First Response: First Dance Class — Cheryl

In Jessica’s first Call for Story, she posed the question, “What is the secret to unlock the story of our lives?”

It’s an intriguing question, but one that’s impossible to answer. Here’s why: A life is not one story; it is a series of stories. Even an 800-page biography will not tell readers THE story of the subject’s life. Perhaps I’m splitting hairs, but I think it’s an important distinction.

Ernest Hemingway is credited with having written a powerful story in six, short words: “Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.” It’s a perfect tale to translate into a photograph. I imagine a black-and-white shot of pristine, white baby shoes, price tag still attached, sitting atop a table with other “treasures” at a yard sale. Somewhere behind the table, either in the frame as a blurry outline or out of the frame completely, I imagine a heartbroken couple trying to put on brave faces and answer prospective buyers’ questions without getting choked up. But is that the whole story?

Who are these people? How long have they been together? How old was their baby when he or she died? How did it happen? What will happen to them? I assume that they’ve not been blessed with other children, since they’re selling the unused shoes. Will their relationship survive this ordeal?

I guess my point is that life is not about just one story. It’s about many stories, and a good one — whether written in words or recorded in a photograph — will make you want to hear more stories.

***

My photo is a shot from four-year-old Stella’s first dance class. I don’t know how successful I’ve been in a creating a story with this picture. The storytelling aspect of photography has been hard for me: both in the telling and the interpreting. I’m glad that Jessica chose this Call, though. It’s an important part of photography, and I need to invest some time and effort into it.

The First Call: Let’s Play a Game! — Jessica

My six year old has reached the stage where he loves to play board games, until, that is, he is about to lose. We were fortunate to have a lazy morning yesterday and plenty of time for a couple of rounds of Dogopoly.

So that’s the background story of the photograph: young child, practicing counting and turn taking, rolls the dice and moves his game piece around a board. Is that the only story here?

One of the primary things that I want to do this year is to improve the storytelling aspect of my photography. Rather than simply document a moment in our family life or home, I want to mine the scene a bit deeper. I want to reveal universals of family life, of growing up, of living an examined life in service to the good, the true and the beautiful.

I want to know how to do that. Beyond mere gesture, or contrast or composition — maybe it’s the unity of all three? What is the secret to unlock the story of our lives?

That is the primary aspect of story that interests me. But there is a secondary one that I have very much neglected and I think it shows in the creativity of the thought behind my photos.

That is the aspect of Story as input in the creative process. Twyla Tharp in her book, The Creative Habit talks about how when she is beginning to choreograph a new dance she seeks out all kinds of varied inputs; everything from art, to novels, to science becomes fodder for her to mash into something new.

How often do I seek inputs away from pictures and other photographers? Lately, not very often. Music, poetry, novels, fairy tales, prayer — all these things offer keys to unlock my mind. I just have to remember to look for them.

The Third Response: Picture Within a Picture — Jessica

The popular phrase “trust the process” has always grated on my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. And now, thanks to Cheryl’s observation in her last post, I know why! I also know why I just can’t get into the whole art journal thing — even though I love to watch them being created on YouTube.

I do see a vision in my mind and then attempt to bring it to reality, you are very correct in that assessment, Cheryl. However, it doesn’t spring fully-formed like Diana from my forehead. Rather, it is born as an idea or feeling that I want to share. Then, as I allow it to roll around it begins to take shape in a visual way. Once that vision begins to take place, then I can pick up the camera and attempt to capture it — pin it down in reality. That may still require a dozen or so shots, but when I am more focused, I feel more successful.

I can’t just start with raw materials and then form something. I guess that’s the more inductive, intuitive type of thinking and it just leaves me frustrated. Hence my inability to do anything with the art journal. I spread some paint and stamp some stamps and then wonder, “what now?” With such limited time to create, I have to have a plan in order to accomplish anything. At least to my way of thinking.

Part of the reason it has taken me so long to write this response, is that the other quotes that Cheryl shared led me down a long rabbit hole: thomism and art. To keep that from sounding overly pretentious, let me share this quote from Jacques Maritian:

St.Thomas,who was as simple as he was wise, defined the beautiful as that which being seen pleases, id quod visum placet. These four words say all that is needed: vision, that is to say, intuitive knowledge and joy. The Beautiful is that…

The key, I think to all of your questions, Cheryl, is in the last quote you shared: “to share.” RAW, JPEG, iphone, dslr…those are only tools. Tools that the artist manipulates to produce a vision or message to share. Whether the vision drives the work or the work drives the vision is neither here nor there. The work becomes art when it has that message to share. Art then is a communication of something. As a Christian artist, I hope to communicate the beauty (and truth) of the Creator.

And here, I’ll close with (Saint)John Paul the Great:

Every genuine artistic intuition goes beyond what the senses perceive and, reaching beneath reality’s surface, strives to interpret its hidden mystery. The intuition itself springs from the depths of the human soul, where the desire to give meaning to one’s own life is joined by the fleeting vision of beauty and of the mysterious unity of things. All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardour of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendour which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit.
…
Artists of the world, may your many different paths all lead to that infinite Ocean of beauty where wonder becomes awe, exhilaration, unspeakable joy.

Fifth Call: Bird of Many Colors

Yesterday, I wrote about Jessica being my own personal contemplation trigger. Today, I’d like to explore at least one of the thoughts she put into my head.

First and foremost: I’ve discovered that Jessica and I (seem to, at least) approach art/photography in completely different manners. Jessica, please correct me if I’m wrong, but you — apparently — get an image in your mind and do your darnedest to make it a reality. Because this image in your mind is very concrete, you want as much control as possible over any variable that plays a role in the creation of your art.

I, on the other hand, start with the vaguest of notions and see where they take me. I neither want nor need control over the variables, because I’m happy to let circumstances beyond my control (I don’t know if this is a terribly accurate descriptor) lead me to my destination.

I don’t shoot in RAW. (There I admitted it: I’m a Philistine!) I’ve simply never felt the need nor had the desire (and I’ve never bothered to install my camera’s software onto my computer). I own an Olympus E-5, because I’ve always been incredibly impressed with the JPEGs produced in an Olympus camera. (Its color saturation stands out in my mind.)

I take a lot of photos. On average, I shoot 100 pictures a day. I imagine this seems excessive to some. (You, Jessica?) Because I begin with vague notions, though, I try to produce as much raw material as possible, and then see what rises to the top and how it inspires a finished product.

I’m perfectly content to let the software developers at Olympus make decisions for me (with their algorithms), because I tend to get paralyzed by seemingly endless options. If the field is wide open, I don’t know where to begin.

When I’m creating a painting or a drawing or an art journal page (even when I’m writing a blog post or a story), I give myself parameters, and these allow me to start. Waiting until I have an image completely worked out in my mind before even picking up my camera (or a paintbrush or a pencil or a keyboard) is almost the same as packing it into the box it came in and placing it on my closet shelf. My universe of creating art is very much governed by the law of physics that states, “A body in rest tends to stay at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion, unless the body is compelled to change its state.”

My owl painting was inspired by (the much better) work of artist Dean Crouser. His paintings were my starting point, and my parameters included the watercolor paints that I own, the paper I could lay my hands on, the amount of time I had to devote to the painting (not much), and my skill level. While I’m relatively happy with my finished product, it looks nothing like the notion I started with. But that’s perfectly fine. The freedom I found in creating this painting and the willingness to simply follow my own intuition makes me want to frame it.

What I’ve learned through this week’s project is that “straight out of the camera” is a distraction. NO, wait. I’ll go further and say that it is meaningless. (Now, I have to decide if I’ll delete ALL the SOOC tags attached to my photos on Flickr — nah, probably not). But this rather bold statement does not mean that the conversation has nowhere else to go. On the contrary, I’d like to offer food for further (very likely tangential) thought.

H.W. Janson, in The History of Art, writes: “We must remember that any image is a separate and self-contained reality which has its own ends and responds to its own imperatives, for the artist is bound only to his creativity.”

Just let that rattle around in your brain for a little while.

Janson dedicates the introduction of The History of Art to answering the question, “What is art?” and often refers to a work by Picasso called Bull’s Head:

… we might say that a work of art is a tangible thing shaped by human hands. … Now let us look at the striking Bull’s Head by Picasso …, which consists of nothing but the seat and handlebars of an old bicycle. How meaningful is our formula here? Of course the materials used by Picasso are man-made, but it would be absurd to insist that Picasso must share the credit with the manufacturer, since the seat and handlebars in themselves are not works of art.

So, according to Janson, Picasso doesn’t have to acknowledge Huffy or Raleigh or whoever made the bicycle parts he used in his sculpture. Do I have to acknowledge Pelikan for the paints I used in my owl portrait, since I didn’t grind the pigments or mix them myself? If I shoot in JPEG instead of RAW, do I have to acknowledge the the software developers at Olympus?

Janson again:

… even the most painstaking piece of craft does not deserve to be called a work of art unless it involves a leap of the imagination. But if this is true are we not forced to conclude that the real making of the Bull’s Head took place in the artist’s mind? No, that is not so, either. Suppose that, instead of actually putting the two pieces together and showing them to us, Picasso merely told us, “You know, today I saw a bicycle seat and handlebars that looked just like a bull’s head to me.”

This makes me ask: if I don’t know what I’m going to create when I start creating it, am I not an artist?

One more, this time from Madeleine L’Engle in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art:

In my commonplace book I’ve copied down the words of a Hawaiian Christian, Mother Alice Kaholsuna:

“Before the missionaries came, my people used to sit outside their temples for a long time meditating and preparing themselves before entering. Then they would virtually creep to the altar to offer their petition and afterwards would again sit a long time outside, this time to ‘breathe life’ into their prayers. The Christians, when they came, just showed up, uttered a few sentences, said Amen and were done. For that reason my people called them haloes, ‘without breath,’ or those who failed to breathe life into their prayers.”

Her description of prayer is a beautiful description of the creative process. Meditation, silence, faith in that which we cannot control or manipulate. And letting go of that dictator self which constantly tries to take over the controls. And listening.

Question: if I give up control by not shooting in RAW am I serving the work? If I don’t fully form an image in my mind before starting to create it, am I not breathing life into it?

OK, I lied. I have one more quote (from L’Engle again): “Picasso says that an artist paints not to ask a question, but because he has found something, and he wants to share — he cannot help it — what he has found.”

I don’t know if I’ve ever come across a more concise description of what has motivated me all my life: “he wants to share — he cannot help it — what he has found.” SOOC or post-processed; RAW or JPEG; concrete image or vague notion: does any of it matter, if all I want to do is share?

The Second Response: Catching the Evening Light — Jessica

Above is the RAW image unchanged as exported from Lightroom. Lightroom exports as JPEG and does add sharpening if you don’t uncheck the box (and I’m pretty sure that I forgot to uncheck the box!)

Now, here is the same picture but more along the lines of what I had envisioned. All I did was crop, warm up the temperature a bit, add mid-tone contrast (clarity in LR) and add a mild contrast curve. That’s not much…and you might not see that much of a difference but making those changes did a few things.

1. It allowed me to make a stronger composition and didn’t someone say “composition is the strongest way of seeing something.”

2. Warming up the white balance allowed the bits of evening sun to more accurately reflect the golden hour hue that my eyes saw.

3. I toned down the highlights a bit because they had clipped a little bit on the surface of the book.

4. Increasing the clarity slider allowed the mid-tones to contrast with the shadows and opened up the background a bit which provided context for the photo but not so much that it became distracting.

5. Increasing the contrast brought the shadows down to almost black which increased the chiaroscuro effect.

So, I started with a SOOC photo that pretty much met my needs and then brought it the rest of the way with a bit of post processing. I tend to use a light hand in processing because so much of what is out there right now seems “faddish” and I would hate to look back ten years from now and think how “dated” my photos seem.

Fourth Call: Lover of the Light — Cheryl

Few people in my life get me thinking, pondering and questioning like Jessica. I had long thought of SOOC photography as being “purer” than work tweaked and streaked in Photoshop, but Jessica has turned that on its head. She’s got me thinking of the tools used by artists; the expectations and judgments that color our work, sometimes before we even produce it (in fact, those expectations and judgments generally do their work so well, they prevent the production in the first place); the comparisons; the rationalizations and the excuses.

And her timing is just exquisite, as I finally finished reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water just yesterday.

In fact, Jessica has done her job so well, I can’t say anything more right now. There’s still too much contemplation to do. Her words have triggered a veritable domino run in my head, with one concept touching off another, and it will take many more hours, more posts and more photos to sort it out.

The First Response: Straight Out of the Camera JPEG — Jessica

I agree 95% with what Cheryl wrote. But I feel very strongly about that remaining 5%. Let me explain.

I came to photography through Photoshop. I got my first copy of Photoshop back in 1994, using it to create backgrounds for Macromedia Director animation (the precursor to Flash). So, for me, part of the joy of photography has always been in the manipulation. That is something that the film I shot wasn’t able to give me. Maybe if I had had a darkroom or classes in photography while in school I would have felt differently. But shooting a roll of film (while not taking careful notes about exposure) and dropping it off a Costco or even the local photo lab was too much of a black box for me. The photos mysteriously came back and sometimes looked good and sometimes didn’t. It made for a very steep learning curve.

Shooting JPEG and posting SOOC is very much like that black box. It is taking away the control that you (as the artist) have over the image (and the intent) and giving it to the computer. A JPEG is not SOOC. It is allowing the camera to make the saturation, contrast and sharpening choices for you.

Now there isn’t anything wrong with that but if you are trying to share a vision then allowing the camera to make those choices isn’t necessarily helping you to achieve your goal.

I shoot RAW and generally make only minimal changes. I do believe that you need to get the best possible image in-camera. But I want to control those final variable so that the image I present matches the one in my head — not the one that the camera’s computer algorithm thought was “average” for that scene. But those changes: cropping, white balance, contrast, highlight recovery, mid-tone contrast, noise reduction, saturation/desaturation are what moves the image along toward my vision.

And those changes are no different than what I would have been able to do in the film world with a combination of film stock, paper stock and developing chemicals, if I had had the resources and skills. So to me, even film was never really SOOC, either.

So, that SOOC image up there? It is a JPEG and I have my camera set to all neutral settings and it looks pretty good. This matches so much closer what I had in my head at the time:

Third Call: A New Year of Lessons — Cheryl

The kids and I started lessons today, and it was a full one. I’m thankful I thought to grab the camera, even though I didn’t take many shots. Before taking this picture of Henry, I had warmed up with a few others, and that likely has a lot to do with its being good enough straight out of the camera.

Second Call: Dancewear — Cheryl

I hesitated before choosing this shot. My fingers were itching to tweak those pinks and make them a little brighter — not to achieve greater veracity (the colors are pretty spot-on), but to create a little more “wow.” The more I study the photo, though, the happier I am with it. Restraint, parameters, boundaries: they can be good things.

First Call: Condensation — Cheryl

And thus we begin our second year of Call and Response. I’m excited and looking forward to new challenges and learning experiences. The month off was exactly what I needed. It was a chance to recharge the old creative batteries, and mine were seriously drained. I don’t feel like they’ve been completely renewed, but they’re energized enough for a strong start.

I chose SOOC, which stands for “Straight Out of the Camera” for this year’s first Call, because I’d like to go back to the beginning, so to speak. When I first fell in love with photography and started posting my work on Flickr, I did no post processing (except to add my watermark). It was good training, as it taught me to carefully compose my shots in camera. Since I knew I wouldn’t be cropping or adjusting light and color, I was careful to compose my shots without distracting items in the background, and I often manipulated my exposure compensation to get the richest colors possible.

Last year’s stint here at Call and Response and Jessica’s inspiring work nudged me into becoming open to manipulating my photos. While I still strive to practice good photographic fundamentals when I’m shooting, I’ve discovered a world of artistic freedom in Photoshop and Picasa. It’s not that I’m creating bad photos and then making them better; I’m creating good photos and adding to (or subtracting from) them. When all goes according to plan, I end up with creations that do more than simply record a scene or moment in time: they tell a story or evoke a mood or maybe, just maybe, reveal cosmos in chaos. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to get such results without post processing. I’ve simply found that the raw material I get out of the camera can often be improved.

This week, I’m hoping to re-train myself to work hard on the front end, so more of my future work will be outstanding, whether or not I do anything on the back end.

The Call: Off into the Proverbial Sunset (Sort Of) — Cheryl

Well, it’s time to escape — for awhile. Committing to shoot every, single day is a double-edged sword. The continuous practice is integral to improving, but the continuous demand can lead to burn-out and simply fulfilling a quota. In the past two months, for me, there have been more quota-fulfilling days than becoming-a-better-photographer days.

It’s time for a break (Jessica and I are taking off the month of August), a reassessment, and a new take on the theme of call and response. Neither of us know exactly what September will bring for C&R, but I’m thankful that my partnership with Jessica will continue. It has become a very important part of my life.

The Response: Vacation — Jessica

So, the end is finally here. And I, for one, am very excited to be escaping from the everyday demand of the 365 project.

I can only echo what Cheryl wrote so well. The double-edged sword has cut very close these last couple of weeks. Life is very busy for a mother of seven and lately just making it through the day has used up every spare brain cell I have.

Those were the days that C&R got a snapshot. I hate having to put up snapshots. That is why I’m ready to slow down and think through what I want to do with my photography.

See you in September!

The Call:  Dangerous Waters — Jessica

Well, so here we are at the end of the project. It’s always a little disconcerting to be finishing something. There’s pride at accomplishing a goal, and relief that the discipline that enabled you to reach that goal can be relaxed a bit. And then there is the fear…What now? What’s next?

Cheryl and I have a rough idea what we’d like to do with C&R for the second year. But for now, it’s still a bit hazy and undefined.

The same goes for my own personal projects…they are hazy and undefined. I need some time to think them through.

Because of all that, what’s next is a break, a short hiatus. And I’m really looking forward to it!

Response: Future Tense — Cheryl

I look at a rosebud, and I’m pretty confident that I know what comes next: a beautiful rose. I think about C&R, and the future is not quite so clear, but I don’t have a problem with that. To the chagrin of my husband and kids, I seldom plan further than a day in advance. I like to think of it as giving the Holy Spirit plenty of leeway. : )

The Call: Hummingbird’s Lunch — Cheryl

Today, even with my red shirt and burgundy minivan, I was hoping that the hummingbirds and insects enjoying the offerings in front of my house wouldn’t find me too noticeable. Bridget wondered what I was doing this afternoon when she saw me just sitting there, parked out front (especially since I hadn’t actually gone anywhere). Waiting patiently with my camera in hand, I was surprised by how quickly the time passed.

The Response: The Sea Lord’s Friend — Jessica

Sitting on the patio of the hotel it was hard to miss this little lizard. He was very noticeable on the white chest of the fountain’s Posiden.

The Call: Hotel Mirror — Jessica

The thing about vacation is that it’s the same job, just in a different location.

Response: Progeny — Cheryl

My aunt always tells me that Stella looks just like the three- or four-year-old me. Once in awhile, I can see it.