The Eye and the Hand - Photography and Technique

[Ed Sukach]

Based on Ed's recounting of the non-exposure of the Polaroid material Ansel certainly appears to be not consistant since that would have been Zone 0 rather then Zone X.

OOPS!!! Well, it just goes to show ya` ... Nobody's perfect.

I use a lot of roll film, and the development of individual frames has not been of primary concern. I DO remember that IV, V, and VI are somewhere in the middle....

Whether Ansel Adams reduced all of his experiences with "dry down" to some sort of photographic equation - I don't know. He didn't appear to be too concerned.
I'm only recounting what was on the tape. He used the microwave as a time saver. I don't..., I'll usually wait until the print is air dried.

 

[Ed Sukach]

I'm going to re-post a photograph of mine .. "Abstraction #26" to the Critique Gallery. I'd be interested in the comments.

Abstracton #26 has been on the Critique Gallery for a couple of days now. It is -- or another scan of it -- has been in my "Personal Gallery" for some time.

This was the result of a number of "errors":
First ... I don't remember the pose at all. I think the model was "flipping" her hair back. I do remember that at the beginning of the session, as I was doing something with the lighting set up... I fired the DynaLites "accidentally" ... somewhere about ten inches in front of my face. Oooo!! Watch the bouncing blue spot (virtual). I think I may " have tripped the shutter while I was at it.
Second... In processing the film, I mis-loaded the film into the JOBO tank, so that part of emulsion was in contact some of the backing in the spiral. Not good - *very* uneven development.
Third ... After I had seen the contact sheet image -- something "worked" and I decided to print on 11"x 14" Ilford MG Portfolio. I happened to get the *one* sheet left in my paper safe ... with the door closed incorrectly ... therefore - light-struck.
After all this, I walked upstairs from my darkroom, and asked my daughter, who was eating lunch, to "give me a number" - she replied "Twenty-six", hence the title "Abstraction #26".
Certainly NOT the product of "error-free", intelligent, "expert" photography .. but it IS the product of MY hands, and I claim it as my work.

I cite all this NOT as an advice to be an ignorant klutz ... although I think we all fit that description, for time to time ... but I would suggest that there are NO genuine "mistakes" in art.
If anyone is familiar with Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he proposes that there are NO genuine errors, that everything we do, in one way or another is subjected to STRONG influences from our "pre-conscious".
I'm fairly sure there was a LOT of that in this instance.

Over the years, I have learned to be "slow" in labelling any image that I make as a "failure"... at times, I cannot easily recognize the elements provided to me from my own "spirit" ... (or "pre-conscious", or "being" ...), after all that IS a prerequisite to being "pre-conscious."
There certainly were a number of points where I would have thrown out this image, at the beginning ..., most notably, immediately after taking the top off the tank, and realizing the misloading.

One thing I try to teach is the idea of "lightness". We have one indication of having truly learned something ... when we no longer have to "think" about it ... and we know we have "mastered" it when we can no longer remember how we learned to do it in the first place.

"Lightness" ... The best example I can think of here is the beginning Fly Caster. They *TRY* so hard ..., and that excess effort is itself detrimental to the learning process. Once a few muscle-memory feedbacks occur ... the wrist relaxes when it *should*, there is an understanding of timing ..and smoothness .... and the way things "flow".
Possibly Flycasting in not well understood ... a better example might be driving an automobile ... How many can drive well with a white-knuckle "Death Grip" on the steering wheel?

 

[ThomHarrop]

Like all other arts, photography involves a set of skills that must be learned in order to produce a viable piece of work. I learned the darkroom entirely from my own experimenting originally (before doing bachelor's and master's degrees at Brooks Institute) and made horrible mistakes along the way. To this day, however, I believe the first few rolls of film I shot in England before I know anything about photography were some of my strongest work. I was presented with a subject I found compelling and reacted without any technique to get in the way.

That being said, many of those images were also so technically flawed as to be unusable. At this point I would know how to handle those situations and would have made photos that were more satisfying as final images. In some ways I feel that I have been overcoming my technique since I graduated from photo school and trying to recapture my beginners eye and appoach to my work. I feel that I have started to make progress in the last few years.

I see this issue every day as I teach at the Art Institute. Students walk a fine line between talent and technique and I watch them form as artists as they find a balance. Clearly, what makes a photographer great is finding this balance. Adams, Weston, Eugene Smith, Uelsmann — the list goes on and on; these are people who had a great vision of the world and brought it to life through superior technique. People who try to skip the learning process eventually end up falling apart as they try to create work for which they are not prepared.

The Japanese approach caligraphy by meditating, then losing themselves in the moment and the stroke. I believe photography must be like this. Whatever level of technique has been achieved must be left behind at the creative moment. One cannont make love well simply by reading about it in the Kama Sutra and mimicking technique. Photography is the same.

 

[lee]

<<<One cannont make love well simply by reading about it in the Kama Sutra and mimicking technique. Photography is the same.>>>

I like this analogy much better than mine. I always say that learning about the technical issues in photography is like learning how to play first base in baseball. You can read all you want, but at some point you are gonna have to put on cleats and grab a glove and let someone throw a ball at you. Photography is a DO thing. You gotta DO it. Like Nike said, "Just do it."

lee\c

edited because I cannot spell.

 

[bjorke]

One cannont make love well simply by reading about it in the Kama Sutra and mimicking technique. Photography is the same.

I'm kind of curious about the data that you use to back up this assertion.