often make images like the above. Instead their work is often quiet, thoughtful, of rather ordinary subjects. Often the images are about showing parts of normal life that we wouldn't normally pay any attention to in our daily lives.

This raises the question - Which is the better photograph? Are the fine art photographers who produce these quiet images, often made with extremely high craftsmanship; possibly deluding themselves into thinking that effort is in fact talent?

Which images are going to be valued in the future, say 20 - 50 years from now, if any?

Could it actually be that the quiet image is simply that way because the photographer wasn't patient enough or determined enough to show up time after time to capture the one day with the incredible lighting or dramatic sky or to take the trouble to choose the really terrific looking subject for a portrait, or the model with the perfect body for a nude?

I sure as hell hope not!

Is there any evidence to help resolve this issue?

Not much doubt that it's the dramatic images that make it to the top on photo web sites and often feature on book and magazine covers and calendars. On the other hand those are all situations in which they need to grab your attention in a glance.

If instead of looking at contests, we review the work of the masters of photography, we seem to be learning a different lesson. Take Joel Meyerowitz for example. He is famous for his colour 8X10 work - Cape Light, The Arch, his street photography and even his work with the 9-11 site. Although he uses light and atmosphere with great care, he doesn't rely on dramatic sunsets and brilliant colours. He photographs fairly ordinary subjects, porches, sea shore, garages and such, ordinary people (all be it with red hair) and so on.

On the other hand, the Muench family are both famous and highly sucessful for their grand landcape, dramatic lighting, incredible colour. They have sold thousands of coffee table books full of finely crafted but definitely 'wow' images.

Rather than bore you with an extended list of argument and counter-argument as I think of photographers who fit in one camp or the other, I suspect you can probably supply your own list of photographers who fit in one camp or the other.

Ansel Adams 'name' was largely made on his 'wow' images though interestingly when he is criticized, it's often by people who don't like at some of his more intimate landscape and even his industrial work or his portraits or even his work with graffiti before it became popular as a subject. Those of us who continue to admire Ansel as a photographer (as opposed to printer or teacher), often do so based on the strength of these of his images.

So, have I just argued myself out of making a point? Probably? Is there anything to be learned then from this discussion? Well, I think so.

I think the conclusion is that there is room in fine art photography for 'wow' images and 'wow' photographers and just as much there is room for the 'quiet' photographers and 'quiet' images.

Sousa marches are all well and good but sometimes you want Debussy.

George Barr

I spent the afternoon photographing a local park. Originally it had been a working ranch only minutes from our house and my wife used to board her horse there. Eventually the ranch was broken up for development and how hosts hundreds of houses in a new sub-division. Forutnately the forrested area was saved. I was standing on a small log bridge and the view was pretty enough but it was all light and shadow and I really didn't think it would photograph well - if at all. I shot it anyway, not even bothering to multiple expose because I didn't think it worth the effort.

After working on all the "good" images which turned out to be pretty disappointing, I decided to at least have a look at this image. I first noted that despite the sun and shade, the camera had recorded the contrast very well and it actually looked more even in the image than it did standing there - how often does that happen?

Next I decided to bring it into black and white (using the black and white adjustment layer in Photoshop CS3 - and suddenly the dappled sunlight looked really nice, especially with a bit of filtering (ie. using the individual colour sliders in the black and white conversion adjustment layer.

A little darkening of the water, slight cropping on one side and eliminating a fair amount of foreground water so the banks came to the corners and you see here the results. Frankly, a hell of a lot nicer than I predicted at the scene. Below is the original colour image, pleasant but hardly interesting.

George Barr

The image above is one I showed a few days ago. I made a print, put it up in the office and lived with it for a few days. I wasn't happy - oh, it's nice enough, but what I imagined isn't what the print shows. Too much clutter and distraction. I see the image as being about the three light coloured bumpers, looking a bit like the reverse of some Japanese character painted on paper. I tried darkening the rest of the print - didn't like it. I wondered about whether there was some kind of curve that would keep the darkest parts of the print showing some detail but the midtones pushed way way down and leaving the highlights where they were.

Today I tried this and though I didn't record the curve, trust me, it's a bizarre looking one


and this is a reproduction of roughly how it looked. Normally this would produce a very unnatural looking result with incredibly muddy tones, but guess what, it did exactly what I wanted.

I wondered though, whether I should help the print glow just a bit. Normally I'm not a great fan of diffused highlights. This used to be a feature of soft focus lenses, now it's simply a Photoshop trick, and frankly, overdone, but perhaps if it didn't hit you like a sledge hammer, it might be ok, and certainly it fit with my plans for this particular image.

I duplicated the image in another layer, then used gaussian blur of around 20 pixels, changed the blending mode to lighten (so we get the flare, not the spread of dark pixels). I then used the adjustment layer opacity slider to tone down the effect till I thought it reasonable. In fact it may not show enough on screen, though it will help if you take the final image and click on it to have the larger version show in it's own window.




Oh, and there's several dozen minor changes made - I cloned out the numbers pasted on a bumper in the bottom middle of the image, removed a number of scratches and spots that looked more like print defects than part of the image, and in several steps lightened the third light bumper on the right to make it stand out equally to the vertical one and the one on the left.

I'm quite pleased with the print - certainly a lot more than with the original. The glow is subtle - you can't actually see it in the details, it just exists. Exactly what I wanted.

George Barr

Luminous Landscape a few years ago featured an article written by Doug Brown, largely about his stitching techniques in action photography. As this is still an unusual technique, it remains interesting, but what I liked recently on rereading the article is the description of a working pro photographer and what he goes through to get the shot. From that point of view, it's quite revealing and I thought you might enjoy (re) reading it.

George Barr