A Challenging Portrait

Often, people ask me how I began my photography career. The early part was pretty simple. I was visiting Japan and picked up a Nikon camera and a couple of lenses. I then moved to Alaska and bought a darkroom setup at a garage sale, bought a little book on how to mix the chemicals, operate the enlarger and so on; I then called myself a photographer.

I found work running the darkrooms for several Alaska photographers, stumbled into some publishing opportunities (there wasn't much competition in those days) and ended up working for a publisher of Alaska regional travel guidebooks. In this way I wrote my first book, a travel guide to Prince William Sound, a vast and convoluted embayment east of Anchorage. While sailing in the region, I had heard of an interesting, very shy hermit working as a caretaker at an old herring rendering plant that had been made into a lodge of sorts. The lodge was on remote and rugged Knight Island, far from any road. The hermit, George Flemming, would run and hide at the approach of a boat. I had seen a fuzzy photo of him, sort of like a fuzzy snapshot of an elusive sasquatch, and knew I wanted to photograph him.

We visited with the owner of the lodge, and she gave me permission to enter his vacant quarters. I left an apple on the table. In the Alaskan bush, apples and any other fresh produce are practically worth their weight in gold, and after some time, George, who had been raised to be polite by his Aleut mother and fur trapper Caucasian father, came to say hello. A friendship was born. For several days we just talked, and then I asked to photograph his sole wintertime companion, Toodles the Poodle. After that I took hundreds of photos of him and he could never figure out why I was interested in him.

One day I took this photo of him at the oars of his boat. George had never ridden in an automobile, but he could handle himself on the water, even though he was nearly blind. The photo was widely published in magazines, calendars and more.

As time went on, I did what I could to take care of George. Finally, a friend offered his bushplane to fly him to Anchorage, where the whizzing autos and compressed population were almost overwhelming. George had never been to a doctor or dentist in his life, so we had his eyesight checked. Unfortunately, the doctors said there was nothing they could do. The same went for his teeth. I made sure he had time to browse the tools in Sears, an unheard of luxury for a caretaker and handyman who lived far from any town. He also received the first professional haircut of his life.

After his few days in the city, I bundled him back aboard the plane to his island retreat. It was the last time I saw George. I moved from Alaska. The lodge burned, victim to a chimney fire. George then moved to Cordova, a fishing village of 2,000, and he lived his last years there, dying in the early 1980s when he was about 82. In recent years some of his nieces and nephews (George never married or had children) have contacted me and I have shared photos of their amazing relative.

How Much Is Too Much?

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the ethics of photo manipulation. Tom Till, the noted Southwest photographer, brought this up recently in a piece he wrote for Outdoor Photographer magazine. He found that he had drifted along the seductive path of saturation: if something looks good with bright colors, just make the colors brighter. After comments from several friends, he resolved to tone down some of his images. Even more recently a photographer won a prestigious international photo contest, only to have the honor stripped from him because of over manipulation. He claimed he didn't read the rules closely enough.

A few years ago I stepped inside a photo gallery in the prestigious little artsy town of Carmel, once home to such greats as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Even today, the town teems with some of the great photographers in the country. In this case, as I stepped into the busy gallery, the colors of the giant enlargements virtually screamed over saturation. The colors were practically migraine-causing. For this photographer, however, the technique worked and he was making a lot of money. 

The over manipulation road is an easy one. Learn a few basic Photoshop (or Elements) tricks and you're on your way. I've seen it happen over and over with my students. Many of them become enamored of HDR (high dynamic range), another potential photo villain. At this point it's time for some careful diplomatic conversation with these students, and I urge restraint. But am I right?

Who's to say? I've said before on this blog that one must follow one's heart, and this doesn't always correspond with the reality of what the scene really was. In the midst of a red rock sunset in southern Utah, the colors can be truly overwhelming. Is it right or wrong to saturate, to express what your heart feels here? I've darkened stormy skies to accentuate the weather, "popped up" the colors of fall leaves and committed other processing sins. The attached photo is an example. It was taken in the gold stamp mill in the ghost town of Bodie. I've done this image (and many variations thereof, as I've been here often over the years with my photo workshops) as a black and white. This version, however, "speaks" to me. I applied mild HDR processing and presto, the beautiful colors of the wood resonated. The reality of the actual scene is a near-monochrome. Bodie is a town of incredible wood textures, and these stout timbers are a good example of that.

I think manipulation should be restrained, unless it's blatantly departing from reality, and then it becomes art or whatever you want to call it. The viewer instantly knows that you've done a lot of manipulation.

Slowing Down

I've been fortunate to visit many of the most beautiful places in the world. Most of the time these are "hurry up" moments: gawk at the site, maybe take a snapshot. Sometimes I am more fortunate: I can linger at a special spot, savoring its uniqueness, its spirit. As a photographer, how do I capture that?

I think some of that happens by slowing down, really thinking about what is here. This photo is a case in point. The subject is a humble little place, Fern Springs, in one of the greatest of nature's spectacles on earth, the Yosemite Valley. My friends and I had passed it by a couple of times, in search of bigger subjects like El Capitan or Half Dome. Finally, we stopped, and the magic permeated all of us.

There is some method involved here. I studied the little spring from many angles, finding new wonders each time I took a step. Sometimes it's good to just leave the camera in its bag for a while. Anyway, the more we lingered here, the more great images we saw. Each angle revealed different lighting, a different assemblage of leaves, and of course, different compositions. A bit of post processing in Photoshop brought out what was in my heart.

Of all the photos in the Yosemite Valley I made that autumn day, the series of images from the spring are among my favorites.

Better Technology, Less Thinking?

I was sorting and culling today through old correspondence with publishers. A generation ago, getting images to a magazine was a ponderous process. First, one had to label slides, then create a separate typed (yes, with a typewriter) list of each slide, together with its file number. I then wrote a cover letter,  created a delivery memo, together with a self addressed stamped envelope for the editor to sign and return. I'd then trot this entire carefully wrapped package to the post office, send it off certified mail and in a week or so the editor would receive the images. Occasionally, on a tight deadline, I'd overnight a package at great expense. The process paid off and I published widely.

No wonder the competition was so much less then. All this sort of thing was a giant headache. Today, of course, in the digital world, it's totally different. I create an online portfolio in a matter of minutes, send the link to an editor, he/she selects a few (hopefully), and I upload a high res image via email, YouSendIt, DropBox or some other service. I've also placed over 1200 high res images on an art website, Imagekind.com and make regular sales there. Just last week on that site I sold a photo of Ansel Adams that I first made in 1980 at his home in Carmel. He was kind of enough to change positions to afford me better light. (Originally he had been silhouetted against the window.) The original was shot with Kodak Plus X film and I scanned the image recently, restoring it in Photoshop. Now Kodak, disinclined to keep up with the digital revolution, is defunct. Keeping up with new imaging software, plugins and so on is practically a fulltime job and expensive besides. Now I am playing with iPhone technology and marveling yet again at how the photography world has changed.

But is it all good? A lot of thought went into those old cover letters. I would write a first draft, reflect on things for a while, then revise, revise, scribbling my corrections on the revision. Today it is too easy to shoot an email to someone (or worse, to whole groups), or splash something onto Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes we don't think of the ramifications of what we say, and occasionally our written missteps can prove awkward.

No, we don't need to go back to the old days. But we do need to think. Critical thinking and analysis seem to be going the way of Plus X film.

Whale Musings

For some reason, whales have been on my mind. I love these gentle giants and have been photographing them for years. The species I photograph are humpbacks, so named for the curved backs displayed when diving. They were hunted to near extinction until hunting of them was banned in 1956. Since then they have rebounded wonderfully.

Successful professional photographers can often point to one defining image that put them into the big time. For me, it was a photo of a breaching (jumping) humpback made in Prince William Sound, Alaska, when the animals were still rare. On the day that I got the shot, everything seemed to conspire against me: I was on a slow-moving sailboat, shooting a film camera with manual advance, no quick acting motor drive. We had seen some commotion in the water and so we pointed the boat that way. Because I had no tripod, I flattened myself on the bow with a 300mm lens, took a few photos, and said, ho hum, didn't get much. We went home, I mailed the Kodachrome film for processing to the closest lab (in those days, in Palo Alto, California) and a few weeks later got the slides. Grabbing the package from the mailbox, I shuffled through the slides and found this keeper, a photo I didn't even know I'd taken.

It ain't much compared to what's out there today, but it was the shot kicked around the world. Magazines and books near and far printed it. The Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia still uses the image today.

Humpbacks can be notoriously difficult to photograph, as they are underwater most of the time and it's difficult to predict where and when they'll surface. Fast shutter speeds and advance positioning help. Often a whale will breach again and again in the same place. More typically they will roll on the surface several times before sounding for ten to fifteen minutes.

I've led photo adventures for Dolphin Charters in Southeast Alaska since 1999 and over the years have rejoiced in recording the antics of these amazing marine mammals. I have a perfect setup: a large, relatively stable platform from which to shoot, a captain who is a marine whale biologist and understands and somewhat predicts their behaviors, plenty of time with these great creatures (we sometimes spend hours with a group of whales), and a warm, cozy cabin afterwards where we can download our images on our computers for almost instant feedback, so different from the film days and waiting weeks for processing. I've learned so much more about our Alaska whales, about their annual migration from Hawaii, mother/calf bonding, lobtailing, pectoral fin slapping, bubble feeding, and yes, breaching. No one really knows why they breach, but typically the younger, more feisty whales breach more often than the adults.

A couple of years ago, we were at Point Adolphus, south of Glacier Bay, when a whale breached only ten feet from the boat. Fortunately the 45-ton animal fell away from the boat rather than on us. It doesn't make for that great a shot, but I think you can get a sense of the moment in this image as the whale erupted out of the sea. It was a bit too close for my big lens, and yes, a bit too close for comfort.

Wet Weather

Often I hear other photographers complain that they can't take photographs on a given day because it's raining. Here in Northern California we're finally into our wet season after months of relentlessly blue sky, and that's a blessing. The wet season brings not only rain, but beautiful skies. Cloud cover also results in reduced contrast and foliage saturated with color. Cityscapes come alive with beautiful street reflections. Fog adds mysterious layers to landscapes. Best of all, sparkling raindrops decorate leaves, as in this photo, taken in a tiny park in Wrangelll, Alaska, with a small point and shoot.

Each summer I have the privilege of leading photography tours to Southeast Alaska. On the last two trips we've had rain almost every day. However, the participants find a lot to love. When it's sunny, bears and other critters crawl off into the woods to cool. When it's overcast or rainy (we call this "bear weather"), the bears come out to play. Clouds encircle mountain peaks, reminiscent of an Oriental painting. Icebergs are even more blue in "inclement" weather, as in the berg below, photographed between showers in Endicott Arm, Alaska.

Of course, one must be prepared for rain. Rubber boots and raingear make for better creature comforts. Some system for protecting delicate camera gear from moisture is essential. This can be as simple as a plastic bag with a small hole torn to let the front of the lens peep through (secure this with a rubber band), or you can go for more sophisticated commercial options that cost more. Take a chamois cloth or rag to periodically dry off gear in the field. Your camera bag should have a rain cover, even if it's just a garbage bag. Many bags have built in covers. At the end of your outing, be sure to dry off gear before you put it away.

Because light is dimmer on a cloudy day, you'll have to increase your camera ISO to compensate for the lack of light so that you can enable high enough shutter speeds to hand hold your camera. On older digital cameras it was not possible to go over ISO 400 without substantial loss in quality, but the latest generations of cameras now make it possible to go much higher.

So, love that rain!

Warp Speed Photo Technology

I have a friend who made a reputation for himself as a creator of large-scale photographic panoramas using large, heavy equipment, and at one time he had three galleries who exclusively represented his work. Along came Photoshop. He refused to budge from his fine niche in the the film world. The result: his career has fallen by the wayside, because it's so easy to create amazing panos in Photoshop. The same thing is happening now. Digital photography technology has evolved at a mind boggling rate.

Just in the last year or two the photography world has changed yet again, with the advent of high quality point and shoot cameras along with smartphone cameras and the seemingly endless apps that accompany these. Many of us carry our phones everywhere, which means we are "there" for the moment. The phones and new cameras are tiny and portable. We are seeing more spontaneous images, always a great deal of fun.

Of course, any technology can be abused. Users of smartphones still need to be aware of such niceties as composition and exposure. As I write this, most phones are only capable of 8 MP images, which means huge enlargements are not easy. At the other end of the digital photography spectrum, I use a Nikon D800E, capable of detailed enlargements five feet across. But for everyday work, my little iPhone brings much joy.

The attached image was taken this past summer in Alaska. Heavy rain was falling, I was tired and not really wanting to haul a big camera around. However, I grabbed my little Nikon AW100 (waterproof) 16 MP point and shoot and began wandering around the ruins of an old cannery, entranced by the rotting pilings. At home, I uploaded this image to my iPad, did some post processing with Snapseed, and replicated an image with a sepia/black and white feel I might have made 30 years ago with my old Nikkormat and PanatomicX film, spending a lot of time in the darkroom with specialty papers and selenium toner (nasty stuff!).

The world never ceases to fascinate. I look forward to teaching some smartphone workshops in late spring and will be enthusiastically exploring this medium for a long time to come.