Early color photograph holds a special place in my heart. The pioneers, like William Eggleston and Joel Meyerowitz, showed that color photography could be used for more than advertising and editorial work, especially when taken out on the street.
But even before those two guys, and their comrades like Stephen Shore and Alex Webb, photographers in the 1950s were blazing a vibrant trail.
Ernst Haas was one of these trailblazers, exploring streets and urban scenes in the ’50s, and making his living as a Magnum photographer. A reissued book of Haas’s photography, Color Correction, is out from Steidl, and it’s a great overview of Haas’s personal work.
Haas sits in the same photography family as early color photographers like Saul Leiter. You get the sense that color, light, and abstraction were all tools Haas (and Leiter) used to express his personal vision.
It’s Haas’s use of light and shadow that really gets me excited. That low-key work, combined with the vibrant colors, is what attracted me to Haas in the first place.
Color Correction is an affordable look into that midcentury color photography that’s timeless and continually satisfying.
This time each year, all the major camera and lens companies put their products on sale, along with the rest of our consumerist-crazy world. You can get some seriously great deals from Thanksgiving to the new year.
Rebates, bundles, sales – if you’ve waited all year, and you’ve been a good boy or girl, now is the time to grab your gear.
Six years ago, it’s exactly what I did. I bought an older-model Canon Rebel T1i with a lens bundle, and it changed my life. Here I am today, a hobbyist photographer, because I jumped on a great deal during the holidays.
Here’s a tip to help you feel better about your purchases: If you shop through Amazon, use their AmazonSmile program to help your shopping dollars give back to a charity or cause you care about (my dollars support our local nature center). Or shop through the affiliate links of an artist you enjoy.
Give back to others, and those in need. And then be good to yourself, if you really mean it.
For many photographers, going into depth on digital asset management (DAM) can be good and bad. Good, because sometimes it’s interesting to know how other photographers manager their photos. Bad, because – well, maybe we should be concentrating on something else.
For me, especially lately, my system has been really crazy. In short, here’s how I do things now:
Load my photos from my card reader into Lightroom as DNG files, organized by date
Go through and mark my favorites, and process them
Export the processed photos as high-quality JPGs into dated folders on an external drive
Load those JPGs into Aperture, tag them, get the metadata right, and organize them by months and days, by year.
From Aperture, I take those photos and send them everywhere else: Flickr, Facebook, photo books, calendars, etc. But before they get to Aperture, my photos are filtered and sorted two different ways.
Why not just keep them in Lightroom? I like Apertures metadata handling, organizational scheme, and export options better (here’s my setup). It works like I like to work.
Why not just start in Aperture? Because I like Lightroom’s post processing setup way better, including using VSCO for editing.
For a long time, this setup has worked surprisingly well. One place to process photos, one place to organize and create print projects with them. Except last week when I went to print a photo book of my daughter:
Bonk! Aperture no longer lets you print photo books or calendars (this after I had done all the hard work already).
So why use Aperture anymore if one of the main benefits has vanished? Good question – one I’m wrestling with. If all that’s left is Aperture’s superior organization methods, then a switch to Lightroom means relearning my tag management and organizational strategy. Plus I have photos in Aperture that do not live in Lightroom, like from my iPhone. All those will have to get moved over and sorted.
When I want to make a photo book, I’ll have to either import photos in Apple’s Photos app on the Mac, or stick with Lightroom and create photo books in there, probably through Blurb. My Flickr setup will have to change. And I’ll have a bunch of tagging and sorting to do.
My plan, so far as I’ve thought about it, is this: continue to use Aperture through the end of the holidays, and use the time in between to slowly migrate my system to a Lightroom-only DAM philosophy.
Aperture was a great program while it lasted. Now that it’s officially on life support, it’s probably time for me to rethink my damn DAM strategy.
I was invited to give a talk at the Jackson Civic Art Association Tuesday night on my still life photography: what was my thinking, what were my techniques, etc. It was also a how-to for other artists to think about making their own still life paintings, drawings, or photos.
It’s a good way to really think about your own projects. If you have to explain the whole thing, from idea to execution, you get really intimate with your process. I feel like the talk was good for me and helpful for them.
And many of the group members did come up and compliment me on my presentation. “I really appreciate the length of your talk,” one lady told me. “Some people are up there for hours going on and on about technique.”
That’s another thing: can you show and tell in an efficient time frame?
In another life, I was probably a teacher. Coworkers at my last job nicknamed me “Professor Dave” because of my presentation style, and my love for getting up on a whiteboard and scribbling out thoughts and ideas. I see talks like the one I gave Tuesday as part lesson, part performance. It’s fun for me.
It was also fun to break down my inspirations, thinking, and planning during the still life project.
What if we finally thought about breaking out of that narrow little world I call “photoland”? If were really serious about it, that would not entail giving up all of the things we believe in so dearly. But it would mean thinking about a lot of them a bit differently. You don’t like Humans of New York? Well, try to do a site that does the same thing, but better (whatever your idea of “better” might be).
Colberg’s points are that (a) photographers might want to keep their art world exclusive (“Do photobooks, for example, always have to be luxury objects?” he asks), and that (b) nothing interesting comes from catering to that exclusive world.
Watching the election results roll in on TV tonight
Flush my well water so it’s safe to drink
Vote for candidates who respect education, science, and the findings of scientists
Finding another solution to printing a beautiful photo book that I’ve already laid out and captioned
An action-packed day here in America as we elect our local, state, and national leaders for the next two to four years. I vote in a rural township hall, and usually only have a dozen or so people in front of me when I go to vote. This year, I’m taking the kids with me out of child care necessity, but I’m looking forward to exposing the kids to this important national ritual.
If you follow me on Twitter, you can probably guess at my political affiliation. After being nervous about the outcome for weeks now, over the weekend I finally resigned myself to trusting the national body politic to make the wise choice.
Frankly, I’ll just be glad when it’s over. And for all of us, I hope we pay less attention to this stuff until much later in the cycle, for sanity’s sake. It’s not healthy for America to be in campaign mode for 18-plus months. Six months would be plenty.
November so far here in Michigan has been rare and lovely: mid 60s, sunny, and the leaves have held on for what seems to be a longer time.
But then there’s all the weirdness in my life right now: the whole family has been sick, we’re trying to sell our house, the election. To top it off, yesterday our water well pump gave up the ghost – while I was in the shower, with shampoo still in my hair, no less.
That’s life, right? The good and the bad. The strange and the secure. Everything is in transition.
Luckily, the nicer weather means more chances to make photographs. I took the boy to an area nature preserve yesterday for some hiking, just to get out in the woods. My wife picked up a bushel of random apples yesterday, so I may do a little still life project around that.
Strange November. It may get even stranger tomorrow night. Make sure you get out and vote.
