Tag: quality

What is your personal best? Is it a single image? Is it a series of images? Can it be your personal best of a session or outing? Do you even have a personal best?

I see book titles, TED talks, motivational articles, and quotes nearly every day talking about creating your personal best. Each of these talks about what to do to achieve your personal best. It is actions, it is words, it is a mindset, it is all sorts of these things. But, what does it all mean to you and me?

My personal best is relative, it changes from day to day. It may change from moment to moment. If you are like me, I live in a fluid ever-changing world. There are things I can control and there are things beyond my control. What I always have control over is how I react to each. The same goes for my photography. When I am out taking photographs whether they are in a studio or on location there are things I can control and things I cannot control. Let me take today’s weather as an example. Yesterday there was a chance for rain in the early morning hours. I am awakened at 5ish AM to the sound of thunder. Now there is a significant chance of rain nearly all day long. I can not control the weather, but I can still do my photography, rain or shine and it may alter my best. I may not be able to achieve the photographs I had planned but I can modify the plan and still work to achieve the best results I can.

Realizing your personal best may not be the absolute best. How many times have we seen others suggest that we move further from or closer to our subject even though they were not there at the time? It may not have been possible, but did you achieve your personal best given the circumstances as they presented themselves? Maybe. Only you can answer that question.

My take on achieving my personal best is an internal decision for me. I strive to put all my knowledge, skill, training, and effort into achieving my best but after I’ve completed the tasks at hand I review and ask myself is this your best? Rarely do I answer no because while it may not be the best I’ve ever done it may be the best I could achieve given the circumstances. If it wasn’t I have also achieved the knowledge that I can do better. I’ve learned what I need to improve upon and the next time I’m faced with those conditions I know what I need to do to achieve my best this time.

Open your mind that your best is always for the moment. The next time your best may be more or it may be less. Strive each day to do the best you can at that moment while remembering we live in an ever-changing world where we cannot control everything but merely adapt to the moment.

We see this type of headline often. Things like 10 simple steps to great financial freedom, or 5 easy ways to improve, or the greatest myths about ____________. Often the headline makes us curious about what fascinating information and insight the authors have to bestow upon us. Some will even go so far as to say, these are “proven” methods but when we get to read them we rarely see the proof. Well, I thought I would do something similar except I am not going to prove it.

We rarely question a painting or drawing as being exactly what a scene looked like. We understand it is an artist’s rendition of something or someone. With photography, we often demand that the scene be an exact recording of a scene or person. I won’t even say expect, we often DEMAND IT! Especially photographers. Why is that? Is it that other photographers are familiar with taking photographs? If we weren’t there at the time do we really know what the scene looked like?

If I were to give you the details of the exposure of the featured photograph, 1/500th of a second at f/5.6 using a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 48mm with the ISO of 100 using a Nikon D750 could you really make an exact replica of my image? Maybe but most like not. Not unless you were at this location on September 3, 2021, at 2:48 PM. It may be close but it won’t be the same. The light is different.

There is often so much emphasis put on the technical data of a photograph we forget the greatest influence on the look of a photograph is light and the skill of the photographer. The biggest myth of photography is that knowing the settings of the camera when a photograph was taken will give you enough information to recreate the shot. You may get closer if I included the lumens.

Stop worrying about the camera settings someone else used. Do you really want to recreate the work of someone else or do you want to create your own work? You might even get something better than what you’re attempting.

I absolutely love dramatic clouds in the sky when I’m doing landscape photography. So much more dramatic. And, with a bit of development in the digital darkroom, we can really accentuate the dramatic sky.

The scene above is actually much closer to what the scene really looked like when I took the photograph. To me, it’s somewhat mundane, a little drama but not nearly what I envisioned.

If you have followed me for a bit you know that I have absolutely no problem changing reality.

The photograph above I may have had to wait years to get, if not decades. Yes, I could probably get a thunderstorm over the grain elevator. This has much more drama than the original

In the fairly near future, I will have more time to spend getting the photographs I envision however, may still not be enough to really get what I’m looking for. I don’t try to say my photographs are documentaries when I have developed them in my digital darkroom but I do want to give them the look of reality.

There are also times when nature provides almost exactly what I’m looking for.

For me, it is more about drama.

It doesn’t always have to be a storm either.

I just don’t like the plain blue sky unless it fit my vision.

Have a vision of what you want to convey in your landscape photography. Don’t let yourself be limited by what nature provided at the time. Push the boundaries, gather assets that can be used later to create your vision.

Being creative can be exhausting. Unlike a light switch, you can’t turn it on or off, it just happens. Many times creative ideas come in waves, one right after another. Other times, it is like a proverbial desert, a wasteland. It is just for those occasions that I began writing my ideas down. I keep an electronic notebook that I can access on my smartphone, my iPad, or my computer since I always have, at least, one of them with me. I also keep a list of projects that I want to work on in the same electronic notebook. I just use a different tab for projects.

This practice works well for me and I was able to share some of those concepts in talking to another creative last night when we were talking about future projects. The one thing I do need to get a bit better at though is to write them down when I think of them. On too many occasions I get an idea and may not write it down until sometime later. It’s like trying to remember the details of a dream the next morning. You get the basic concept of the dream but you may have forgotten some of the more complex things.

Here is the exhausting part. I have so many ideas, concepts, and projects in mind and on my list that the challenge is getting them completed. As time goes by I end up getting involved in another project or concept. Whew! I run out of time and steam. This doesn’t even count my so-called 9-5 gig. I’m not complaining. I truly enjoy the creative challenge. In fact, I enjoy the creative challenge so much that I took on another project which is writing this blog daily at 4 AM.

Join me in the creative mindset, and start your own form of the creative log book. As you work on completing the concepts or creating the content don’t forget to catalog the resulting works of art.

Photography friends, mentors, and clubs are three ways to stay motivated and inspired with your photography. Of those, I have found that photography friends are especially important. Photography friends may call and say, “Hey let’s go shoot!”. They can also call up and just want to hang out, have dinner, or have a cold beer. Photography clubs are wonderful places to meet like-minded people but unless you make friends there the club usually only meets once a month or so. Photography mentors, I wish I knew. I’ve never really had a photography mentor outside of my photography course. Of the two mentors I had during my photography school one I liked the other was a bit gruff, but he gave me one of the most brutal critiques ever, one I still remember to this day.

I’ve been a part of two photography clubs and while I enjoyed them, I don’t really miss them with the exception of a couple of people. I did recently join another club, of sorts. I recently joined a group called the Kansas City Society of Contemporary Photography. It’s a bit more than a club. the Kansas City Society of Contemporary Photography runs art shows in their gallery. They sponsor other shows and like galleries display work for sale. I have yet to attend a function since I only joined a couple of weeks ago but I am attending a coffee and chat session at the gallery tomorrow morning. I was introduced to this society by a photography friend. This is a double win for me since I will be part of a club, so to speak, and I already have a friend there.

If you don’t have photography friends check out the local clubs nearby. You may find there are more people who are interested in photography in your area than you may think, yes even in small areas. Being a part of a group, even if it is just two, can be a great boost to your photographic creativity.

I sometimes forget this concept. Not every site where you can market your work recognizes art. They only market stock images, which have to meet “their” standards, which doesn’t allow for anything artistic. I don’t mean to imply that stock photography can’t be artistic, but you can’t have a soft focus or artistic lighting (must be evenly lit). So if you only light your subject using “advanced” lighting equipment it is often considered by “the expert” to be unevenly lit or poor lighting. If it has a soft focus it is posterized.

I’m not sure when the last time the “reviewers” were deep in the woods but guess what, there is uneven lighting even in nature. With this “rejection” based on the “criteria” given for the rejection I actually had to laugh.

Don’t let the rejection of a submission worry you. They don’t get art. A perfect example is having a photograph of a glass with soda in it that was accepted. Now, I haven’t sold a single license to the soda glass image but it met the “standards”. It’s their loss, not mine as some of the images have already been selected by a local business to promote an event.

Keep producing art. If buyers come, fantastic. If they don’t you’ve still got your art. After all, this is where the term starving artist comes from.