Looking and seeing today

This morning was more about looking with the intent of seeing, which I feel is a subtle but important difference. I look all the time. But a lot of times it seems that I am in a state of quasi-awareness. What I look at does not always fully register and there are many times, e.g. a long drive, where I can not recall what it is that I had “looked” at in any detail.

So this morning, I had the camera ready, but I had decided that it was more important to see today. I had been photographing this section of my drive in Riverside County constantly last week. Now I felt the need to see this passing landscape, to internally reflect on what I was actually seeing and then to plan for what I want to photograph on subsequent drives.

The differences in the landscape between the Coastal freeway and the Inland Freeway have similar attributes to many areas of the world; the working class and those who may have risen “beyond” the working class. The Inland Emprire and thus the freeway running through it is very much the working class area of Southern California. You can see the differences readily. Perhaps that is what I want to capture, but then the question why? Has this type of comparison been done so many times before? What am I helping others to see?

Perhaps everyone when they are driving through the Inland Empire is probably in a state of quasi-awareness, driving, looking and not seeing. This is not a visually interesting place to capture your imagination. No rolling surf on the beach with palm trees framing your view like you would find on the Coastal freeway. The Inland Empire is very raw and has a lot of dusty tan dirt, with scraggly dry brush and barren rolling hillsides peppered with a few houses. It is a land in transition. You would rather be somewhere else than here.

Best regards, Doug

CS3 B&W workflow update

With my Photoshop work flow for creating my black and white image, one of the first things I did after making the RAW conversion, was to make the global highlight and shadow adjustments by applying a Layers adjustment level. It now appears that with the new Photoshop CS3, I have stopped applying a Levels adjustment layer to my images in favor of making the same creative adjustments using a Curves adjustment layer.  Even as I review my earlier images that I created with Photoshop CS, I am deleting the levels adjustment layer in favor of using a curve adjustments layer. It simplifies the image workflow process and reduces the file size and provides the same results for making the global image highlight and shadow adjustments.

Thinking about wide format printers

 Canyon Tracks (from the series Bad Trip – Sad Trip)

As I start to think about the exhibiting of the series Bad Trip – Sad Trip, I am also contemplating much larger prints. Thus the need of a wider format printer, as I diffinately prefer doing my own printing. The interest in larger prints was further stimulated by the 32″ wide panoramic Tired Bones print that I created for OCMA.

Since I already have the Epson 4800 that provides 17″ wide images, I need to consider what I liked about it and what I did not in my printer evaluation. My largest dislike with the Epson 4800 is the either/or the use of Black and Matte Black pigment inks and the relatively expensive and time consuming switch between these two inks. When I bought this printer, I felt that the finest papers available were matte. Thus dedicating the printer to the Matte Black ink was a no brainer for my Black and White images. I still love the matte papers, but since I purchased this printer, some really, really nice papers are available for the gloss Black ink. I like options and I would really like the option of easily switching between the two inks.

Second, moving up in width to 24″ is not that great of an increase for me. So that what I am considering is the 44″ wide, but probably not going to a 60″ wide printers. Which means for the big three printer is either the Epson Stylus Pro 9800, the HP DesignJet Z3100ps GP 44 and the Canon imagePROGRAF iPF8000.

Epson 9800 is a printer similar to the Epson 4800 and I have a lot of familiarity with the K3 pigment inks and it should be easy to scale an image up from the 4800 to the 9800. But the Black the Matte Black ink changes are still a big problem, especially when comparing to the other two with both of these Black ink cartridges are both on the printer at the same time. I saw some info on the new generation 9800 printer, but this problem is not fixed. It may make all the difference in my final choice. Basic list price is $5000.

HP Z3100 is getting a lot of buzz for the quality of the printing, having both Black and Matte Black that easyily switch back and forth and includes a paper callobration system. I can also buy a printer version that includes the ColorByte Imageprint RIP, which becomes increasingly neccessary with the larger printers. Another learning curve, oh crap. Note that no Firewire, but the Ethernet can handle 10/100/1000 for computer connectivity. Fully loaded, the list price is $7500.

Canon iPF8000 is probably the dark horse in this race as I do not know much about it. Although it does have the Black and Matte Black, so I am assuming that it is easy to switch beteen the two inks depending on the medium to be printed. Like the other two, it also has pigment ink and three grays for printing (four grays on the machine if you count the Black and Matte Black). I also see that it comes with a Firewire port, but only 10/100 for Ethernet. List price is about $6400.

 Glad this is not a immediate purchase, but one that I get to mull over for a while, or at least until I get that gallery exhibit invitation ;- )

Best regards, Doug

ArtBiz101 – Marketing: Place

In discussing the marketing of your fine art “products”, the Place is all those places where transactions take place, also called the “Channels of Distribution”. This not only includes where your collector buys your artwork, but all of those in between places where your artwork moves from you to the final sale.

Most products that you buy in a store, such as a food market, go through a number of in between locations call warehouses, perhaps operated by a wholesaler. For your artwork, you should have decided who will buy it, thus decide where is the place that is best for them to buy it at.

Traditionally artwork was either sold directly to the collector, but probably more commonly through a gallery or a private dealer. Today we would label a gallery which has a physical location as a “brick and mortar” place. In the Channel of Distribution, the private dealer was the wholesaler in the fine art market. They might buy from the artist and then to a collector or another gallery. They would also buy from a gallery some “excess inventory” to hold and then sell to another gallery. Yes, within the gallery channels of distribution, your artwork becomes “inventory”.

For photographers in the 1950’s, the place to exhibit and perhaps sell was on the walls of coffee shops and the rare venues were like those Stigliz had in New York. The first handful of commercial photography galleries started up in the 1960’s. Today, you can find photography exhibited with almost any other medium. Likewise, today, we have that relatively new channel of distribution, the internet, where artists can have their own on-line gallery and sell directly to the collector.

So the question remains, who is buying your artwork and where and how is the best way to make your artwork available? For established artist, this may not be as daunting of a question, but even then, they also wonder what the better approach is, such as exclusive representation or multiple gallery representations. For each potential channel of distribution, there are pros and cons that you have to consider. So a quick overview;

Direct sales; you as the artist sell your artwork directly to the collector. This can be accomplished with a web site, displaying at art fairs, buying display ads in fine art magazines and networking with friends, also called “word of mouth”. You could also establish your own “brick and mortar” gallery for your work in your city and perhaps represent others as well. One benefit to selling direct is you do not have to share the sale of your artwork with anyone, as galleries will take at least 50% of any sale as their commission.

There are a number of downside to direct sales, first is that you can spend a lot of time trying to sell your artwork when you could be creating more artwork. This can amount to 25% of your time and more. Selling direct may or may not connect you with established collectors and the chance that they find out about your work may be a bit random. There are also corporate buyers who create collections within large corporations that you may not have access to as they usually buy through galleries or dealers. Last, selling direct, you need to establish the infrastructure to help make the sales occur, such as the ability to accepting credit cards, although PayPal had made this task a little simpler.

Indirect Sales, e.g. Gallery representation; which is where you select or probably better yet, you are selected by a gallery to be represented. You create your artwork and then make it available to the gallery and they in turn use their connections and location to a track and obtain sales. This channel has also become available on the web, with web portal Galleries that will create your personal gallery within their gallery to help create sales.

I think that many artist perceive that a big con to selling through an established Gallery is the loss of 50% of the sales price. Trust me, there is a lot of work that is being done by a Gallery to understand the market, cultivate collectors and help with the promotion of their artists, and finally, the investments that they make just to stay in business and make a decent living. You can also spend more time creating your own artwork and less of your cash on promoting yourself.

Bottom line is that you need to decide which of these two routes you want to travel, as they are pretty much mutually exclusive. A Gallery that represents you and makes investments to promote you does not want you to be competing with them and selling directly to collectors. You may have to sell direct while becoming more established until such a time that a Gallery will decide that you could be a good artist to represent because you artwork will sell.

Best regards, Doug

Alternative Photo of the Day: Riverside

Alternative Photo of the day, which do you like best? (and why??)

Photo of the day: Riverside County

Suggesting images, another take

This morning was a nice opportunity to work on images that “suggest” a feeling or thought, versus a literal description of a idea.  We are seeing some of the effects of the Hurricane that is moving through Mexico, especially with the change in cloud cover and overcast morning, thus an unusal disfused light to work with. As a result, the shutter speeds were slower and what I had been photorgraphing on the freeway had a different appearance. With more motion blurr due to the longer exposures, the landscape was no longer sharp and well defined. I recognize that I had the ability to change that appearance by increasing my effective ISO and working with a wider aperture, but I liked the results that I was acheiving this morning.

So this morning, it was more about suggesting the landscape in a more abstract form that will evoke different feelings.  Rather than accurate describing the landscape as I have created mostly to date. Part of my question is that can both of these means of interpting the same landscape co-exist in a body of work or the same series? At the moment, I think so, as I can not think of a good reason why it can’t.  This probably will create more of a challange to a viewer when seeing multiple ways of a feeling being expressed in the context of a series.  I think that what I am trying to avoid is creating confusion or mental mush. This is part of the creative risk I believe that I need to confront.

I believe that this is my fear of being classified in any one school of visual thought. This in of it self also creates limits as to what a person can create and imposes boundaries on development. Not sure that I am ready for boundaries just yet:- )

This means that I must be getting nearer to understanding and subsequently writing my artistic statement for my Freeway series!

Best regards, Doug

Photo of the day: Freeway neighborhood

I’m still working on the compositional issues…..

Series updates

For my series Bad Trip – Sad Trip, I just received permission from Simon Denison to quote him from the Introduction of his book Quarry Land for my artistic statement. I have complete about 50% of my sanity check on the printing and titles to the images of the series. My web site, which has about 50% of the images of the series is now up to date. I still may tweek the layout of the images and still not sure about the last two images in the lower right corner. hmmm.

For the series Insomnia: Hotel Noir, I have whittled down the first cut of the photographs which stands at 50 images. Most are not titled yet and those that are just have a working title. Like the first series, I don’t know if I will go with a descriptive title or a suggestive title. This “titling” topic, we have been discussing this on our other blog Stills. Its slowly coming along ;- )

The Freeway Series is still a crude working title and as you can see from the Photo (s) of the Day, I am currently engaged in photographing. Thus you are seeing a real work in progress, as my recent Photo of the Day is not getting the usual “long look and contemplation” refinements. Heck, I’m still working out the photographing process while trucking down the Freeway at 70 mph (that’s fully legal on the I-15 in Riverside). There is something about creating these images on the fly, versus stopping and fine tuning a composition. Anyway you look at it, photographing at 70 mph is dangerous and stopping on the Freeway shoulder is even more dangerous. In making this series, another situation where digital feedback shines, as I can quickly assess if my set up is getting the images I want, and then make the neccessary adjustments for the next image. Not fool proof, but better than waiting a couple of days to look at developed negatives and trying to figure out what I did right or wrong and make the adjustments.

Photo of the Day: Freeway series

You may have noticed a slight change in my postings recently, that is the “Photo of the Day”. This is three fold, first being that I was kinda burned out with the completion of the Bad Trip – Sad Trip series. Second was that I was not sure that I had anything meaningful to add at the moment, so why say anything?? Third, I just felt like posting some recent images perhaps without much fanfare. So there you are, short and sweet. My batteries are recharging and probably have more to add very soon.

Oh, oh, oh, did you hear about the new Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III at 21Mp???  See, that did not take long:- )

Best regards, Doug