Update (28-Jan-2008): Robin and Doug have both posted their comments on the workshop. Looks like they’re going to do it again in about six weeks and they’re offering half price for those of us who attended this time. It will be interesting to see where I am with the exercises by that point and whether I am ready to try again.

Doug Plummer and Robin Shapiro led a new photography workshop today in Seattle: The Photograph Within. It’s different than other photography workshops I am aware of since the focus was not on technique, or other technical matters like printing or digital darkroom work, nor even about the topics that typically concern most artistic workshops like composition. Instead, the workshop was about the zone of awareness where you’re engaging your right brain, how to listen to the messages that come from that non-verbal but essential-to-art part of your brain, and how to get into that zone.

There were 12 participants and they all had significant experience with photography; the workshop included several current (and one retired) professional photographers. There were amateurs there as well and I was far from the only one without a formal art background.

Developing sensitivity to your body was the foundation for most of the exercises. As I understood it, the right part of your brain communicates through sensations in different parts of the body. They would help us clear our minds and "listen" to our body and then go make some photographs. We then explored what we felt as we composed the photos and pressed the shutter. There were other exercises, like thinking about our preferences for different things like particular foods or favorite types of movies and where we felt a response in our body to those.

This seemed to be easy and even natural for most of the people in the room but I–not surprisingly–had a hard time with it. I approach everything analytically and verbally. I think I have managed somehow to build a simulacrum of the functions of the emotional right brain out of purely analytical thoughts but it clearly limits what I can do with photography–or at least it limits how much I can enjoy what I am doing with it.

Today was the first time they have done the workshop and I suspect they will change the format a bit in the future. There was too much to fit into the time but not nearly enough time to experiment with the day’s lessons and discover what they mean for each of us personally. There was especially not enough time for me, though Robin did give me some "homework" that I will be practicing. First, when I have to make a choice, I am supposed to quiet my mind and find what part of my body is responding to the choice. We all make thousands of choices a day so I suppose I will just do this as often as I practically can. The other exercise is more directly related to photography. I should find something I haven’t taken pictures of before and I am supposed to stand in front of that thing and look at it until my analytical brain gets bored, then I will be ready to take my pictures.

It should be interesting. I have a selection of my photos from the day in a photoset. The pictures are OK, but they are not nearly as good as even my normal daily work. It’s not surprising because the focus for the day was on the process of taking the photos, not on the final result.

In response to my post about my frustration with my photography, Mark Hobson, a.k.a The Landscapist, neatly summed up my problem:

Creating Art is an emotional, not an intellectual, act.

And he provided a way to start working on it:

Get your hands on a point-and-shoot, set it on Auto, take it everywhere you go, and just take pictures of anything that catches your eye.

I’ve heard this advice, or variations on it, several times in the past, notably from Ben Lifson. But it never quite sunk in. People would say: just shoot anything you see that interests you. Carry a camera around all the time.

But when I filtered what they said through my brain, I added an assumption: that I should try to make good photos of whatever interests me. So I would dutifully carry a camera around and, seeing something, would stop, try to frame it, think about the light, think about the composition, think, and think, and think. And then I would go home and expect to see successful photos. And, of course, I would be disappointed.

But the key is to eliminate all that thinking mess. And eliminate any expectations that these photos should be “good” or presentable. The important thing, I realize, is to act: take photos of anything that interests me. There’s tremendous value in that alone. And then I can look at what I have shot and, in each photo, ask myself why I took the photo. I believe this act of photographing without thinking and without any expectations of the results, and then reviewing what I have shot, will be the start of something wonderful.

I’ve been doing that for a couple of days now. I have to admit that it’s a whole lot harder than I thought it would be. I almost had to grit my teeth to take those first few shots. But I’m already beginning to notice things about my visual interests that I had been vaguely aware of before — things that I like to look at and would like to photograph but resisted because I didn’t think it would be an interesting photograph. I hope to teach myself to take photos of things that actually interest me as opposed to those things that my intellect says ought to interest me, or those things that interest other people. And once I recognize what I’m interested in, and have convinced myself to take those pictures, I can go to work on making good pictures of those things, whatever “good” may mean.

At the Eastside weblog meetup tonight, we talked some about cameras and photography and I told Anita and Jules that sometimes the expectations I have set for my photography are more burden than benefit: I can hardly bring myself to just take a snapshot anymore (although you might not believe if you look at my Flickr photostream — at least I don’t intend to take snapshots).

I’m not saying I want to take snapshots. But along the way I lost the joy of taking photos, or I forgot why I liked photography in the first place. I have managed to replace enjoyment with a burden of responsibility. Each time I pick up a camera, I have to think about the composition in the frame, and I want to make sure that the edges of the frame have strong forms, and I don’t have washed out highlights or shadows lost to unrecoverable blackness, and I’m looking for lines or progressions of shapes that will lead the eye through the frame but not out of it, and I’m wondering whether the picture would be stronger if I took it from over there instead, or from down on the ground, or from up on those stairs. And, oh yeah, what’s this photo actually about? What mood or emotion or idea am I trying to convey? Now what can I eliminate from the frame so that the idea is stronger? Is this idea better communicated through a wide angle, a normal field of view, or with the compression of a telephoto? Do I want the whole frame in focus from front to back or do I want to open up the aperture so that I selectively focus on only a part of the frame? Is there enough light for that aperture to keep the shutter speed up and avoid blur? Do I care if those trees in the background converge because I’m not holding the camera perfectly parallel to the ground? Is the horizon straight? In scenes like this, does my camera tend to meter them high or low? So how much exposure compensation do I want to dial in? Would a bit of fill flash help? How much ambient light do I want to let in?

And on and on. Read that paragraph again — did you notice any concern about what I was taking a picture of?

I came home after the Meetup and, while Dawn was playing Elebits, I popped up Bloglines and saw that Timmy Corkery had a new post. With a scan of this wonderful Polaroid photo from years ago. Since I hadn’t been checking Flickr in a while, I had a look at the rest of his photostream.

Timmy has fun with his photos. And I have fun looking at them. He doesn’t try to make “fine art” photographs: he takes photos to tell stories. He tells stories about the food he loves, about his bicycles, about his friends. There’s this joy of life — of his life — that sings through Timmy’s photos.

Somewhere along the way, in my quest to make better photographs, I went off into the weeds. I decided that I wanted to make art, not photos, or not just photos. So I spent a lot of time studying the techniques and theory of fine art photography and sought to produce photos that would stand on their own as artistic creations: photos that would be appreciated as art on their own, not for their content. In fact, it was almost as though the subject didn’t matter: that I would truly have succeeded when I could make a great artistic photo of anything at all, where the question “what is this a photo of?” is irrelevant.

But I forgot, or never learned, that a true artistic photo doesn’t choose the forms and the shapes instead of the content: it starts with the content and adds all that visual grammar of art to it. It intensifies the beauty or the emotion of the subject with a strong composition and interesting shapes and forms.

Maybe that’s why I can’t enjoy so many of the fine art photoblogs: like me, they think the design is the message, not a way of clarifying it. There are a few art photographers whose work I enjoy: Billie Mercer, Paul Butzi, and Doug Plummer. There’s a common thread for all three: they shoot what they love and let the art follow. Billie has her adopted town of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico; Paul has fences and rural landscapes (and before that the rocky beaches of the Pacific Northwest); and Doug has contra dancing and sticks.

So maybe I should just open my eyes, stop pretending like I know everything (or anything) and let the joy I feel everyday come through my photos. Let go of the pretensions that have produced my recent spate of drivel and just tell a few stories like Timmy.

The details are finally available about the long-rumored Canon EOS 30D. Did they change to a 1.3x format as so many expected? Did they improve the sensitivity of the sensor by another stop? How many megapixels is this one?

They didn’t do any of those things. The 30D has the same sensor as the 20D. The major differences: a spot meter (still a 3.5% circle, and not a 1% circle); ISO settings can be changed in 1/3-stop increments; the rear LCD is larger and nicer; and they added the Picture Style image processing parameters.

Either Canon has hit the wall of physics the pundits have been predicting as manufacturers cram more megapixels onto the chips, or they wanted to protect the recently-released, and much more expensive, Canon EOS 5D.

Canon did something kind of like this when they moved from the D60 to the 10D (both cameras had 6-megapixel sensors) but there were more significant changes between those two than the 20D and the 30D.

All the people who have been foaming at the mouth in the DPReview Forums for the past few weeks must be terribly disappointed.

More interesting to me is the new EF-S lens: 17-55mm f/2.8 IS. If I didn’t already have the 17-40, I would be looking seriously at this. Yes, it’s EF-S only, but it looks like Canon is dedicated to the format so it’s not a dead end — there will be resale value. And it’s a wide lens with image stabilization. Add to that the f/2.8 max aperture, and this would do so much that I’ve wished for from my 17-40 f/4 L.

Tags: Canon, 30D, camera, photography
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