Fame?

When I was in high school I enrolled in the Famous Photographers correspondence course, however I long ago gave up any notions of becoming a "famous photographer". This comes up this morning because a friend jokingly suggested that I was famous but it reminded me of a discussion I had with Diane a while back.

There aren't many photographers who are famous in the conventional sense to the word. There are the famous people who take up photography and instantly get attention because they are already famous from some other endeavor. I'm thinking of people like Graham Nash (Crosby, Stills & Nash) or by virtue of association with someone famous (i.e. Linda McCartney) or even a bit of both like Julian Lennon (son of John Lennon & a musician himself). This is not to imply that they aren't good photographers, just that fame and quality of work are not necessarily connected, especially in the field of photography.

I challenged Diane to name 10 photographers that would be known to the average American who did not owe their fame to some other field or a relationship to someone famous in another field. She thought of Alfred Stieglitz but she was forgetting his relationship with Georgia O'Keefe. Aside from Ansel Adams I can't think of any. There are some who are semi-famous in that they are known in a certain subset of society, for example Annie Leibovitz but even she owes her fame largely to the celebrities she photographs. Edward Curtis might make the list but he isn't remotely contemporary. The average person may vividly remember an iconic photo but probably not one in ten thousand associates the image with the photographer who made the image. Photography in itself is a poor path for pursuing fame.

Perhaps that is because unlike acting, singing, politics, etc. photographers, as individuals, are largely absent from their work. The viewer sees the image but not the person who made it. Perhaps it has been compounded by the recent proliferation of photography with the advent of digital imaging. It is much harder for any one individual's work to stand out in the crowd.

In any case here is my challenge: Make a list of contemporary photographers whom you believe are "famous" in their own right and submit it as a comment. By contemporary I mean from about 1960 to the present. By famous I mean someone whose name would be recognized by at least the same number of people as a well known musician, actor, politician, etc. By "in their own right" I mean that they weren't already famous for something other than their photography and they aren't related somehow to someone else who is/was famous and thus had access to media attention that the ordinary individual does not. Your list can be any length. Comments are moderated so it may not appear immediately.

The photograph above is from the Owl's Head Peak outing on Monday during one of the moments when the sun was on the peak and a rocky nub beyond. Canon 7D, ISO 100, 1/250th at f/9, 18-135mm EFS IS lens at 25mm, wind at 30-40mph.

Weather or Not...

A friend and I went down to the Adirondacks today to climb Owl's Head Peak, a small subsidiary summit that rises from the slopes of Cascade Mountain on the Keene Valley side. It is a favorite location of mine and photos from there have appeared many times before in these posts but this was the first time I have climbed it in winter.

On the way into Saranac Lake we encountered what was probably the best scene of the day on the high flats by Gabriels, NY, a view of Whiteface Mountain against the early morning sky with dark clouds approaching. We grabbed a few shots before continuing on. Only moments later the summit of Whiteface was in the lowering clouds.

Although the experience on Owl's Head was enjoyable, we had some of the worst photography conditions I have worked in, wind, rain, wind, sleet, wind, snow, and did I mention the wind? It howled through so that we couldn't leave cameras on tripods to stand of their own accord. We had to physically hold them down. At times the gusts were so strong they nearly knocked us off our feet. And then there was the changing light. If you weren't positioned and ready to shoot, you missed the photo because the light we wanted seemed to last only a second or two before moving on with the wind. Fortunately the temperature was mild. Had it been 10º like it was last Friday it would have been impossible. Despite the difficulties I thoroughly enjoyed the outing. Yeah, I know. Photographers are strange.

A Day in the Adirondacks

I took a drive down to Lake Placid today (the Adirondack Park is South from here) and hit some of my favorite photo haunts along the way. I started under clouds, went through snow flurries, back to cloudy, on to sunny, back to cloudy, to fairly heavy snow and back to clouds by the time I got home. Typical NNY weather. I shot 157 photos along the way including a series of the rapidly changing sky over Barnum Pond. I think this is the best one of those. I haven't entirely made up my mind but it is tentatively number one so it gets posted.

Canon 7D, RAW, aperture priority, ISO 100, 1/125 sec, @ f/16

Addendum: A series of photos from the drive/snowshoe day above can be seen here. If the link doesn't work for you, copy and paste the following URL into the address field of your browser .

A Road Less Traveled

A busy day today. After cleaning up the snow from the recent storm I decided to go snowshoeing in the Southville State Forest. The River Hill Trails there are just 2 miles from my house and regular readers will notice that it is a frequent destination when I want to get out into the woods in winter. It was a perfect day, 8-12" of new snow. I actually enjoy breaking trail so it was with pleasure that I was the first person through after the storm. Lots of snow broken only by the tracks of animals from deer to mice. Bright sunshine and an impossibly blue sky. I did not use a polarizer and there has been no added saturation in Photoshop in the image above. It really was that intensely blue. The temperature was still in the teens but between the sun and an occasional breeze the snow was starting to come off the trees, clumps breaking up and falling, glittering like showers of diamonds. Unfortunately I didn't manage to get photos of any of them. The good news is that none of them landed on my head or went down the back of my neck as I passed under the trees and I still have the images in my heart even though I can't share them with you.

Canon G10 set on aperture priority ISO 100 with  -2/3rds exposure to compensate for the sun reflecting off the snow

Not A Nice Day

All the schools are closed. We are getting a mix of snow flakes and mini snow pellets. The wind is blowing and it is only 8º F. Even at that the worst of the storm is apparently South of us. I won't be breaking out the snow blower until much later. We aren't going anywhere and whatever I did to clear it now wouldn't last.

Frosty Morning

The thermometer at my house this morning read -30F.  The radio said that it was -38F in some places near here. That's the coldest we've seen in several years. I drove Diane to work and coming back across the Racquette River in Potsdam I saw this frost and mist as I crossed the bridge from Fall Island. Whoever left those tracks trusts ice farther than I would but they do add an interesting element to the photo.

I Should Have Washed That Window

I put the storm windows on rather late this year and in my hurry to get it done I didn't wash the windows first. Darn!

This afternoon a pair of deer wandered into the yard to munch on the remains of dead plants sticking up through the snow. I'm not a wildlife photographer but when it waltzes into my yard and poses I'd be a fool to pass it up. I watched this doe and fawn for 10-15 minutes as they wandered and fed on dead plants and seeds that were on the ground under the bird feeders. Most of the views are cluttered with shrubs, fence and the bird feeder post but as they were leaving they stopped in the side yard for mom to clean junior's face. They realized I was watching them and looked toward me for one last photo with a nice clear background.

Photo taken with my Canon G10. I had to do some burning in where white film on the window made light spots but for a serendipitous photo through a dirty window, it's not half bad. Thank you deer for gracing my day with your presence.

Prints or publication rights available. 

Warm Fingers All Day

It was a chilly morning and only got up to about 15º today. My first job was to clear the 3" of snow that fell yesterday & last night.  I put some Hot Hands (dry chemical packets that generate heat) into my gloves to keep my hands warm while running the snow blower. Two hours later I had cleared the driveway, walks and the walkway on the bridge over the river. I put out seed for the birds. They need all the help they can get this time of year. After lunch and some indoor chores I went to the State Forest to do some snowshoeing. The Hot Hands were still warm so I threw them into my mittens. As I was coming out the last stretch I met two women just starting with their dogs who were cavorting and generally enjoying the outing. The older woman was already having problems with her fingers getting cold so I pulled the Hot Hands out of my mits and put them in her mits. Then I came home to some homemade peanut butter fudge and hot tuna casserole with biscuits. Life is good.

The photo was taken with the Canon G10. It has been modified in a Topaz filter to protect the identities of the innocent and because I like the effect.

Snowshoe Sunset

For several days I've been going snowshoeing in the Southville State Forest on the River Hill Trails. I went later than usual today and was on the lower section by the river, where there is a nice grove of cedars along the river edge, when the sun was dropping behind the trees on the opposite shore. As usual on an outing like this I was carrying the Canon G10. I composed this to catch both the sun and its reflection off the water on opposite sides of this old leaning cedar.

Another Snowy Walk

Back in December I posted a photo that I had taken on my daily walk during a snowstorm back in 2005. This afternoon I was out walking in a snowstorm again and grabbed this shot as a pickup truck was coming though the hollow I was headed toward. I thought it captured the mood nicely.

New Photo Series

The photos I posted on the 30th have turned into a new series that is probably destined to grow. I have put up about two dozen so far on Picasaweb including the one above. Comments welcome. Prints are available.

A Time to Look Back & Ahead

It was 53º in the North Country today. Our January thaw arrived before January did. The beaver pond that I walk past for my daily exercise has standing water and slush over the ice and the river is losing much of its ice. Walking is good for thinking.

I’ve been reading “Occam’s Razor” by Bill Jay. Bill has long been my favorite commentator on the state of photography and our son bought me a copy of his out-of-print book for Christmas, a series of essays. It is classic Bill Jay. He cuts to the chase and tells it like he sees it. The essay I read this morning was “Professors and Professionals” in which he describes the divide between academic art photographers, “a lazy dilettante, playing with inconsequential, irrelevant and largely superficial ideas...” and commercial photographers, “who, because of lack of intelligence, moral scruples or willful ignorance of the medium’s history and aesthetic issues, have compromised with commerce...”. His descriptions go on and explain the problems I have experienced trying to cross that divide.

I started photography at age 13, was largely self taught until high school when I enrolled in NYI’s correspondence course (still available today) followed by the ill-fated Famous Photographers course. After joining the Army I both attended and later taught in the Signal Center & School of still photography at Ft. Monmouth, NJ. Of course all that was based on commercial photography but I had an artistic bent and (perhaps naively) saw no reason that I could not apply my commercial photography skills to ‘personal work’ that could be considered to be art. After all Ansel Adams was doing that.

In art school after getting out of the Army I had my first encounter with the divide that Bill Jay described in his essay. Because I had changed my major I lost some credits and became aware that I needed to make up at least 6 semester hours in order to graduate as planned. The dean of students suggested that I get one of the professors to agree to grant me some credit based on my prior life experience and I thought that my photography background would be just the ticket so I approached the photography professor (there was only one) to ask what I would need to present for him to consider it. I hadn’t taken any photo courses from this fellow since I had already been through three schools and taught in one. He took one look at my work and informed me that I didn’t know as much about photography as his first semester students. Puzzled I asked what I was doing wrong and he said “Your work isn’t esoteric enough”.

Needless to say, since I wasn’t trying to be esoteric, I didn’t get the necessary credits to graduate from him. I did get them but that is another story. As a commercially trained photographer I was trying to clearly communicate with my photographs, not hide my meaning. Some time later I saw some of his photos in a faculty exhibit, blurred images of snowplows plowing snow in a blizzard printed in shades of grey, roughly zones 3-6, no blacks and no whites (Ansel would not have approved). They were in a gallery and were considered “ART” but had one of our students in the Army school where I taught turned in images with technical quality like that for their assignments we’d have flunked him out and sent him to infantry school instead. Therein lies the divide. Neither of us was seeing photography in the other’s terms.

In this weblog I have dealt the question “is it art?” several times, most recently in October, and I still have trouble with that divide. Bill Jay said that for his part he didn’t think that photography was art. He apparently didn’t think it was lesser or lower than art but simply a different animal. The real problem however isn’t how we define art, rather it is the gap that the two mindsets create. I finished my degree in Fine Art (ceramics, not photography) and, as this blog attests, I have continued photography. All this is the long way of saying that my New Year’s resolution is to continue to try to wrestle with the gap. That and lots of making photographs and I wish you all a happy and productive 2011.

Going Round Again

A different twist on the round images I did last year. Those were just cropped round, these are distorted in Photoshop to appear spherical. I got the idea from an email sent to me by Adorama which attributed the idea to Carol Leigh. I couldn't find it on her site but she has a lot of stuff there. I probably just didn't look hard enough because Adorama had all the instructions in their email.

The photo is of a dandelion seedhead that I photographed at Chaumont Barrens in 2009. It was cropped square and set to 8 bit mode (the filter doesn't work with 16 bit images). The trick is to distort the image twice with a 180º rotate in the middle. First you  use the distort>polar coordinates>polar to rectangular filter. Rotate the image 180º and apply the distort>polar coordinates>rectangular to polar filter.

I have mixed feelings about this sort of modification because I have so little control over it. It feels like I should have more of "a hand" in the process than to simply set an automated "accident" in motion. OTOH when I was firing Raku pottery there was always an element of accident and I didn't have any qualms about accepting the results of that process. I guess I have a prejudice against computer accidents vs kiln accidents. I need to work on that. In the end, just as with Raku, sometimes you get something nice and sometimes you just want to break/toss what comes out the other end. The advantage with pixels is that there are no broken shards left over to give evidence to your failures.

You do have a bit of control in your choice of what images are appropriate to use for this treatment and I've played a bit with applying other filters before or midway through the spherizing process described above. Of the ones I've tried "Pinch" seems to help sometimes.

Addendum: I've been playing with this process to see what works best. The one below is definitely one of the best so far.

An Oldie but a Goodie

I made this photo back in 2005 and posted it to a website that I had at the time. A woman in Maryland promptly bought a large print of it. It comes up again because another person just commissioned a print after seeing it on a note card at the local gallery where I have some work.  It is an nice image and has special memories for me as it was made during a pleasant walk in a snowstorm. The tree was one of my 'milestones' as it was exactly one mile from my house. Sadly they cut it down the following spring. I can't walk by this spot without thinking of this photo and that snowy walk in 2005. Be sure to click on the image for the larger view. The blowing snow shows up better in the large view and feel free to use it on your desktop but please do not "share" it by sending copies to others or posting it elsewhere without permission from me. If you want others to see it, send them the URL to this page.

Shameless self-promotion: Although I'd be hard put get it to you in time for the holidays I remind my readers that I sell prints. They make a nice treat for yourself any time. An 6X9" print matted to 11x14" is $35, an 8x12" print matted to 12x16" is $60 and a 12x18" matted to 18x24" is $100. Sales tax (if you live in NY) and shipping is extra.