"Research the following terms and how they relate to photography...."
Exposure
Correct exposure is determined by the combination of aperture (f-stop), shutter speed, and ISO.
f-stop: f stands for the focal length of the lens the slash means "divided by." So if your lens is 50 mm and the f-stop setting is 1.4 = 50/1.4 =35.7mm diameter actual lens opening. The full f-stops are at f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, etc. Each step down from one f-stop to the next full stop, you half the volume of light entering the lens (i.e. going from f/4 to f/5.6).
shutter speed: controls the amount of time the light is allowed to stay on the media or film in the camera. Every full stop down on your shutter speed doubles the volume of light on the film (i.e. going from 1/500 sec to 1/250 sec).
ISO (film speed): ISO is like worker bees or horsepower. Higher ISO means you can use a faster shutter speed and/or smaller aperture to get the same result. This can be helpful if you want to convey motion in your photo by using a longer exposure (then use a lower ISO). If your subjects are mostly stationary, you could use a shorter exposure (and higher ISO).
Depth of field: Area of sharpness within a photo. You can increase the depth of field by using a smaller aperture/larger f-stop to let less light in (sort of like pouring paint into a can using a funnel is tidier than splashing it in with a "wide open" aperture). But you might sometimes want a small depth of field and a "messier" look that is achieved with a larger aperture/smaller f-stop to encourage your audience to focus on a small area and blur a distracting background.
(sourced from Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson)
Composition
Framing: using elements in the foreground, middle ground, or background to "frame" around the main subject, directing the viewer's eye and adding depth and interest to the image
Rule of thirds: don't just put your subject in dead center, imagine a 3x3 grid of 9 equal over your photo and place the main subject at one of the 4 intersections or along one of the lines to balance the subject with negative space and make a more dynamic and aesthetically pleasing photo.
Leading lines: elements within the photo which guide the viewer to a specific focal point (i.e. roads, fences, rivers).
"Take at least 20 photos that demonstrate how you are living the farmgirl lifestyle and share them..."
Intermediate Level
"Look up some famous photographers and find one whose style you prefer."
(curators speculate Vivian shot this in one take through the window of a moving bus!)
Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny. At first, I thought I could relate because my "career" this season is also as a nanny (of my own kid). I also aspire to choose quality possessions over quantity. Vivian has arresting photos in both color and black and white. She has alpine landscapes in her portfolio but where she really shines is urban street photography and portraiture. I love her sense of humor, capturing a generous derrière precariously perched on a too-small park bench. I love her social commentary in capturing the simmering racial tension in the streets of New York and Chicago and memorializing the sentiments of the era by photographing graffiti. I love the sweet moments of storytelling, elderly couples holding hands, a little girl swinging between the handholds of two nearly identically dressed women shot from the back. Her experiments with using reflective surfaces or lighting to capture herself in distorted, duplicated and shadow form are a trip.
I envy Vivian's reputation for quickly seeing and capturing the shot without much set up or a learning curve. No one divides her work into early "rough around the edges" era and her mature work. Perhaps because it was all munged together, undated, in storage repo auction crates? It seems like she was born an intuitive photographer and I want to believe that I can grind my way to competence with 10,000 hours of practice and a lot of crappy early work. But am I willing to grind it out to achieve this particular style? I wouldn't cut in lines or jump in front of a motorcade to get a good shot of a celebrity, I wouldn't break into crime scenes, stalk mourners to capture their grief, or approach strangers and snap their portrait at close range with no preamble. I also wouldn't fill my living quarters with a hoard of newspapers, engage the services of storage units, or allow myself to routinely lapse into past due on those bills if I did. I am a far more entrenched people-pleaser. Yet the author weaves a story connecting all these less desirable behaviors to a singularly traumatic childhood, which I also did not have to compensate for.
"I couldn't believe it when the horse showed up. It looked like Arnold. Arnold's thigh in those white pants looked like the horse's thigh."
Annie Leibovitz At Work
The thing about Annie is she has a 40+ year career with very little of it in obscurity because she of her early notoriety of getting in at the ground floor of Rolling Stone. In reading her autobiography immediately after Maier's biography, it struck me that while some of this was luck, a lot of this was being a flexible, reliable operator. This came to the fore in her segment about taking the queen's portrait "I'm rather proud of being in control of a complicated shoot," she begins and proceeds to regale her audience with 9 pages of detail about how little autonomy the queen's handlers afforded her. In her 10 most-asked questions, she refuses to dish about people who are a pain to work with, "I'd be crazy to name them. You can't be indiscreet in this business." 40 years of experience allows her to comment on how the technology has evolved from black and white, to color, to digital. She is more of a collaborative learner and planner than Maier. Describing her formative years at the SF Art Institute, "Since the prints were washed in communal trays and everybody's pictures were lying there with everybody else's, you tried hard to come back with something good." Because of her process, you get a short list of other artists and photographers she respects and what she considers admirable about them, Arbus, Avedon, Helmut Newton to expand your own education.
The areas she broached that I am still chewing on are the idea of using digital to add subjects or change backgrounds asynchronously. I understand that this is a powerful advantage of digital and allows for flexibility when working with subjects who are celebrities, but I couldn't help thinking back to her critique of the photojournalists on war fronts rearranging the guns for a more dramatic shot on a slow day being disingenuous. I also found myself wishing she would have pushed a bit further into commenting on video vs. stills, how the landscape has changed with photography technology available in phones to amateurs, and what if anything she would do to be a more agile photographer. It seems even with culling the variety of films, lighting apparati, and tripod that she is still a bit of a maximalist in terms of the equipment she packs. While I love that she seems to have a growth mindset philosophy toward photography skills, they are something you can work on and develop, I was then disheartened to learn that she felt being photogenic was innate and that some of her success was in working with people who are arresting no matter who photographs them. With that in mind, maybe my place really is better behind the camera than in the frame!
Is this social commentary? Pinning NRA "We do our part" sign to a cigar store Indian.
Ansel Adams 400 Photographs
Landscape photography isn't particularly intriguing to me, even if it is beautifully executed. Paging through this book in a day only made matters worse-- another picture of Half Dome, another of El Cap -- all the while realizing Ansel had taken these shots years apart. There is admiration that he probably had to hike into these snowy redoubts, that he didn't have strobes and was likely capturing even his moonscapes with just natural light, that he probably didn't even have much immediate feedback on how it had all gone until he got back to his dark room. I wonder if it struck him as cruel at any point to be taking black and white photos of rainbows in the mist or rock formations called Painted Lady? Maybe that was the point, to leave the viewer slightly dissatisfied and motivated to go out and see these monuments for themselves, or at least support their conservation. In a way, our family has. We have a framed without glass map of the Sierras we mark with dates of our camping trips as we accumulate them.
An advantage to swallowing an entire career of work in a few hours is that I began to appreciate symmetries in the close up and long views of nature. A zoomed in shot of a creek could have ripples that could have been plausible as an elevated shot of a canyon. Chunks of dead trees and their grain looked like uncanny rock formations. I also admired his portraits, as they were often other famous artists and it made it feel like there was some sort of American Bloomsbury club that got together and shared ideas. Oh, he's hanging out with Georgia O'Keefe and who is this Orville she looks so amused by? Wasn't there another photographer that was in love with her? Scandalous!
Hold Still Sally Mann
I was gobsmacked with Sally's verbal acuity in this "memoir with photographs." Every page was riddled with interesting vocabulary and wry sense of humor. Part of me is tempted to go back through and highlight each ten dollar word to relish them again. But a larger part of me has no interest in wading through images of scantily clad tweens frozen with eerily worldly expressions and dangling candy cigarette butts or the end pages of decomposing bodies just to gather these verbal pearls. I also wish Sally had consulted with Annie Liebowitz about how pictures render differently on different paper types and textures and made some better presentation choices to make it easier to see with full force what she described so beautifully in text. The effort felt a bit reminiscent of a rough punk rock 'zine without a redeeming cultural call to action.
But presentation aside, I admired that here is a philosopher photographer, sharing her observation that photography seems to unwittingly rob us of high fidelity memory of the subject, yet ironically, how a singular surviving picture might be uncharacteristic of its subject and yet still come to stand in for their entire personality when that is all that survives.
Without knowing much about her, I first judged her initial two works harshly as the sort of sensationalist content that would make a fitting cover for Nabokov's Lolita. Hold Still, such a fitting double entendre of a title. Could it be a triple entendre if you also factor in the morbid interest in aging and death? Eventually, I mellowed into the view that these were shot pre-pervasive internet and the ramifications it has for the photographed subjects, however willing they might be at the time and that this sort of material is not worthy to aspire to now but shouldn't be judged too harshly with the benefit of some hindsight. While I wouldn't say this is a style or subject I aspire to, this has been the most thought-provoking photography book I've read so far.
Humans of New York - Brandon Stanton
Contemporary street art portraits and from the captions, it sounds as if he is asking permission first. The short quotes and captions for these portraits are delightful. I wonder how hard it is to keep records of those to cross reference if you are taking hundreds of photos a day? Stanton has a great eye for composing a humorous portrait without making his subject the brunt of the joke. Most of these portraits look like they could be the start of a character sheet for a quirky dungeons and dragons personality. It seems like "humans" are so singular a feature for NYC, I wonder if he could have done it in other cities? He summarized his earlier stops at Pittsburgh as "yellow steel bridges," and Philly as "bricks and flags," so maybe we would have seen more architecture and less humanity if he had settled elsewhere. He wrote that he had planned to continue traveling to the west coast, but he never made it out here. If he had, what would his compositions look like? It is interesting how social media can give much more rapid feedback to the artist and impact where they focus than those publishing posthumously. The Leibovitz book had a similar comment, indignant she had been "scooped" on a shot of a celebrity getting his hair done in a beauty parlor by a photographer working for faster-to-market tabloid. Having watched a standup comedy bit where the black comedian, Josh Johnson clues white friends in that the default camera settings are not friendly to melanin and to take this into consideration with group selfies. This was something that hadn't occurred to me, but now makes the range of skin tones of Stanton's subjects, all flatteringly captured, more impressive.
There and Back: Photographs from the Edge - Jimmy Chin
Chin is an iceberg. There is so much unspoken foundation behind his work. Not only did he capture the most breathtaking landscapes and action shots I have come across so far, it took years of training to be able to follow these ground-breaking friends to the edge of the world and back. It takes a certain alchemy to forge partnerships while sharing a claustrophobic portaledge suspended thousands of feet up in subzero temperatures on rationed food waiting for the weather and avalanches to clear. The fact the same partners continued to seek him out for future trips and introduce him to their up and coming colleagues speaks volumes. He reminds me of Leibovitz in the prestige and star power he brings to the work after earning Nat Geo credentials and documenting Free Solo. Yet the power of his party's story-- summiting a demanding piece of geography or skiing down it-- removes the need to come up with a gimmicky concept to direct the shoot. There isn't furniture or ephemera to move when the scene only contains the carefully curated items people were willing to pack in on their backs.
I am still mulling over how these photos feel so much more immediate and compelling than other scenic views. I think part has to do with the fact he is in the middle of such extreme locations that even if some of the steepness and precarity is muted in the photo, it still feels like a cliff hanger in a way snapping a sunset from a scenic overlook on the highway never could. I think part might have to do with phenomenal editing available on digital capture, as he credits several editors on his time. Part might have to do with the technique of putting a human (often miniscule) in the middle of the composition for scale. Part might have to do with climbing at all hours and in particular those golden hours of dawn and dusk. Part might have to do with spreading these photos on glossy paper wall to wall and sometimes across the fold of a massive coffee table book with no margins. Although he isn't as much of a lyrical wizard with words as Sally Mann, I found myself impressed with his terse captions and brief essays setting the scene for the shots. It seemed that facing the near possibility of death carved away almost everything but the esteem he held for the terrain and his climbing subjects and maybe the occasional self-deprecating understated joke.
