The Full Body Photographer

It’s pretty hard to bring sex into a blog about compositing, but I’m going to try. I was going to title this post “Viagra for Photographers” but I think we are all pretty tired of Viagra jokes.

Everybody has those days when they get all there gear together, set out to make do their thing and find … absolutely nothing. There is no response, no attraction, ones brain is filled with Styrofoam and thoughts of failure. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a pill …?

I live in a remote, rural setting with a lot of dogs. Whenever I set out to find pictures, there’s at least one dog along for the tour. Usually a Jack Russell or two, but sometimes a Basset Hound. We all set out in search of our prey.

I am jealous of the dogs. They find their subjects, not only with their eyes, but with their ears and their nose. The Jacks will stand stone still for minutes at a time, listening and staring at the ground, then suddenly jump about two feet into the air. When they land, their feet are already roto-tilling the ground sending dirt flying – I’ve been hit by flying turf more than once. Or they see things, or they smell them. Sometimes all three at once. They hunt with every fiber of their body.

The Basset can track anything, anywhere, just by inhaling. She tracks me just for the joy of it, howling and baying all the while, even when she can see me. (Once she actually caught something; a mole. However, rather than kill it, she held it gently , head-first in her mouth and the critter bit her severely on the tongue. She wouldn’t let go, but she made a terrible wailing. I had to rescue her.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if great visual subjects sent out a scent, or made a particular sound – a humming or rustling – anything at all would be most helpful when ones eyes have gone tone deaf? The sensation as one zeroed in on that perfect photographic target would be positively climactic.

Find Where the Light is Wrong

In a previous post I described how easy it is to miss incorrect on-object shadows (self-shadowing) when making a composite. Below is a picture that I thought was finished. However, I now see at least one leaf that is wrong. Can you spot it?

[it's the pale pink leaf in the lower left quadrant]

Shadow Shape Test

In the illustration below, I have added a cast shadows to the same leaf (2x in each picture). The light direction is indicated by the red arrow. I have not added/corrected the on-object lighting (self-shadowing) on any of the leaves as that would make it too easy. Which of the two pictures has approximately correct cast shadows? [looking at shape only; not edge blur or fade]

The correct answer is the picture on the left. If you picked the one on the right, look again. You need to pay attention to the 3D shape of the leaf, not to the 2D edge.

The Moral High Ground

In today’s posting on The Online Photographer, guest writer Ctein has an essay called The Photo-Fetishist League. In it he pokes fun at photographers who are obsessed with some particular method or feature of photography and who aggressively advocate their position on whatever it is that they have fetish-ized.

By so doing, Ctein claims for himself the moral high ground of being free of that about which he is writing. The people with such fetishes claim the moral high ground over what they believe; Ctein claims the moral higher ground of having a better, more balanced perspective on what matters in photography.

Commenters to Ctein’s posting on at The Online Photographer are now claiming various even higher moral grounds above even Ctein. We are talking really high, here. Right up there with Jimmy Carter.

I, secretly, wish to claim the ultimate moral high ground of not being at all interested in moral high grounds. However, obviously, by even making this post, I have blown it.

The only way to achieve that perfectly virtuous highest of all moral positions is to not ever make any post of any kind on the topic of moral high grounds. It’s sort of a zen thing; like the country music song “If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me.”

Photography is a Performance Art

Not too long ago, I was driving along a two lane highway in the country when traffic slowed to a crawl. While inching along, bumper to bumper, we (the people in cars) passed a photographer on the side of the road. He was an older gentleman, who looked like a nice fellow, balding, slightly, not thin but not too fat, dressed neatly and comfortably  for a fall day in Virginia. He was shooting from a tripod. Looked like 35mm, medium focal length lens with hood. Had his cable release in hand. I wondered why he needed the tripod for a bright nearly midday scene, but some people are fastidious about such things. I looked at what his camera and his gaze were pointed towards and didn’t see anything that I would have wanted to photograph.

In the car in front of me, there were five people. Two in front, three in back. I watched as all heads turned first toward the photographer, then towards what his camera was pointed toward. Next, they appeared to engage in animated conversation, occasionally looking again at the photographer and then at what he was photographing.

The single person in the car behind me looked briefly at the shooter, and at what he was after, then turned and stared pointedly in the opposite direction.

All of us judged his performance. I gave him points for the tripod and for his concentration and commitment, but deducted points for the midday light and his subject. I’m not sure what the score was from the car in front, but the fellow behind me clearly didn’t give him high points.

Mary Lou Retton (famous gymnast for you young whippersnappers) may have been able to score perfect tens for her performance on the uneven bars, but could she have done that AND at the same time make great art?

Targets

There are three ways to describe what you aim for when making a picture:

1. Imitation. You think about pictures that you admire and try to photograph or make something similar. Your attention is on remembering what those other images were like and on matching them as nearly as possible. This is a great way to learn.

2. Pleasing the audience. You listen to what people say about pictures (all photos, including your own) both in person and on the Internet and then try to tailor your pictures to suit those preferences. By definition, you won’t be making anything personal or provocative, but pleasing viewers is a natural and comfortable goal, especially if the third way is not happening for you yet.

3. Find what stirs you up; what moves you; what excites and holds your attention and make pictures about that. The only thing in your target zone is your own busy imagination – in which you have total confidence. Unfortunately, this can be hard (or impossible) to translate into an effective image. Number 1 is much easier, and number 2 is so very tempting.

Try for 3, use 1 if you can’t do 3 and resist 2 as much as you can. In any event, have fun and keep making pictures. Stopping is not an option.

Economics

I just found myself quoting Joseph Schumpeter in a photography forum. If I admit that I read the Economist cover to cover every week, I will probably lose my digital artist license, so I won’t admit it.

Schumpeter’s  best known theory was that of ‘creative destruction’. From the book ‘Essential Economics’: “Perhaps because monopolies often become lazy, successful innovation may come from new entrants to a market, who take it away from the incumbent, thus blowing “gales of creative destruction” through the economy. Eventually, the new entrants grow fat on their monopoly profits, until the next gale of creative destruction blows them away.”

 Painting > view cameras > hand held > digital imagery > [who knows what].

Another economic phrase relevant to compositing is ‘cost effective.’ It’s not worth expending  the extensive editing time needed to make a good composite scene in Photoshop if you can spend less time simply going out and making a (straight) photograph of that same scene. Compositing is used for making otherwise unattainable images – or nearly unattainable such that they are very time-expensive.

Farting Around

I spent the whole morning making a joke image to post on photo.net. I am a bad person…

The Nowhere series that I am working on now is hard. Jokes are fun. Today I needed a little break.

Here is the picture. Pretty silly. It’s called “Infidelity”.

Now, back to work.

Distance: a Mini-Rant

Things in the far distance are: flat (tones merge towards gray), monotonous (colors merge towards the tint of the ambient light), blurry (see the previous two entries), and small (duh!).

This is really, really obvious to anybody with their eyes open. So why do I see, time after time, composites with (added) distant objects that are contrasty, richly colored, sharp as a tack, and big (!).

Stop it. Please.

Dirt

There are a bunch of red zones in compositing to which one must pay particular attention when trying to achieve a desired result.

I have already hammered away at the overwhelming importance of cast shadows and edge work as well as, to a slightly lesser extent, on-object shadows.

An area that I have forgotten to mention because it’s something I generally don’t do rather than something that requires effort, is how you deal with the ground upon which a composite is built. The dirt that has to be there somewhere under all of the stuff on top that one is fiddling with.

As a rule, I use one base image. I don’t try to mix up a near foreground from one picture with a middle ground from another and a distant view from a third – or any combination of the above. I have found that when you mess with the ground, then that recombined base will dominate the picture. If that is what you want, then go for it. I did that in the Four Ways series where I was interested in the tension between the obviously false ground with repeated objects; and the nevertheless true/consistent/single-source lighting.

Our brains are adapted to be particularly sensitive to some things and not so sensitive to others. Incorrect cast shadows and environmental/ground disruption or inconsistency are two such areas because when they are not exactly right, viewers will be profoundly distracted by them. 

You can mess with the ground if you want to, but I think you have to make it overt. Attempts to conceal changes somehow make it more, not less, alarming.

In my pictures I especially enjoy making scenes that the subconscious mind will (should…) see as just fine while the rational, reasoning mind simultaneously sees them as obvious fabrications. If the lighting, edgework, behavior and ground are all perfect, the subconscious is perfectly happy to accept what it sees even as the rational mind knows that the image is blatantly not real.

Changes to the ground – as well as incorrect shadowing - are areas where the rational mind will often fail to see anything wrong while the subconscious instantly smells a rat. People can enjoy a clearly intended visual exercise of reality versus surreality, but they don’t like a picture that looks like a mistake; where the overwhelming instinctive response is “Something is wrong. This does not work.”