Black and White Book Club: Michael Freeman

Everyone is invited to join in the Black and White Book Club (and Flash of Color February) for the month of February. The idea is to join a group of photographers in reading a relevant photography book during the course of a month, while also applying the techniques and strategies of the book to your daily photography. There was a great turnout and interest for our last book club in August, and you can read the weekly posts and updates about it, if you are curious (Overview about the August Book Club, Week 1, Reflections on Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and Week 4.) We are also continuing in the tradition of Flash of Red February, started by @olivetreeann last year, and you can see examples of the finishers' monthly layouts here. (Mine is below.)

For the month of February, we will be reading either Michael Freeman's The Complete Guide to Black & White Digital Photography or Michael Freeman Black and White Photography Field Guide. (The Field Guide is a slightly slimmed down version of The Complete Guide, but the vast majority of the text and examples are the same, just in a smaller, more conveniently-sized package. If you really want to stare at the subtle differences in some of the example images, however, I recommend the larger size of The Complete Guide.) You do not have to read the book to participate, but you will get much more out of the experience if you do. Your local library may have copies of the books (mine did), or they are available from many sites online, such as Amazon.

The Book Club will be broken down into weekly sections, and there will be a detailed post each week with thoughts and summaries about the relevant book sections and their possible applications to your photography. The following is an overview of the ideas and topics covered:

• Week 1, Feb. 1-2: Black and White Photography as Fine Art – fine art or abstract photography

• Week 2, Feb. 3-9: Black and White Photography as Normality – still life, landscape, street, portrait, architecture, or journalism / documentary photography

• Week 3, Feb. 10-12 and 14-16: Elements of Visual Design – thinking about shape, structure, tone, volume, form, and texture

• Feb. 13th: Flash of Color February – an image processed with selective color to bring out a specific color

• Week 4, Feb. 17-23: Creative Choices in Exposure – exploring over- and underexposure, high key, low key, high contrast, and low contrast

• Week 5, Feb. 24-28: Putting it All Together – a final week to go back to your favorite or most challenging ideas or styles of black and white photography. You can also explore topics not covered in the weeks above, such as Grain or High ISO photographs, HDR, Tone Mapping, and Adding Tints.

Section Two of the books, Digital Monochrome, will not be included during a specific week. This section deals intensively with the processing side of black and white photography and how to achieve specific looks using post-processing software. I highly recommend reading or skimming through this section at the beginning and then using the relevant techniques or strategies as they apply to the final photographic look that you are trying to achieve for a specific image. (There are a wide range of free post-processing apps or programs that you can use, if you do not already have post-processing software. Some of these include Picasa, Gimp, Picmonkey, Snapseed for Apple and Andoid, and many more. You can also shoot black and white by setting your camera to its 'monochrome' setting and not doing any processing to your images.)

All are welcome, even if you do not want to commit to the full month and just join for a week or a few days.

Feel free to leave a comment if you're interested in participating. You can also sign up to receive email updates, read it in your RSS reader, or be notified via Google+ (see links on the right hand side). Or you can 'like' the Facebook page  for updates via Facebook. You can also join the Photography Book Club group on Flickr to see and share photographs during the month.

Hope you'll join us!

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Boost Your Photography: Set a Personal Goal or Challenge

If you want to improve in a sport or learn to play an instrument, you know that setting a goal or a personal challenge is an important strategy to motivate and encourage yourself along the way. A goal helps you to measure your progress and celebrate your accomplishments. A goal can also help you push through when things are difficult or keep you motivated when you are going through a slump.

The same is true in photography.

Ask yourself: What is my goal?

Setting a goal or a personal challenge for your photography is a great way to keep yourself motivated, help you measure your progress, and provide a reason for you to celebrate your accomplishments. Goals and challenges help you grow.

Take some time to think about what would be an appropriate goal for you. Try to keep your goal tangible and within a limited time frame. An abstract goal like "Improve my photography" is much tougher to evaluate than a more concrete goal like "Take portraits of five different people in the next month." A shorter time frame, like a week or a month also helps keep you on track and provides an opportunity for reflection. If you wait six months or a year before you check in on your goal, you are much less likely to have accomplished it.

Ideas for Goals or Challenges

Stick to just one lens or one focal length.
If you want to push yourself creatively and learn more about what your lens is capable of, limit yourself to just one lens for a week or a month. (If you are just starting out and only have one lens, then push yourself to stick to just one focal length - like as wide as your lens can go or as narrow.) Limiting your lens and focal length will force you to be more creative and use your feet and body to change your perspective or point of view. Read more in Zooming vs. Cropping: Perspective in Photography.

Changing aperture can change your image.

Stick to just one aperture. 
You can learn more quickly about what a specific aperture can do for you by setting your camera to aperture priority (Av) mode. Try choosing either your widest aperture (like f/1.8 of f/3.5) or your narrowest aperture (like f/22). Take a range of shots in different light, different situations, and different perspectives (where you are relative to your subject). See how the impact of that aperture changes when you are nearer or farther from your subject. Read more about Aperture and the F/Stop Conundrum, What an Aperture of F/1.8 Can Do for You, What an Aperture of F/22 Can Do for You, and the Middle Range Apertures: F/8-F/11.

From Where I Stand, a collection of feet photographs

Start a Series.
If you want a bit of a longer-term goal, think about starting a photographic series. A collection of images related by a common subject or theme can be powerful. A series can also help keep you focused and keep you thinking about ideas or ways to add to your collection. Maybe you are interested in windows and their views, or you want to look through old photographs and take updated versions. Even images of your own feet can be a great way of demonstrating where you have been. Finally, consider making a collage of your collection to display and share.

Celebrate a home-town tradition like a Local Farmers' Market

Try a New Style or Genre of Photography.
Are you comfortable shooting architecture and landscapes when you travel but leave your camera sitting in its case at home? Get it out and try shooting portraits or close ups or street shots in and around your own home. Do you only shoot portraits of people? Take your camera out to the park and explore landscapes and flowers for an afternoon. Trying to photograph different styles and subjects will take you outside your comfort zone and push you to understand more about photography and the photographic process.

Even gutter puddles can create unique and memorable images.

Try to Capture a Specific Type of Image.
There are so many photographic subjects and techniques out there, but it can be hard to find the time and effort to try one unless you sit down and commit yourself to doing it. Always wanted to try light painting? Grab a flashlight, cell phone, or LED key chain and learn how to do Light Painting and Spin an Orb. Or, make the most of a rainy day by trying Puddle Reflection Photography. Give a new technique, like panning, a try. Want an extra level of challenge? Grab some friends and try Spinning Fire with Steel Wool.

Seek Out Accountability.
Photography is often seen as a sole endeavor, but you can learn so much more in partnership and community with other photographers. Find a local photo buddy, join a local photography group, or join an online photography community and get involved. Share your goal or challenge with someone else and have them check in with you about it. Being accountable to another person can help push you when you are lacking motivation on your own, and it is a great way to seek out and receive feedback and encouragement. Read more about how to Improve your Photography: be accountable. Consider joining the Boost Your Photography 52 Weeks Challenge - take a photograph a week and get feedback and encouragement.

Summary

Improvement comes through effort, and creativity requires both inspiration and perspiration. If you are looking to give your photography a boost, then consider setting a goal or challenge for yourself. Pick something that will push you in a new direction or force you to try something you have been putting off. See if it doesn't help you grow, improve, and be more motivated in your photography.

Did you set a goal for yourself? Did you meet it and did it help? Post your thoughts in the comments below.

Photography Is ...

I have been doing a lot of thinking about photography lately, and I wanted to share some of those thoughts with you and perhaps even get some feedback.

I feel like much of the conversation about photography, especially when one is first starting out, is all about technique and settings. I know that was where I focused after upgrading to my DSLR camera. I wanted to know the exact settings for getting the kinds of pictures I was seeing and admiring, and I could not figure out why that information wasn't always readily available. It was not until much later that I started to realize that settings are only a small part of the picture. Not that they are not important, they are, but knowing how someone else took a picture does not always mean that I could then go take that same picture.

Continuing that train of thought has led to me conclude that photography is really about three main things: timing, patience, and luck.

Photograph is Timing

The more time anyone spends with photography, the more they become interested in light. 'Painting with light' is a rough translation of the word photography to begin with, and the recording of light in a specific time and place for a specific interval and with specific settings is the mechanical heart of photography. But timing is what makes that heart beat.

There is endless discussion of light in photography. About the types and directions of light. About the temperatures and colors of light. About the shadows, lines, and depths created by the movement and manipulation of light.

Once you begin to understand about light, you also begin to realize that getting that light is all about timing. If you want to photograph during the "Golden Hour," then you need to be up and awake for that hour centered right around sunrise or out and about during that hour centered right around sunset. Professional travel and landscape photographers understand this. Timing and the planning behind it are critical to their work and their success.

Photographers use tools like the Photographers' Ephemeris to plan out their shoots and to refine their timing. This program allows you to view and plot sunrise, sunset, moon rise, and moon set for any location and date. You can figure out exactly when and where you need to stand if you want to capture the full moon rising behind a significant landmark. These kinds of shots rarely occur through happenstance. They are the result of an intentional, creative decision on the part of a photographer who understood the critical role of timing.

As a tourist or casual photographer, however, timing is not always something that we have at our disposal. We have other obligations, places to be, or group outings to meet up with. We have a whole family's worth of schedules to coordinate or friends to reconvene with. And so we come home with memory cards full of photographs taken in harsh noon light or sunsets hastily snapped before our evening event, and we wonder why our photographs fall short. We did not have the timing down. We did not plan for the light that would best flatter our subject. We took what we could in the time that we had, but it is often not the same.

I had envisioned a grand, glorious sunset behind the Tetons.
This was what I came home with: a hazy view, obstructed by forest fires,
and not helped by clouds or dramatic light in any way.

Photography is Patience

Something that I have learned from participating in the 365 Project and the routine of daily photography is that quality photography requires patience. Yes, I can take a picture every day in less than a minute, if I wanted, but that does not mean that it will be my best picture. It does not mean that I am learning and improving from the experience.

Great photography is the result of a process that involves significant patience and waiting. Timing can get you to the right location at the right time, but it cannot prevent the clouds from blocking your full moon or the rain from wiping out your glorious sunrise. This is where patience is required: the patience to return to a location again and again; the patience to wait for the light or the weather to be 'just right' for what you had envisioned; the patience to keep exploring and taking images rather than just going with your first thought and stopping.

I recently decided to alter my morning commute slightly and give myself around twenty minutes before work for photography. I wanted to pursue morning light, as the later autumn timings means that the sun is just rising when I leave for the day. In my first week, I saw the sun exactly once, on the first morning. And then, it was glorious: brightly burning through a mist of foggy frost and creating hazy silhouettes.

The next four mornings, in contrast, were a string of cloud-laden skies and deep gray autumn skies. Had I only gone out for one time, one morning, it is unlikely that I would have captured the grand sunrise over the lake I had been picturing. Instead, I wanted to challenge myself to exercise patience, to continue to return to the same location, and to see what I would be able to find through such an exercise.

Sunrise on the First Morning by Archaeofrog on Flickr

Sunrise on the Fifth Morning. (Mornings two through four looked similar or even less interesting, such that I found something different entirely to photograph.)

Patience is also needed when trying to 'work the subject.' The idea here is that you want to devote some time and creative energy to deciding how best to photograph your subject. Do you always take landscape shots that are horizontal? Are all of your portraits shot from the same position or including the same amount of the body? Are all of your close-up flowers shots head-on with the flower in the center?

Push yourself to try something different. Exercise patience and devote a little more time to getting the photograph that you want or creating one that you like even more than what you originally thought you wanted. Spend some time walking or moving around your subject. Change your perspective or your focal length. Get in close, back up far, get down low, or look down from up high. Be patient in deciding that you are 'done' photographing. You may surprise yourself.

Photography is Luck

Even with the right timing, even with the patience to return for the shot or to think about it in a new way, there is still always an element of luck in photography as well. This element does not dismiss the great amount of skill and effort that goes into such a picture, however. Freeman Patterson said it well in his book, Photography and the Art of Seeing, which was our book club choice for last August.

On page 85, he notes that "Critics who scorn the 'lucky' chance of a photographer are suggesting an accident takes place when a photographer captures a unique event that lasts only a moment, but it is no accident if the photographer anticipates the event and knows how to use his tools … A photographer has to hope for and prepare for 'lucky' chance."

Photography is luck in that all the elements of the image have to come together at the right time and in the right place to be captured by the photographer. But it is the skills and knowledge of the photographer that allows them to successfully capture that 'lucky' image. Even studio photographers, with their ability to control the lighting and elements of the set down to a minute detail, still fall mercy to the importance of a hint of a smile in the eyes or a coldness in a stare that might vanish in a fraction of a second. Photography must always include an expectation of the unexpected, particularly when working with forces beyond our control, like nature, pets, or children.

I loved the reflections of the trees in this puddle but felt like the image was incomplete.

I had already started walking away when I saw this woman in her bright blue jacket walking down the sidewalk. This was what I had been missing. (Read the how to in Puddle Reflection Photography.)

Agree or disagree? For me, the understanding that photography is timing, patience, and luck has helped me to refine and expand my process. I understand why my one day in a location does not measure up to the standards of an image created by a photographer with infinitely more hours and more experience shooting in that particular location. But I also understand how I can explore the importance of timing and can exercise more patience in my own photography. I can do the learning and the investigating and come away with dramatically improved images. And who knows? Maybe the next time a lucky chance comes around, I will be ready and prepared to capture it.