Bob Keefer
Is a writer and photographer who lives in rural Oregon.
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Tag Archives: art
The digital sketchbook
People are still fighting endlessly on the Web about the relationship of film and digital photography.
Most, of course, prefer digital for its convenience and because that’s where all camera companies are putting their energy. Some zealots preach “Film is better!” and then go home to their vinyl records.
Me, I like them both. Film is what I love for making hand colored photographs. I also like the slower process of working with film, including the mystical time alone in the darkroom.
And digital is great for its quick utility.
Lately, though, I’ve come to appreciate digital as a kind of sketchbook medium. I can use my digital camera to take notes when I’m shooting large format, for example, and as an aid to previsualizing the photo I am trying to make.
This afternoon, home recuperating from minor surgery, I spent a half hour in the woods shooting flash-blur photos with the LX — bracketing exposures, trying different kinds of movements — before it dawned on me I could do all the experimentation with the K20D and be a little more methodical about understanding the process.
Set the camera to pop out a BW jpeg and you can see, instantly, the scene in black and white.
OK, it’s not the same. But it’s a guideline.
And it’s instant. It helped me to figure out some things about what works, and what doesn’t, in flash-blur black and white — without spending several days or weeks in the process.
What works best?
A subject that is closer than the background and clearly separate. A flash exposure that’s dead-on, or a half stop bright. An ambient exposure that’s about 2/3 stop low. And an exposure time of about 1/15, so you get that nice blur effect.
The photo above gets a lot of what I am after: It has a look that grows from art printmaking as much as from photography.
Now to go shoot some more film, using the same technique but with film’s more beautiful tonality.
photo: Blackberries (digital), 2010
Abstract design
These branches form interesting abstract patterns against the sky.
photo: Branches, hand colored black and white, 2010
Working to boredom, and beyond
photo: The Getty, Los Angeles, 2008
A few years ago I was fortunate to take part in a two-week National Endowment for the Arts workshop in Los Angeles for theater writers.
Not writers of theater, but writers about theater.
One of the high points of the experience was that every day, first thing in the morning, all two dozen of us middle age writers would troupe up the street in our sweats and sneakers to a nearby dance studio, where we spent an hour learning about movement from Tom Leabhart.
Leabhart, a CalArts professor, is a mime who has studied his art like a martial arts master. He can, I believe, make any muscle in his body move in perfect isolation from the others.
In our work with him, he had us each devise a simple physical routine, which we were instructed to go back to our hotel rooms and practice repeatedly every night, until we knew the movements as closely as breathing.
We were to practice our routines, he said, to boredom, through boredom and beyond.
That notion of going “through boredom” is useful in photography as well as acting.
So much of society’s concept of art depends on inspiration. Inspiration is a great thing, though to quote Chuck Close (and others), “Inspiration is for amateurs. I don’t have time.”
But greatness comes from the deep understanding that comes of steady practice.
I’ve been trying to reach that point — beyond boredom — with some of my photography, taking not quite repetitive images and printing and coloring them even when I can barely stand to look at them anymore. Just doing the work. Shooting four rolls a week, developing every Saturday, printing half a dozen on Sunday, hand coloring those prints during the week. Same subject, one that’s always close at hand here: The forest.
The funny thing is, I keep discovering more and more to learn about those photographs. Even in boredom.
“You Are Not a Gadget”
Remember when the Web was going to save us all?
Jaron Lanier does. And he’s bitter about its failed potential. In “You Are Not a Gadget,” he attacks the pathetic side of Web 2.0, putting his finger squarely on a few of the problems.
It’s not that Facebook has turned us all into obsessed adolescents, exactly. It’s more that the whole culture of the Web, with its built-in devaluation of information, has begun to erode the world’s ability to produce and refine information of real value.
(Just that chilly word, “information,” has a built-in bias: That all information is as good as any other information.)
Laron points out that the Web is already well along in the process of destroying newspapers and music as paying professions. No one will pay for news, or for music, when it’s all “free.”
And, yes, the thought resonates completely with me. As a career newspaper writer, I would say that I have been able to average, over several decades, two to three coherent, useful stories a week — while working full time at producing them.
Is it any wonder that most daily blogs are vacuous?
Read the Independent’s review of Laron’s book here.
photo: Liberace Museum, Las Vegas, 2009
Technology, art, nature photography and kitsch
The development of new technology regularly leads to new forms of art. The invention of metal paint tubes in the 19th century, for example, helped artists to carry their paints into the field, fueling the explosion of plein air painting and Impressionism. The invention of the electric guitar spawned rock ‘n roll.
But sometimes the technology takes over, funneling art into narrower and narrower directions.
That’s exactly what has happened in the last 30 years in nature photography.
Time was — and I mean a time when photographers shot on slow speed slide film and used manual focus lenses — it was just plain tough to get a picture of a bird in flight. It’s not easy today but it’s a whale of a lot easier than it used to be.
Back before effective autofocus and good quality high ISO digital cameras that were affordable to the masses, a lot of nature photographers wanted desperately to get those shots.
Now they can. And now they do: Over, and over, and over again. Magazines are full of them. Flickr is full of them. Nature websites are full of them. And they all look alike.
What is all this got to do with kitsch?
I am not entirely sure, but I sense that there is a relationship between the clichéd state of current nature photography and the increasing amount of nature kitsch, such as the leaping wolf photograph that was recently disqualified from the competition it had won not because it’s such a bad photo (it is) but because the Spanish photographer apparently used a tame wolf in a wildlife park for the shot.
What is kitsch, anyway? There many definitions, but an essential ingredient is always an element of pretense. Kitsch is bad art that pretends to be important.
Our more detailed level, of course, kitsch plays to the crowd, always. It’s the gaudy sunset shot. It’s the baby in a floppy hat.
And (here’s the connection to wildlife photography) it’s the perfect eagle, soaring perfectly in a perfect sky, as opposed to the actual eagle, whose wing feathers are tattered and whose right leg is sprouting an ugly fungus.
Nature photography has lost touch, in a fundamental way, with nature; and driven by the rat race of technological improvement, it’s turned itself into a close cousin of paintings on velvet.
photo: The birdcracker, 2009