Cloudy with a chance of Music

For the first time, I can see out the side light windows by my front door. The ice storm has bent the 12' arborvitae nearly to the ground, snapping the tops without detaching them so they now resemble an arrangement of dried grasses rather than stately columns. A man came by to offer tree removal services but I just don't have the heart yet to give up on them. Maybe we can anchor them again; we have lost part of every tree in our yard and I feel exposed without them.

All day long I have been working on the photos from New Orleans to the sound of chain saws. I could use the energy of the street music from Frenchmen Street to liven me up. The brass and drums hold more hope than the dull thud and gasoline buzz. 

Photographing the dancing and playing was a challenge and one that I have got to figure out how to overcome. So much of what is interesting comes out at night...and doesn't stand still. In Mexico I was drawn to the dance and drum circles shaking through the streets in brightly colored feathers and shell covered leggings, something that happens after dark. I got the same blurry, oddly colored images as I worked to penetrate the darkness to show what I could see but that my camera could not. Those images were the first where I understood what luminance noise was and the inverse relationship between sharpness and noise.

The real trick is to somehow create images that express what I saw. This is more than an act of light because my brain fills in more than the frozen mechanical cyclops that is my camera can capture. So much of what we see isn't actually there. It's really about finding that mixture of technical skill and experience part of which lies in the taking of the photo and part of which is in the post production work. I don't want the images I have of night dancing to look like they were taken at noon. I don't want the people who are filled with movement to be crisply still. It was dark and alive with bright spots and absolute shadows; things half revealed and too fast to be seen. 

I dropped the exposure down by 2 full stops and bumped the ISO up to 2500 figuring that the noise would have to be dealt with by softening (thank you to Ben Long for the great run down on night photography at Lynda). I thought this was an okay compromise since the images would never be razor sharp anyway - the night of drinking and dancing was soft and blurry and so would be any images I created of it. The motion of the dancers' feet and hands drags across the images but doesn't dissolve the framing or leave the figures slopped across the scene. 

I wouldn't say that I think I've nailed this but I am making some progress in understanding how to make the camera work for me instead of telling me what I can and cannot have. If photography is writing with light, night photography can be whispered through highlights but there is still something ferocious in the shadows.

What is a Portrait?

Portrait of boy and his dog

This isn’t something that I would have thought to be particularly controversial. You take a picture of somebody and bam you have a portrait, right? I mean, clearly there is going to be variation in the quality, Richard Avedon’s Dovima with the Elephants is a little better than the selfie I took of my new hairdo looking down into the partly thumb- obscured lens of my disposable camera. 

It wasn’t until I was looking at Flickr groups with titles such as ‘portraiture’ or ‘people’s portraits’ or ‘artistic portraiture’ that I realized there did actually seem to be a wide variety of interpretations of what constituted a portrait. Yes, this question began not by wrestling with the idea of the Greek blank eyed marble discus throwers as portraits or types, but from the everyday world of Flickr. 

Portrait of my son

Clearly, some of this confusion stems from people simply not caring that their picture out of the window of the airplane capturing parts of the wing and a bit of cloud didn’t constitute a portrait. I have to say I can also firmly state that poorly drawn pictures of oral sex also don’t make the cut, I’m not sure when that became unclear. 

Portrait of a Monkey

Then there are some gray areas. Can pictures of animals be portraits? What about of a building or a plant? Is it possible to paint a portrait of an inanimate object? What is it about a picture of an individual monarch butterfly that makes it less of a portrait than a picture of an individual person? Sure, to me all of the monarchs look the same, but I bet they would say the same of people. 

So, whenever I run out of knowledge, I turn to the gods of google. I started my quest with the usual evocative form of address, designed to flatter such deities: 

“Oh gods of google, what is a...”

I was immediately interrupted by the eager demons of autofill: 

Angel Santos, World Famous Ceramacist

“what is a thot?”
“what is a good sat score?” “what is a bitcoin?”
“what is a good credit score?” 

 No, wait, that’s not what I need. Hold on...what is a thot? Okay, I’ve looked that up and I’m not going to share it here. Nevermind. It’s enough to know that the plural form is thotties. I’m glad that’s been thought through. 

I pushed boldly forward with my query: 

“What is a portrait?” 

As always, the first gods to respond were Wikepedia, god of common knowledge and esoteric information, and Youtube, god of whatever people thought of last now that everybody has a video camera all of the time and apparently very little common sense or understanding of what other people might find interesting. I pushed past them to a source that seemed more respectable, The National Galleries of Scotland. 

Portrait of Armando Arriega

The answer comes in a charming short video with responses from the curators to that very question. What is immediately clear is that, like all things that we are accustomed to, any thoughtful answer is much less definite than we would think. In fact, it seems to me that the very familiarity with the word prevents us from every actually understanding what it means. One of the first responses is that it is an evocation of a person. Another curator states that in a portrait, there is an emphasis on the uniqueness of an individual (possibly why a picture of a monarch butterfly, no matter how beautiful, is not a portrait because we just don’t know how to evaluate monarchian uniqueness). 

Portrait of the Churro-maker's daughter

Then, the waters get muddy again with Keith Hartley’s disclosure that a portrait doesn’t always have to be of a person, but that it can be of a thing as well. In fact, by the end the curators really seem to be falling apart...and remember the are world class experts at the National Portrait Gallery. What is so wonderfully charming about this video though is the very frank confusion and recognition of the humor of that state by the curators. 

Portrait of a Dancer

Nicola Kalinsky begins to address the question of who makes the portrait as an element of determining what a portrait is. Also, she invokes the existence of a memory in connection with the image as an essential characteristic. 

If a portrait is individuality, connection, and memory in a visual form. Where does that leave our photograph of a monarch? Probably without portrait status after all, no matter how beautiful the butterfly, any memory held by a butterfly would not be recognizable as such by a person and vice versa. When thinking of a family dog, or any of the higher order of mammals (do not distract me by asking me what that means...I can’t answer everything...) there is clearly a connection and a memory and individuality on a different level. 

Of course, the best definition is saved for last and comes from Gerd Sander, photographer and grandson of the photographer August Sander: 

Portrait of Don Jose Lopez

“It’s like being in love you know, it’s the same thing...you never know how it happens but if it happens right a good outcome will be there.”

Maybe a good portrait is one that makes me fall in love with the sitter, whether with their eyes, their smile, their power, or their dream. Rather than dispute with anyone over their personal experience of that love, let the definition be expansive rather than exclusive. After all, we’re always better off with more love than less.

The Long and Winding Weekend

I wish I lived in some place with an amazing and dramatic view that I could use for practicing photography techniques, I fairly quickly have exhausted the small suburban backyard genre…although I'm sure people will say 'a good photographer can find a photo in anything.' None of those people are invited to my birthday parties because they are obnoxious. Also because I am too old to have birthday parties.

I have been on the B&H photo/video channel of youtube again, this time watching another of Jeff Cable's videos on night photography. I did take some night shots outside up at the trees and into the night sky, just to practice some of the exposure techniques. Nothing particularly interesting visually came out of it, but it got me ready to do some night shooting in more interesting areas. Also, I didn't want to change out of my pajamas yesterday and that somewhat limits my ability to roam the wide world looking for photos, so it's at least partly my fault.

Since I haven't shot anything in the last couple of days (other than the light streaming through the plastic ball that my rats roll around in…very dramatic and probably would fill a previously unknown void in the stock photography world), I revisited some of my images from Mexico. I took a lot of pictures at Monte Alban in Oaxaca and I keep looking through them thinking there will be more interesting stuff in them because the site itself was so wonderful. I have come to realize though that a lot of those types of environments require people in them in order to be more than just a visual note of the sites appearance. The sky there is big, but somewhat dusty and it was completely cloud free without being that deep piercing blue that can make photos stand out. The grass was fairly dry, the stones of the site are shades of buff and orange and I didn't take sufficiently good quality images to stitch together for the panorama, so instead I have overall panoramas where everything is just too small to really appreciate. It's like I'm learning…So, clearly, I will have to return in the future (because I can't return in the past or I would) and try again. 

I did come across one image of a woman walking across the top of one of the platforms that has grown over and the nearly white/blue sky disappears as a background creating this nice relationship between her figure and the lone tree growing in the middle of the frame. I'm pretty happy with this image and actually think it does a better job of capturing some of the desolate nature of the place. It wasn't all like this, the site is expansive and there are parts with trees that were absolutely overflowing with yellow flowers and alive with the sounds of thousands of bees. But, it was very hot and dry and so this feels like one of the moods of Monte Alban. Particularly since I think we had run through all of our water by the time I made this image.

One of the other things that I have learned from listening to photographers is that I shouldn't post every image I make, just the best ones. In that spirit, I am going to try to limit the images I put on the blog. I also would like to go back through my Flickr page and see if I can cut down on the number of images I have displayed there. It's hard to erase them, even though I know I still have them on my hard drive, but it makes sense to not have mediocre work out there to become part of any first impression I make. Given that Flickr seems to be somewhat like Facebook for photographers (shout outs about what you've done and a popularity game) I'm not sure what benefit the time spent on there really has, yet, but I'm still hopeful that there is a reason to be involved. We'll see.