Standing up for what you like

At the brewery of St. Clemens a yellow picture adorns the cover of their newspaper-style menu. On the back is a small biography of the artist (from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts) and a description of his style: "[his] artistic practice fundamentally takes place in the intersection between aesthetics, politics and poetry. The works often balance subtly between a simple, clear expression and a condensed conceptual complexity of meaning. Its apparently simple expressions invite the viewer to interact with the work themselves and take part in producing meaning. "

I read this as "the pictures are boring and convoluted. Instead of putting in the craft required, a virtue is made of sloth by leaving the work of producing meaning to the observer." Quality and hard work have become anathema to modern art, instead calling ambiguity and half-done work "inviting the viewer into the creative process." The artist does not dare make a clear message, does not dare stick his neck out by making his views known. Besides, one would rather not offend anyone, and if the work's meaning is entirely up to the viewer, there is no danger of that.

Art should say something. Art should relate to its surroundings and not just to itself. The kind of art whose only question is "is this art?" has no meaning outside the art world. So much art is self-referential navel-gazing whose only question for the viewer is "is this relevant?" with only one possible answer: a resounding no.

At the same time, many have confused "relevant" with "social realism". One can quite well relate to the world in ways other than by pointing out things that are bad. It's easy to criticize, find fault and belittle. Who in the world of art stands up these days and says "This is beautiful! I like this! This is good!"? We are all experts at criticizing, but it takes courage to be for something. 

When you proclaim your admiration of something, you put yourself at risk. You take a chance of being belittled or denied. But at least you have taken a viewpoint rather than shying away from any commitment. It forces you to dwell on your subject, to feel something for it, to vouch for it, rather than just flit on to demeaning the next thing. A "Yes" has always had greater consequences than a "No", but we are unable to handle the consequences. We like having an undo button, a way back, an opportunity not to be permanently damaged by the mistakes we commit: The house must be able to be sold again, the divorce should be painless. But if we do not vouch for something, we will never have anything of true value. If we try to overthrow our shitty society without taking the trouble to actually make something better, we just end up with chaotic crap instead of organized crap.

It is worth remembering Sturgeon's Law: "90% of science fiction is crap, but then again 90% of anything is crap." It's easy to find something to criticize, because there is so much that is reprehensible. When you stand up for something, take a chance, you no longer have the statistics of Sturgeon's Law on your side.

I try in my art to follow this, to look for what makes me happy and depict it. It is not always successful, and many a time I fall back on the critical and ironic, but I think that the experiment itself is important.

Orchid petals

The apartment I got when moving down to München had this orchid plant standing in the window. After giving it a minimum of water, it rewarded me with the most interesting flowers, of which I of course had to take pictures.

The mouth of the flower, while the most colorful, turned out to be hard to make a good composition from. Instead I looked to the petals, which have a veined-ness that is frequently overlooked. I took this with an on-camera flash bounced off a hand-held small bounce (the walls in that apartment had a color cast). Took me some tries to get one where the veins were really accentuated.

Part of the reason for bouncing was to make sure the shadows from the other petals were nice and soft, as it was more or less impossible to not include them. The black background is intentionally made by placing a black office chair there.

Notes from online videos

I watched a couple of videos while eating lunch, and took some things away from them that I need to remember - and in particular that I want to remember for this afternoon's photo walk.

From this video, I got some tricks on natural light portraits:

• Have the subject look towards open sky, to get the reflection in the eyes.
• Be in the shade
• Have a natural reflector (typically a big building) nearby.

I want to find some places that are good for this, fortunately we have a lot of massive buildings in München with open space around them.  I want to find out if I can get a strong studio-like side light by being close to a reflector, and if working in full sunlight works if right next to a reflector. I also want to find a couple of readily accessible places that are good for this, and note at which time of day they are best. I didn't care too much for the flatness of his light, though, so I'll have to see if being a bit more extreme in the lighting is better.

From this one, I learned mainly to watch out for light coming up from the ground, but also that columns are useful for portraits - and we have a few of those around here. I like how he has a little cloth-covered set -- not for an 8x10 camera, but for his laptop. It would be fun to make a set-up that looks like a classical camera, but is actually a laptop used as a "viewfinder", something like on the right, but preferably a little more steam-punk as well.

This one told me that I need more reflectors - especially adding the last one made a huge difference. But also the little things like straightening the elbow, adjusting the hair and clothes, and turning the fingers -- these are the kinds of things I never think of looking for.

Pictures from planes

Every time I travel by plane, I want to take pictures of the landscape passing gently but quickly underneath. I have only very occasionally managed to get anything useful out of my attempts, though. It's a tough environment, after all: Constant shaking, limited viewport, thick crappy slabs of transparent plastic, lots of UV light, extra haze, and typically bright light. Our eyes adjust, but the camera struggles.

Here's an example of a picture that works out, though more in an abstract manner than a direct depiction. It took some drastic manipulation to make it useful, so I'll go a bit more into details:


The first version is how it came out of the camera; had I been the type to delete on the camera, it would have gone.


The second one is with auto white balance and auto toning. Not much better, but you can start to see things.


The third and final one is with manual adjustments up the wazoo. For the Lightroom users: Exposure -1.2, Blacks +100, Brightness +58, Contrast +100, Clarity +77, Vibrance +45, Strong contrast tone curve with Highlights +49, Lights -11, Darks -100, Shadows -15, and finally a graduated filter over most of it with Brightness -21, Contrast 13, Saturation -8, Clarity 51.

This is a massive adjustment that would normally ruin a photo, but for these pictures, it's the only way to save them. And it's only because it's shot in raw that there is so much to save. To determine which of the shots I'd taken were any good, I applied the more extreme of these settings to all the shots, and got surprisingly many I liked.

Fleeting light

Photography has rightfully been called "painting with light". In most cases, the light plays the role of oils on a canvas, but sometimes it comes center stage (to mix a metaphor) and really make everything else the frame. Those instances, alas, are few and fleeting, partly because of the differences between how the eyes and the camera sees the world.

"Bush at Sunset" ©2010 Lars Clausen
Buy this photo at Redbubble.com

I remember when taking this picture outside Odense, Denmark that I felt like I'd missed the good sunset and was just taking photos because, well, I had little else to do out there. Only when I came back and saw it on the screen did I realize how the light had played out beautifully. I guess if I went out much more often and looked at the pictures immediately after, I would eventually get to recognize what light actually makes for good pictures.

Rocket of flowers

Flowers are so obvious a photographic target that they are difficult to make interesting photos of. These flowers stood at the corner of a building, with the sun just barely peeking around the corner. I had to twist into a very specific position to ensure I got the translucency without having the sun itself hitting the lens and destroying the contrast. It turned out nicely.

Unintentional blurring

Blurring is probably the main new idea that photography brought to the art world. Both blurring to show motion (in several ways) and blurring to show depth of field are very common photographic techniques, and all photographers should know how to use them effectively.

What's less common is taking a completely static scene and intentionally moving the camera while shooting. I've seen a couple of attempts at making intentionally blurred images this way, with some amount of success by Alain Briot, less so with most others. Mostly, I find it pretensious, a sort of anti-art breaking the rules just for the sake of breaking the rules, and I have shied away from doing it intentionally. However, I can't avoid getting shaken pictures with some frequency (especially when using a long lens), and ever so occasionally one of them gets a special expression of its own that's actually better than what a sharp picture of the same scene would have been. Here are two that I particularly like.


The first one is from Garmisch-Partenkirchen, taken while driving past some scattered houses in a bus. Between the clouds, the dirt on the window, and the shake, this image has a desolate quality and a dreaminess, as of half-forgotten places on the outskirts on reality. It works mainly because the blur is parallel with the houses, where it's most obvious, and isn't really noticable on the forest.



The second one is from Englischer Garten, and in this case my shake is very random and even across the photo, though with areas where it is not noticable. It gives an impressionistic style that removes the image from the mundane and adds some mystery, a sense of ages past and idyllic French villages.

Which is of course a total lie, but that's photography for you.