Change is informative, the familiar redundant. What we are surrounded by above all are redundant photographs…This is therefore also the challenge for the photographer: to oppose the flood of redundancy with informative images.

– Vilem Flusser

Here is a little experiment that I have been doing lately with my photographs. I go out and I take some shots. I come back to the studio, I download the images, I sort through them and decide which are going to stick around for the short go and which are out, and finally I edit the keepers. Now it’s time to test the results to see if these are redundant or informative, as Flusser would say, with the help of “the internets”.

I go to Google Images and I start searching for the subject that is depicted in my photographs. So say I have taken a series of photos of the Charlotte pier on Lake Ontario (like for instance the one above). I might put in <charlotte pier> as my search term. Now I see how many of the images I get back are similar to the one I’ve taken (try it) – at first blush, some but not too many. But a lot of these images are color, lets narrow it down to just black and white. Still not too many – I count about three images that are shot from a similar angle with a similar composition and similar tones. Not bad, but it appears that I’m not the first person to decide to stand in this spot and shoot down along the pier.

How about if we just put in <pier> for a more general search. Here I can find a couple more images that are similar in composition even if not of the same pier. A general search on <lake ontario> doesn’t help much. We could try other search terms, but you get the idea.

Now try this. Enter <antelope canyon> as the search term. Notice anything? Here we have a serious redundancy problem – especially when color images are included. Each image is barely distinguishable from all the others. Now I’m not saying these are bad photos; some of them are quite well done. And I’m not saying that if I went to Antelope Canyon I wouldn’t come away with something similar. I’m just saying that if I ever do go there, doing this test should motivate me to think a little deeper about this place and try to come up with some new ways to photograph it.

In August 2011 Flickr announced it received its 6 billionth upload. Sounds like a lot, but get this, Facebook is said to receive 6 billion images each month! On top of that we have plenty of other photo sharing sites and private web sites and photo blogs. That’s not just a flood of images, that’s a tsunami of images! – room for redundancy for sure. Here is what a day’s worth of uploads to Flickr looks like if they are all printed out: Artist Erik Kessels Prints Out 24 Hours of Flickr Uploads

So this image of mine may not be exactly groundbreaking, but I haven’t done too badly on creating a relatively unique image that goes against the rising tide of redundant images. There is some information in this image that can’t be found in any other image. It should be worth someone’s time to look at it.

Certainly this isn’t an exhaustive or scientific system, but it gives me a feel for whether I’m just re-shooting the same stuff as everybody else. It helps me be more creative with my work. If my photos start to look like a million others, it reminds me to take a step back and try a new approach.

MDW

I was going to publish a post today that included some Google searches, but with the SOPA black outs going on, maybe I better wait until tomorrow. So instead I’ll show you some photos that I took list night down at the canal lock.

I’ve been to various canal locks at night before, but this time the lock is under construction. I have no idea what they are doing,but the place is all torn up and fenced off and there is a lot of equipment standing around.

Some of the regular lights are gone at the moment, but there are several very bright portable lights pointed here and there. I think these lights are for security purposes rather than for working at night or anything. They are low and bright and I needed to position the camera in places where walls or equipment blocked the direct rays otherwise they would overwhelm the scene.

My son was up at the nearby school for indoor soccer practice and I figured I could sneak out for an hour or so to take some picks. The weather started out nice and calm with some tattered clouds and temps in the 40’s. I had only been there about 30 minutes and was just getting on a roll when things changed. I started to feel a few sprinkles during one long exposure. I figured it wasn’t too bad so I tried another one. Well, before it was over the sprinkles had turned into a downpour. Then the wind hit. I was getting soaked, the camera was getting soaked, the lens was getting spattered; I had to shut ‘er down and run for the car. The storm blew all night with 50 mile an hour gusts. Yikes.

So this is what I got. I like the harsh artificial lighting and the construction equipment and fences blocking up the scenes. It gives the photos a kind of old black and white prison movie feel. I can imagine James Cagney going over the wall with the sirens wailing and the dogs barking.

MDW

I like to read. Mostly I read classic novels, but of course I also like to read books about photography. Now I’m too cheap to buy these books for myself so every Christmas I put some on my list and Santa (or one of his minions) always comes through for me. This year I picked up “Towards a Philosophy of Photography” by Vilem Flusser. Wait, before you click away, this isn’t going to be a book review or anything. I just want to pull one idea out from what I read and go with that.

The idea is this: The more automatic our cameras become – the more we come to rely on them to select the exposure, the focus, to flash or not to flash, even down to deciding when to click the shutter (smile detection) – the less our photos are an expression of us. We don’t take pictures anymore, our cameras do.

“Anyone who leafs through the album of a person who takes snaps does not recognize, as it were, the captured experiences, knowledge or values of the human being, but the automatically realized camera possibilities. A journey to Italy documented like this… shows which places the camera has been to and what it did there.”

So if I go on a vacation and I put my camera on AUTO and I take pics at all the usual places, what I will come home with is an album of what my camera did on vacation not what I did. And of course my camera’s album will look strikingly similar to every other person’s camera’s album. One automatic picture of Cinderella’s castle is pretty much the same as another, just swap out my kid’s face and put in some other kid’s.

On the other hand, to the extent that we resist being told what to do by our cameras, our photos will more closely depict our personal experiences. And they will be a darn sight more interesting too.

Now I’m not suggesting that we all start lugging around a ton of fancy camera equipment and go to art school just to take better snaps on our next vacation. Even I tend to use a small compact camera when I’m on vacation and I often put it on AUTO – sometimes I just want a quick snap of Cinderella’s castle. However, I don’t leave it that way all the time. I’m constantly looking for opportunities to subvert the camera’s programming and force it to do my bidding. At the very least I keep my eyes open, get off the beaten path, and aim my camera at some less expected subjects.

Maybe we could at least stop taking all our pics with our phones and maybe familiarize ourselves with some of the settings on our cameras – just so we can mix things up a bit once in a while. Maybe take a long exposure to blur the people moving through the piazza in order to emphasize how crowded it was or maybe crank the shutter speed up to catch the kids actively playing in the water rather than always posing them in front of something and telling them to hold still and smile.

On another level, when I go to a gallery show of photographs, I don’t want to see photos taken by a camera or by a computer. I want to see photos taken by a person. That person may use a camera to capture the image, but the less intrusive the equipment, the better. The more manipulated the image is, the more my view is blocked by the machine and the less I see of the photographer and the meaning of his/her work. The manipulated photograph ceases to be a human expression and becomes a programmed arrangement of bits.

“There’s no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I’m always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don’t give a damn how it got made.” – Minor White

“We emphasized the creativeness that happens at the moment of seeing over the kind that takes place in the dark room.” – Minor White

Even though I use a digital camera and a computer to create my photographs, that isn’t what I want people to see. I want the mechanics to be as invisible as possible. I don’t want the people who view my photographs to care what editing software I use or how many megapixels my camera has. Just as I don’t know nor care what model camera or what brand of film Weston or Penn or White used.

When Minor White said “I don’t give a damn how it got made”, he wasn’t saying, “go nuts people and use whatever mechanical trickery or synthetic means you can to cobble together an image”. On the contrary what he meant was to stop getting all hung up about equipment brands and specifications and concentrate on using your imagination to create great images. Use an expensive high-tech camera or use a shoe box with a pinhole in one end; doesn’t matter - concentrate on the image not the gear.

MDW

I live just a mile or so north of the Erie/Barge Canal which means that I have to cross it almost every day if I need to go somewhere. The two closest bridges, one east and one west, are old single lane steel deck jobbies standing high above the water. The road has to rise up an embankment on either side to reach the deck level.

Since they are only one lane, the system is to drive up to the bridge while staying to the right until you can see if there are any cars approaching the bridge from the other side. If it’s all clear you head across, otherwise you have to wait off to the side while cars from the other side pass. There is a whole system of unwritten etiquette for who goes when that the locals have followed for years.

I’m not sure how long these bridges are going to last. Traffic has increased through the years but the politeness of the drivers hasn’t exactly kept pace – everybody’s in a hurry now and waiting your turn at a bridge can be frustrating.

Another reason the bridges my not last is that they are old and falling apart. One of them has already been closed indefinitely with structural safety issues. I have not heard what if any plans there are to replace it. I just heard the other day that the working bridge is scheduled to be closed for repairs in the summer of 2012. It’s going to make for a long drive up to the corner store when both these bridges are closed at the same time. There are other bridges, but they are miles out of the way. Oh well.

So I see these bridges all the time and I’ve often thought about photographing them. Of course with traffic on them and no foot paths it would be tough to do. Then I got one of those thoughts that makes you slap your forehead. The bridge is CLOSED – has been for months. Go take some photos while you have the chance. Duh!

So I waited for a nice sunny morning and grabbed my camera stuff. It was great. I could stand anywhere I wanted and take all the time I wanted without getting run over. These are some of the photos I came away with. Mostly I shot up into the structure. I love the complex angles and bolt patterns. The black spatters on the railings are tar that splashed there the last time the road leading to the bridge was paved.

I like these so well that I think I’m going to do a series on steel structures. I know where there are some railroad towers and a couple of cranes and maybe I can even find another closed bridge somewhere.

I threw in a shot of the flag pole outside my studio window. I guess it counts as a steel structure albeit a very simple one. It stands out in the parking lot. It’s very tall and has always intrigued me for how it stands out so bright white and perfectly straight on clear sunny days.

MDW

The image at the top is the pier at Charlotte/Ontario Beach Park/Port of Rochester. With something like this I’m trying to balance the mass of the pier with the emptiness  of the water. Sort of a Yin and Yang thing that I borrowed from Japanese sumi-e painting. We westerners tend concentrate on the solid objects in a scene. We are told to zoom in and fill the frame with our “subject” and empty space is only there as something that defines the things in the photo.

I could have gotten on top of the pier, centered it, and filled the frame with it (I did take some shots like that) or I could have turned the camera more towards the pier and let it reach all the way across the frame (I also took some like that). Those images are OK, but they are pictures of the pier. Just the pier. By including a large area of water, an area actually larger than the pier itself, I tried to express more about the spirit of the place rather than just another pier that we have all seen a hundred times before.

I tried to get at the vastness of the lake – the pier is large, but small by comparison. I tried to show something of the depth of the lake and imagine the mysterious life hidden down below. Way out there on the water’s surface there is solitude, silence, peace. Closer to us there is the sound of the waves constantly lapping the shore and rolling along the sides of the pier. The pier stands still while the water is constantly on the move. The pier is solidly built, but the soft squishy water eats away at it little by little through the years – eventually the pier will need to be rebuilt. The edges are already crumbling and plants have started to grow in the crevices.

The more photographs I take the less I’m concerned with depicting the things I see and the more I’m concerned with showing how the things feel or at least how the place where the things are feels – old, solid, sunny, cold, lonely, calm, intricate, slippery, moving, quiet, simple, mysterious, rough, sharp. How successful I am in conveying these things varies from photo to photo. I keep trying.

The image with the snow fence was taken at Sodus Point. All the local beaches have snow fences on them this time of the year. I’m not sure why. I’m thinking it is less about the snow and more about keeping the sand from washing away during the winter. This was a beautiful day for taking pictures. I loved the bright blue sky with the scattering of wispy clouds streaming along.

I found the doorway at Beechwood State Park. The park has been various things over the years (like a girl scout camp), but now is just kind of a place with some decaying buildings and a small beach that is returning to its natural state. It’s neat. Hopefully no will try to improve it any time soon.

The next image is the Irondequoit pier. I took it at night using the light of the moon. The exposure was something like 294 seconds. If you click on it to enlarge it, you can see the lines drawn by the stars as they moved in the sky during this long exposure. Of course this way I get the reflection of the point beacon on the water which can never be seen with daylight shots.

The last couple of shots are a big rusty bolt on the side of the pier and some rocks. You might notice that I like rocks and if the rocks are in water, well, all the better. The bolt? It’s pretty old and beat, but still hanging in there.

MDW

There is one spectacle grander than the sea – that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky – that is the interior of the soul. Victor Hugo

Continuing on with my series on Lake Ontario I found myself at Golden Hill State Park, home to Thirty Mile Point Lighthouse. It sits about half way between Rochester and Niagara Falls. It was a nice cool sunny autumn day with a little bit of a breeze and some wispy clouds in a bright blue sky. A good day I thought for shooting large expanses of water and sky.

‘Course it wasn’t bad for shooting more solid objects nearer at hand either.

MDW

I’m continuing my Lake Ontario series with some shots from another vantage point – Fair Haven State Park. Back in our high school days my buddies and I used to camp at this park and hang out at the beach all weekend. It’s a very popular spot during the summer, but not so much at the end of October. The sky was a mix of sun and clouds and the winds were whipping again. I had to set up the camera in sheltered spots to get it to stand still during the exposures.

Fair Haven has a long beach, a couple of channels to ponds, and about a bazillion feet of seawalls/piers. I couldn’t shoot at all from the piers as the wind made steady exposures impossible. This old broken pier (above and left) is off by itself down at the far end of the beach. It’s close to the woods and has a bit of an embankment at the start where I could get out of the wind and take some shots. It has more character than the more modern piers (right) – especially since it is cracked and twisted. Way cool.

The high winds spawned lots and lots of waves which made for some nice mist floating on the water’s surface and swirling among the rocks on the shore. I like the rocky shoreline of Lake Ontario. Here on the south side at least it takes work to keep a soft sandy beach. The lake by nature prefers stones and shells and sticks along it’s edges.

Speaking of stones… The shores of the lake were a major source of material for building “cobblestone” buildings in the 1800’s. (Check out this Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobblestone_architecture). These beautiful buildings were painstakingly constructed using the hard rounded fist sized stones collected along the lake or from farmer’s fields. Masons laid the stones in neat straight rows surrounded by mortar. It seems that almost all American cobblestone buildings are located in and around Rochester, NY. There are several cobblestone houses in the little town I live in (and the next town over). In my younger days I worked helping my father restore/remodel some of these homes. I take them for granted and never realized that they are such a rarity. The stones on the left are natural ones deposited by the lake. The water sorts them from largest to smallest as you go up the beach. The ones on the right are ones hauled in from who knows where to serve as a break wall.

As long as we are talking about the lake, it might be a good time to throw out a few tidbits of geographic information. Lake Ontario is the smallest of the Great Lakes in surface area, but still ranks as the 14th largest lake in the world. It has roughly 700 miles of shoreline along New York and Canada and contains about 390 cubic miles of water. The deepest spot is 800 ft. – yikes.

MDW

This blurry guy here is Eddie. I met Eddie down along the pier at the Port of Rochester while I was taking photos of the water. He introduced himself as a 56 year old veteran down on his luck and in need of $4.80 to get a meal. He seemed like a nice guy. We talked for a while and he gave me some tips on where I should take pictures “if I really wanted to get some good ones”.

He asked me to take his picture. Unfortunately I had just before been taking long exposures (like 25 seconds long) and had neutral density filters on the lens, my aperture set at around f32, and my ISO down as low as it would go. I pointed the camera at him anyway and we talked while the seconds ticked by – that’s why he’s blurry. I gave him a few bucks, we shook hands, and went our separate ways. Hang in there Eddie.

It was a windy day at the Lake Ontario shore. I’d been waiting for a windy day so I could get some good wave action. It was almost too windy. At one point I dropped my lens cap and it skittered across the pier and into the water. That’s the second lens cap I’ve lost in water. Even though I brought the heavy studio tripod, the wind still made the camera vibrate. I took to shielding it with my body during exposures. I also had to shield it from spray as the wind whipped up the water and sent it flying. I even had to shield it from sand that hissed across the beach.

The water was just crazy. Waves moved every which way. They weren’t huge, but very turbulent – choppy. No surfing these waves. They weren’t long rollers heading straight into shore. They were short and disoriented. First breaking toward the beach then blown off course by the wind they strike the pier and then reflect back colliding with other waves equally confused. White caps popped up here there and everywhere.

One minute the sun would be shining brightly and the next black clouds darkened the world. The water went from playful, bright, and sparkling to charcoal grey, ominous, and threatening and back again within minutes. In the channel between the piers of stone and concrete things were much smoother. Where the seagulls chose to brave the wind and stand all in a row on the beach at the waters edge with the sand whistling around them and the water pushing them forward and back, the ducks chose to nap on the rocks inside the channel. Sometimes one or two would get into the water and bob around just to cut the boredom I think, but most were content to stick their heads under their wings and wait it out.

I’ve been going to the Lake Ontario shore for a couple of weeks now – Ontario, Irondequoit, Sodus Point… I’m starting to build up a collection of photographs of the lake and I plan to do more. I’ll post some more samples here in the coming weeks.

MDW

There are these weeds down near the railroad crossing. Most of the year they just look like regular old weeds, but with Autumn here they have turned a very pleasing amber color. I don’t know what they are. They’re thin and wispy and grow in clumps scratching out a meager existence in the diesel grey wastes alongside the tracks.

I notice them most on sunny mornings as I drive across the tracks on my way to shoot baskets at the park for exercise. The early sun beams slanting low across the earth, catch these weeds just so. The fluffy wisps reflect the light in all directions making it look like they glow from within. The effect is especially striking when a heavy dew blankets them in watery beads.

I thought about photographing these weeds each day as I drove past. One day I decided it was time. Don’t know why, just was. So I loaded up the camera and tripod along with my basketball.

I tend to feel self conscious when I know people are watching me take photos. This spot is obviously right along the road where passing motorists would have a good view of me crouched down in the bushes with my camera. On the other hand it is early morning and the road is out in the sticks without much traffic. I figured how many people could possibly see me during the few minutes I would be there? I figured wrong.

The crossing barriers chose this day of all days to get stuck. With their arms down and red lights flashing, they soon had a line of half a dozen cars waiting at an empty crossing with nothing to distract the occupants except me crawling around just outside their windows. I tried to ignore them.

Just as it was dawning on people that the lights were stuck and they starting thinking about going across anyway, a train actually came through. I thought this would shake the switch loose and solve my problem, but no dice. After the roaring banging squeaking train passed, the lights stubbornly kept up their quiet flashing.

Eventually I finished and packed up my gear. With a wave, I hopped in my car and drove off.

We take photos of our son all the time at birthday parties and holidays and what not, but we also like to have an “official” yearly photo to hang on the wall marking his progress through the years. At first we did the typical parent thing and went to the local department store and got run of the mill shots posing in front of standard backgrounds. The results were what thousands upon thousands of other parents have on their walls. Just swap in the kid of your choice – not exactly works of art.

Later my wife started taking more personalized photos. Using a compact camera she took shots of him around the farm or out in the fields behind our house or at the beach. She is much better at these kind of shoot from the hip almost candid type shots than I am. They turned out really nice and gave a much more natural result than dressing him up and dragging him kicking and screaming to the mall.

This year I figured that I should take his ten year photos – seeing as how I’m professional photographer now with a studio and all. I think the photos came out pretty cool even if I do say so myself.

When taking portraits I try to get some ideas together as a starting point and then let the sitter choose where things go from there. I don’t want to just say “sit here”, “tilt your head this way”, “turn that way”, etc. – then the photos are only what I say they should be. I want the sitter to collaborate with me and take some ownership of the process so that the final photos are infused with his/her unique personality.

Some people are more comfortable with this kind of free association process than others. Some folks wouldn’t do anything unless I told them to do it. Others love the idea and really run with it. Of course kids tend to be the best at it.

My son is a bit of a ham so we had some fun with it. I put him in a couple of different situations, one in front of a background in the studio and one against a wall down in the basement of the building, and let him goof around. I had to give him some direction once in a while, but I tried not to force him into too much. He did great.

I’m not sure that the relatives are all happy with the results though. For one, I worked in black and white – the absence of any color shots has been mentioned. We also tried to do some artsy fartsy stuff which isn’t always appreciated by a population weaned on picture packages from the department store. Guess you can’t please everybody.

The more portrait work I do, the more I find myself using natural light. For the studio shots I used only the light coming from the windows in the east wall. I chose the spot downstairs because of the beat-up black wall and because there was a big glass door at the end of the hall that threw some fantastic light at that time of the day. The sign with his name on it was just a goofy idea we cooked up.

MDW