Essay- Robert Adams Quotes

Essay

Some Quotes from Robert Adams from his book "Beauty in Photography"

Robert Adams Quotes
I am a great admirer of Robert Adams' photography and writing. In one of my favorite books about photography are several lines I refer to in my teaching. I thought I'd share a few with you here.
Truth and Landscape essay
Geography by itself is difficult to value accurately - what we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place.

We rely…on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know
Gardens are…strikingly like landscape pictures, sanctuaries…the Persian word for paradise is "walled enclosure" much like what a photographer sees through the finder of his camera.
from Beauty in Photography
the word beauty, is in practice, unavoidable. It accounts…for my very decision to photograph.
The Beauty that concerns me is form. Beauty is a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life…Why is form beautiful? Because…it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.
Quoting William Carlos Williams…poets write for a single reason - to give witness to splendor.
Art…abstracts. Art simplifies…a careful sorting out in favor of order is called composition.
A photographer can describe a better world only by better seeing the world as it is in front of him. Quoting Weston from his Daybooks, he started to photograph because of his "amazement at subject matter."
I think we judge art "by whether it reveals to us important FORM that we ourselves have experienced but to which we have not paid adequate attention. Successful re-discovers Beauty for us."
Quoting Stieglitz "Beauty is the universal seen"

The View From Here - April 2013

Mt. St. Helens. 1995. from With a New Eye: The Digital National Parks Project.

THE VIEW FROM HERE
by Stephen Johnson

The Connected Photograph

For years I've been talking about the idea of a "connected photograph," an image that exists not only in its space as a visual, and hopefully heartfelt record of what seduced ours eyes into making a photograph, but also as a connection to the place, time and technology embedded in the image.

I find the idea very seductive of linking a photograph that I care very much about, with the surrounding information now automatically generated by digital cameras, and augmenting that information where possible. Time, date and means of exposure are useful, the technical information regarding lens, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, metering modes, exposure compensation, all of which are gathered automatically now. These data points can be deeply useful in trying to determine technical success of a challenging image, and should definitely be looked at when trying to analyze image quality, positive and negative.

Where We Were

I've long been intrigued by the GPS potential. Since the beginning of my project on the national parks, With a New Eye, I've carried a GPS receiver to log exact location. Early units had no digital compass as part of the data stream, so I carried a compass to record bearing as well.

The location and bearing can have all sorts of useful derivations. When used with good maps and mapping software like Google Earth, places and landforms in photographs can be identified and named better than the best note taking I've ever managed. This has proven deeply useful in as commonly traveled a place as Yellowstone and as remote as the Antarctic Peninsula.

In a recent essay, I also mentioned FlightAware as a way of knowing where your commercial flight aerial photographs were taken.

Where Were We

This information can be extraordinarily useful in rendering a better understanding of the geography of a space, both while present, which is becoming ever more possible, and later. Certainly, after the fact placing the photograph in time and space has some dynamic implications. I often use my photograph from the top of Mt. St. Helens as a great example of the photograph carrying its own aesthetic weight, but the context of the actual location dramatically deepening the power of the image.

The weather can often be determined later as well. Although much of environmental conditions might be obvious from the photograph itself, such as sunny or overcast. Temperature, wind direction and speed can also be aids in more fully understanding the scenes. For the most part, this information currently needs to be gathered independently and contemporarily with the image-making.

It is interesting that so much of this information is now automatically gathered by our cell phone cameras. Innovation often comes in the back door even as we lobby the big camera companies to build GPS into the professional cameras. Of course, for reasoning I don't quite understand, the first cameras with GPS built-in seem to be point and shoots rather than pro-bodies. Nikon has made connection with external GPS units as part of their strategy for awhile, Canon has made provisions in recent years.

As one of Canon's Explorers of Light, Canon will send in equipment to me through their CPS program, and I borrow equipment frequently for testing. I was most intrigued by their new EOS 6D and have been enjoying the built-in GPS and wireless connection. My iPad controlling the camera is fun and potentially useful.

In so many ways, I deeply believe we photograph to hold what we see, which is why I'm so conservative about photo manipulation and fakery. But frankly, it is a huge challenge to hold the wonder of the real world with our cameras. It takes very careful recording and a great deal of finesse in RAW interpretation and image processing to move the recorded view close to the experienced scene.

The Color of Light

One of the areas that continues to be a real challenge is getting the color right. I've talked a great deal about this over the years, and real progress has been made with better cameras, better White Balance controls and tools like the ColorChecker Passport and Adobe's DNG Profile Editor. But there is a missing component here that could be a great aid toward realism in photography, and that is the inclusion of a spectrophotometer in the camera itself.

I believe having a spectral measurement of the ambient light, knowing the real color characteristics of the camera, and being able to integrate those two real pieces of information into the basic interpretation of the photograph, could make real progress toward narrowing the gap between what we see and what we get. This won't fully account for the limitations of the single camera capture as opposed to the almost unbelievably sophisticated images our memory, eyes and brain can experience at the scene. But it could eliminate some big information gaps.

This is one of those issues where some companies have scoffed at the value of the added capability, but I believe some variant of this deeper color interpretation capability will not only come to be embedded in our cameras, but will make a big difference in our ability to be faithful to the wonder we see.

Of course, as I eluded to earlier, a spectral measurement of the light is just another useful piece of information. It cannot account for our own color adaptation to the scene and consequently what we actually "see," being a product of our eyes, our own internal "image processing" and our brain trying to adapt to different light conditions over time.



Mt. St. Helens View Rendered by Google Earth.

Rendering out photographic sites in software like Google Earth can give us an unparalleled sense of the geography of the scene. It is a remarkable tool, and of course, works best when you have the exact location of the image rather than just an approximation. However, it is amazing how close you can reason out your position by working with the software.

Interestingly enough, in trying to relocate to exact site of the photograph for this rendering, it appears as though it is no longer there, likely succumbed to the constant landslides we were seeing on the crater rim.

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Flora and Form Workshop Coming Up

Check out the Flora and Form  Workshop April 16-18, 2013 or May 16-18, 2013 at Shelldance Orchid Gardens. Any and all cameras welcome.

Shelldance Nursery. 2013.

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Latest Video Study: San Francisco Bay Bridge Light Show

Canon 1Dx video. 2013.

Tutorial - A Reply to a Student

TUTORIAL

A Reply to a Student

I frequently get emails from photography students around the country having been asked to research a photographer whose work they enjoy. Typically they ask me about my work habits, equipment and processes. In answering one of these this morning, it seemed that it might be relevant to a wider audience.

I use a variety of cameras depending on the situation, 35mm style dSLRs like my Canon cameras for highly portable work, my Hasselblad cameras with Phase One back for higher resolution, and my 4x5 Betterlight scanning back for my most serious work.

I don't really have any tips or tricks, just the most sincere application of craft I can put into the image. I don't use Photoshop to change the image, but just like with silver based photography, I use the raw file much like the exposed but undeveloped negative and carefully process it in Adobe CameraRaw and then in Photoshop to reveal, to the best of my ability and the best of the technology, what was before the camera.

Fast shutter speeds, careful use of aperture for desired depth of field, no smaller aperture than required to maximize lens sharpness, normal ISO when possible, making sure I get adequate exposure and take full advantage of the tonal resolution of the device. These and many other considerations go into any well-crafted exposure in the camera.

I don't believe in concepts like enhancement in Photoshop. The world is already self-embellished, As I see it, my job is to be a loving witness to the wonder of the planet, bring sensitivity to making a photograph, take the time and care to execute a well crafted exposure, then be faithful to that inspiration all through the processing of the image. The real world is so much more interesting than the chromed-up cartoon-like results I see so often from extensive use of Photoshop to alter and manipulate.

I hope that helps, with my perspective at least.

Steve

The View From Here - March 2013

Ice Sheet at Dawn. Merced River. Yosemite.. 2013

THE VIEW FROM HERE
by Stephen Johnson

Redwoods, Flowers and Ice.

Themes can run strange as you start to look through recent work. The photographs may not be necessarily related except in the time frame you might have made them. But there are also times when visual relationships and sensitivities do suggest something going on bringing somewhat disparate work together. Sometimes only as timeline, sometimes an evolution of your current state of heart.

Those sequences of interests inevitably couple with what we notice in looking back at the photographs, picking out what we want to work on. That in and of itself can be interesting, because we don't just record our photographs, we have to decide to process them into more finished works. It becomes a continuum of selection and caring and that may be more revealing than a conscious effort to create a body of work.

So as I looked through photographs from the last month, I chose a few that moved me, some I wish were more successful, and some that sprung new ideas, and even a new workshop.

Yosemite in Winter Workshop. 2013.

The Yosemite in Winter Workshop

Our Yosemite Workshop last month went great, good people, comfortable weather and a wide variety of photographs were made. Moving through the park did bring back many memories of challenges and opportunities over the years. Yosemite Valley is a place full of photographic icons, which can prove challenging to see uniquely. We were somewhat amazed as we passed hundreds of people lined up to get a photograph of Horsetail Falls at sunset. For me, I think, the photograph would have been of the photographers.

Giant Sequoias are always dramatic, but very difficult to photograph in a way that communicates their grandeur accurately. Mid-19th century photographs often posed people next to the giant trees to portray their unbelievable size. Those photographs were documents for the most part, needed documents, and were amazing. Their immense scale is now well known. Seeing the trees for the first time overwhelms the viewer with that very size. Their reality is impressive. So our photographs now seem to strive to confirm their amazing scale, but not repeat the cliches', and make art as well. A big challenge, so to speak.

I'm not sure I've ever risen to the challenge, but thought I'd share a few recent photographs and past efforts to render these giants.

Bachelor and the Three Graces. Mariposa Grove in late afternoon light. 3 shot HDR file. 2013.

The photograph above works for me mostly as a memory jog of the light and scale. It is reasonably well-executed, but an obvious location, and an expected, even if natural composition. I am unmoved in the sense that I feel like I've seen many variations on it, from old hand-colored postcards to hundreds of advertisements over the years. Postcards and these trees have a long history together that continues.

Thanks to Ted Orland for the postcard above. His Man and Yosemite book is well worth checking out.

A few years back, working on the digital national parks project, With a New Eye, I also struggled with the Giant Sequoias with only ok results. The photographs are fine, but I've yet to make a photograph of these trees that even comes close to the emotional response of being in their presence.

By the way, check out the Save the Redwoods League.

Ice Yosemite Valley. 2013

Ice Crystalled Leaves near Merced River. Yosemite. 1977.

Ice in Yosemite has been another matter. Even early photographs from the 1970s revealed my fascination with ice in the park. This workshop proved again that for me that small scenes, like the ice, can often be as rewarding photographically as the iconic and massive rocks and cliffs of Yosemite's famous skyline. It's not that the tiny ice abstractions match the grandeur of Half Dome or El Capitan, but in the light-based world of the photographic image, beauty is not only derived from the spectacular, but also often from the small and humble scenes, and has little to do with scale.

We spent more time during our dawn session at the Merced River looking down at an icy eddy than staring up at the rather spectacular Yosemite Falls. Although the falls, cliffs, ice dune and frozen mist did get some deserved attention.

Succulent. 2013. iPhone Photograph.

Flora and Form

Before my friend Michael's memorial service last week, we sought solace in the natural beauty and form of wondrous flora by visiting our local orchid nursery.

An idea I had been considering for awhile arose once again, of putting a workshop together exploring the challenges and great opportunities of the natural form and photography. Fortunately, Shelldance Orchid Gardens agreed that it was a good idea and a new workshop was born.

Check out the Flora and Form  Workshop April 16-18, 2013 or May 16-18, 2013. Any and all cameras welcome.

Orchids. 2013.

Weird Plant. 2013. iPhone Photograph

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Michael Black

I lost a dear friend last week, my friend of 30 years, Michael Black. I first came to know Mike about 1984 as an advisor/helper/consultant on the Great Central Valley exhibition I did with my friend Robert Dawson. Michael had been working for years on native Salmon runs, their destruction and mismanagement. He taught as a visiting professor of political science at many universities and had written widely on the Salmon issue. Michael put together a Symposium on the Central Valley, its people, its water and agriculture during the Great Central Valley Project Exhibitions' run at the California Academy of Sciences in 1985.

Michael was a great humanitarian in his generosity of spirit, support for his friends and deep love of his 16 year old son. We lost Michael to a hit and run accident as he was walking back to his car from a nature walk in Santa Rosa California. Mike was 64 years old and was deeply loved by many friends. He was a fellow board member on the Pacifica Land Trust on which I serve.

I will miss his friendship, his appreciation for the natural world, his encouragement for my art, and his companionship that will now only be memories rather than plans.

Tutorial - The Moon and the Land

TUTORIAL

The Moon and the Land

The recent full moon I witnessed over Death Valley and the eastern Sierra was a good teaching moment for me.

We get into habits, some of them dating back decades, and sometimes it takes awhile for those old habits to be challenged and supplanted by new and better ways of doing things.

The brightness difference between the full moon, which is very bright, and the rather dimly lit landscape below, can be a real photographic challenge. Although our eyes and mind rapidly adjust as we glance between the ever so slightly different locations in our gaze, the camera cannot. Timing a day before or day after the actual full moon can give you more light on the ground for exposures that are more manageable. But when confronted with what to do at a given moment, we witnessed a real challenge of extremes this past week.

In the days of film, we would have likely calculated how bright the moon was, assumed a N minus 2 or 3 development, and seen how much exposure we could capture of the ground. Then in printing, a really good job of burning in the moon would have probably also been necessary for the print. Some examples from photographic history do come to mind.

Last week, I instinctively just hand bracketed the exposures assuming I would put them together after the fact, as digital can often allow. But with the 600mm lens I had borrowed from Canon, the magnification was such that the time lag of manually adjusting the shutter speed and taking the second exposure allowed the moon to drift. Consequently, small differences in feature location between the exposures emerged with the long magnification that the lens provided.

The result was that very few of my photographs line up well. And this might be ok, but there were other factors I ran into, the glow around the moon itself that needed to be preserved as well as the color coming through in the sky around it.

My manual exposure changes were simply too different in moon location to do a standard HDR integration after the fact, although I'm still thinking that one through.

Doing a standard HDR integration should have been obvious to me at the time, and not unlikely what my students were already doing with their auto bracketing habits. I simply should have set up a bracketing sequence on the camera for a very wide range, and had the camera do a continuous stream of exposures to encode the range as automatically and as independently from any human jiggle and as close in time as possible. That would have minimized any difference in location of the moon relative to the proper exposure and the over-exposure of the image designed to record some ground detail. Then a standard HDR integration might have worked well.

In other words, I should have simply done an HDR set, and a standard HDR integration after the fact.

The moon exposure was f8 at 1/400 of second, the mountains below f8 at 1/8, six stops of exposure difference which is not an unusual spread for HDR at all.

The two images were opened into Photoshop Layers, aligned, and the moon shot masked to only let the moon through, with considerable work on the still imperfect mask. The lens exhibited some chromatic aberration not completely eliminated by the Adobe RAW controls, which had to be hand tweaked.

Although it seemed worth including here as an example, it is still very much a work in progress.

The View From Here - February 2013

Hills, Zabriski Point. Death Valley. 2013.

THE VIEW FROM HERE
by Stephen Johnson

Journey of Remarkable Light and Form

The last few weeks have given me the pleasure of witnessing some truly remarkable light. Spending some time at the beach, on our way to our Death Valley workshop, in the park itself, coming up the eastern Sierra and then a quick trip to Yosemite, all within the last few weeks.

Spectral Breakout on Lenticular Cloudbank. Dawn Lone Pine on the Eastern Sierra. 2013

Death Valley was a reminder of the beauty of desert and the wonder of it as a place. This year brought some rain, beautiful light and skies that frankly will take some time to sort out, there are so many photographs I am looking at with interest.

On our way home from Death Valley, we stayed over at Lone Pine to see the moonset on the eastern Sierra crest. The moon setting at dawn was wonderful, even if a bit cold. But behind us to the east, a lenticular cloud had formed that I turned a 600mm lens toward, very near the rising sun.

At first glace, zooming in on the cloud bank was dramatic. Unexpectedly, a wonderous rainbow like spectral breakout was suddenly visiable around the cloud. It jumped out at me, quite unbelievably. My first thought was that the color ring was some artifact of the long optic pointing so near the rising sun. Then, as we looked closer, with only our eyes, we could barely make out the exact same color breakout on the cloud's edge. Although visible in the photograph, the effect pales in comparison to seeing the real thing.

Radio Telescopes along Owens River. Owens Valley Radio Observatory. Big Pine. 2013.

Driving up the eastern Sierra in the Owens Valley, through Lone Pine and past Manzanar, we noticed some satellite dishes on the east side of the valley.  One of our Death Valley Workshop students mentioned a radio observatory on the east side, and we appeared to have found it.

We took the first way in, though it felt like a back way. We followed a dirt road across the desert leading us up to the Owens River, just opposite the telescopes. It was an unusual mix of form with the winter desert brush, cottonwood trees, river cutting through and the space age construct plucked down in the landscape.

Highway 395 above Conway Summit near Mono Lake. 2013

The following weekend we couldn't resist a quick trip to Yosemite. It's only a little beyond a planned trip to see my sweet 85 year old mother, which made it good loop of love and beauty. As is almost always the case about Yosemite, I was treated to scenes I never imagined and a slightly deeper understanding of this so familiar place, enrichening my mind and heart.

Tree and Mist. Bridalveil Falls. Yosemite. 2013.

The waterfalls and bellowing mist from them are always part of my delight in Yosemite. In fact, falling water is almost synonymous with Yosemite Valley. When mixed with ice and cold, it can be almost other worldly and surprizing. Part of the delight in wandering the planet with a camera is just such surprize, even in places we think we know well.

Snow Dune. Yosemite Falls. 2013.

The sheets of misty water draping over a dune of ice at the base of Upper Yosemite Falls was amazing to watch. The pattern changed with every moment, leading to many stills, and some very graceful video.

Ribbon Falls Rainbow. Yosemite. 2013.

In looking though the photographs made last weekend, when we did the short swing through Yosemite, it made me particularly grateful for our Yosemite in Winter workshop coming right up. I'm anxious to go back and spend a few days. I know many of the people coming to the workshop and a few days spent with some fine people in such a special place sounds really good.

Full Moon Setting over Eastern Sierra. HDR with Canon 1Ds III and 600mm lens. 2013.

Moonring and Jupiter over Paso Robles. 2013.

Along the Coast

A recent trip to the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, brought another set of ongoing curiousities renewed. The Reserve is one of my local haunts here on the north peninsula coast near San Francisco. The extreme of compelling visuals I found those few weeks ago drew me deeply into a diversity of natural form. From the brilliantly lit cliffs above the tide pools to the oh so blue sky through the trees, and the intricate alien form of tide pool life, particularly the anemones. I was entranced.

Cliffside. Fitzgerald Reserve. 2013

There are some places that keep drawing you back, some out of convenience because they are nearby, and some you go to great lengths for. This stretch of coast, from San Francisco south to Santa Cruz, remains a road of refuge and heart engagement for me.

The Highway One Coastal Journey Workshop April 20-21 seemed worth a mention with these photographs that have stayed with me these last few weeks.

Anemone. Fitzgerald Reserve. 2013

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Death Valley Workshop 2013 Group Photo. Titus Canyon, Death Valley.

Our workshop Group Photo from Death Valley this year captured a moment of delight that in some ways summed up the wonderful light we had all day exploring Tutius Canyon, the road in from Nevada and wonderful Red Pass. We were contantly reaching for superlatives to describe what we were seeing, and feeling a heartfelt gratutude at being able to witness such beauty with the excitement at having a chance to photograph.

We didn't get everyone in the photo, but thanks to Fiona for capturing these wonderful expressions.

Irresistable Motion

Snow Dune Video. Yosemite Falls. 2013. Canon 1Dx, 600mm lens Stabilzed with YouTube Filter.

Tutorial - DSLR

TUTORIAL

DSLR VIDEO

This may be more an enthusiasm than tutorial.

Cuts assembled in Photoshop CS6. Surf audio thanks to Bill Schwegler, Fyreplug. Lee Vining Creek 2010 (from the September Newsletter)

I started with an overall scene of the creek, then decided to zoom into various areas where the design and movement seemed interesting. Finessing length of shot to the dynamics of the scene is key. This particular edit simply assembles the cuts into what might be a starting point for a shorter piece. Canon 5DII video.