David duChemin's Blog, page 33

Better Questions

Prevailing wisdom says there are no stupid questions. But some questions are better than others, lead us to deeper inquiry, raise new, stronger questions, and better address the reason we asked the question in the first place.

I hear a lot of questions. In emails, at live events, on my blog, and through social media channels. I suspect, with few exceptions, that they all come from a genuinely curious mind and a good heart. People just want to learn and sometimes they ask the only questions they know how to ask, in the only language they know, and we get so much of our language, as photographers, from the prevailing culture of photographic education. As that culture leans towards a heavy commitment to gear, if not a downright addiction to gear (see how gently I worded that?),  our questions about photographs tend to be worded in those terms.

What camera did you use?

What lens did you use?

What were your settings?

Do you shoot in sRGB or Adobe 98?

How many megapixels is the original file?

Did it really look that way?

I’ll give you 5 minutes and I bet you can come up with a dozen others. Some make you want to bang your head against the wall more than others. Learning photographers can feel so lost in the sea of technique and technology that it’s no wonder these questions beg for answers. But what if the technical were not the first concern? What if we asked, at least as our first questions, about more important matters? Here are my suggestions for questions that will get you more interesting, more instructive, answers. They’re the ones I would love to hear and could spend hours talking about, instead of the ones above.

What thought or feeling were you trying to express in this photograph?

What consideration did you give to the colour?

Why did you use the lens you did instead of something tighter or wider?

What was it about this specific moment that made you choose it instead of waiting a moment or two longer, or making the photograph a moment sooner?

Why did you use the combination of shutter and aperture that you did?

What considerations drove your choices when you processed and printed this?

There’s nothing wrong with the first set of questions, but most of us will learn more if we ask questions more along the lines of the second. In fact, these are the kinds of questions I encourage my students to ask of photographs they look at, whether or not the photographer that made them is there. How much more would we learn and grow as artists if we studied and asked better questions of the work in front of us, and of our own work? What if we asked these questions before we pressed the shutter? Don’t want to abandon your question about bit depth or colour mode? That’s fine, but try asking the other questions first. You’ll get a handle on the technical stuff soon enough if you go out and make more photographs.

 

Yukon Cut Short

My first instinct is not to publish this post, which I wrote a week ago, and to leave these events just between me and those privy to my moments of stupidity. But it’s good fodder for my new reality show, which my girl, Cynthia, calls “Dumb Shit David Does.” From the beginning I’ve tried to be truly vulnerable on this blog and to do that I need to do better than just write the stuff that makes me look good. Someone recently asked me when it is that I feel the most vulnerable and part of my answer included those moments when my stupidity is on display for the world to see. But this blog is, or tries hard to be, more than a PR machine for me. I want it to be more honest than that. I feel more than a little nervous about this one, because if it does anything, it doesn’t make me look like the man I wish I were. I wish I were less clumsy, but I’m not. I feel like a buffoon. Still, what doesn’t kill you only gives you something to blog about…

A couple nights ago I found myself lying on yet another hospital gurney, with people working on my foot. Again (though I won’t recap how I fell from a wall in Italy a couple years ago and shattered both my feet and cracked my pelvis, the memory is painfully fresh). This they did after I pulled up the torn pant leg, pulled off the thick leather boot with the yawning gash in the side of it, and pulled off the layers and layers of bloody gauze and tape I’d applied in the darkness, beside my fire in Tombstone park, after the axe glanced off the wood I was cutting, and into my foot. When the axe hit me it felt like little more than I imagine getting hit sharply with a baseball bat might, and I wouldn’t have looked at all had I not glanced down to pick up the axe and saw my pant-leg cleanly cut.

Trying very hard to be calm we closed the tent on top of Emily, my Jeep, put away the medical kit, and secured things, then set off in the darkness to Dawson City, because part of the appeal of places like this is the remoteness and there’s no medical help, or cell signal to call it, for miles, so you’ve got to go find it.  Getting from Tombstone, an hour along the notorious Dempster Highway, back to Dawson, at midnight, was terrifying, and not something I’d chose to do again without the need to find someone to patch me up driving me to it.

Finally pulling into Dawson we found the RCMP station and after 20 minutes of phone calls, an ambulance pulled in and took me to the medical centre, with one lone nurse on duty. Nurses in the north are a different breed, and she did it all: she cleaned me up, took a couple hours to freeze and close the wide wound, and then did x-rays. The images showed that my axe had gone into the bone, though cleanly, and I was casted and put on an anti-biotic IV before they sent us back into the night around 5am.

And now we’re on our way home, our adventure cut short, if you’ll forgive the clumsy pun. I had just arrived that day into Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon, when the leaves set the park on fire with colour, a place and time I consider one of the most beautiful on earth, and after only 8 hours was leaving it. A year planning and it all washed away. Most artists I know love their work too much, invest themselves too much in that work, to just sigh and mumble a resigned “c’est la vie.” I’m trying to be zen-like about this, but am ashamed of my stupidity, and of returning home without the work I so hoped for. I’m afraid of yet another 4-8 weeks in a cast and leaning again on friends and loved ones who thought they’d seen the last of me crippled and hobbling. I worry no one will want to travel with me again (or that those who do are secretly hoping to see me do something spectacularly stupid). And I’m in pain. The painkillers only go so far to numb things, and don’t at all touch the pain of what feels a little like a sudden, and self-imposed exile from Eden. I made some sketch images, and a few photographs I love, but I thought my best work was still ahead of me. Perhaps it still is, but it won’t be this year, and that disappointment stings and angers me. Most of all there’s the fear that this kind of thing is the cost for what I do as the apparently clumsy person I am, and I wonder how much more of it I can take before I give in to the voice of fear that calls me to just stay home and do something less harmful to my body, though to do so would kill my spirit. I know that’s not the only alternative, but so far from home, right now in this hotel room about 4 long day’s drive from Vancouver, I’m more emotional than I am rational.

The accident happened Sept. 05/13; I’m home now. Why I post this at all is because in my deepest parts I believe art, to be art, must have something true and honest of the artist within, and so that is the real work of the artist. To share himself with the world. With or without photographs. In all our imperfections and flaws, and if that means showing the world what I feared they’d one day find out anyways (the bit about me being clumsy and a little prone to disaster), then perhaps it’s better that way. Anyways, all this is the reason the adventure’s been cut short and the photographs I so hoped to share after that adventure will have to wait for another time. You can see that work here if you’ve not already done so. I know in my heart that it’s the work I did that matters, not what’s left undone. No one sees those. But their absence, when I had set my heart upon them, and the experiences that would make them possible, stings. My heart hurts more than my foot does right now, and I guess that tells me I was on the right track with this work, because our work is probably not worth doing if we’re not prepared to shed some tears over it.

There’s gold in them hills, I tell ya! Cynthia never imagined when she met me that she’d be to the hospital so many times in 3 years. She sat with me while I awaited evacuation from Pisa, Italy, and in the months of recovery afterwards, and then again when my gallbladder screamed to come out last year. And now this. I’m the luckiest man in the world (well, except for that other stuff…).

 

 

Yukon Ablaze

Here is a small body of work that I brought home from the Yukon, before cutting my trip short with an axe to the leg*, which has proved not to be one of my better ideas. When I headed north last year I was blown away by the colour, even though we’d missed its peak by a good week. This week we went earlier, hit the colours perfectly and just didn’t get the time I wanted there before we turned around and headed south. A 9200km round-trip, we saw an incredible amount of wildlife, camped in some beautiful places, and had a truly epic adventure. The colours hit me this year like flame, and from the beginning I tried to work with a flame-like colour palette and experiment with intentional camera movement to better express that in some of the photographs. Next year I plan to be driving across Canada for a couple months in the fall, so I’ll add to this with the maples in the east as they too turn blaze red before settling in, bare-branched, for the winter. And then I suspect you won’t be able to hold me back from the Yukon in early September the year after that.

Click the first thumbnail and it’ll enlarge. From there you can scroll through the larger images to see the whole collection.

Earlier this week we released The Visual Toolbox, 50 Lessons for Stronger Photographs, my most recent book. It’s the lessons I wish I’d learned and applied myself to when I was much younger, instead of becoming so side-tracked by gimmicks and gear. Until midnight PST on September 17, you can save $3 and get it for only $17. The Visual Toolbox is a 200 page, downloadable PDF eBook. For more information, see this post.

* I’ll tell you about the accident on Monday. I’ve got  a post all ready to go.

The Visual Toolbox

Something about making photographs makes sense to me. It has since I was fourteen. I love photographs, and making them, more now than I ever have. Learning this craft, and creating this art, is one of my great joys. Teaching it, too. I’ve thought often about what it would look like to open a photography school – an honest-to-god place where people could come and learn together, a place where we could dispense something more than a bunch of tips, magic bullets, and quick fixes when the first two fail. And who knows, maybe one day, but knowing that day wouldn’t be soon, and even if it were there’d be more people that couldn’t come than could, I created The Visual Toolbox.

The Visual Toolbox, 50 Lessons for Stronger Photographs is my curriculum for year one of a photography school that doesn’t exist, but could. It’s the bones, a year’s worth of lessons and assignments for photographers who want to do more than just master their cameras, but to create photographs. It’s for photographers who are stuck and for those having a hard time making it an aesthetic art and not merely a technical craft. It’s for anyone who can benefit from sitting at the feet of a photographer who has learned – and is still learning – these lessons the hard way and wants others to benefit from them.

They say the book you write should be the one you yourself want, and so I made this book for my 16-year old self, a passionate young photographer who took way too long to learn that this art is so much more than just making a good exposure and learning to focus. There are no magic bullets, and no quick tips in this book but I’m very sure that if you don’t just read this book but study it, and do the lessons, you’ll become a stronger photographer faster than you will with all the quick-tips and platitudes out there. Every one of the 50 lessons, and the accompanying assignment work, is a stepping stone to becoming more proficient with the tools of this art, and the means by which we can create stronger experiences with our images. Some of those tools are the camera and lens, but many of them have to do with composition, balance, tension, scale – visual language tools, or with being present, perceptive, and learning to see. And they’re all practical, get out there and do it, kind of lessons, because in the end you aren’t going to learn photography from a book, but from time spent making photographs. This book is a collection of 50 guided steps in that direction.

My first Craft&Vision BigBook, The Visual Toolbox is a 201-page downloadable digital book in PDF format, and will be my only new book until sometime in the middle of 2014. I’m thrilled to be getting this out and to be able to share it with you. Do me a favour? If you’ve benefited from my books in the past, I’d be so grateful if you’d introduce your world to this book by using the social media buttons below to share this, or even to review it on your blog. Either way I hope you get even more than you expect from this book, and that it takes you steps forward on this journey. Thanks as always for your support!

View the Table of Contents

Retail Price: USD $20

Use the promotional code TOOLBOX when you check out and pay only USD $17 OR use the code TOOLBOX20 to get 20% off when you buy 5+ Craft & Vision products. These codes expire at 11:59 PM (PST) September 17, 2013.

September Desktop Wallpaper

Fresh off the Dempster Highway, in Canada’s Yukon, a couple days ago, Tombstone park ablaze with colour, here’s something for everyone in the northern hemisphere about to enjoy autumn, and for those in the south for whom it’s a ways away. The image above will take you to a full-sized desktop wallpaper – enjoy!

 

Postcard from Dawson City, YT

A quick hello from Dawson City, Yukon. We pulled into town an hour ago in the middle of one of the craziest storms I’ve seen in years, after a beautiful drive from Keno where we spent the last couple exploring days the hills and chasing beauty. Been on the road for 16 days, with plans for another two weeks. Tomorrow we head to Tombstone Territorial Park, hoping the hills will by now be ablaze with the fall colours as blueberry bushes and cottonwood turn red and gold. From Tombstone we’ll head north to the Arctic Circle, then perhaps as far north as the roads will take us, into Inuvik, NWT. Then we’ll come back for round two of the colours in Tombstone and begin the trek south to Prince Rupert where we’ll catch the 20-hour Northern Explorer to Port Hardy, then slowly back to Vancouver.

Check in again on September 10 for the release of the Visual Toolbox, my new book from Craft & Vision. I spent the summer working on it and I’m excited about what it means for people wanting to learn photography as more than just a technical pursuit but an artistic one. It’s the stuff I wish I’d learned when I was younger, and – I hope – a chance for you to get a jump start on some of those lessons. There are no short-cuts, but this book is 50 lessons for stronger photographs and if you’re looking for some guided learning, I can’t wait to show it to you. Until then, I’ve got dinner at Klondike Kate’s waiting for me, and if my girl, Cynthia, has her way, a SourToe Cocktail at the Downtown Hotel (look it up!) (Updated: We went to the Downtown Hotel, shelled out $30, and drank the famous SourToe Cocktail, with certificates to prove it! Also, I’m told the colours in Tombstone are at their peak, so we’re bound there tomorrow. I’ll check in when I can…)

I have this thing about edges…

Postcards from the Yukon

Sitting beside Kluane Lake, near Destruction Bay, the water an almost-perfect mirror. To the south the mountains and Mount Logan, Canada’s highest peak. I’m in the Yukon for almost a month, including the time it’s taken to get here and will take to get home. I’m here, with my girl, Cynthia, and my Jeep, Emily, to chase the fall colours and to have an adventure. I’d love to make some photographs too, but the adventure comes first: a chance to do exactly this. To sit and breathe deep, to think, to read a book, and to listen to the loons whose call has spoken to my soul since I was a kid.

The colours are amazing here, though we’re a little early yet for the aspens to turn gold and the low brush of Tombstone Territorial Park and the infamous Dempster Highway to go red. So we’re taking detours, seeing what else there is to see before heading north up the Dempster to the Arctic Circle and then into the Northwest Territories.

We’ve spent hours in the fireweed, the first vegetation to grow back after a fire, and the colours, which is what this trip is about photographically, have been amazing. Backlit, they glow from within, turning them into the fire after which they’re named. I’ve been pursuing my series of expressionist and abstract images, a few of which are posted here, through intentional camera movement and in-camera multiple exposures. Surrounded by glory, I’m having the time of my life.

We go to sleep, reading Farley Mowatt, and listening to the loons after long evenings by the campfire – twilight lasting well past 10pm – with alarms set for midnight and 2pm in hopes of seeing the aurora. So far the skies have been stormy, or starry, but have yet to do that dance of greens and blues that we’ve come so far to see.

In a couple days we’ll head to Dawson City, then depending on colours, either to Keno City and Mayo before looping back up to the Dempster and Tombstone, or straight there to spend several days on our knees with our cameras and the colour.

4th Birthday Sale!

Light the candles. Sing the song. Cut the cake. Craft & Vision is 4 years old. We know we can’t send birthday cake to you in a PDF, but we can go one better. Today and tomorrow only (August 27 & 28, 2013), everything in the Craft & Vision store is 50% off (OK, almost everything. Subscriptions of PHOTOGRAPH are still regular price. But you can get the full first year of back issues at 50% off. And individual issues.) There are no discount codes, just go shopping and the deals are built right in.

I never expected Craft & Vision to become what it has. It wasn’t even on the radar. But it’s a testament to the power of asking, “What if…?” and of being willing to learn new tricks. And y’all have been part of that. If you’ve purchased even one book you’ve been part of what I do, and together we’ve launched nearly 60 books, created a quarterly magazine, and helped 17 other photographers keep doing what they love. Thank you! Now go get those half-price eBooks. Like cake, the offer goes stale way too fast. And then tell the world. There’s no fire code that says we can’t pack this birthday party to the walls. The social media links at the bottom of this post will get the word out to your friends. And then they can be part of the fun.

Take me to the Craft & Vision birthday party, I want to fill my party bag!

Want more photographs from the 4th Birthday Fairy-Princess Pin-up Theme Photo Shoot? This kind of indignity doesn’t come around often. Here’s the full shoot, but you gotta promise me you’ll go buy some eBooks. I don’t put on a tutu for just anyone, you know. Glutton for punishment? Click the thumbnails to see them larger and scroll through.

What can I say? I promised my team I’d do a better photo than last year. Even told them they could pick the theme of the photograph and, seeing as it was a 4th birthday, there were votes for princess, for fairy, and my girlfriend might have suggested a Pin-up theme. I’m not sure if they chose those because they thought I wouldn’t do it, or because they knew I would, but not one for letting anyone feel left out I decided to do it all. Thanks to Corwin for finding a tutu for me, and to my girl, Cynthia, for bringing a little classy boudoir styling to it. We’re nothing if not classy, folks. Thanks for a great 4 years.

Here’s a little video to add to the humiliation:

Take me to the Craft & Vision birthday party, I want to fill my party bag and help David pay for the therapy he’s going to need after this.

Getting UnStuck

The late Steve Jobs once said that creativity was nothing more than connecting dots. Ignoring for a moment that creativity is more than just idea generation, and necessarily includes idea execution, I like the metaphor. The more divergent those dots, the more unusual and interesting our ideas and the solutions to the problems we’re working on, whether that’s a new photographic project, a painting or a novel. Divergence matters. Einstein said he had no particular talent except an insatiable curiosity and it was that curiosity that led him in divergent directions and gave him some of the most interesting raw materials – the dots, if you will – from which to draw his thoughts.

Where this applies to photographers is in our need to become more divergent. We need to collect more dots before we can make connections between them, and the more those dots come from different sources, the better. So why is it that wedding photographers spend so much time looking at wedding photographs and landscape photographers looking at landscape work? There’s a lot to be said for having domain knowledge and knowing our stuff, but if we’re looking for new directions and trying hard not to repeat ourselves, we need to look elsewhere. If photography is about lines, light, and moments, then we’d benefit from looking for those elements, and see how they’ve been used, in the work of other visual artists. Stuck? Look for ideas in a different arena than the one in which you hope to use those ideas. Consider spending a day with painters you’ve never heard of and see how they use line and colour, balance and tension.

It’s the same with business ideas. We’ll learn much more, and find more interesting ideas, if we look beyond the lessons already learned by our industry peers, and look elsewhere. It’s not like the most extraordinary entrepreneurs are found in the photography world, anyways. Sure, we’ve got some innovators, but none of us is Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg. Looking for solutions to business problems, or looking for new ideas and directions for your business, look past (but don’t overlook) the ones in the photography world and see how others are facing their challenges. Collect all the dots you can – books, bios, interviews, articles, tweets – but make sure they’re also divergent.

Another metaphor: it’s like diet. We all do better if we eat different foods, not just the same thing over and over again. Mix it up. Be curious. Learn. Stretch that brain. When Jay Maisel famously told his student he’d make more interesting photographs by becoming a more interesting person, I think we could have also said, “become a more interested person.”

The best dots of all, so long as we’re talking about collecting them before we can connect them, are the people with whom we choose to surround ourselves. The more divergent from our own field, our own work, our own thoughts, the better. Connections beget connections, and nothing makes us more the people we are, creative or otherwise, than connections to people that inspire us, that push us, and that create new connections for us, than amazing people.

We all get stuck. Putting our foot on the gas when the wheels are spinning almost never helps. Writers get writer’s block for all kinds of reasons, among them fear and procrastination, but I think the biggest blocks happen when we run out of raw materials, when we get so busy connecting the dots that we forget to seek new inputs. You can only draw water from a well for so long if the source dries up. When that happens there’s no sense in getting a bigger bucket or raising the rope more often. Put the bucket down and go to the source. Step back from the camera and go read a book, watch a play, visit the gallery, pick up a paint brush, have coffee with a wildly creative person who does something different than you. Fill the well again. That’s your inspiration, your act of breathing in. Now go exhale, do something with that new oxygen, before you get dizzy and pass out.

TEN. Yours Free.

4 years ago I wrote a small eBook called TEN, Ten Ways to Improve Your Craft Without Buying Gear. It changed my life and put me on a path to do what I love: teaching photography and pursuing projects I long to do. Later this month we’ll celebrate our 4th anniversary of Craft & Vision, the unexpected little eBook company that kind of got away from me and became something amazing, and we’ll offer some crazy deals for a day or two to say thank you again. But before we do that we’re graduating TEN and making it free from this point on. It’s earned its way and now we’re putting it out to pasture and giving it away. If you don’t have a copy, it’s all yours. If you’ve read it and found it helpful, would you do me a favour and tell the people in your world who might also find it helpful? Use the social media buttons at the bottom of this post and tell the world – TEN is now free.

Stop spending so much money on gear and invest time learning your craft instead. Download TEN, free, and with our thanks.