Brush, Palette, Mouse....Ready For the Louvre

Last year I was black-balled from entry into a Facebook group of artists - condemned for being an "events photographer". I suspect it was also because I was unable to speak Artish and would not get a tattoo or a man-bun.

Whatever, it set me out on a quest to become an artist in spite of the critics. I thought long and hard about what art I would pursue. Making miniature scenes was all very well, and taking pictures of weddings and hot rods and pretty girls might be a good training ground, but something more was needed. Something that would say Art loud enough and in a condescending enough manner to allow me to sit in a coffee shop and fill out Centrelink forms...What to do...What to do...

Then I had it. Digital art. Prints derived from images that I have taken, suitably modified until either they resemble other media or I resemble other artists.

Armed with that determination I ordered this book:

Focal press books are generally good, though they have had some authors who seem to have spent too much time in coffee shops filling out Centrelink forms. But in this case, Susan Roddick Bloom seems to have hit upon just the right level of communication to help the novice. And fortunately , Camera Electronic equipped me with the rest of what I needed.

Of course, I needed the images in the first place, and I've a Drobo full of them. And a Wacom Intuous tablet - CE had those too -  and a new iMac computer. I also had the Epson printer I got from CE and it is calibrated with the Spyder Express, so I was nearly all set. Final piece in the chain was the image editing program...and I went with my faithful Photoshop Elements 14.

It proved to be a good choice. Ruddick's book is several years old, but the basic procedures that she outlined in Photoshop itself are now quite do-able in the latest Photoshop Elements. There have been no procedures or techniques mentioned in her text that cannot be done in PE, and very few of the references she makes to specific things need to be translated to another wordage. Adobe have been decent enough to keep the same things in the same drawers in the digital desk.

Ms. Bloom covers sketches, pastels, cont, oils, watercolours, and illustrations. She has a chapter on some of the commercial plug-ins that also simulate drawn art...and she is not too prissy to admit that they can be a good jumping-off point for fast starts. I've tried a little from many of the chapters and found her advice to be excellent. it was money well spent.

The Photoshop Elements 14 program was also money well spent - and if you are at all interested in getting into digital shooting and manipulation I can recommend it.

Now it will be a case of experiment, practise, and time. One day I hope to be refused entry into ever more prestigious art groups. If I can be ejected from the Hermitage, Tate, or MOMA I shall consider myself a success.

Uncle Dick

Good Colour Bad Colour Ugly Colour

The days of putting our films in to the chemist and hoping for some decent prints in a fortnight are long past. We now put our memory cards into the card reader and hope for some decent images in 5 seconds. The time occupied by gnawing anticipation is reduced greatly but we have also lost the consolation of being able to buy a bag of barley sugar sweets even if everything is blurry.

Same with colour. We once got what we were given and liked it. Sometimes we got what we deserved. The cost of colour slide film or colour printing in the film era was considerable - and we did not waste our shots. But what came back was tied to the temperature and purity of the baths in the processor and that could be a mixed bag - and sometimes the technicians loading the machines got it horribly wrong. Ask me about the wedding that vanished...

Nowadays we can get our colour RAW and cook it for ourselves. We can take precautions to prevent all but the direst disaster. Most of our weddings and some of our brides survive. Of course we may be wrong with the colour - that is still a subjective matter for most shoots. We are aided by the mechanisms in modern cameras and can make use of Datacolor colour charts of various types. We can calibrate our monitors and printers and viewing lights and everything. We can desaturate everything and talk up the art of it...fancy footwork can save a bad situation. Try to show the prints in a dark restaurant after a few drinks...

In the end, we need to remember that we are not making real objects - we are making flat images of real objects. We can get 66% of the way to realism but that third dimension kills it. If we are not making a stab at realistic representation we can even throw the 66% away - as long as we can please the viewer.

 Remember that sometimes we can't  - Vincent van Gogh made a dynamite starry, starry night but nobody wanted to buy it then.

Fine Art Paper - Pulp Friction Brought To Life

I realise that using the phrase fine art photography is a dangerous thing - it seems to be two adjectives chasing a noun. And in many cases unsuccessfully...But at least we can try.

If you hope to present digital images that will be hung you must make sure they deserve to be*. This means a great deal of careful work before the printer whirrs - photographing, editing, critiquing. The printer that you choose and the inks that it will use are prime factors as well...but the chief thing that has to be right is the paper.

It has to last. People who pay money for pictures want those pictures to stay flat, stay clean, and stay the way they were when the money changed hands. Thus you need to search out archival-quality paper. "Archival Quality" is also a fraught phrase but at least there are some scientific standards for it - laboratories have established criteria for the longevity of paper and ink and published them. Various manufacturers tell us that their products meet these standards.

Of course, performance over a passage of time is only tested by the passage of that time. There might be a sales warranty issue on the Great Pyramid of Cheops over the stone facing that has fallen away...but the builders are nowhere to be found.

But back to your prints. Your surface needs to be appropriate to the image presented. Some people want canvas - some paper. Some want aluminium - they can all be accommodated these days. The papers can be smooth matt, smooth gloss, smooth semi-gloss, or can have texture imparted in the manufacture. Some are extremely rough, but if the image can be of blocky form this may be just perfect.

On a technical point - the heavy papers can be very heavy and you'll need to see if your printer can deal with the increased thickness. They may also have considerable warp and droop and you'll need to make provision to eliminate or cope with this as well. Crude as it sounds, you might find yourself doing a bit of judicious paper bending with your fingers before you press the start button.

You'll be confronted with some real choices in the base colour of the paper. Various words are bantered about; wheat, buff, cream, ivory, etc. but the end result is off-white. See if your image is one that will be complemented by this sort of thing or whether you'll need a clear white. these are available too.

Come in an browse amongst the Ilford, Hahnemuhle, and Permajet products. Some can be got in sheet form and some in roll. Sample packs are here so that you can experiment before lashing out for a full box.

* Either they hang or you do...

Save Everything - Whales, The World, Old Soap Wrappers, Jpeg's

Everything.

Save it on your computer drive, back it up to your Time Machine hard drive, then back this up to your Drobo, then burn CD's of the files, then print them out on an Epson printer, then rephotograph the prints with a 35mm copy camera and archivally process the film. Then store it in acid-free sleeves in a fireproof contaner.

Then take the discs and the film and the prints and any spare pixels that have fallen out of the back of the machine and put them in a safe deposit box down at the Bank of New South Wales.

You may want to ask the bank to sandbag the St. George's Terrace entrance and post guards armed with Stirling SMG's there - better safe than sorry.

After you have done this, go back and look at the images you started with. Are they really all that good? Is your student portfolio of 365 daily images of a banana on a plate really the stuff of your dreams? Have you advanced? Would it be a good idea to keep one picture of the banana and clean the rest out of the drive?

Just this thought occurred to me some time ago when I noted that the content level indicator on the Drobo drive I use got past half-full. Now the Drobo is a wonderful device for keeping things safe, as long as you keep it safe. I can re-disc it to far more capacity than it bears now...I'll do that eventually, but decided to look into the thing at present to discover what was in there.

Well, I didn't find the missing sock but I did find damn near everything else that I had dumped into it. Including jobs that had a set of RAW files, jpeg finder files, working psd files, and finished jpeg output files. Plus a few tiff's and something that looks suspiciously like a tram ticket. It was like an overgrown garden of pixels.

I set aside my ruth and weeded relentlessly - gaining back valuable disc space and concentrating each division into work that I am happy with. I did allow some wiggle room with RAW files that I may re-work...but even there I have been realistic with what was actually worth re-working. Let's face it folks, we usually get better as we go along, and it is retrograde to go back and try to make silk purses out of our sow's ears. They are never good and it annoys the sows.

Spring cleaning is not just for the carpet - try it and see.

Talk Arty To Me....In Mount Lawley

If you need to know, they want you to listen...

There is to be a talk tonight in the series " Talks For Emerging Artists " at the Astor theatre, Mount Lawley. Three presentations on the subject and some pretty good speakers.

The time is to be 7:00 and the entry fee is on a what-you-feel-you-can-pay basis. So this is a chance to measure your soul as well as your pocket.

Go to this link for more information:

https://www.facebook.com/events/745448755571347/

Good luck. Those of us who have been rejected as artists and have had to make do with being event photographers salute you...

World Record Paid For Photograph

DP Review has just reported that a fine art photograph produced by Peter Lik has been sold to an undisclosed private buyer for $ 6,500,000.

This gives us all hope that we may, with the proper equipment and opportunity, emulate this success. Unfortunately the report does not state which camera and lens was used, nor the aperture or shutter speed. Apparently the original file is a colour one and has been converted to monochrome for this sale.

The photograph was taken in Arizona in a place called Antelope Canyon. It shows sunlight filtering down through what may be dust or smoke. Or it could be from some form of vapour rising from the sand floor of the canyon. Unfortunately the highlight that shows the floor of sand is so bright that it obscures whatever is lying there - hard to tell what might be releasing the vapour.

Perhaps there had been a recent visit from antelopes. Or zebras.