Printing Workshop This Weekend

Intermediate Fine Art Printing Workshop this weekend!  March 24th-25th. The class features one on one time with you transforming your images into beautiful prints. Still openings...so spread the word!  http://www.sjphoto.com/print_wkspHO-int_frameset.html

THE VIEW FROM HERE Staying With Making Art

Farallon Islands Mirage. Pacifica, California. 2012.

THE VIEW FROM HERE
by Stephen Johnson
Staying With Making Art

I've been immersed in printing for weeks now, first filling an important print order, then teaching a four day printing workshop helping my students shape their photographs onto paper. It feels tangible, substantial, real, like prints in hand always do. It felt like a good winter indoor activity as the calendar turns to plans for for spring outings.

Years ago we started the Featured Print Program to make one of my photographs available every month at a very reasonable price. But there were some other internal reasons for the program. To put it simply, it forced finished work out of me. It is easy to get overwhelmed by the day to day, in these days of economic stress even more so. It is easy to loose our ways as artists, to forget the making of artworks at our core. I've found it important to construct internal imperatives that force the work, so that the making of art with all of its passion, does not get routinely buried in the must do tasks of business maintenance. Having to make a new, finished print every month has helped force the issue.

Some who work in the arts can simply follow their art making as a daily routine. Some live very simply, some start off well to do, some retire into a life in the arts, some make a good living from their art. But we all need push sometimes, and most have plenty that can get in the way.

Many of us involved in the love of landscape end up in a very different daily routine. It takes time and effort to go out and make work. Keeping up with the offloading and sampling, much like developing and proofing of days now gone, is a very separate process. It doesn't feel like making art. It feels like a task. It can be joyful if the work is breaking exotic ground, but good solid seeing with workman-like dedication is harder sometimes to push through entropy.

New projects, new ideas, new territories, all contribute, but the hard core discipline to go at it everyday is rare, and important. On the days when it comes easy it is precious. On those days when it seems there are a thousand things in the way, the tasks get exaggerated and the work enticement of the art gets romanced, then easily tarnished by the fact that it may be merely good, without necessarily being monumental. Not to mention the fact that making art is hard work.

A finished print in hand can help serving as a sense of accomplishment. Much like a potter's finished firing, a print is the thing, the tangible manifestation that allows us to move to the next piece, whether a print or a journey. Sometimes just the getting out is enough to stir up the pot, break the routine, and entice more to be done. The weight of the unfinished is the killer of the yet to be imagined. Somehow a balance must be struck, so that the enticement of seduction keeps producing more, and that realization of the finished image as print becomes the path to moving on to the next.

Culvert and Grass. Pacifica, California. 2012.

Dancing Flyers. Pacifica. 2012.

Fundamentally, it is simply important to continue to work, to make art, seek the experience, persevere through the doldrums. Just do it, even if its just effort and not necessarily inspiration. It can come to you.

In the middle of writing this column, I forced myself out into a chilly afternoon, brought my dog along for a walk, and was then unexpectedly rewarded with a sky full of paragliders. I would not have guessed they would have been out in the cold air. They were magical.

 

New Photograph: Seal and Rocks. Pt. Lobos State Reserve. California. 2011.

Process, Craft and Media Informing an Audience
Our viewers come to understand what they are seeing in our artwork in many ways. One of the traditional vehicles of some comprehension was to understand the media and materials used in constructing the art work, oil on wood, pastels on board, cast bronze, collage, silk-screen, etc.

In this digital photographic age, we seemed to have moved away from this tradition. There seems to be a reluctance to call an inkjet print what it is, coining words like "giclee." Many hold desires to continue to call an artwork a photograph long after it has been changed into something quite different than the word photograph implies.

This comes up again and again,as it just did in my Fine Art Printing class last weekend, and it likely will continue to as long as people show images that appear to be photographic, that are in fact heavily "altered realities" and seem to want to engage their viewers with a wink and a nod.

There is a long tradition of deriving all sorts of artwork from photographs, making absolutely wild and wonderful new media. That continues to be the case, where all sort of possibilities can flow from a photograph in this digital age. What has changed is the implied deception now possible with digital technology, allowing drastic changes to what could be captured with light and lens. Even with heavy fabrication, some image makers still want to imply that the construct is what they saw and recorded. There would be no objection to informing their audience of the nature of what they are seeing if it were not for enjoying the reality shift and taking credit for the image as though it was seen rather than constructed. I'd rather they took credit for their Photoshop skills and helped their audience understand. 

This is all a little confusing, making remarkable scenes captured be suspected of fakery, and creating a world of unreal expectation that the lesser of us must just not be as talented because we aren't getting or seeing these remarkable scenes to photograph that never existed in the first place. It also creates a false expectation of what reality is, making the beautiful sunset before you somehow less, as it is not as wild as the one just seen on the "enhanced" postcards in the gift shop.

I believe this also breaks down a commitment to craft up front, in the camera. The old "fix it in post" adage comes to mind where an assumption is made that you'll make it good later. Instead of concentrating on holding a magical image, this line of thought encourages a view that the image can be cleaned-up and made magic in Photoshop. In lectures across the country, and various parts of the world, I continue to emphasize my conviction that the photograph is made in the camera, everything else is just trying to process it into revealing that magic.

Indulge yourself with any direction you please, but give the viewer a fair chance at understanding the context of what they are seeing. Photography does occupy a special place in our visual world in terms of its ability to hold a light scene. Inspiration runs deep, deception can be disturbing. Of course, part of art is, as Picasso once said "a lie that helps you see the truth." I'm deeply aware of the gray areas that abound here, the rich history of images derived from photographs, and that artistic freedom demands just that: freedom.

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A Few Quotes

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

Man Ray

The days you work are the best days.

Georgia O’Keeffe

My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

Diane Arbus

This benefit of seeing... can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image... the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.

Dorothea Lange

The weight of the unfinished is a killer of the yet to be imagined.

Stephen Johnson, from this Newsletter

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Tidbits

A few things I would like you to keep in mind...

Virtual Education: Our Virtual Consulting and Mentoring Program is working well. Readers of this Newsletter can still get a 20% discount by mentioning this reference when you enroll.

Catch Steve Live: Steve will be speaking here and there around the country over the next few months, April in MA, June in NY, late June in Maine, early August in MI.

• The Fine Art of Photography Event
  Plymouth, MA
  April 12, 7pm
• With a New Eye
  George Eastman House. Rochester, NY
  Thursday June 14, 2012. 6pm
• Maine Media Workshops Artists Lecture
  Rockport, ME
  June 26, 2012
  
• Summer Weekend of Photography and Digital Imaging
  Southwestern Michigan Council of Camera Clubs
  Hope College, Holland, MI
  Saturday August 4, 2012
  Workshop: 9-11am
  Artist's Lecture: 7pm
• Keynote at PSA International Conference of Photography
  South San Francisco. September 20, 2012.

Featured Print March 2012

Featured Print March 2012

About this Month's Original Photograph

Rock Wall. Pt. Lobos State Reserve, California. 2011.
Canon 1Ds III
11x14 Pigment Inkjet Print on Cotton paper
$195 each.

the rough and rocky cliffs of Pt. Lobos at surfline

We're offering an 11x14 inch print of either photograph, matted to 16x20 and ready to frame for $195, framed in silver for an additional $75, wood for $150. This print at this price is offered through March 31. We'll be taking orders until then, and shipping them out by April 15th.

To Order 

 

New Photograph: Lake Michigan

Sunrays above Chicago. Lake Michigan. 2011
Canon 1Ds III
11x14 Pigment Inkjet Print on Cotton paper
$195 each

Flying off to a new and great adventure, I looked back at Chicago and was amazed at this play of light and color.

Tutorial: Working the Fine Print

(excerpt from the book Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography unreleased revised electronic version)

Most first prints are work prints. It is the first look at the behaviors of the color management workflow, overall density and balance, the glow of white from the paper, the apparent perceived sharpness. If you think of printing as a process that evolves as you explore, tweak and refine, you step right into the traditions of fine-art photographic printmaking that has yielded an astonishingly beautiful history of photographs on paper.

As a general rule, a fully edited file will still take work to make a beautiful print. Anything less than the most refined edit you can make in Photoshop should be expected to print poorly, and will need extra and sometimes confusing work to make a great print. As general advice, take the time and care to edit your image to a high level of satisfaction, then start the printing interpretation process.

Paper
I believe our artwork deserves the best materials possible and that it is largely a waste of time to test on anything less. So I do all of my test prints on the paper I intend to print on, although often as small 3×5 images on letter-sized paper. Sometimes a lighter-weight version of the same paper is available and cheaper.

My papers of choice have been the same for many years now. Specifically the Hahnemühle Museum Etching (which I helped create) for the cotton printmaking paper look. I also use the Hahnemühle PhotoRag Pearl for a more traditional gelatin-silver look. It should also be pointed out that Hahnemühle supplies these papers to my workshops, but of course they are by my choice the papers that I use and want to teach with.

The View from Here: RAW Processors plus Photoshop

Much has been said in the last few years about the wonders of Adobe Lightroom and the obsolescence of Photoshop. Lightroom is remarkable and powerful. In many forums however, I remind people that for all of their power and conveniences, Adobe’s Camera RAW, and Lightroom, Apple’s Aperture, and PhaseOne’s Capture One are after all RAW processors, not image editors in the same sense of Photoshop’s flexibility and pixel by pixel precision. I believe that Photoshop remains an absolutely critical ingredient in image editing.

Many photographers are simply put off by the complexity of Photoshop, the seemingly endless array of options and elaborate workflows abounding on the internet. Others simply want the flexibility of RAW without all of the work and time that finishing the image in Photoshop implies. The cost differential is also real. I can understand all of these notions, but want to discuss a few of them here.

The View From Here - January 2012

Moonset over Panamint Mountains. Death Valley. 2012.

THE VIEW FROM HERE
by Stephen Johnson

As I write, I'm out in Death Valley, between workshop sessions, pondering the new year ahead, my presence in this landscape and my movement around this planet in exploration.

In a place I've visited so often, like Death Valley, I wonder about even making new photographs, as I certainly have more than I'll ever use. But in the making is seeing first, and seeing something new with every visit is part of the wonder of this world and of photography. The variety of this place, its scale, its unexpected color and upheaved geology is truly remarkable.

As I think forward a few weeks to my Yosemite Valley in Winter workshop, that thought is even more prominent in my mind as I grew up near Yosemite and so much of what I think of as nature were experiences born there...those early backpacking trips with my friend Peter Mauffray, artist and musician, now gone, or my first memories of seeing deer, bear, and snow. The birth of my interest in landscape photography came from Yosemite, Ansel Adams' wonderfully inspiring and dramatic black and white landscapes. I clearly remember my first conversations with Ansel on the porch of the house behind the Ansel Adams gallery in the Valley, talking about the At Mono Lake Exhibition.

I am drawn to Yosemite in unique ways. It forces an instant re-apprecition of grandeur. It reminds me that even a famous and heavily visited place can remain full of solitude. It keeps me aware of the power of the earth's forces to constantly reshape itself and the tiny little window of time that our lives here can witness. Yosemite Valley fosters an appreciation of all of these things, and builds in the heart a unique place of personal memory and scale.

The park is remarkable. Lying at the heart of the 10 million year old Sierra Nevada range, glaciers have cut through its river valleys for over a million years. Yosemite Valley formed from a massive 4000 foot deep river of ice, slicing huge granite domes and carving today's valley. Yosemite Falls is 2425 feet tall, the highest in North America, and 5th largest in the world. El Capitain is the world's largest monolith of solid granite, its huge brother in the park, Half Dome is perhaps the most recognizable rock formation on the planet. Yosemite was set aside not only for its spectacular scenery but for its huge Giant Sequoia redwoods which were starting to be logged in the late 1850s and early 1860s.

Giant Sequoias, Wawona. Yosemite. 2008.

Photographically, Yosemite remains hard as the reality competes with the photographic history and our preconceived views. But I never find the photographs equal to the experience, and consequently keep getting pulled into reaching deeper into the being there to understand what I see and want to record. And I want to share what I've found...

I move around this great big world
see such beauty and intricacy
I want to hold it like some precious love
Let another soul see and believe

from Make the Art, 1999 by Stephen Johnson

Half Dome, Yosemite, 1996.

It is that sharing, that wanting to say "isn't this remarkable" that is the recurring theme for us as imagemakers. Our artistic vision may take many paths, but for me, that "remarkableness" is fundamental. It is at the heart of why I do straight photography, because it is my interest in this real world and its uncanny beauty, variety and nuance that continues to amaze me, and draw me in with my camera. It is almost as if the photographs become something other than a product from the experience, they become a constant suggestion of wonder, and reminder of our privilege in being here, being able to be witness.

Titus Canyon. Death Valley. 2012

Notebook Scribbles from Death Valley's West Side Road

The silence. The silence here is amazing, pervasive and feels profound. It is so unlike our normal worlds. I can hear the crinkle of paper in my hand, and the scratch across it of the pen as I write.

I'm looking into a 100 mile 360 degree space, almost devoid of human constructs, but full of earth upheaval and light-heat of our sun.

There is a low level, barely audible under-sound of distant wind rushing through endless canyons, almost a bottom-end shelf under which there is only real silence.

A raven suddenly appears squawking north through this huge valley. I wish I could inquire about its journey.

The earth has now dropped the sun below the mountains, with a huge cirrus arc rising above, stretching well beyond the zenith.

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Titus Canyon. Death Valley. 2012.

Tidbits

A few things I would like you to keep in mind...

Our Virtual Consulting and Mentoring Program is working well, and although the initial discounts for early enrollments have passed, readers of the Newsletter can still get a 20% discount by mentioning this reference when you enroll.

 

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Dunes. Death Valley. 2012.