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Black and White Inspiration

kick it back even further - O'Sullivan, Gardner, Watkins, Brady, Henry Peach Robinson, Frederick Evans, F. Holland Day, Clarence White, Gertrude Kasebier, Julia-Margaret Cameron...
but don't look at them as a standard of comparison- think of them more as inspiration for problem-solving techniques.
 
Quality work of any type seems to help me. Sometimes in a genre I like, sometimes in one I don't. One of the reasons I keep a decent library of photography books.

Relaxation is good - hard to come up with conceptual ideas and mood when you have a deadline to produce X widgets next week...

Grab a flower, a statuette, or even a teddy bear and make pictures. By the time you have fiddled with backgrounds, lighting, and the fact that your teddy must be drunk because he won't stay sitting up, you will be thinking in photographic terms (like how do I get this shot and the table cleared before dinner?).

Seriously, routine life has a way of getting in the way of any art endeavor.
 
+1 on that! [oh and I've ben finding Saul Leiter really inspiring recently].
 
Yeah, I only rarely have time to shoot that does't involve me hauling along my 9-month-old. All locations must be stroller-ready, haha,

Someone asked my style, I have added an album with my favorite pics. Not nearly so dramatic as Jon's work, but I like them.
 
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One piece of advice which I've found handy is keep taking pictures, keep taking pictures and keep taking pictures...
 

My wife (an accomplished artist) will usually breeze over all the images I made with painstaking attention to technique, and stop at the few unsharp, shoddily exposed ones that are "missed opportunities" from an image quality perspective, but somehow convey more of a mood or concept. And the more I look at what people like you do, the more I realise that what you say here is so very true. The heart does not see in lpm or 7 zones. It sees in line and form, that become metaphors for intangible feelings and that part of memory that refuses to be concretised.
 
look at

DArbus
GWinogrand
...

shots and see if you can copy or combine in any way.

Or find a difficult neg and try and make a good print.
 
SNIP SNIP
Xmas said:
Or find a difficult neg and try and make a good print.
Click to expand...

find anything put it in your enlarger or on your paper and make a goodprint.
THAT is how i taughtmyself how to print better.
trash, hand made, terribly exposed +developed ( on purpose and not )
anything and everthing ... interpret it and print it ...
 
jnanian said:
not sure if you have considered making cyanotypes ... or lumen / retina prints but no darkroom needed, and cheap+fun
Click to expand...
I haven't even heard of those so I should go look. Technically speaking I could at least develop the film at home, I suppose, and scan the negs.
 
no darkroom needed for this stuff, just subdued light
you can go to bostick + sullivan or the photographer's formulary
they sell "classic cyanotype kits" you mix each container with water
then put equal parts on a piece of paper, let it dry ...
you can either contact print negatives on them( or make photograms or whatever )
( the paper turns confederate grey, you can peek at the negative to see if it is done )
then rinse it in water. what is rinsed off the paper are iron compounds. according to the people
that sell prepackaged sun print paper in craft stores it is harmless
anyhow you will see an image ( a positive )
you can soak in a very weak sodium carbonate ( like baking soda with less moisture in the powder ) solution
to remove the blue, and then tone in tea they look beautiful. i tend to add color to mine with watercolors, its loads of fun.
you can also invert an image in PS so its a negative, and have it printed by laser printer, or non smearing ( water safe ) ink, or
at a xerox shop .. wax the paper with warm parafin so it is translucent and print that the same way as a cyanotype ...

retina prints are images made with photo paper long exposed in a camera .. it takes 20 mins to several hours depending on the light &c
and an image is burned onto the paper and you can scan it .. the original photographs made this way
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/firstphotograph/niepce/
they are ephemeral, can't really be fixed for the most part ..
i've made huge cameras out of foam core, and exposed 16x20, 5x21, 11x14 images this way
its a lot of fun and doesn't really take much effort. meniscus lenses can be bought at he surplus shed for a few dollars
and it is something to distract you while you put the pieces of your other photographic life together ...
sometimes this sort of stuff takes on a life of its own
 
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