4.08.2023
I guess this week's fascination is with products from Voigtlander. At least that's what I'm currently interested in....
A "re-print" of something I wrote for Michael Johnston's "TheOnlinePhotographer" twelve long years ago. More appropriate today that it was at the time. And tangentially the subject of a recent series of columns. Enjoy?! From 2011.
To see the original with photos and comments appended, go here: https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2011/12/kirks-take-kirk-tuck-2.html#more
Action vs. Activity. One makes you an artist,
the other makes you tired.
By Kirk Tuck
Action and activity are two very different things and it's important for an artist to know which one they're focusing on. Action derives from need or reaction. You are hungry so you eat. You need to get somewhere quickly so you walk faster. You need to get warm so you head for shelter. You have a vision you want to interpret as a photograph so you do the process of making that photograph. You are pushed to eat from necessity and you are pushed to create the photograph by necessity. One driver is physical while the other pursuit is driven by passion. Both are pretty unencumbered pathways and both have an immediate aim. Eating gives you the fuel to go on while creating art gives you the emotional fuel to enjoy life.
Compare honest hunger with a more common variation: Eating because you are bored. Eating because the food is in front of you. Eating because you want to keep your hands busy. And, eating because the taste of whatever you’re eating entertains you. In this sense eating becomes an activity instead of an action. And activities are the biggest time wasters in our lives.
As photographers our focus should be on the making of images. But that's hard work. Even if you are hungry to make an image, there are all kinds of impediments. You might have to find models or subjects that truly resonate with the vision you have in your head, and you'll have to find locations and you might even have to get permission from a property owner to make your image on their property. But if you are really driven to make the image and express your art you'll find a way to channel the resources and the energy. If you are committed to expressing yourself and sharing your interpretation of the world around you then you'll punch through the mental and rationally-based "resistance" to actually creating art, and you'll get your project done. That's action. It comes from a need: the need to express your art. The action fulfills the need.
And if you practice your art with a focus on the action you'll find that it becomes less and less scary to pick up the tools of your art and head out the door to just do the process. But...some of us get trapped by one or more of the insidious spider webs immobilizing us from taking the right action. We get stuck in one of the levels of hell that I call "Endless Preparation." It's also known far and wide as "Research."
For photographers endless preparation begins with the selection of camera gear. As rational, educated and affluent adults we move in a world of bountiful information but we’re not always good at asking the right questions or divining the right answers. In fact, we focus so narrowly on some parameters and not at all on others. We've been taught that good preparation is paramount for any successful mission and we’ve taken that to heart. And so we begin the first part of the journey into the sticky spider webs of rampant indecision and quantitative ambiguity.... I’ve been doing it all month. I would be better served inviting my quirky and interesting friends into my little studio and making their portraits with whatever camera and lights I already have, but...shamefully, I've allowed my subconscious resistance to getting that project started push me into the un-winnable endless loop of trying to decide which little mirrorless, compact camera deserves my true affection. Will it be the Nikon V1 or the Olympus EP3? And, of course, it doesn't matter which decision I make because I'll end up using it for casual work and not the work that really motivates me to create my own personal art. But I've already wasted plenty of time shooting with both cameras and then writing down and sharing my observations. In a sense I'm also guilty of enabling other would be artists' progress by inferring that the issue of picking the ultimate "little camera" from a "moving-target" list of camera is an important and valuable consideration. Which, of course, it's not.
And even though my mercurial and unstable selection processes are becoming (sad) legend among fellow photographers, I find it hard to resist. Just like everyone with a facile and functioning mind, I've found that my subconscious can rationalize the hell out of just about any equipment "research" and acquisition. The latest is a little voice that says, "The art of photography is getting more fluid and fluent. We’re capturing sequences and interlacing it with video and all the presentations are going to the web. We need small cameras that can capture both quickly and easily. The small cameras with fast processors are the equivalent magnitude of destructive innovation engendered by the screwmount Leica cameras of the 1940s and early 1950s." Hell, given time I'm sure I could rationalize selling my car and buying all the small camera models.
You may laugh at my personal quagmire but I see variations in and among my friends and colleagues and all over the web. You may be the kind of person who finds the activity of researching and testing small cameras lacking in restraint, but your "activity" might be endlessly profiling your printer, your monitor, your camera, your wall, your light stands and so on. While my wasted time is spent comparing reviews and specifications of delightful neckwear bling, your wasted time is spent scanning and shooting Greytag MacBeth color targets and "mapping" them to some new paper from Croatia. It’s really the same thing. It's a preparatory activity that's powered by the rationalization of mastery, but it's really just a strategy to procrastinate from dipping a toe into the unknown.
I also have a friend who is really a good photographer who has been on a relentless workshop circuit. If someone's offered a workshop somewhere on the web he's probably been there and taken it. And yet what each workshop offers is a new set of technical skills that he feels he must master before he heads out to do his "real work." But since there's an endless supply of workshops, and a nearly endless reiteration and repackaging of techniques, he's mostly ensured that, without some effective catharsis, he will never really get around to doing the work he envisioned when he first became entangled in the sticky webs of photography.
If the activity that fills your nervous void is something like eating or smoking, chances are you will either become very large or very sick. But if your activity is the research and mastery of every corner of our craft, you will become an expert in arcane lore and analysis and a pauper in creating and sharing finished art. And there's is no law that says you can't make that choice. But so many of us are so well trained in debate and rationalization that we suppress a reality that we should at least give a passing nod to. In some ways my own blog tends to enable the endless search for endless things for which to search. But it sounds preachy if I tell everyone to stop reading and contemplate what it is they really want to say with images.
So, what am I getting at? Well, I'm trying to become a "recovering" researcher in my own work and I've made myself a little checklist to work with. I’ve set some ground rules to keep myself within the design tolerances of sanity. We'll see how well this works out....
Kirk’s Rules of choosing Action over Activity:
- It's okay to buy a new camera, but I am required to go out and shoot fun images with it for more time then I spend writing about it or measuring its results.
- It's better to shoot images that are fun, make you laugh and make your friends happy than images you think will impress other photographers. Even better if the images can work in both camps.
- If there's no reason for me to be out shooting I can default to a nap on the couch to replenish my body and spirit. Sometimes pushing myself out the door is just the wrong move.
- If I catch myself shooting test charts I stop immediately and head out the door with a good book. Or a camera.
- The feel of a camera in my hand should always trump someone else's written evaluation. No one really knows how I want things to look.
- I have a post card sized white card pinned to the wall behind my computer that says, "Making Portraits is my Art. Anything else I do is not-art."
- Quiet contemplation is more conducive to having fun ideas than relentless study.
- All the things I really need to know to create are already locked away in my brain, I just need to be still and quiet enough to open that door. Sitting quietly beats looking at DxO results for thinking about creativity.
- Inspiration comes to those who leave space for it to come in. A busy mind usually lacks the space.
- I have a smaller card tacky waxed to the bottom edge of my monitor that says, "To stop suffering stop thinking."
And therein lies the real secret roadblock to all creativity...at least for me. We spend far too much more time thinking about our art than just doing our art. Being smart is highly overrated because it requires us to do too many mental exercises to prove to ourselves that we should be doing what we already know we want to be doing. And the process of rationalizing and the desire to master each step is the process of not doing the final step. The "going out and shooting."
The photographic process (in a holistic sense) works best for me when it works like this: My brain comes up with an idea for a visual image. (Not the overlay of techniques but the image itself ). I quickly decide how I will do the image. I go into action and book a model or call a likely subject. We get together and I try to make my vision work. Within the boundaries of the original idea we play around with variations and iterations. Finally, the photo session hits a crescendo, and the subject and I know we've gone as far as we can, and are spent.
My years spent as an engineering student taught to be logical and linear, but have been my biggest impediment to doing creative work. Because there's always a subroutine running that says, "This is the step-by-step approach to doing X." And I'm always trying to approach things logically. But to get to X is hardly ever a straightforward process and being able to step outside routine and to stretch past logic creates the time when fun stuff happens.
Beyond my ten steps to choose action over activity is the realization that I already know enough technical stuff to last a lifetime. And, if we admit it to ourselves, the technical stuff it the easiest part to learn because there are no immediate consequences to learning or not learning the material. Really. You might waste a bit of time and money but for most of us that's about it. The hard part is being brave enough to stake out a vision and work on it. The hardest part for most of us is to continually engage the people around us that we want to photograph and convince them to collaborate in the realization of our vision. But it's only through doing it again and again that our styles emerge and our art gets stronger. The technical stuff is so secondary.
As an exercise, when I'm out walking around with my camera I make it a point to approach a stranger each time and ask them if we can make a portrait together. If I get turned down, I approach someone else until I find someone who's willing to put a toe across the fear line and play. The image isn't always stellar. Hell, it's rarely great work. But it gives me the practice and the tools to abate my fears so that when the right muse comes along I am ready and willing to give it my best shot. Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice frees your art. Relentless activity depletes that same energy like air escaping from a balloon.
I hope you'll accept what I've written here in the spirit I've intended. We're all on a journey to amaze ourselves. The first step is to choose action over activity.
And by the way...there is no ultimate camera choice.
Kirk
Retro memory day. Here's a link for a post I wrote for Michael Johnston's site over eleven years ago. It's my take on LED lights after just publishing the first photography book about the same. Enjoy?
I love predicting the future. Sometimes it actually works out.
I'm sure there's still a curmudgeon out there somewhere who is "waiting" for LEDs for photography to be "perfected."
4.07.2023
Stuff photographers worry about that doesn't turn out to be very important after all. Warning: It's all TL:DR
4.05.2023
Battling the malaise induced by recognition of the oncoming Robot Apocalypse. Or how I learned to be happy while generative A.I. disrupted white collar jobs.
A quote from Greg IP's article about the ramifications of generative A.I., in the Wall Street Journal:
"To paraphrase the old saying about recessions and depressions, technological disruption is when your neighbor is automated out of a job; the robot apocalypse is when you are automated out of a job. Professionals, including people who write columns for a living, now know the fear of obsolescence that has stalked blue-collar workers for generations."
But it's equally effective at creating photographic images from scratch. Or from suggestions. Or from source materials such as snapshots or drawings.
What I hear from people outside the tech industry and outside the photo industry is that this sort of rising autonomous ability on the part of machines is creating overblown news stories and that the sort of capabilities required to replace trained, human professionals is years and years, or decades away. But when I look at tech resources and even at the cutting edge of my own industry I can see that this will be like the "Kodak Delusion."
The Kodak Delusion was the belief, supposedly supported by rich data, that the world's biggest imaging company would be able to rely on film sales for decades past the nascent introduction of digital cameras. Dozens of Kodak PhD, economists, on the payroll, assured the board of directors that progress would be slow and linear in the digital field and that the slow and steady progress Kodak was making toward sliding into the digital market was right on the pace. Right on the numbers. And then everything went to hell as the acceptance and demand for digital products skyrocketed and accelerated logarithmically and left Kodak in the dusty museum of once great companies, sidelined within a small handful of years. Film, for the most part, just vanished. So did labs. So did processing chemicals in nice yellow envelopes. So did support for hundreds and hundreds of college and vocational photo education programs. So did their valuable professional support programs.
I wrote earlier about how quickly I thought the new tech would disrupt the market for business portraits; headshots. I've now, at last count, had about 45 people email me links to a number of ads offering the following service: You take a group of selfies with your phone. You choose a style and a background you like. You upload these files to the service which puts your images into a source file which software deconstructs using standard face recognition techniques (space between eyes, height and structure of cheekbones, nose structure, mount structure, etc.) to build a "new you" from all the parts. The new you is enhanced, cleaned up, rid of scars, acne and rough skin. Stripped of your previous double chin. And output as a series of new "candidates" for you to choose from. All for about $29. Turnkey.
The slower thinkers among us reflexively say that there isn't enough "resolution" on the phone selfies to make great images and so current professional headshot creators needn't worry. They totally miss the point that the supplied photos only supply the framework or the overall facial grid coordinates for the final digital portrait construction and that the appearance (and reality) of detail, texture and overall resolution and sharpness are made when the program "skins" the "frame". The resolution of the source material is immaterial to the final quality of the images; as long as the source images (selfies) provide broad information (hair color, facial metrics, complexion tones). To put it simply, the A.I. programs are looking at your supplied selfies the way a painter might look at a model or source material when doing realistic painting. They get the broad strokes from the small photos and then paint large. As large as you might want. And with as much fabricated but apparently real detail as you might want.
I have a few friends who understand this new technology very well and say to me that the sky is the limit, that we are at early days in the "takeover" and that this will free up mankind for more leisure. Neglecting to acknowledge that most of the off-boarded knowledge and creative content workers will need to find new sources of income to replace their existing salaries. I guess the counter argument is to not worry about it if you are a stockholder of a company that benefits from endless, free content creation by machines because the embrace of the robots will reduce operating costs and raise equity value... An argument that brings little solace to those made redundant....
So, the sky is falling. The robots are kicking down the doors. bullets bounce right off their titanium alloy armor. Why don't I care?
Hmmm. I guess it's because I am confident that most bright people who are temporarily displaced will find a new way to make money and thrive. I'm also of the belief that a certain percentage of the population doesn't read the news, doesn't understand the coming changes and the ramifications, and that they will continue on doing things the way they have been until forced to change.
I did some work for a large, regional advertising agency last week. We made portraits. They have a burgeoning I.T. department filled with very bright young people. To a person they found the new tech "interesting." But, importantly, they weren't rushing to adopt it in their own work. The portraits I was shooting were for use on their website. If a progressive (in terms of development; not in the political sense), tech forward, young company isn't rushing to use these new resources then there is some breathing room for current photographers. At least for now (but see the Kodak Delusion above...).
Last weekend I needed to get out of the office and away from the computer. I walked downtown through familiar territory. Everywhere the trees, lawns and gardens were green and growing. The weather was textbook perfection. And all over the touristy spots of downtown Austin the landscape was busting with portrait photographers taking graduation portraits, engagement portraits, model portfolio portraits, family portraits and even portraits just for fun. All of the customers, if they had deeper knowledge, would be perfect candidates for much cheaper, retouched A.I. images --- if they were aware of the existence and value proposition. But they seemed happy to work with photographers who were working exactly the same way they did last year and even a decade before. The majority of photographers I saw were Gen Z and Millennial females, almost all wielding the almost cliché Canon DSLR and one of two zoom lenses, The venerable 24-70mm f2.8 or the 70-200mm f2.8. Some used flash but most were just winging it in the shade of the tall buildings. Gotta like open shade. It's the best.
Here's my take. I think there are a lot of guys like me who really get into the technical stuff. We're on top of the latest gear and the latest techniques. We can imagine, clearly, the consequences of this sort of evolution. But it takes a lot longer for people who aren't welded into the industry in the same way to "discover" the value of new technology.
I remember years after I bought my first two wildly expensive Kodak digital cameras running into a friend/peer/competitor at one of the local processing labs (we still needed prints back then for clients) and he was asking me if I thought digital would ever supplant film-based commercial imaging. This was in 2004. He thought not. He thought his Hasselblad film cameras would be adequate for at least a decade more. And then, BAM! He was thrust by his own clients into the fast learning curve of digital at the time and a year later sold his last film camera to retool. It took the lab a long, long time to convince him that sRGB files were, indeed, what he needed to output his files as for printing. He tried to get good results giving the lab ProRGB files (incorrectly rationalizing that the wider gamut would provide better quality) for a long time before he understood. But eventually he came around, shoved along by the momentum of commerce.
We're at the same kind of inflection point right now. We might be able to adjust in a number of ways. We can learn the new software and try to add our own value to it. We might pivot to a different specialty that values primary, human interpretation. We can delay the invasion of automation for a few years more by turning to video production instead (but the writing is already on the wall there too...). Or we can find the clients who don't want to change, don't know about the new tech, or just don't care how we do the job as long as it gets done.
As an older generation (our demographic here trends "over 40") we have two real choices. We can learn as much as possible about new innovations, new trends and new tools like A.I. and incorporate them into our creative existence/workflow or we can hide our heads in the sand, deny that anything has changed, soldier on with an ever decreasing market share for our traditional wares until we are left barren of customers/audiences and distraught.
There is a third option. We can just exit the market. If you don't need the income you can choose not to choose. But if you do need continuing income from creative content then you'd better get busy learning new ways.
Sad to think that my old laptop and ChatGBT might just be the next Vladimir Nobokov. Or Richard Avedon. Now where did I store that cache of EMP weapons? Currently baiting the robot traps with lithium batteries....
Time elapsed concepting, researching, writing and editing: 1 hour 30 minutes. I owe it all to my typing teacher at high school...
"Happiness is a learnable skill." -Jewel