Monday, February 15, 2016

Best of 2015

This was a really difficult project. I shot over 25,000 images in 2015. Too many by any measure. But of what value are any of these images if they just sit collecting virtual dust in my photo catalogue? They need to be seen. They need to be mulled over. Discussed. Dismissed even. But definitely not ignored.

One cannot display 25,000 pictures easily. Printing them would be prohibitively expensive. There are so many crappy images, junk really, in that batch. And many repeats or series that hardly differ from one to the next. The only option is to select a few that might be representative of the entire collection in some way.

A friend suggested this exercise could help me recognize a style or some common thread in my art, some recurring theme maybe. This alone seemed like a good reason to proceed. But additionally, it might be a chance to delete a lot of images that in the old days of film and prints would have gone in the waste basket.

At a purely mechanical level, the process is simple enough. I created copies of all 25K images and then quickly ran through them all applying a star to any that seemed notable. Even if the image was of dubious value, I gave a star. This left me with about 500 images to consider more carefully. But while this system is straightforward enough, every single decision was fraught with difficulty.

Many images have some emotional value to me. There may be someone in the image who is dear or it may be of an event that brings intense emotions with it. Do I keep these images? Some are of people I hardly know, but they are beautifully shot or framed. Without the emotional value, do I keep these? Then there are the images which tell a story or ask you, the viewer to imagine a story. What if such an image is poorly framed or badly exposed?

And then there is that concept of "Body of Work". An image may stand out or make sense, not by itself, but because of it fitting into a body of work.

In the end, I tried to balance all of these issues while making my selections.

I reviewed these first 500 selections and slowly isolating images by repetitive selection I honed my set down to 24 images.

But now I am filled with angst. Are these really my best? What is "best"? Are these the ones I want to put out here for the world to see and judge? But what about all those other images that I really love? How can you judge the merit of an image without benefit of knowing the entire body of my images?

I have to ignore these fears and just put myself, my images, out in public and accept the feedback I receive. The good feedback (i.e. constructive critiques, suggestions for improvement, questions of motivation, etc.) and the bad (i.e. "oh that's lovely", "I could have done that with my cell phone", "Who are you, you pompous prat", etc).

Now here is an interesting discovery as I pursued this exercise. As to the matter of "style", I seem to favour B&W images over colour images. I have known all along that I have a "thing" for  B&W but I was not aware to what extent. Of my final set of twenty four images, there are NO colour images. I tried and tried to include a few colour images but they simply do not speak to me the way B&W does even though so many of my colour images are really lovely.

I have found that I tend to prefer portraits and images with people over landscapes and still life images. Maybe this is all the analysis I'll offer and instead wait to hear your reactions to my set.

I'm including all the images here in this blog posting and I'll put copies on my Farcebook and Flickr accounts. And I am going to print a book (probably via Blurb) of these for our own personal pleasure.

I really do, honestly, look forward to your comments, whether just a "I like these" or some details of what you like or don't like. Please feel free to speak up.

(a hint to view the images. Click on the first one and then use your arrow keys to cycle through them).

From a series "Chair on Ice"
Beach Party
Early Morning Calm
Alone at 6am
Benches in the Fog
Arowhon Peace
A Light in the Night
Cousins
Lovers
Curves
Angie
Dance
Portrait of a Woman
Sisters
Direct
Went for a hike : it snowed
Alone
Music to Dance by
Never too old
Only a Mother will do
Friends
Just There
Just There II
Intent

Sunday, February 14, 2016

Collaboration

I got a call the few weeks ago from an artist friend. At the time, Laura, a painter, was just finishing up a series of large canvases, self portraits. She had been working from photographs her husband took of her.

Laura had been imagining her next project. Her idea was a woman floating (another woman, not herself this time), maybe like she was under water or in space. The background should be black, the woman's hair floating. The initial idea was to use a somewhat more (Laura's word...) "voluptuous" model. But the need for physical prowess outweighed and ruled out the voluptuous idea (at least for now).

By his own admission, the photography requirements were a bit more than Mark, her musician husband, was comfortable attempting. She had seen some of my portraits online, my use of a black background was exactly what she had in mind and was curious how I created the effect. We sat down a few days later over a coffee to talk about her plan, her ideas and how I might be able to help. I quickly realized the easiest (and for me, the most fun) would be to do the photography for her myself.

The first order of business was to find a location to shoot in. Laura's own living room was ample big enough so we settled on that. Then, how to float? Laura had already been thinking a small trampoline might do the trick, so sourced a cheap one on kijiji. We did a test shoot with Laura as model and found everything was working to plan.

Now to find a model. We searched Model Mayhem and we asked everyone we knew. I posted a query on my Farcebook page, Laura did the same. We got a couple of responses which looked promising.

One of the people who contacted us was Alina. She heard about our project through another model I know. She was very keen to participate. At first, Alina's fine, dancer's physique seemed to be at odds with Laura's "voluptuous" requirements. Laura was not convinced Alina was right for the job but I was so taken by her look that I was eager to try her out. So I suggested an "experiment" with a fit model could be helpful to understanding how the photography was going to work. Then we could proceed to find us other models till we had what Laura was after.

Well, as it turns out, Alina was so good at what we were trying to create, she just simply nailed it. There was no need to continue looking for other models.

As an extra bonus for me, I was able to create some wonderful portraits for my own portfolio after we finished up with Laura's project.



The entire shoot worked out wonderfully. It was fun to work with another artist trying to imagine and then create their ideas. New friendships were forged. New ideas have been hatched.

More to come!