Anyone seeking inspiration, and a rare glimpse into the life and work of one of the American West’s greatest photographers, will do well to spend some time reading David Leland Hyde’s new blog “Landscape Photography Blogger“.
David is the son of photographer and wilderness activist Philip Hyde and offers, among tributes to his father’s photographic and environmental work, a moving narrative of his life.
Reader Recommendation: Landscape Photography BloggerTags: american west, environment, landscape, philip hyde, photography
I am temporarily severed from my image files and camera gear so no photographs this time around. The vacuum is filled with facts and a feeble attempt to grasp their meaning.
If I were to travel at the speed of light (roughly 670,000,000 mph) I would reach the other edge of the Milky Way in about 100,000 years. The Milky Way is but one galaxy out of over 100,000,000,000 in the observable(!) universe, some of which are home to over 1,000,000,000,000 stars each, many not unlike our own sun, many far larger. And oh, that is just a tiny part of the universe. The other 95% or so is made of dark matter and dark energy which we know little about. And then there are dimensions of existence beyond our limited perception of mere space and time.
I think of all the beauty and knowledge and experiences out there to be had, and of the realization that I will never know or experience or understand even a minute sliver of it.
Let me at least revel in the knowledge that so much is yet out there and that the struggles of one life, even one species, even one planet, or one galaxy, don’t amount to much. The particles and energy that make who I am today may yet return as something altogether different, but what of my consciousness and memories and revelations?
Frustrations Of A Self-Aware MindApparently not much, at least as it pertains to the goal of photographic technology. It seems comical that modern day film aficionados tout the benefits of a product that was really just meant to make life simpler and easier in the days of glass plates. Film ads of the 1800s and early 1900s boasted such benefits as “simplicity”, “no darkroom”, “don’t break”, and “cleaner, simpler, pleasanter than the old days”.
And now we can add “no chemicals”, “no incremental costs”, and “process and print in the comfort of your own home”.
Advancements in photographic technology were always aimed at eliminating distractions, freeing the photographer to focus (no pun intended) on making images rather than tools and processes.
How curious it is that some people can wake up in the morning, adjust the thermostat on the wall, retrieve food from an electric refrigerator, microwave their breakfast, shower using indoor plumbing, hop in a motorized vehicle, ride the elevator to the office, and bring up their electronic mailbox without batting an eye, yet froth at the mouth at the mention of using the same technologies for the simple task of recording images.
How strange to see people using the computer-powered(!) media to accuse computer imaging technology of anything from “cheating” to “the death of God’s light”. How silly will these proclamations seem to someone reading them 130 years from now?
As glass plates were in the early days of film, so is film today (to borrow Kodak’s own perfectly-phrased term) “impedimenta heretofore necessary” but no longer…
Let us now make great images. By any means.
Tags: ad, advertisement, digital, film, glass plate, kodak
Prior to leaving on my recent trip to the Pacific Northwest, I told a friend I needed time to myself to visit some ghosts. This was intended with all sincerity. Some of my closest friends, greatest role models, and dearest loves are ghosts.
Shortly before the trip I heard an NPR interview with Wendell Berry. He read a couple of poems from his new book Leavings which I found deeply moving and personal. I tried to find the book to take with me on my trip but alas it was not yet available. The cover image, a simple photograph in nostalgic warm tone, stayed with me as I meandered the wintry beaches and coastal woods. As expected, the Northwestern winter offered rainy gray days and the same subtle beauty and soft lighting that struck me in Berry’s book cover. I spent several days immersed in the velvety mist, breathing the rich scents of ocean, evergreens, mosses, and wet earth. And, for the most part, had the deep woods and beaches to myself. And the ghosts – they did come. It was an emotional and memorable journey through time and light and solitude.
Leavings was waiting for me when I returned home and I enjoy it a little at a time, poem by poem. They are intimate, sometimes sad, reflections, yet they read to me as if I had conjured up the words and thoughts and feelings myself. And, in that sense, they are comforting to me. The words converge with images of this past week and take me back to the cloudy, foggy, private scenes I photographed, and to those silent conversations.
Tags: black and white, coast, landscape, northwest, ocean, pacific, photography, rainforest, wendell berry, woods
I spent most of the holiday weekend on the road, quite literally. I drove about 1300 miles alone on the long lonely rural highways of Nevada, not seeing another vehicle or human presence for hours at a time. The intense chill made for crisp clean air, and I had to stop every so often just to soak in the peaceful silence and to observe the desert up close. This was a time to think, to cleanse the mind, to focus on exploring the most complex of concepts, unencumbered by the white noise and attention-deficit-inducing buzz of daily life.
I stopped somewhere along Route 375. I felt compelled to walk to a an area of jagged rocks some 1/4 mile from the road, just to touch them. I needed to fully appreciate their sharp edges and smooth faces with more senses than just vision. I also wanted to feel the cold air on my face, to breathe in the faint perfume of desert brush, and to listen to the silent stillness. I wanted to complete the experience. I always find it so much more satisfying and “real” when fully immersed in the scene – an array of sensations I always wished I could better convey in a photograph.
I remembered reading that the mountain ranges around me are pretty much unchanged from the way they were 10 million years ago. In fact if I had been standing right where I was, back a few million years, the only perceptible difference would likely be the existence of the road I was traveling. This road can’t have been here more than a few decades. Humans didn’t inhabit this land until 10,000 years ago or so. Our own species hadn’t even been in existence for more than 200,000 years, and yet – here’s a view 10 million years old, almost unchanged, still as vast and quiet as it had been for all that time. And who knows how many like it are out there, on this planet and others.
If you compressed the (presumed) time line of the known universe into a full-length movie, there’s a very good chance that humanity won’t even show up – our existence so brief it may well fall into a gap between consecutive frames. All our cultural heritage, all our arts, our religions, our creations, our wars, our epic stories, our cities, and our science, all occupying an almost infinitesimally insignificant amount of time and space in the grand scheme.
And yet, this microscopic blip on the universal clock is everything to each of us – our entire life, our chance to get a tiny taste of existence, and the most significant gift any of us will ever be granted. Each and every one of us is allowed a glimpse into a place of incomparable beauty, a celestial body of unique circumstances, grandeur, and complexity so much greater than anything we can hope to fully understand. For our short journey, we were each given the most advanced vehicle to ever exist in this unique place to roam around and explore with. How can one not feel profound gratitude in the face of such incredible realizations?
It saddens me sometime to think of the meaningless and unfulfilling ways so many choose or are forced to spend their individual blink of an existence, detached from the greater context of being, never fully grasping the possibilities, the incredible knowledge, and the powerful experiences to be had. Albert Camus summed it well when he said: “if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life”.
In the past, I tried to make the case for sustaining these ancient places in their wild state so that others like me may be similarly inspired by them. In expressing these thoughts I was often categorized as an environmentalist, or a conservationist. I am neither.
The original sin of the environmental movement is the very concept of the environment – an entity that is separate from humanity. The word Nature is similarly implicated. These fictional entities persist in the minds of many as something outside of ourselves, something we are free to choose whether to protect, preserve, use, alter, or destroy at our whim and without consequence. The reality is there is only one existence and it encompasses humans to the same extent as it encompasses all other life and matter and even knowledge and spirit.
The “environment” in the larger sense is not in danger. Human habitat is. We are so minute in the grand theme of things that if we were to disappear today our very existence may never be known by another form of intelligence for the rest of time. Neither should we be concerned about saving the planet. We can’t. In about 900 million years (give or take) the Earth’s atmosphere will no longer be able to sustain plant life, followed by a depletion of oxygen and the end of all life on Earth as we know it. This would have happened with or without us and in all likelihood humans will be long extinct and our impact long erased by then.
What we should do is our best to sustain and protect the system we are part of – the biological processes that support our physiology, and the wildness that feeds our spirit; not because it’s a nice or altruistic thing to do but because – whether we like it or not – we are not bystanders and our very existence is tied to them. There is no “us” vs. “nature” or “the environment.” We are all the same stuff and should do the right thing by ourselves. The “environment” could not care one way or the other if we survive or that we ever even existed.
Tags: conservation, environment, environmentalism, nature, nevada, preservation, wilderness, wildness
It’s almost impossible to have a conversation with professional artists these days without some mention of SEO and Social Networking. Everyone seems to be engulfed in an all-consuming struggle to rise to the top of the search engine heap and to drown out the competition in sheer number of posts. An astounding amount of energy is spent on keywording, Twittering, FaceBooking, AdWording, Friending, Blogging, and probably a few more buzzwords I am yet to stub my toe on.
There jury is still out on whether these activities actually pay off in ways beyond mere socializing but some consequences are already becoming clear, and they are not always favorable.
For the heck of it, I typed “landscape photography” into Google and began paging through the results. Some names I recognized, others I never heard of, the actual photography ran the gamut from excellent to downright appalling in no particular order. Ansel Adams showed up on page 81.
Let me say it again, in case you missed the point: in searching for landscape photography, Ansel Adams is listed on page EIGHTY ONE.
Those of us who grew up gathering knowledge from multiple information channels; whether books, museums, galleries, formal education, news media, magazines, presentations, etc. will surely recognize Adams as a premier figure in landscape photography. But, consider the fact that the Internet and search engines are rapidly eclipsing or even eliminating many of these same channels. In a few years, Google or the likes may well be the primary or even sole source of information for most people. When that day comes, Ansel Adams — on page 81 — may as well never have existed.
All things being equal, a good marketer will be more prominent than a poor one, but things are no longer even remotely equal. When popularity is all about search engine rankings, the quality of one’s work is no longer a barrier for entry nor a measure of success. Instead of great thinkers, great artists, great authors, or great teachers; there will only be great keyword hackers, who may or may not also possess other talents.
Success in the age of SEO is no longer about distinguishing yourself by talent or skill but rather by being able to exploit the system. It’s what allows mediocrity to push in line ahead of excellence.
Want to get people’s attention? Forget about creating good work, offering an insightful thought (of your own!) or a piece helpful advice. Just try to fit the word “Avatar” (or whatever the hot term du jour happens to be) into a Tweet.
You could plausibly make the claim that good marketing always gave one an edge, perhaps even an unfair one, but when Internet marketing offers such a huge advantage for those who can manipulate algorithms vs. those who can produce actual meaningful value, the skilled and the creative are now playing against the equivalents of card counters, bat corkers, and steroid users and with the same consequences: the game itself is rapidly losing its appeal for both the players and the audience.
Let’s also not ignore the dramatic dilution of content quality. Try to estimate the percentage of Tweets, blog posts, Flickr images, etc. that are completely devoid of meaning and usefulness. Am I the only one whose guess is in the high 90s? Do you really want to see a random stranger’s vacation photos that in the past were confined to the family album? Do you really care to know that the other day I dropped a large framed print on my foot and boy did it hurt? Well, I did, and I had the good sense not to Tweet about it to the hundreds of people who put their trust in me to provide them with useful information.
How much effort needs to be expended these days to pick something useful, inspiring, meaningful, or even just plain interesting from the barrage of data that flows through Social Media channels? Or, viewed from a different perspective: how much useful, inspiring, meaningful, and interesting content gets drowned out by the flux of idle banter and may never get the recognition it deserves? How many DaVincis, Mozarts, and Picassos may be out there who may never get a chance to stand out from the crowd?
I don’t know the answer but I will say for myself that I am still struggling with the enormous commitment of keeping up with online marketing and have yet to see a return on the investment. Even if the return is there, I have to ask myself if this is something I really want to do or really need in order to be successful. The answer will undoubtedly be a game changer for me, and likely for others. Don’t let anyone tell you that Internet marketing is free. If you place even a small amount of value on your time, the sheer magnitude of the commitment makes it a very costly proposition.
Also, for myself, I consider very carefully what’s worthy of sharing with the world before broadcasting a missive to hundreds or thousands of followers, subscribers, and friends. I also make very judicious use of the “Unfollow” button when others are not as considerate of my attention span. And, I take the time to page through search results, never assuming the highest quality content is necessarily always at the top of the pile. In fact, I often find that to be the exception.
My hope is that one of these days an ingenious computer scientist will find a way of quantifying a metric for “meaningful” so that true greatness will rise to the top, rather than optimized mediocrity. Then again, letting a computer (or its programmer) determine what amounts to “meaningful” for the rest of us is another slippery slope altogether.
The Unintended Consequences of Internet MarketingTags: art, facebook, google, photography, rating, seo, Social Media, twitter
The last thing I want is to start another useless film vs. digital debate. I did, however, want to share the results of a recent experiment that may be of interest to many of you who struggle with issue of “how large can I print?” This seems of special concern to those coming into digital capture from large format film (as I have).
I originally intended to experiment with new mounting and presentation techniques for mural-size prints. To that end, I made a series of 30×40″ prints for my own personal use, with the intent of sending them to a couple of service bureaus for mounting using different methods.
Since I planned to hang the prints on my own walls, I picked a few personal favorites I didn’t yet have on display. It was a mix of 4×5 film scans and digitally-captured images.
In the past, I subscribed to the common wisdom that up to a given print size the difference between digital files and film scans will be a wash but beyond a certain threshold, the large format scans will consistently have the upper hand. I was surprised to find (by my own subjective judgment) that this was not the case and in fact at this size some of the digital files actually produced sharper-looking prints.
This seems to contradict not only common perception but mathematical calculations (which I generally try not to argue with.) The explanation came to me as I was working on the files, preparing them for print. The raw 4×5 scans were indeed significantly larger but as anyone who worked with large scans knows, straight out of the scanner the files looks gritty; and lines, detail, and transitions appear a bit “fuzzy”. In comparison, a good digital capture, albeit containing less pixels, is very clean with clear detail and well-defined lines.
There is a difference between resolution and sharpness, the former being actual measurable detail and the latter being perceived/subjective appearance of detail. Until recently I thought they were well correlated but I’m no longer convinced.
At large print sizes, the digital files lend themselves well to interpolation while retaining the appearance of smooth lines and detail. The film scans, on the other hand, becomes fuzzier and harder to sharpen.
I now believe that rather than a clear threshold, there is an interim area where large format film still has sufficient detail and require little interpolation and can appear sharper than the digital capture but beyond that, where both formats require significant interpolation, the digital capture gives a sharper appearance despite having somewhat less detail.
In the coming few weeks I will ask friends who share my experience with various formats to evaluate these prints and see if they share my subjective impressions.
For now, though, I wouldn’t be too quick to assume that a large format scan will necessarily produce a better print. I will also think twice about the need for higher resolution digital capture (medium format or future camera upgrades).
This is one of the prints in the set. It is cropped from a file captured using a first-generation Canon 5D. To my eye (and surprise) it turned out to be the sharpest-looking print of the batch.
Tags: 4x5, canyonlands, digital, film, island in the sky, landscape, large format, photography, print size, tree, utah
This book is probably not what you expect it to be. When a photographer publishes a book about a road leading to seven National Parks, one might expect a tribute to the scenic beauty and natural history of the place, and indeed the book doesn’t disappoint. But, this book is about so much more than just geography and scenery.
Ann has a rare way of relating to people and gaining insight into their lives, struggles, hopes, and joys. The result is an amazing tapestry of human drama, colorful characters, and stories previously reserved to a privileged few, all posed against, and intertwined with, the dramatic and timeless landscape of the American West.
How many of us can muster the courage to stand in the middle of a road photographing a parade of Hell’s Angels, or the caring sensitivity to pierce through the hardened shells of small town farmers and cowboys, prompting them to share their most intimate fears, or the journalistic fortitude to track down stories passed down through generations in small rural towns? Ann is all that and the resulting book is a fascinating document of western Americana and a tribute to the lives of those who continue to hold on to the ways and romance of the American frontier in the face of imminent transformation, overseas wars, and a changing economy.
Buy this book, admire the photography, and most importantly: read it. It is a moving tribute to rare places and rare people.
The book is available from Sagebrush Press.
Image by Ann Torrence, used with permission
Tags: americana, ann, arizona, book, highway 89, hwy89, montana, national park, torrence, utah, west, western, wyoming
My latest piece on B&W printing is featured in the current edition of Popular Photography Magazine.
Tags: black, bw, landscape, magazine, photography, popular, technique, white
I’m always up long before dawn. Couldn’t sleep past sunrise if I wanted. One of my favorite things to do in these quiet solitary hours is go through some of my older work, paging through the years to times of inspiration and bliss. It’s a great way to start the day. I always wonder about people seeking a “cure” for insomnia. Why would anyone want to be cured of getting a little extra living done each day?
Tags: desert, escalante, landscape, photography, sunrise, utah