Look at your images!
Friday, April 17th 2009 @ 12:38 PM (not yet rated)
Fred Picker was a noted landscape/art photographer, and a guy that just liked to puzzle out things. He shot his landscapes/art images on b/w film using either 4"x5" or 8"x10" film in folding-view cameras.
He naturally puzzled about things ... like why, when he metered something with a 1 degree spot meter (which only "sees" a one-degree area, a tiny spot), it didn't always give him a reading that made sense compared with something else he metered in the same scene. And a friend and phsyicist at Harvard then found out it was because the meter "bounced" infrared around inside it and onto the sensor. So he found someone who could set up shop to modify meters so they were accurate, period.
Even his cameras ... he took the best 4"x5" and 8"x10" folding-view cameras made, used them, found what worked well in the field and what didn't, and had another shop start making them to his standards. They are wonderful tools, made of beautiful woods and brass, and are a delight to use even after packing them into a mountain range by foot twenty miles.
He was that kind of guy, an intensely thoughtful, wondering person.
He wrote a newsletter for twenty years, and in it he suggested that we should have a shelf just below eye-height in our "workroom", and put 8"x10" prints up on it of our newer work. We should then stand and simply gaze around the room several times a day ... so that we would learn to see them, and get to know them intimately.
And after knowing each image better, we'd both know how to improve that image in another effort at printing, and especially, we'd know how we could better handle that same subject in the future back in the camera in the field.
He felt, that when you had a print on the shelf for say three months, and you couldn't figure out how to either shoot or print it better, and you liked it, then you should make an exhibition-size and quality print and add it in to your "show" images.
I think it's time that I try this idea out, modified of course for my workspaces. It's only taken twenty years of cogitating around this idea to get around to deciding to do it.
Do you think it would be good for you too? I don't have a clue why I've taken so long. Wasted time, don't you see? When a wise and thoughtful person has a good suggestion, I seem to always have to learn anew ... don't fight it, just do it, though perhaps with smallish changes to fit. NO BIG CHANGES, just wee ones to help it work.
Shall we get on with it?
