Since we’re more than 10 days in to the new year, it seems inappropriate to make a post comparing the old with the coming new, doesn’t it? However, I can’t let my belated first post of 2012 go without some due diligence to 2011. Last year was a good year. Good in the sense that I stayed busy and had some of the most impacting and awesome life experiences I’ll ever have. Our first child was born (I could stop there and be completely happy with how the year–and subsequently the rest of my life–went), I wrote my first book, Storytellers, for a great publisher and an even greater audience (thanks to each and every one of you that have and are showing interest in not only my book, but the more important issue and occupation of visual storytelling), I had another great year of teaching an engaging set of students at Texas Tech University and at the university’s center in Seville, Spain, and I had enough assignment work to keep me from tending my blog regularly (but I can’t argue with the amount of work and the great people with which I share it). That being said, 2011 was a good year. 2012, I don’t expect anything less out of you.

I do want to make a point with this post, though. More of an observation and a call for similar reflection on your part. I photographed the tree above during the Christmas holiday we spent on my family’s cattle ranch in Paradise, Texas (yes, there is a Paradise, Texas, as well as a Utopia, Texas–both wonderful places but in two very different regions of the state). Every time I’m back home, I try to get out for a couple days of shooting. Several years back, I shot a small book on the ranch during summer time, and I still publish the images I took that year of cattle on rolling hillsides, kid goats playing with each other, and even portraits of my grandparents. Photography allows me to become reacquainted with a place I knew well growing up, but in a very different and new way.

However, the shot above was a bit…tough, for lack of better words. Not tough to shoot–the dog walking along with me could have made it if he’d just had opposable thumbs and an attention span longer than, well, a dog. Tough in that I struggled with deriving meaning from this shot. I still am to be honest. But there’s something oddly attractive to me about the shot.

Meadows Ranch is a pretty place, even in the winter. It ought to be for as much care my grandfather puts in to keeping it clean. I can’t tell you how many hundreds of acres my cousin and I combed when we were younger, hacking invasive weeds and picking up fallen branches and rocks that had sat in a pasture for Lord knows how long. And the trees, the pecans and oaks, are the perfect ranch trees. Large canopies for the cattle, and many of them symmetrical enough that when winter rolls around and the trees go into dormancy, they’re seemingly just as nice looking as when they’re fully clothed.

One day a couple weeks back, I went out on a walk around a pasture south of my parents’ home, and at the end of the trek, I turned my photographic intent toward a couple well placed trees on a hillside. The sun was literally a minute or two away from completely resigning for the day, and the only area of the subject matter at hand that was lit with that ultra-warm light was the branches. The blue in the sky was vibrant and the wood glowed bright orange while the greens in the grass stood out enough to play well with the other colors. I shot several different compositions of the tree–horizontals, verticals, a lot of foreground, very little foreground, tree along the right and left hand third lines, etc.

Something, though, just wasn’t working. There was something more visceral in how I was seeing this tree. The tree is well balanced, and I felt the shot needed to be symmetrical. We’ve all heard that you have to learn the rules to break them, and this was certainly one of those times. For me, the best way for this image to speak was to place the tree right dab in the center. Well, there goes my double-truck spread in the next issue of the greatest magazine in the world. What will my students think about this image after I just gave them the lecture on using the Rule of Thirds? Regardless of the publishing possibilities of this image, or the perception of relatively new and well-meaning interpretation of such an image, in my mind’s eye, and in respect to the tree’s story, I had to break the rules. I had to place it in the center.

Editing the images later, I was still struggling. I liked the composition, and I especially like the color treatment after adjusting the usual contrast levels. However, I wasn’t convinced about finalizing the image. I’m not one for black and white. There are many, MANY people out there that do black and white way better than me (I’m always working on it, though–I just LOVE color). But this image, this barren, symmetrical tree and subsequent frame said black and white. Again, a visceral feeling of the image’s content and the frame itself. Part of my vision for the image, if you will, in conjunction with the story of the tree and land itself. Black and white sure seems to tell the winter more strongly in the frame. Black and white does say something in this frame that color did not.

In the end, I’m happy with the shot. It’s not the best image ever made. It’s simply a dormant oak tree patiently waiting for spring to arrive. However, the struggling with the frame, to get it to a point to where it says something about the winter it’s living through now and the drought it just endured, in the end resulted in one that in my mind speaks more to myself and to others in a similar way. Of course, once it’s out of my hands (and on the Internet in this case), the interpretation is completely up for grabs.

Struggling with your image making, I believe, is not an all-the-time necessity for making storytelling images, no matter how much of it you should have when creating art (another subject, another time, I suppose). However, I do believe it is something we all endure at many various points in our work as photographers. I hope I continue to struggle at times with creating images that tell a story (particularly new areas of the visual world in which I’ve yet to delve), and if they tell a slightly different story to everyone that sees them, then at least they’re doing that. In the same sense, I hope you too experience this struggling. Sometimes it comes in the form of not feeling creative for long amounts of time, or when the gear, technique, and vision just aren’t complementing each other. However, just as a world-class athlete becomes such, working through and sometimes with these frequently frustrating times and experiences leaves us better photographers and visual storytellers.

So, here’s to 2012. Happy New Year, happy photographing, enjoy your storytelling this year, and if you hit a bump in the creative and communicative process, work through it, learn from it, and become a better storyteller from the experience.

Thanks again for all your support! More to come!

If you’ve visited my site recently, you’ve probably noticed the Craft and Vision links on the side and bottom of my blog posts. Over the past half year, I’ve ran across a great deal of photography-related resources that have benefited me as a professional AND as a teacher, and one of the better resources I have come across is the Craft & Vision eBook library. The brainchild of David duChemin, Craft & Vision offers a series of highly affordable, content-loaded eBooks centered around the mission that spending and worrying less about gear and concentrating more on photographic and story-telling vision is most of the battle in photographic success. I tend to think along the same lines. Simply put, I don’t think there’s another set of resources that continually grows that compares for the price, content, and the overall quality of these eBooks. For this reason, I decided to become an affiliate, hoping to at least provide a channel to this wonderful resource!

That being said, periodically on this site, you might find an eBook review, and my first is the latest one available, titled Venice, A Monograph, by David duChemin. The book culminates a collection of images shot over a five-day span in Venice, supporting the theme: loneliness. The presentation is akin to few coffee-table books from photographers that want to exhibit a bit more about their images, such as how the shots came about, the process of thinking through an idea and seeing it created in their images, and staying cognizant of their surroundings and interpreting its meaning. The book opens with a short introduction, followed by several pages of just images. This section, referred to as The Print, contains no text, no commentary to interrupt the viewer, just meaningful imagery. True to monographic form, they follow suit with the theme, and several necessitate the viewer to dig deep for the correlation.

duChemin really capitalizes on The Process section, which revisits the images with short, insightful explanations of the reasoning behind each one. This section should hit home for those photographers interested in the thought process behind certain images, and it allows that photographer reinforcement of how they can conceptually develop photographic ideas. In an online world that is wrapped up in what gear it took to get certain shots, this book is a refreshing break into the thinking process and the visual and interpretive mind, which arguably is the most important tool a photographer can have! However, to satisfy the gear geek in all of us, duChemin did provide technical aspects for each of the shots, knowing that understanding how your equipment can aid you in accomplishing your vision is unavoidably significant.

From a photographers perspective, I love hearing the “why” in every shot, particularly if it comes from the photographer that created the image. I have spent a lot of time with many of my own mentors, conversing about various shots, immersing myself in their experiences, knowing that theirs will to some extent edify my own. From a teacher’s point of view, this is a strongly recommended read for new, upcoming, and established photography students and practitioners. We often get wrapped up in the technical side of the craft, or the business, giving too little time to consuming information that provides us interpretive insight in to the art and aesthetics of what we do for a living or as a hobby.

At 47 pages, Venice, A Monograph, by David duChemin, is well worth the $5.00 you’ll spend on it! Wait…$5.00? Yes, another point worth mentioning about the Craft & Vision eBook library is that each book is only $5.00. For the quality of information and packaging, this is a steal! The PDF format makes it easily viewable on the iPhone and iPad as well. Save yourself a few coffees, and check out their offerings!

On that note, Craft & Vision is also running a SPECIAL DEAL on Venice, A Monograph: starting June 10, for three days, use the offer code VENICE4 to purchase the book for $4.00 instead of the original $5.00. During that time, you can also use the offer code VENICE20 to get 20% off of your purchase of five (5) or more books from Craft & Vision. The coupon offers expire June 12, at 11:59 p.m. PST.

Some time ago, I wrote about photographing with big light sources, such as large soft boxes. One nice thing about soft boxes is that they provide a large, soft light source that’s not stark and brutally intense like a bare-bulb speedlight or strobe. Before recently (ah, within the past several years, since the popularity of the Strobist movement), you couldn’t find manufactured soft boxes small enough for most speedlights. However, they were commonly found for larger, more traditional lighting rigs. Even today, the really large softboxes are manufactured for studio-grade kits (even though, technically, there’s nothing stopping you from sticking a speedlight inside an 84″ octa, but that’s a discussion for another time). While the speedlights are nice, especially when in the field, there is still something nice about knowing you have enough power to over power the sun during the middle of the day with more than a few watt-seconds of power.

Each spring, I teach a photography lighting course at Texas Tech University, and while teaching in the studio is fundamental and necessary for a good deal of this course, that’s not what this lighting series is all about. At least two weeks out of the semester, we’ll drag the lights out of the studio, and commence throwing photons around outside, in an attempt to learn how to work with the ambient light, shoot in a variety of environments, and lug equipment around in the heat (essential for all field photographers)! Since the class is composed of 10 plus students each spring, we are never short of models. Alison Church (@SwinginSquirrel) put her camera down for this particular setting, allowing the rest of the class to work around her and the light.

As I was saying, more powerful lights allow you to override the ambient light, even at 1:00 p.m. on a clear day in April. As long as you are controlling the aperture, a soft box with enough light pushed through it creates a nice, focused (yet soft) source of light that will start to fall off quickly (tip: shoot at the maximum shutter speed the kit will allow you to knock out the ambient; if it’s still not enough, close your aperture down and control the light exposure from the power pack/lights). If it’s an extremely bright day, shutting the ambient light out may create more depth of field in your shot than you wanted, so be aware of your aperture.

Using one light is fairly popular today, and the only source for these shots is a 16″X24″ softbox, running through an 1100 watt-second pack, dialed down about half way. By reverse-engineering the shots, you can tell the top image has the light placed slightly to the left of the camera, and the center of the light source (the soft box) just barely above her head, creating that small shadow dropping down from her nose (a small butterfly lighting effect). The second shot is obviously more dramatic, with the same soft box to the extreme left of the model, slightly above her head again. This allows the shadow side to sink in to the darker levels of the histogram, and by stopping down the aperture and shutter speed, the fall off of light becomes more evident, and in this case, more leading and intriguing. The final shot is actually a movement made on my part, moving in front of Alison. Now, the shadow side doesn’t see so mysterious.

Keep in mind the environment. This corrugated tin background worked well for us, and if you can knock out the ambient all the way, you’ve just created yourself an outside studio…in the middle of the day!