The Art of Photography: Exploring the Camera Obscura

One of the earliest and most fascinating experiments in photography is the camera obscura, an invention that has been used for centuries to study light and its effects on various materials. In one of his early classes, a photographer demonstrated a beautiful example of this technique using a simple setup consisting of a lens attached to a dark box with a second light bulb inside. The resulting image was stunning, showcasing how the camera obscura could capture and project images onto a surface. This technique has been used by artists and photographers alike to explore the relationship between light and its effects on various materials.

Camera Obscura: A Tool for Creative Expression

A photographer recently experimented with the camera obscura using a room as his studio. He covered the windows with black trash bags, creating a completely dark space, and then cut a pinhole in one of the bags to project an image onto the wall opposite the window. The resulting images were breathtaking, capturing the beauty of New York City in a unique and innovative way. This technique requires patience and precision, as well as a deep understanding of light and its effects on various materials.

The Power of Negative Imaging

When holding an image in the right light, it can create a beautiful negative effect, where the light reacts with the paper to create a new image. This phenomenon is often seen in photography, where the photographer controls the amount of light that hits the sensor or film, creating a range of tonal values and textures. By experimenting with different lighting conditions, photographers can push the boundaries of what is possible and explore new ways of expressing their creativity.

The Artist's Approach

One of the most interesting aspects of camera obscura photography is the way it challenges the photographer's approach to composition and creativity. When taking pictures, photographers often rely on visual elements such as shape, color, and texture to create a visually appealing image. However, when using the camera obscura technique, these same elements are transformed into something entirely new and unexpected. This requires a different mindset, where the photographer must think outside the box and explore new ways of creating images.

The Importance of Experimentation

When it comes to photography, experimentation is key to unlocking new ideas and techniques. Rather than relying on established formulas and conventions, photographers should be willing to take risks and try new things. This might involve experimenting with different lighting conditions, camera settings, or even unconventional materials and objects. By embracing this approach, photographers can push the boundaries of what is possible and create truly innovative and groundbreaking work.

The Artist's Website

One of the most striking aspects of camera obscura photography is the way it showcases the artist's unique vision and style. A photographer who has experimented with this technique has created a stunning body of work that showcases his creativity and technical skill. By exploring new ways of capturing light and its effects on various materials, he has created a distinctive style that sets him apart from other photographers.

The Assignment: Think Before You Click

As we move forward in the course, it is essential to remember that photography is not just about taking pictures, but also about thinking creatively and critically. Rather than simply clicking the shutter button, we should take the time to reflect on our ideas and approach, making sure that we are using our camera in a way that aligns with our vision and goals.

A New Approach: Thinking About the Photo

One of the most exciting aspects of photography is the way it challenges us to think creatively about our subject matter. When taking pictures, we often rely on visual elements such as shape, color, and texture to create a visually appealing image. However, when using the camera obscura technique, these same elements are transformed into something entirely new and unexpected. This requires a different mindset, where we must think outside the box and explore new ways of creating images.

Hogga Tutorials: A New Approach to Photography

In our next episode, we will be exploring some unique tutorials on photography techniques that can help you improve your skills. From experimenting with unusual materials to pushing the boundaries of what is possible with lighting and composition, these tutorials are designed to inspire and educate. Whether you are a seasoned photographer or just starting out, these tutorials are sure to provide new insights and ideas that will help you take your photography to the next level.

The Final Thoughts

As we conclude this episode, I want to thank our viewers for joining us on this journey into the world of camera obscura photography. We hope that you have enjoyed learning about this fascinating technique and exploring its potential for creative expression. Remember to always think creatively and critically when approaching your photography, and don't be afraid to try new things and experiment with different techniques. With practice and patience, we can unlock the full potential of our cameras and create truly innovative and groundbreaking work.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enall righty guys we're ready to get going so welcome to the very first edition of masterclass live this is going to be uh way cool I think um and is if you watched the last podcast I kind of explained it um basically the cool thing is is like when I do these podcasts can you guys see me I can't really see myself um when I do these podcasts uh I've done these gosh we're almost three years into this I think the 18th is the official date that the first podcast went up three years ago so anyway that's pretty cool and uh I've had a really good time in the last three years doing this stuff and sorry I'm still adusting um one of the things that that has been a little bit frustrating well frustrating is kind of a harsh word but uh one of the things that that I wanted to kind of change a little bit within the podcast was you know you have some constraints on the actual uh physical podcast you know I keep them around 15 20 minutes in length um they're kind of one subject a piece sometimes we do series stuff like that but I I what I really would like to do and as a teacher I think it's more fun if we could do something this live broadcast kind of inspired this where what we'll what we'll do is actually have a curriculum and we'll do multi-week uh lessons and really get to explore a topic in depth and I think that's pretty uh pretty cool and pretty important um and so our first uh class that we're going to do is going to be developing your style as a photographer and this is something I've been wanting to do for a long time because uh and not that I have mastered um a personal Style by any means but uh one thing that is exciting to me is uh you know being able to explore this and come up with some exercises and some topics and some things we can talk about and do to kind of uh try to get our heads around this and so once again there's notes uh you should see links to them on the website if you're there and you can kind of follow along as we go along so um how this is going to run is it'll run multiple weeks I think this first one I've either got planned is six or seven weeks I'm not sure I can't remember uh but anyway we'll meet same time each week I may vary the times up because some people are in different time zones uh that way our Australian and Asian friends can get a chance to watch uh live as well uh but we'll see how that goes um but if you miss a a class or can't watch it live for whatever reason we are going to Archive them and put them up uh for the full duration of the class they will all be up and all be free and I haven't really decided what I'm going to do mainly because uh these are going to go about an hour and length and so the bandwidth will be an issue um and the cost with that so I may have a subscription service or something if you want to go watch old archives but during the full duration of the class every class will be live and um we'll find a way to do that so uh anyway so it's pretty exciting so this first class is going to be developing your style as a photographer and uh giving kind of an introduction here um some of the methods we're going to be using here is I really have been wanting um to kind of do something that digs a little deeper than what we normally do with the podcast and and a lot of times with photography you have more or less an environment that's set up where you have parameters and and rules and um you know guidelines to think about you know and it's everything from being in focus to having the right exposure to doing something with the exposure um and this class isn't really about any of those things this class is really about digging a lot deeper than that and so we're going to talk about some meditation examples we're going to talk about some very unorthodox things as far as exercises go that that you'll be able to do um and I think it's really going to be fun uh I'm looking forward to it quite a bit myself um and so some of these might be weird or uncomfortable but the whole point of this is to stretch your comfort zone and actually get some results and make you better as a photographer and I think that's really important um I I don't see a lot of this kind of thing you know with podcasts that exists um you know you've all heard me say that I think they all kind of get too much into equipment and that's not what this is about this is about getting results and getting better photos as a photographer this is about getting better this is about you guys like improving and so that's what we're going to do um the prerequisites because I'm not going to go over basic stuff in here we're not going to be talking about aperture or ISO or any of those things at least on a basis level you need to have an understanding of those and I kind of wrote some things out on the notes because I want you to be able to read them later and I'll kind of go through these but anyway this Workshop uh this is a workshop that takes an advanced look at a very specific area of Photography uh it is highly recommend that you have a grasp on the basic theoretical and mechanical concepts of Photography under your belt so obviously uh you need to understand how to make an exposure using aperture shutter speed ISO things like that if you don't have a grasp on these you probably still find the class beneficial but I won't be covering those um this is more advanced than than some of that will you know entail um you should understand different focal lengths of lenses obviously achieve different visual applications and how they uh physically affect the image you need to understand at least a basic overview of how lighting Works in both natural settings uh when used as artificial lighting such as strobes or flashes so I'm not really going to cover lighting uh we're going to be taking pictures and I'm going to give you assignments and you're going to be doing a lot of work and you're going to have to find those things on your own so assuming that you're comfortable with those things I also have just a resources section I really didn't give you many resources uh but we have three years of podcasts on this show and I've covered a lot of those beginning Concepts on here um in various details so you know if you go to the art of photography. TV you can watch all the previous episodes or if you subscribe on iTunes they're all there as well just search my name or The Art of Photography and and you'll find it in your podcast um so if you have questions on things those are a really good resource to go to um there's tons of stuff online like if you Google photography lighting you'll find a whopping load of tutorials so it really is not hard to find this information and which is another reason I wanted to go more advanced and give you something that that is just not something that's normal to find um online although you know other people have kind of covered some of this but uh anyway materials and this is what you're going to need for the class and it's real simple you're going to need a camera obviously uh you're going to need a notebook and a pencil that you can carry with you and this is very important let me show you what I use hang on um you can uh if you go onto Amazon or if you just go to your local bookstore I would recommend that because you can actually pick up and look at them uh this is a mol skin notebook I have a ton of these um they're a little overpriced for what they are but the M skins all have the the uh elastic band and you can open them up take your notes drw pictures whatever you want to do they come in different styles this is the reporter style so it's kind of a a horizontal flip here or vertical flip um and so you're going to need one of these for taking notes um we're going to kind of go old school a little bit with pictures and you're going to see in this first assignment that we're going to cover today um there's a lot you're going to be writing down and taking notes and and you know uh as reminders for yourself so a notebook and a pencil don't go overboard don't spend a lot of money on it the mol skins maybe not recommended just cuz they cost a little bit too much uh the problem that I have with mol skins that I've always had with them is that I'll buy them a lot and because they cost a lot of money I'm afraid to mess them up and ride in them sometimes which is kind of defeats the whole purpose of buying a notebook um for some reason I think there's going to be a special project that I want to reserve it for and um this is your special project so get something you feel comfortable with that you can get messy with uh and also for software um I'm sure most people in here especially if you shoot digital uh have Photoshop something like that the one that I recommend actually and I'm not going not reading these out loud I'll go through uh but I'm recommending Adobe Bridge let's let's go back a little bit and let's talk about the camera real quick um I jumped ahead of myself and in the notes I said you're going to need uh actually you're not going to need the camera until week two um in fact you have work to do before we even pick up the camera so wait until this happens to decide what you want to use so if you're the kind of person who has a lot of cameras and you're real indecisive about that just just get through this first week before you decide but we're going to narrow it down to one camera so you'll need one camera that's right one and that means one lens as well so if you decided during the course of the workshop that you need need to switch to a different Lids or camera that's fine but don't go back and what I'm doing with this is I'm trying to eliminate distraction what we're doing is we're um a lot of times cameras because especially with modern cameras with with digital functions and menus and things like that that kind of thing is going to distract from what we're trying to do in here and I think that's really important to understand um that you want to eliminate that distraction this doesn't mean you're permanently going to stick to one camera but what we're trying to do is improve skill so that eventually um you know you're going to make the decision of what camera to is based on what is in your mind and what you're going after visually uh rather than just picking up a camera and I think this is really cool too because you don't need a fancy camera for this class and I'll kind of go on here here comes the ambulance I live next to a hospital too um cameras and lenses have an impact on the image on a technical level but that's not what we're going for here which I just described uh we are trying to develop your eye and get your personality and voice to show in the image yeah you will see this has nothing to do with the tool you're using you don't need a good camera at all in fact a cheap camera is fine your talent vision and personality are stronger than any piece of gear uh could use so no matter how expensive so I think that's really important to understand and uh don't think that you need to go out and buy you know the latest Canon Nikon most expensive thing you can find uh whatever you have will work um I would suggest however I'm on page two now that you do use a digital camera and the main reason for this logic is we're going to take a ton of images um in fact this first week you're not going to be taking any images uh but you're going to be doing other stuff but once we do get in images you're going to be taking a ton of them and I think it's really going to be difficult if you're shooting film U and I wrote in here unless you're you're used to using a light table and you want to go old school and you can read a negative um if you're not familiar with that then I don't recommend it um also it could get expensive if you're getting things developed at a lab and so I would rather that not be a a hindrance here this is probably one of the the few times I recommend not using film on something it's just a practical reason that's the only reason for it um so anyway and I also recommend you keep the camera as simple as possible point sh is ideal actually and you can even use your cell phone um there's nothing wrong if you got an iPhone some kind of cool Android that has a decent camera in it even if it doesn't have a decent camera that's not the point here we're going for a visual image not so much megapixels quality um color tones things like that at this point um so anyway so at least for this first week that's what you're going to need um and actually all the weeks that's what you're going to need uh notebook I already went over you're not going to need anything spe specific I use the mol skin you can use whatever you want spiral bound is fine you can spend a dollar on one at the store if that work works for you uh but just make sure I do recommend that that you keep the size down and one thing I like about this is it's small and it fits in my back pocket or not really my shirt pocket but anyway um uh you'll want to carry it around a lot as will the camera you're going to carry that around a lot too so that's why actually I recommend a point and shoot or your or your phone camera um mainly because you just need to have it with you um I love my my Canon 5D Mark I but uh it is massive and it is a base to carry it around and you'll find yourself leaving on your desk a lot or something like that so anyway and finally the software uh you're going to need a photo browser okay so basically you need something that you can open up and look at your images light table Style with minimal fuss and so I actually recommend Adobe bridge for this it's simple and does exactly what it needs to do um I don't recommend uh Lightroom or aperture and the reason is is I I recommend them for General post- production but that's what they are they post- production tools and for this what we're doing is we're working on um on really honing in on taking a lot of photos and and and looking at composition and things like that so I think it's really important if you're going to use a photo browser um to stick with Adobe Bridge something like that you can use uh Lightroom obviously and aperture they both have kind of a light table mode where you can move thumbnails around but the problem with both those applications is they do post- production as well and so there's a lot of buttons there that are vying for your attention and you're going to start wanting to correct levels you're going to start wanting to change the exposure and we're not talking about post- production uh that could be another class that we do um this is getting it as right as possible coming into the camera so um I don't recommend those just because the temptation to start editing um we're not really going to be talking about a lot of post-production in here I want to I'm I'm more interested in looking at what you can capture with the camera and so that's that's Adobe bridge is going to be easier for that um because you won't have that Temptation so that's basically the outline of what we'll be doing in this class and we're going to start getting into the nitty-gritty right now um one thing I want to point out before we get too far along into this is I actually made an error on the lesson plan here um you can see on the last page I go into part four which is uh photographic meditation we're not doing that this week that's next week it's a preview um I will correct that so if you're watching this um as a pre-recorded thing uh your your uh your thing may you know um somebody just asked in the chat room if there are any free alternatives to Adobe bridge probably so um I should have researched that I did not um with if you're on a Mac just uh there are ways just to use the finder to preview images and that's okay um or you can use something like preview it's a little more cloy Adobe Bridge comes with everything I don't think you actually have to pay for it and I don't know if you I think if you do the free trial on Adobe software I think you may get to keep Bridge don't quote me on that I'm not sure but I remember at one point um at least a year or two ago that was the case uh Windows has some stuff actually um the Windows Live yeah Picassa is a good one actually that is a good uh Bill Cunningham mentions Picassa might fit I would recommend Picassa you can download that that's free or if you're on a Mac you can use iPhoto that's fine too but again those have postp processing options so just don't be tempted if that's what you're using um what we're doing is looking at images so anyway but uh I I did put next week's lesson in here so you can ignore that or if you're watching this later um I probably will have it fixed in the file that you download so anyway so what we're going to talk about today the whole point of this class the uh definition is developing your style as a photographer and so what we're looking at is is okay what separates you from somebody else or if you look at the photographers that you're interested in what makes them stand out and usually it's their personality or their inner voice um their creative mind that speaks things like that and that's really what we're going to be looking at um uh through all this and what defines a style well you have basically styles of Photography okay and so you know we're going to kind of cover those in a second um but when you think about it really as human beings we're all different everybody's born different everybody has their own set of experiences and accomplishments and disappointments that they deal within their lives that affect and shape their personality and so right off the bat I think the first thing you need to realize is that you are already an individual and that is probably about 75% of the battle here the rest of it is trying to figure out how to take that inner voice or take that personality and have that come through in your images and this is a lifelong process um this is something I don't feel like I'm got a total grip on yet I feel like I'm better than I used to be at it but I don't think it's ever over with and it's something that you could spend a lifetime doing and I think most of the great photographers in the world would agree with that um in fact I think they all would uh it's really something you're constantly doing and I think with creative work no matter what that is whether you're a photographer whether you're an artist whether you like to draw whether you like to code uh applications for the computer you know whatever you're doing that has a creative side to it I think that's the process that draws Us in over that Lifetime and if it weren't a challenge and there weren't something to strive for I think we'd all get pretty bored at it um you know if I could go out and shoot exactly the photos that I want to take all the time what would be the point um I think it would lose a little bit of its of its Allure uh to do that so you know the first thing to realize is that you're already an individual and what the challenge here is as I said is to try to get that personality to come through uh with the camera and it's hard to do um it takes a long time when we talk about styles of Photography there's there's your personal style and this is the hard part about this class is that if you look at just photography history as a whole there are a lot of styles of Photography that exist uh basically you you could subdivide them into two categories and what's weird is I kind of googled this when I was you know coming up with the curriculum and making my notes and it's amazing how all over the map uh and I I hesitate to use the word bad but but the results were not what I thought they were going to be and mainly because people like to personally subdivide things which I think is okay um but in a more General historical definition of styles of photography I think that you have two main styles that that you're dealing with there's photography that's commercial in nature and there's photography that is fine art in nature okay and what is the main difference and I've heard uh actually a friend of mine described a long time ago who was an illustrator uh he did both fine art and Commercial illustration and he mentioned that you know the difference between illustration and art is an illustration uh you know what you're going to get paid to do the job and you go do it and in Fine Art you have to go do the work first and then figure out what it's worth later and so that's kind of a funny but broad definition of it but within those you have sub definitions of what styles are so within commercial photography you have things like product photography you have um you could have landscape but it's probably going to deal more Under the Umbrella of architectural photography um if you listen to the photography show the audio podcast that I do um Wade is really good at that kind of thing who's my co-host on there um he's awesome at architectural photography for commercial application he gets a lot of clients doing that and that's I'm not going to say his whole style is that but it's it's definitely um you know an element of his style and something that he excels in so that's kind of a substyle of commercial photography there's also photojournalism um and photojournalism kind of falls under both categories but uh because there are people that do kind of a photojournalistic style as fine art um there's also Paparazzi photography um that you know has kind of reared its head in the last oh 40 years or so um you know to varying degrees so anyway photojournalism is a little bit different because you're not out just capturing a landscape or a building or a product you're out trying to tell a story and so it's very different than a commercial application such as um you know shooting tabletop uh product stuff you know it's just going to be completely different and people I think really good photographers can be good at Several of these things I think the best photographers have something that they obviously enjoy and prefer and Excel in particularly when you get into the Fine Art category and Fine Art could be anything I mean you have people like anel Adams who did commercial work as well but a lot of his fine art stuff were the beautiful landscapes he did um you have uh people who do abstracts you do uh you have people who do portrait photography portrait is is one of the subsections that could be either commercial or fine art depending on what your approach is to it but you know these are all styles of Photography um and where do you fit in with all that um if you're younger or just starting out don't feel like you have to decide that immediately I think the best option is is if you're kind of a beginner and you've only been doing this a couple years or so is actually to do to not Define yourself as something I would get out and shoot as much as you can and let those opinions start to shape sometimes it can have the opposite effect they have a more practical definition to them because especially with street photography um that's something that I think a lot of people uh you know see uh hre C Bron images or uh Frank cap images or something like that and they want to be a street photographer and they go out and they realize that they're not really comfortable shooting strangers in public that's a really hard skill to to to get down or maybe people want to go into shooting portrait photography but you're not the kind of personality Who develops a rapport with the client or the person being photographed and and that can kind of shape your direction you know maybe that's not for you therefore something else becomes more enjoyable so if you're just starting out I would explore as much as possible if you've been doing this a while you probably already have started to explore some Avenues and I think maybe it's good to push yourself into some things that you're not as comfortable with um I try to do that from time to time too I certainly have things that I shoot but I really haven't fallen into something that I feel is my thing and um again that's part of the the carrot that keeps you moving over the years and so anyway so um talking about Styles photography now what we're going to do is I want to go back for the next couple bullet points and we're going to scale back and this may seem really Elementary but I think it's important to at least at the beginning of this class is to to Define some parameters uh definitions of what photography is so anyway one thing we have is what is a photograph and I think this is really important uh even though it seems pretty basic um but a photograph and this is my definition is a representation of an idea that is created using light sensitive materials okay so a photo in the traditional sense is a visual recording of a scene but could also be manipulated scenes that can be reconstructed into a final image so we've seen a lot of this uh I think in the pre-digital era there were photographers or our photographers like Jerry yelman uh guys like that that did a lot of photo manipulation in the dark room and obviously now with Photoshop being such a common tool that people use I think this boundary gets pushed even further and obviously there are um some issues that you might have um with where is that line you know when is it long longer a photo and it's a Photoshop composition and I'm really not going to Define that in this class obviously I think there's a line but to some degree especially with commercial work you will get into post-production that's pretty heavy in photo manipulation so it it is a part of Photography and so I've I've gone ahead and listed it as that um you can do things in the camera that I mean the whole thing is is if you're just capturing what you see that's not really photography that's documentation and my personal definition is anybody can do that um you know uh any of my friends who anybody who picks up a camera can do that you can document a scene especially now where everything on the camera is automatic um but what defines this as visual art is going to be something different so there is a degree of manipulation whether it's in camera or post- production um and we'll get into this as we go um what is visual art and this is a really important definition because this is something that we're dealing with here but visual art is the organization of visual elements in empty space to form a composition okay stop there and I want to think about this one line um visual art is the organization of two things visual elements and empty space that's the key to form a composition you have to have the empty space and the empty space is kind of uh sound like Star Wars here using the force but it's it's kind of this overlooked thing because it's invisible and less obvious but if you don't have the empty space it's harder to Define elements in your composition I think the easiest way to think of this is like real minimalist art or minimalist photography or here's one if you think of typography so the study of U creating fonts uh legibility if you're reading when your eye reads things on a page the letters all have shapes to them and we learn these letters as we go it's a visual element but your eye actually defines those letters using the white space that comes around them and if you think of if you've ever seen posters that are done because typography can be hard to read at times if you have too much background noise it distracts from the letters and your eyes actually you can make out the letters but it becomes more difficult to read because your eye is using that negative space to Define what it's going after so that's a really important thing to keep in mind is that you know within a composition that negative space is a very important element that goes into it so you're using visual elements and these are things like shape line contrast uh color um objects uh light and then you're using that empty space which is harder to Define because is sometimes it's not necessarily White Blank Space um it actually is filled with like a sky as a background or something like that but something that is it contrasts in its level of distracting you know what I mean it's uh it's not distracting so you have that contrast of of of um objects within a composition so that's very important to understand um the composition typically serves to react with the viewer okay and this is kind of a debate too and this reaction can range from anything from an emotional reaction communication or simply existence so if you think of it this way somebody you're always creating your art or your image for somebody to see okay uh that could be argued sometimes people do create stuff and they don't want people to see it but maybe that art is for them as an artist but if there's no reason to look at it later then why would we try to make it so you can think of it that way and so this reaction that you're getting from whatever audience this is whether it's just yourself or whether it's other people whether it's other artists whatever um there's some kind of reaction that you're trying to get out of that okay and so that could be with highly conceptual stuff which we're going to talk about in a minute that could be you know changing the way people think about something um it could be trying to communicate an idea it could be trying to get a reaction you could be trying to irritate somebody or get them emotionally involved make them happy sad upset um there's a lot of artist especially within advertising I think in the last 10 to 20 years that has tried to spark you know some kind of emotional reaction like that to make people think especially political ads things like that and so you know that's certainly a function um and then there also is the function too of just being able to uh you know make something that's aesthetically pleasing that's beautiful to look at and I think the best stuff is kind of an amalgamation of these things and we're going to get into that in a minute um real quick I want to define the process of a photograph and I think especially people who are newer to this and never really uh experienced photography when it was film and all of this analog nature and it's digital to really keep this in mind but traditionally a photograph is a two-dimensional representation of a three diim space and I think that's important too because though you can shoot video in 3D and you can shoot um photos in 3D the bulk of what we're dealing with here is is this two-dimensional representation so a print on paper or on the screen of a three-dimensional Space phography is really easy to deal with this in because we have things like contrast we have lighting we have depth of field most of that is already exists in the scene so creating recreating a three-dimensional space isn't as problematic but I think it's a good thing to remember to get your head around that that's what you are in doing um anyway this two-dimensional representation was created originally by a process using light and chemical reactions as opposed to drawing by hand and in the 21st century we've seen substitutions of electronic components and machines that become alternatives to the chemical process but it's all still the same you have something that's light sensitive it records what it's seeing visually through a lens or pinhole or something that's that's shaping that light and Records it so this could either be uh a chemical process um that you would need to treat or it could be uh traditionally using silver gel and other materials or it could be digital um and it's it's all the same it's just a kind of a different way of recording it okay I want to talk about aesthetic versus concept okay um a lot of times art can fall under one of two categories or parts of both and I think that's where the strong stuff comes from and if you think of something that's aesthetic that means it's something that is visually pleasing on some level it's something that's nice to look at or I think more specifically it's a u Way of shooting it's a way of composing that creates interest within that composition and in some of the older podcasts that we've done we've talked about things like rule thirds uh we've talked about uh you know we've touched on contrast things like that things that you can make your composition more interesting you know for instance if you want to draw emphasis to something that's in the frame you put it near the edge and that makes a stronger statement because it's kind of contrasting with your ey with what your eye wants to see or your brain wants to see is pleasingly centered um so disturbing that kind of symmetry uh there things like that those are aesthetic Concepts um I think lighting can be an aesthetic concept uh and then there's conceptual which is completely different rather than dealing with an aesthetic you're trying to tell a story or make a point or draw some kind of reaction and you see photographers or even artists that fall sometimes really strongly on one end if you think of like a Continuum so you have the aesthetic interest over on one side you have your conceptual interest over on the other some usually people fall somewhere on that Continuum somewhere and so you might see things that like you know Robert Frank is a photographer that I talked about a couple years ago on the podcast and uh he's one of my favorites and if you look at uh you know his Grand thesis of Photography or his big project was called The Americans and the Americans is is extremely unique and cool and interesting but he's not a rule of thirds guy he's not a Perfect Exposure you know do it all in the dark room zone system kind of guy it's really kind of a raw take but with the Americans he was document in um his the the I guess the view of of the United States through his eyes in the ' 50s as he traveled across the country and some of the images are a little bit disturbing some of them are you know kind of sad in nature but they all make you think and I think this is more of on the conceptual end of the Continuum and it has a lot of Mer Merit and value to it even though it's not as visually beautiful as somebody like anel Adams who really didn't have a whole lot of the conceptual thing to his work but dealt more of the aesthetic components there's no right or wrong there's no one's better than the other um personally I feel like the stronger work um that is best conveying your own personality shining through is somewhere in the middle of that Continuum um and so I guess what I'm trying to say is if you're somebody who's been heavily on the conceptual end try to start thinking about the aesthetic or I think most people start out on the aesthetic end because you before you learn how to really communicate these things that's the more natural path to go down but start thinking more in conceptual uh terms like you know is there something you can say with the image is there's something you can visually represent um a lot of people refer to the is storytelling and you know what is the story uh that you're trying to capture there and sometimes a story I'll say too if you're shooting still life or if you're shooting uh stationary objects or landscape that story isn't going to be you know the beginning middle end kind of traditional story but there maybe something you're trying to say with it and maybe that's some kind of if you're ding a landscape maybe there's an environmental concern that you want to capture within the photograph and so that would affect the way you compose it and the way you shoot it and what's being said to the viewer um these are just examples um but anyway that's something to think about um important photographers now I think because I have a big music background um if you don't uh haven't heard before um that's I started out as a guitar player and I went to college and majored in composition and I really wanted to do film scoring at one point in my life and even as a photographer was kind of a second thing but that was going to be my occupational thing and uh the music business is pretty brutal and and did not work out but what so anyway long story short I'm doing photography um and I'm just starting to do some music again but what's interesting is having come from a photography background and other photographers that I know that are musicians this is kind of a weird thing because with music you're kind of trained as an early age to pick people that you like and be influenced and you kind of have these well mentors or Idols that you look up to uh people that you really want to try and emulate as as a guitar player or a violinist or whatever it is as a singer um you have your Heroes and I found that with photography generally speaking uh maybe a little less so with visual art people don't do this as much and I think it's a really important part of learning and you're not setting out necessarily to copy somebody but you want to be influenced I'll get into that in a second but it's really important um to have an understanding of of Photography literature and to know who the key photographers are um I'm not going to go through all these because I think that falls under the prerequisite heading and there are a ton of places that you can you can find this stuff I recommend just finding a good photography history book at a used bookstore that's enough um and find out what some key photographs have been over the years um photography is not that old in the grand scheme of things and so there's really U you know kind of a narrow window of history that you're looking at uh but I think it's important to understand those I think it's important to understand visual art um especially stuff that came before photography and and where all that came from so you know knowing who Edward Sten is and knowing who anel Adams is and knowing who even contempor like Anie leitz or Dan wyers or somebody like that uh knowing who these people are I think that's really important to understand um understand the different styles the different backgrounds the important images why they're important why they're famous you know that kind of thing um and Finding Your Heroes is the next subject and I think this is really really really important and if you don't have people you look up to and I'm not talking about FRS of yours on Flickr or Google+ or something like that there are obviously an enormous amount of talented people in those places but I'm talking about people who generally and this is a side track I would like to see um some key contemporary photographers do more social media like uh Google+ Facebook things like that uh just to have a voice in that but I found that that kind of traditionally that hadn't happened I think there's a generation of people that are going to be very good that are really involved in social networks but I would not limit yourself just as what you see within social media I would really recommend um starting to buy books starting a collection even if you're doing stuff like like finding people on the internet just famous artists and keeping a notebook and printing images out to refer to and really finding what you like and uh what you like to see and there's kind of um there's two things that I want to talk about along this this term and there's kind of two schools you can you can kind of fall under as far as um as far as uh you know being inspired or being influenced by an artist and I'll probably show some visual examples here but I have some of my favorite photographers and again this is aesthetic versus conceptual again but uh there's people like uh if you're familiar with the work of Tom Burell and let me show you his stuff he was uh one of his big jobs he he uh this is his book it's just called Tom Burell and Tom does these wonderful things he shoots a lot of pen hole a lot of codian process um and he is just simply a beautiful photographer um stuff like these tulips this is a very famous image of his I don't know if this is showing up really well um and Tom Burell is a big hero of mine um he's not one of the most famous photographers in the world but he certainly is one of my favorites um he did a series of architectural images in New York City I don't know if you can tell right here or not uh this is the uh Chrysler Building in the background shot from a empty office space and but the use of light the use of contrast the the black and white tones that he gets uh the subject matter um one of the things he became very well known for I may have the wrong book for this oh yeah is the series of Botanical images so they're just images of flowers and so this is a sunflower and I think one of the things that influences me the most about Bell's work is that he didn't just shoot it as a flower um he kind of takes a lot of influence from somebody like Carl blossfeld um probably to a dangerous Lev uh but really trying to capture the essence of something that's common in every day but in a different and new visual representation so this is a dying sunflower it's upside down uh it's wilting it's shot from behind these are not what you are used to seeing as traditional images even though he uses traditional process like uh codeon wet plate here's another one where three sunflowers shot from the backside and so um you know obviously he's somebody that I've kind of think I feel like in a bad way I've become dangerous and coping a lot and I don't mean that as an arrogant thing or an egotistical thing because I feel like some of my still life work looks like second rate Tom Burell and that's something that I've tried to curb in recent years um but I think that's okay especially when you're starting out to find people to aesthetically try to copy their work uh because you're going to learn a lot doing that I think it's unacceptable um once you get part past a certain part in your career and this is what I'm kind of bringing on myself but I think it's kind of unacceptable at that point to start making a career or name for yourself copying somebody else's work but I think in the early stages the beginning I think it's a great place to start so I hope that makes sense it's not too much of a ying and yang um but that's really important it's really important to find people that you enjoy their work and um that speak to you and you know that's really important but I think on the other end of things um there are photographers such as um if you guys have seen some of the recent art photography episodes I did a whole episode on Hiroshi sujimoto and that's somebody that I'm very influenced by and very inspired by and it's different because I don't my work doesn't look like that um at all I don't go for the same kinds of things aesthetically at this point uh that Hiroshi goes for but it's more his conceptual thinking it's more um kind of how he shoots an image like for instance anel Adams is another one I don't really do a lot of lscape Photography at all but I'm very inspired and very influenced by Ansel ABS I love his work I've got a ton of anel books over there um if there's an anel show in town I'll go see it uh because I'm inspired by that I don't shoot anything that's anywhere in the ballpark of what he does I don't do do a lot of landscapes in black and white but what I am influenced by is his sense of composition uh his attention to detail his you know dying aspiration to have the perfect black and white image when he's done uh finding ways to manipulate to bring out tones to bring out contrast just this obsessive thinking about how the image should be represented and I think that is you know just for me mind-blowing and so there's two things there's copying versus finding your own voice and I think it's good to find people you're interested in maybe aesthetically their work isn't your interest but there's something else there that you are influenced and inspired by and uh I think that's really important um I'll show some more work in a minute I'm going to keep going and maybe when we do in the Q&A I'll I'll show some other people that that I'm very inspired by um the last thing is an ego check and I know this has been a lot in this episode but I started out by saying you know you're already an individual and if we're you know the class subject here is developing your style as a photographer to understand that you already are there you're an individual you don't think like me I don't think like you I don't think like my heroes um and so already I'm different I'm unique I stand out and so are you um it's just a matter of finding that and I think it's really important to start believing that um a lot of times especially when you're starting out it's real easy to see the results of your own work and get a little bit shy about it and come down on yourself about it and maybe it's not exactly what you want to be looking for um I'm kind of particularly highr strong and I tend to beat myself up over it and I think it's important to keep your ego in check you want to stop doing that and you want to start really believing in yourself and believing that yes you can do it because I don't think you can do it unless you believe it and I think it's really important right off the bat to understand that you're already unique you're already an individual and you're going to get that to shine through on this stuff but be very careful because what you don't want to do is develop a sense of arrogance around that it's one thing to be proud of the work that you do and to show off your images and it's another thing to kind of take that too far and we've all known people who have come under that category and just keeping the ego in check is all um don't beat yourself up but just keep it in check is all I'm saying in fact it's really hard because you you can't beat yourself up over it if you're going to get results this has to be um you know uh obviously a priority here okay so we're going to get into here uh and then I'll take some question answer is our first assignment which is photographic memory and I want to kind of describe where this is coming from a little bit um and the first bullet point on here is I wish I had my camera and we've all had a situation where maybe you're driving down the road or maybe you're out on a walk or maybe you're on your way to work and you see something that captures your eye and you don't have your camera and you think wow that' make a great picture I mean we've all done it I do it all the time and it's interesting because I've also you know there's kind of this belief that well you should always have a camera with you to capture those moments and there's nothing wrong with that I agree with that you probably should but what I think in developing our own voice is I think a really important part is to not use a camera this first week and really learn how to tap into that voice of I wish I had my camera with me okay and what we're going to need for this is uh we're going to be talking about keeping a journal and most important we're talking about learning how to see and anel Adams I'll go through the assignment in a second but anel Adams had a technique that uh he referred to a lot that was called prev visualization and uh for him he was dealing with zone system and his work was all black and white uh in the end he didn't shoot a lot of color he's known for his black and white Landscapes and they had these really rich tones to them and sometimes he created these real dramatic moods using contrast that may not have been present in the initial scene that he was looking at at the landscape but the whole prev visualization is learning how to see what you're photographing get that in your mind and learn how to prev visualize what that final print is going to look like and it's a real Challenge and it's something that I think a lot of photographers don't or even people who take pictures don't consider you pick up the camera you set it to Auto you go or you start messing around with the settings to experiment and there's nothing wrong with experimentation but what you want to do is learn how to get that prev visualization to see what that final image you're going for is and then the process is learning how to tear down those walls to get from point A to point B from what you're photographing to what the final uh situation is with your print or your image or whatever it is that you're you're doing and learning how to prev visualize and so I think a great technique is this whole I wish I had my camera concept using that to learn how to prev visualize so for instance I think on the very most basic root level um you see something it catches your eye and you say to yourself I wish I had my camera okay why and what would you shoot and what would it look like and starting to think about that and get it in your mind um I think a lot of times for me like I'm really sensitive to how clouds and light look particularly before and after a rainstorm cuz they can do some really beautiful things I live in a part of the country that is very hot and doesn't rain a lot um in Texas and so when we do get these things they're a big dramatic contrast to what I see on a day-to-day basis and I think that's probably a lot why they catch my eye um and so I think it's really important not just to say wow that's really cool I wish I had my camera but what is it that's interesting about it and getting that in my mind so I know what you don't want to think about and I'll get into this with the assignment in a minute is practicality like oh well I have to have my camera now because that would never come back don't think about that yet what we're thinking about is we're trying to develop that creative muscle in our mind that knows what it wants okay later if you're doing a real photo shoot so either you're shooting fine art or you've got a client or you you're shooting something for commercial reasons or you have deadlines and things and you got to get out there and do it then you can start peeling those layers away and dealing with okay this is too expensive to do this way I can't have this or this light isn't going to you know I'll be waiting for it too long um you start to deal with those practicalities later but it's more important to not think of those in the beginning you want something that you're going for you know kind of this Gestalt uh as they say in Germany um but this Gestalt of the the the grand work what the perfect work would look like and that's what we're going for here so the second document I have which is the assignment for the first week and I I'm going to be doing these along with you and what we may do uh there's no photograph that comes out of this in the end but once we get get to where we are photographing things U maybe we can put them in the flicker group or something and we can kind of talk about them as we go um if you don't have time to participate with these that's okay you can do these later most of these exercises or these assignments are kind of written not as a one-time thing but something when you feel like you need to go improve on some creative aspects in your life you can kind of revisit um and some of these are based on things that I've had for years and I still revisit to this day but anyway this is first assignment and it's called I wish I had my camera and uh mainly I've already said most of this but we've all had moments where something catches our eye Etc but this is how our brain works thoughts are okay here's the deal though um you realize you don't have your camera with you or maybe you're in a hurry and you don't have time to fiddle with the camera on your iPhone but chances are the moment will go away and you won't remember it later it's gone that's how your brain works um when I did a lot of music composition sometimes you get an idea and a lot of times those ideas and you this happens with photography too you get an idea for a portrait shoot that you want to do or something like that usually those come at weird times and the two times they come to me are when I'm in the shower or when I'm about to go to sleep at night and your brain is working on a different level in those two situations I'm not going to start to go into the technical aspects because I'll get most of it wrong and there are a lot of books on it but there is a reason why your brain does that and at night um it's starting to relax you're starting to not think is um as detailed as as maybe other times of the day and so thoughts come to you at that point uh the shower is kind of same kind of thing I just got up in the morning I'm relaxed I haven't been stressed out yet in the day and so ideas will come strangely enough those are the two places though that that uh you're not around to record these ideas or it's it's it's um kind of a hassle to do or you don't have a pen and paper or you don't have a camera something like that and chances are within sometimes even a couple minutes you forget these things a lot of great songwriters talk about that if they don't remember it write it down record it something they'll lose it and so that's what we're really getting strong with doing is let's say we don't have our camera how do we find a way to record that and how do we find a way to think about that okay and so what we're going to do is create some of these moments and learn how to make the most of them and then go on to talk about anel Adams and the previs visualization technique which I won't go through again um but anyway here's the important part on the fourth paragraph here you will not use a camera in this week's assignment you will leave it at home seriously forget it we are learning how to see and this is really really important at this phase the camera is nothing but a complete total distraction in other words you're trying to figure way to take the image and I don't want to do that I want we're going to just concentrate on thinking about it right now and we want to learn how to see and how to think we want to get better at thinking through all the possibilities this technique is much like developing your physical muscles it is cumulative though the more you do it and the better you get at it it becomes easier so if you think of an athlete uh you know somebody plays professional basketball or football or something like that you train for these things um you think of the Rocky movies he was a boxer and you'd see these these long scenes of intense training and this is the kind of thing you do when you're training to do something specific um I found that if I'm not doing this it becomes really hard to do because it's kind of like a muscle it atrophies uh you've got to keep it in shape and you've got to keep keep it going okay so um what is the assignment and what will you do okay so what you're going to do is this week you're going to choose three visual locations okay these could be outdoors or indoors in a public place and you could also use something as every day and mundane as your kitchen or your bathroom or your bedroom or something I just need you to pick a situation so if you feel like you don't have time to go out you just need 30 minutes to set aside and you need to sit somewhere and anywhere is visual so that's all you need to do um again we're just keeping Journal we're not writing things down but we're going to learn how to think okay so what we're going to do is set aside 30 minutes to an hour and sit somewhere in your chosen location and I would recommend uh actually using all three of these so go somewhere Outdoors that's public go somewhere indoors that's public maybe stay in your home at one point but do three if you don't have time do one but do something this week so what you're going to do is set aside 30 minutes to an hour to sit somewhere in your chosen location one of two things will happen you will either think that nothing is interesting to make a photograph of which is very likely or something will catch your interest immediately and this is why we left the camera at home because neither of these is what you want okay so what we're going to do is use the notebook you've assigned for the class you're going to write down your gut reactions this is your first reaction so this means if there's nothing here great say why uh this is there's too it's too busy uh it's too uh common uh maybe you're in a tourist area or something like that it's been photographed to death or maybe you're in your house and you think well there's nothing here to shoot because it's all my stuff and I've Seen It All Before um but write that down figure out why or if your gut reaction is wow there's the most beautiful thing over there that I want to capture there's something that's really interesting over here um or I have an object in my living room that would really make a nice subject for still lives I have some flowers or something write that down that's your gut reaction so it's either positive or negative but write it down and and talk about why ask yourself what is happening in your current setting then what we're going to do is dig a Little Deeper is there a story or narrative you can tell maybe maybe not is there something in the scene that represents your surroundings more than something else is there something that you see that you hadn't noticed that you might find interesting now if you sit there for at least 30 minutes you're going to start to notice things that that you didn't know noticed before maybe there's small details maybe it's something just for whatever reason you hadn't looked at that should have been obvious but you're going to find these and that's why we want the time to sit there and look at them okay so is there a way to make this interesting uh do you need to move your Vantage Point do you need to sit on the other side of the room do you need to move on the other side of the park do you need to move is the scene better from one side or from another side or angle uh anyone can document a setting but we're looking to do something unexpected and unique and remember that that's really really important highlight that if you printed this out anyone can document a setting all you need is a camera but what we're looking to do is do something that's unexpected and unique okay this is hard and it takes time and I will be very honest with you it's not sometimes it's weird you'll be sitting there going what the heck am I doing here I don't have a camera this anything to do with photography it's ridiculous stay there and think it through and write things in the notebook don't be afraid to destroy the notebook write things if you think they're dumb you're the only one looking at it so it just needs to be basically what a notebook is to serve is is to come back later and Trigger your mind on stuff and that's the most important thing about it so just don't be in be inh inhibited what I'm trying to say with it don't uh sit there and say well um you know uh this is silly I'm not going to write down nothing is silly write everything down because what you're trying to do is open it later and get back to that same state of mind the same state of thought so it's not supposed to be beautiful literature or beautiful Pros it's supposed to be triggering thoughts so write it all down anyway so this is hard and takes time that's why you need to set some time aside and think about it so don't do it if you've got to be somewhere and you're stressing out like if you're in school and you got a test in 30 minutes it's not a good time to do it uh do when you really have 30 minutes to an hour to sit there and really think about it and maybe some time afterwards we you go to dinner and maybe it changes your mind or thoughts or something like that that make sure you set aside the time to do it okay after you work at becoming aware of your surroundings you can begin to think about how you would make a picture here the most obvious is to use a wide angle View and just document the location the less obvious would be to use objects in the location that maybe you haven't noticed before and even less obvious than that is how an object or objects relate to their surroundings okay for instance how do you get uh this recorded as a photograph what are the obvious angles conditions what are less obvious does the entire mood does the entire mood shift depending on the time of the day or the weather so let's say you're in a park and you're looking around how would this be documented would it look different if it were cloudy or rainy or if it were at night there's no right or wrong answer in fact I think you should be pushing yourself to think about maybe there's something that's the right answer that I didn't think of before that's the whole point of this exercise so if you're for instance like let's say you're downtown and there's a lot of buildings and you're thinking okay this is really interesting this would be really interesting at night or this would be really interesting if it were bad weather and it were raining and people were wearing rain cloes with umbrellas you can get really neat shots doing that and I think a lot of this was inspired like when I was writing it out because I see people make comments uh to me via email flicker group uh where they're talking about well the or we've had a lot of this on hogga projects that's where a lot of this comes from where people like well it's it's this is terrible weather here it's raining it's not a good time to go out and shoot well I'll be honest with you I'd rather shoot in in Gloomy weather like that cuz I think it's more interesting as far as the the heavy contract than it is to go out when there's bright sunlight I think that's harder for me but not everybody feels that way so what I'm trying to do is push you guys to think differently um except rainy weather go out and enjoy it so anyway so uh there's no right or wrong answers here the right answer is you responding and thinking about the photograph okay we're not actually making this Photograph you're just trying to think it through and you're trying to visualize it in your head you're trying to to see it before you even well we won't ever take it but you're going to see it so using uh all right now here's another thing I forgot to put up use your framing templates and to start experimenting I'll talk about this in a second actually let's talk about it now um I did not get a chance uh when I was making all this stuff I ran out of time and I will put these up so if you're watching this after it's been recorded I will have these on the links there but I'm going to create some framing templates and I didn't even make one for myself but what this is here um you guys saw this on the dark room episode This is actually a negative carrier that goes in the enlarger so you put your negative in there you sandwich it together and the light projects through here and then you make your print underneath but what we're going to do this is not for printing but I'm going to use this and you don't have to have a negative carrier in fact I wouldn't walk out in public with this people think you're nuts um I would make one of these and I will put some templates up for you to to use to just cut out but this is a 35mm um um you know um ratio here you could do a square you could do 4x5 whatever you want to do but I'm just using this to visualize so you can make one of these out of black paper or um cardboard something like that I would recommend using something that's a little more stable than just black and or white paper uh but what we're going to do is actually use this we'll call this the framing template here um we're going to use this to start expanding experimenting uh are there objects in the way that are distracting to your composition okay so for instance if I just hold this up and I look through it you kind of have to shut one eyee to do it I'm going to start framing up my composition and you'll notice as you pull this is very crude but if the closer you hold it to your eye The Wider angle lens is going to be and the when I put it out that becomes a zoom lens so maybe there's something that's way over there but what you're going to do is close one eye and start framing this up and start seeing what your picture is cuz we've kind of thought about the situation or the setting we've have in our Mind's Eye and now I'm starting to think about what would the picture actually look like and this will be a visual aid to help you just make one of these out of cardboard I'll put some templates online so this is what a framing template will be um so are there objects in the way that are distracting to your composition that's one of the first questions you need to ask because generally you already know what it is you're trying to shoot maybe it's a portrait uh and maybe there's some trees that are distracting they really don't form an interesting pattern they're just there so maybe you need to change your Vantage Point and that's what you're going to look for when you actually just start framing things up um so you want to look are there objects in the way they're distracting are there objects that you would want to bring and set up so for instance there's something missing in the scene uh for instance is the location perfect for a model to be doing something in your picture so do you want a person there um you're not actually making a picture as I keep saying we're learning to see one so don't put limitations on yourself don't think of in terms of what's difficult or impossible think of what's possible okay make as many notes as you can in your J write things down and describe what you're thinking no one but you will see this so it can be as random weird honest emotional or strange as you make it don't worry about it at this point you're communicating only to yourself you're recording so you can recall this prev visualization in your mind later so what I want you to do is write down words you can draw pictures start sketching out the composition nobody's going to see it so it doesn't matter if you can't draw or not I I draw stick figures really well so you know take advantage of that you're just trying to get something to show the key elements in fact you don't want to be a really good um artist at this point you just want to get sketched out what's important like you know maybe there's two objects and where are they in just position with one other are they close to the edge of the frame are they more in the middle are using rule of thirds what what is it that you're going for what looks the best and you're going to learn that by moving this around and experimenting um if you could do this with a camera but if you have a camera you got buttons to start pushing so don't do it with a camera um because the whole point is to really get this prev visualization thing down so most importantly enjoy this learn how to see photographs that you want to make later on we're going to figure out whether they're possible or practical that's a a separate skill and and not one to worry about this stage uh so for instance maybe the park you're sitting in would look better shot from a helicopter and that's okay it's better to make that decision and figure out one day how to do it than it is to learn to think in limitations and this is so important um a couple years ago I just showed you some of Tom Bell's work and uh I long story of how it came across but I did a phone interview with him one time and my God I was on Cloud9 here's one of my ultimate Heroes and I'm getting to ask him questions that I came up with over the telephone and so I was interviewing him and he did a series of images that are particularly interesting to me they're pinhole images that were done at a place called Jones Beach that's on Long Island somewhere up in New York and they're just absolutely surreal and beautiful and kind of blurry but still some sharpness to them and I was asking how those were created and I didn't ask well that's the question I asked and the answer I got was to a question I should have asked but anyway what I asked him was I said well you know those are interesting and they were pinhole images he said there were actually people on the beach that day so used a um was either I think it was an orange filter over the pinhole and there were two reasons one to get more contrast and two to knock it down a couple stops so the shutter speed would be longer so they were about a 20 second 30 second exposure and what happens when you use that Recreation of time in your image is first of all if there's people on the beach and he said there were they won't show up as long as they're moving they won't be in one place you might get some ghosting but if the exposure is long enough if people are walking through they're not sitting still long enough to get the image out of so um open up that shutter and keep keep it long so that got rid of that problem but what it did was on the on the beach stayed clear and in focus for a pinhole but the waves and the ocean and the um horizon line had this really surreal kind of glowish blur to them because it was open so long and they were moving and kept coming through that uh that was the effect that came in with the overall picture and so that's what I was asking about and he mentioned that he it took him five trips or so out to Jones Beach to get the images he wanted and it kind of blew my mind cuz I thought wow here's a guy who really had an image in his head that he was trying at all cost to get and that's what I want you guys to start thinking about because that's where your personality is going to come out you've got an image in your head that you're looking to get and you don't get it right the first time you don't get it right the second time I know people who have had images I've had it happen where there's there's something you're interested in shooting there's an image and sometimes it takes years to get that image finally captured um I have a few in my mind I haven't gotten yet and so for instance I mentioned kind of comically using an aerial image out of a helicopter and I'm serious with that you know if you really think that there's a cool shot of what you're looking at that would require something expensive like running a helicopter that's fine we're not making these images right now but I want you to get you used to thinking in those terms because if you don't that'll never be a goal that you shoot for so if I immediately dismiss renting a helicopter because it's expensive or improbable it'll never get done I can't afford a helicopter today I can't afford one tomorrow I probably won't be able to afford one next year but who knows 10 years from now the situation could arise and I'm thinking you know I know the perfect perfect shot for this and you never know how that happens so learning how to think in those terms when you are at a point where like I said before if you're doing commercial work something of that nature and you have a deadline associated with it or you have images you need to get done and get shipped maybe you have a show if you're a fine artist or you have a gallery that wants work you know the helicopter may not be realistic to do in that case and if that's the image you're going for you might find another way to do it maybe there's a crane maybe there's a building you can actually shoot from and get close and that's when you start thinking about what's practical what's not but if you train yourself to never find anything practical then you're never going to push that envelope and that's what I want you to learn how to do with this exercise is to really start pushing that envelope um it's really important and I think probably one of the most important things about photography so that is the first assignment um that is the lesson uh I'm not going to go through part four if you're coming in late I actually put next week's bullet points in there sorry about that uh if you're watching this after the fact I may have had it fixed in your show notes so don't worry about it and next week we're going to move on we're going to start with the camera and do some things there but try and do the assignment this week um have fun with it uh if you don't have a lot of time I know we all get busy I certainly am real busy this time of year uh try and do just rather than three different scenes just do one but learn how to think in those terms uh and the most important thing is don't do it when you're in a hurry really try to set aside 30 minutes to an hour to do this make sure you've got some kind of I'm calling it a framing template and I'll put these online you can make these out of just dark paper or something and learn how to visually uh you know compose uh what's the scene and another important thing is change your vantage point because it's really easy to just sit there and dial in the zoom and okay it looks good from here was that a nice composition or what would it would it look better if I sat over there would it better if I got closer with a wider angle those are things you want to start exploring and why what's in the picture what sits near the edge what's in the middle what falls on the rule of thirds um those kinds of things I want you to start thinking about what speaks to you can you tell a story um is there something that is less obvious um here's another thing is think how would your Heroes do this so let's say there there's a photographer that you really like the work of what would they do in that position you know uh how would they shoot it you know sometimes you're not so much looking to copy people but you are looking to think outside of your your current comfort zone so anyway I will look in the chat room now and see if there's any questions and we'll go a little while longer I'm not going to go too much longer cuz um the folks recording it we've been about an hour so if you guys have any questions you want to shoot me or anything um I am totally happy to look at it I need a little water because I've been talking for an hour and I'm worn out hang on so um yeah so that's the deal and uh next week we're going to get into shooting and some some other cool stuff but uh I got no questions I can show you some more work if you want let me show you a couple other guys that I like if you got questions uh pop them up in the in the chat room uh I showed you brell's work um here's a guy I'm very inspired by who's a very standard guy you've probably heard of this is a wonderful retrospective of HRI Cartier Bron and uh oh the photographer spelled his last name it's it's spelled Barrel b a r i l Tom barrel and uh it's on the spine here you see that Tom barrel and it's pronounced barell in fact I used to call him Tom barrel and I remember when I did the interview with him uh I uh called him on the phone his wife answered it says Tom Burell there or Tom Barrel there and she goes yes Mr Burell is here okay um yeah that's it's pronounced barell but it's b a r i l uh you can use your hands for framing templates um if you don't have one I would make them though because uh part of the cool thing let me show you on this is this black area around it really blocks out things and it's just easy to you know frame up better you could use your hands there's nothing wrong with that um I recommend a framing template personally but uh I see people using their hands generally you want to do that if you don't have a template with you but uh but there's nothing wrong with that but anyway uh car bran this is one of his famous images you got to know who this guy is this is some people having lunch in Paris I think uh it's on the banks of the the Mar in France uh anyway hre car Bron was a street photographer or kind of came known as that uh I covered him if you go watch the podcast I did on rule of thirds I showed a lot of images from this book this is such a beautiful image and one of my favorites it's not one of his his more famous images but these uh these boys down here that are looking at a sculpture and Museum I assume and you have such this triangle effect here of you have this this visual point of the statue up here looking down this one's looking at the boys and they're looking back so you kind of have this three-way triangle uh effect in the composition these are probably hard to see on streaming video but um uh that's kind of what we're going for anyway some great stuff uh this Bron he's uh as far as photography lit goes you need to know who he is he's one of the big famous photographers uh and I think if you know who he is you need to know who he is um some of these I've shown in podcast before and I won't belabor you with them again Carl blossfeld who does uh the Botanical portraits I did a whole episode on on Carl blossfeld and so that's uh that's an important one um another one this is a book that I got recently and I'm going to do a podcast um talking about his work but this is a Russian photographer named Alexi tieno or Teter enco and uh this is some really interesting stuff he's not very old he's a younger guy I think he's 50 or so and he uh has done these images that he does this is probably going to be real hard to see on the video but this is uh basically a street scene where he left the shutter open for a long period of time and you see these people walking through it and these ghosting on the images which is amazing uh there's a lot of cool scenes like that so I think a lot of times like I think a Common Thread that you can see here it's people going upstairs you kind of see that sorry I'm using the monitor up there to see where the lights's reflecting uh anyway I'll do a whole podcast on him uh I think he's brilliant um but this whole representation like you know when you have it looks like smoke coming down these stairs the people walking but I think much like sugimoto's work um who's you know I obviously sugimoto is how you pronounce it who I covered in a couple podcasts ago you have this element of time this thread that goes through it's this this dimension of time that that um that you're seeing and so I think that's a really important thing like that's something that you can be influenced by which is just going to shape your thinking and not so much copying what you're doing so um um Ted you mentioned you have ideas pictures you've taken do you keep a record of that or write down uh not all the time and I should and I'm telling you to and I'm going to try and get better at it uh generally speaking yes I do have some that that are just burned in my mind that that that I want to get one day um and usually they're images that occur in locations that are not here or they're physically impractical actually the helicopter thing is an example because I do have some aerial things in mind that I would like to do one day and so generally I try to write those down I think what's really important though like for instance if I could do this this afternoon go write some of those down and start thinking through them how does it look what's the weather like what's the lighting like you know start kind of coming up with some of those things in my mind of what I think is interesting um I may not get that shot for another couple years because either it's financially not feasible or physically impossible but don't think it only relates to that one photo it's going to relate like I said this is a creative muscle that you're building so that can influence other pictures that I take or other things that I can think of and that's what you want to get out of this that's why I say the guy is not the limit and it doesn't matter whether you ever get the photo or not but it influences other work that you do and that's why it's important to uh to think about um you guys have seen Saul light uh saw lighter he's another big influence of mine I did a whole it's in the episode called color I go through a lot of the images in this book sa lighter is just brilliant another Street photographer see I'm not I'm not much of a street guy um but I'm very influenced by people who are um it's just some beautiful images these are early color images but like this is this this guy back here in a hat that's blurred out these are just like just such brilliant compositions kind of Slice of Life stuff um yep Thomas says it by writing down ideas you build up a buffer of stuff yeah you get to it some point but just just the whole Act of thinking that's what that's what you get better at um maybe it's not that image maybe you know whatever um Do You Believe like me the black and white shoots The View really see the image um black and white it's it's interesting because black and white um here I'm looking at a book of color images but black and white that's a whole another subject for maybe another class but I think the thing with black and white is that you know as visual artists you kind of you know you could deal with black and white like if you're a painter or something you could you could do charcoal or something that is deals with scale and value but you know it's easier to go with color with with with photographers I think that's one of the easiest ways to knock things back from reality is just to shoot it in black and white it's just a simple um you know early innovate in early uh innovation in photography just from a technical level is that it was too hard to make color I mean you we have the tech technology for it early on so black and white came first but it's a really easy way for photographers just to knock knock that down and all of a sudden remove it from reality right there and there's this whole visual aesthetic I love black and white images most of what I shoot is black and white um I do some color for work rated stuff but I just I'm enamored with black and white but I don't know if it has as much to do with here or not you may pre-visualize something as being black and white and they're maybe a reason why that you can either explain or maybe there's a reason that you can't explain that you're trying to figure out but why would something be more that's a question to ask yourself is why would how would this look better in black and white than in color uh sometimes I saw a photo taken by another photographer thinking about these composition shot with a different angle or different lighting um yeah I mean that is prev visualization but you need to get out and learn how to deal with your surroundings I think um yeah both are valid you could do that but I wouldn't do that for this assignment I would just try to get out get somewhere um yeah it is definitely part is I'm agreeing with Thomas here Thomas is a good guy he's he was the first hulga project guy to come off the roll um but yeah but but yeah someone else's prev visualization I mean what what you're learning how to do though uh if you do exclusively that I think you're missing learning how to react to the setting that you're in because you're eventually will be taking your own photographs and so it's real important to um be able to prev visualize what you're trying to do and what your conditions are um somebody else taking a photo and you thinking how you could do it better you're given a big chunk of information right off the bat it's just kind of this gift and that's not what we're going for here we we're learning how to conceptualize that information that stuff can certainly influence you there's nothing wrong with that and don't not do it but that's not what we're going for as part of this exercise so um yeah Thomas is famous he's he's the man let me show you another book this is um and I need to do a podcast on this guy I want to meet this guy one day he's still alive he teaches at school up in m Metts this is Abelardo Morel and I think he is one he's up there with um for me with sugimoto is one of the uh great minds I think in photography today and what I love about morel's work is I don't think that he sets out to be a great mind I think he's himself and I think that just comes through in his images um he shoots uh there's several styles that he kind of shoots within he does a lot of camera obscure work that I'm going to show you um and then he does kind of these simple still with objects around his house and I think if I recall correctly one of his motives behind that uh having small children was kind of trying to see the world through their eyes and and how that impacts also through teaching um he does a lot of illustrative Concepts that he did for his class which have just in their Brilliance have become wonderful Fine Art photos in their own right like for instance here's a self-portrait he shot postcards falling on this book I've been through this book a lot uh self-portrait he shot through his eyeglasses sitting on his desk and and obviously illustrates the refraction of light being focused through the lenses cuz he's blurry except through the glasses I just think this is brilliant I mean my God what a mind and and like I said if you don't want to go out somewhere in a public space just sit in your own home and and sit in a room and look at objects around you and what could they do what what is interesting about this um that's important uh some early work get into this yeah these are some of the Through The Eyes of a small child kind of objects the the horse over here and the building blocks on the left hand side just absolutely brilliant beautiful he shoots all 4x5 film does his own printing he is a monster I love the Crayons just a simple box of crayons you know it doesn't get much more beautiful than that it's just so awesome I love the Simplicity of it it's not a minimalist composition but it's a minimalist subject and the fact that you don't see color they're all in black and white um this is brilliant too this is uh it says Laura and Brady in the shadow of our house so you can see that this was shot in like probably the driveway outside something like that and it's done in the shadow of the house and they drew the windows in and the girls are lying down the girl and the boy and it's just genius I mean just taking things that you never thought would make an interesting photo a shadow and improving on it and trying to figure a way around it and I just think it's absolutely brilliant uh he shoots some pretty conventional stuff too but um like for for instance here's one that that I Illustrated in the one of the I think it was the very first uh Art of Photography class the camera obscura um and he's done a beautiful I did a weird podcast he did a wonderful photo of this where you see a light bulb over here a lens attached to a dark box and you can see how this projects on the inside uh with the second light bulb you can see it's upside down just absolutely gorgeous some people are having stream problems and I'm sorry uh don't worry will put everything up you will be able to see it later uh these are a little harder maybe to make out on here but uh these are some of the camera obscure shots and let me explain what he does he builds a camera obscure out of a room so uh one of the things he'll do is put um black trash bags or whatever cover the wall of the window so they're completely dark and then you cut a pinhole about the size of a quarter and what happens is this projects whatever is happening outside the window onto the wall in the back so he does these beautiful camera obscure shot so he shoots the camera obscure when he's done this is one of New York City you can see it's upside down takes up the full wall these are really long exposures and I imagine they're really hard to do he's doing some of these in color right now which is um just you know stunning uh look at his website you can see a lot of this work I mean I would love to just like this guy is so amazing this is cool too here's some using some objects in the room that you might initially find distracting um and finding something to do with them like so camera obscura so dark paper over the windows small pinhole IT projects the image onto the back wall cracks the building on the bed I mean that's just awesome I mean I would my gut reaction is that bed's in the way we need to move it but uh yeah his website is definitely worth looking at uh he's one of my favorites and I for whatever reason I haven't covered him on a podcast yet and I really would like to um he has a whole series of images that he did using books this isn't I want I just want to rip this guy off it's like it's brilliant like for instance here's just a neat shot of a huge book from a library it's just a simple shape composition very simple still life it's it's amazing thanks for joining us gut adult um we're almost done here you won't miss much you can catch the in later um this is interesting too if you hold um an image in the right light you get the way the light reacts on the paper it becomes a negative um just simply unbelievably awesome I really can't say enough good things I've never met this guy he's not very old um he teaches uh it's just like my God I mean just his stuff just totally speaks I think it's it's completely awesome go look at his website I won't try and show you the stuff over a stream I think it's uh it's it's uh kind of cheesy anyway guys um I think we're going to go ahead and shut it down now we've been an hour um and I'm going to put all this up later so I don't want to have more video than I know what to do with so thank you so much for stopping by and watching um I don't know how many people we've got in the chat room now but uh says 50 um that's quite a few good stuff any other last questions um all right if you have questions save them for next time maybe we'll do a little Q&A before we actually start the show and you guys can ask them away then we'll meet you next week so what what you're supposed to do this week is is do the assignment what we're learning to do is think about the photo we're not taking anything yet and what I bet will happen this is what I wager is that when we get to the the next assignment where you are going to be taking pictures and using your camera your approach is going to be completely different and that's really what I want you to do so if you can help it don't take any photos this week just just do this assignment just learn how to think learn how to see think about this all the time that's that's the important thing so thank you guys so much I've had a great time uh thanks for the questions thanks for tuning in and we're going to do this again next week so um I'll have a podcast live in the next couple days we're going to do one on some hogga tutorials which I think is going to be cool and so uh we'll see you on the flip side there so anyway uh thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next timeall righty guys we're ready to get going so welcome to the very first edition of masterclass live this is going to be uh way cool I think um and is if you watched the last podcast I kind of explained it um basically the cool thing is is like when I do these podcasts can you guys see me I can't really see myself um when I do these podcasts uh I've done these gosh we're almost three years into this I think the 18th is the official date that the first podcast went up three years ago so anyway that's pretty cool and uh I've had a really good time in the last three years doing this stuff and sorry I'm still adusting um one of the things that that has been a little bit frustrating well frustrating is kind of a harsh word but uh one of the things that that I wanted to kind of change a little bit within the podcast was you know you have some constraints on the actual uh physical podcast you know I keep them around 15 20 minutes in length um they're kind of one subject a piece sometimes we do series stuff like that but I I what I really would like to do and as a teacher I think it's more fun if we could do something this live broadcast kind of inspired this where what we'll what we'll do is actually have a curriculum and we'll do multi-week uh lessons and really get to explore a topic in depth and I think that's pretty uh pretty cool and pretty important um and so our first uh class that we're going to do is going to be developing your style as a photographer and this is something I've been wanting to do for a long time because uh and not that I have mastered um a personal Style by any means but uh one thing that is exciting to me is uh you know being able to explore this and come up with some exercises and some topics and some things we can talk about and do to kind of uh try to get our heads around this and so once again there's notes uh you should see links to them on the website if you're there and you can kind of follow along as we go along so um how this is going to run is it'll run multiple weeks I think this first one I've either got planned is six or seven weeks I'm not sure I can't remember uh but anyway we'll meet same time each week I may vary the times up because some people are in different time zones uh that way our Australian and Asian friends can get a chance to watch uh live as well uh but we'll see how that goes um but if you miss a a class or can't watch it live for whatever reason we are going to Archive them and put them up uh for the full duration of the class they will all be up and all be free and I haven't really decided what I'm going to do mainly because uh these are going to go about an hour and length and so the bandwidth will be an issue um and the cost with that so I may have a subscription service or something if you want to go watch old archives but during the full duration of the class every class will be live and um we'll find a way to do that so uh anyway so it's pretty exciting so this first class is going to be developing your style as a photographer and uh giving kind of an introduction here um some of the methods we're going to be using here is I really have been wanting um to kind of do something that digs a little deeper than what we normally do with the podcast and and a lot of times with photography you have more or less an environment that's set up where you have parameters and and rules and um you know guidelines to think about you know and it's everything from being in focus to having the right exposure to doing something with the exposure um and this class isn't really about any of those things this class is really about digging a lot deeper than that and so we're going to talk about some meditation examples we're going to talk about some very unorthodox things as far as exercises go that that you'll be able to do um and I think it's really going to be fun uh I'm looking forward to it quite a bit myself um and so some of these might be weird or uncomfortable but the whole point of this is to stretch your comfort zone and actually get some results and make you better as a photographer and I think that's really important um I I don't see a lot of this kind of thing you know with podcasts that exists um you know you've all heard me say that I think they all kind of get too much into equipment and that's not what this is about this is about getting results and getting better photos as a photographer this is about getting better this is about you guys like improving and so that's what we're going to do um the prerequisites because I'm not going to go over basic stuff in here we're not going to be talking about aperture or ISO or any of those things at least on a basis level you need to have an understanding of those and I kind of wrote some things out on the notes because I want you to be able to read them later and I'll kind of go through these but anyway this Workshop uh this is a workshop that takes an advanced look at a very specific area of Photography uh it is highly recommend that you have a grasp on the basic theoretical and mechanical concepts of Photography under your belt so obviously uh you need to understand how to make an exposure using aperture shutter speed ISO things like that if you don't have a grasp on these you probably still find the class beneficial but I won't be covering those um this is more advanced than than some of that will you know entail um you should understand different focal lengths of lenses obviously achieve different visual applications and how they uh physically affect the image you need to understand at least a basic overview of how lighting Works in both natural settings uh when used as artificial lighting such as strobes or flashes so I'm not really going to cover lighting uh we're going to be taking pictures and I'm going to give you assignments and you're going to be doing a lot of work and you're going to have to find those things on your own so assuming that you're comfortable with those things I also have just a resources section I really didn't give you many resources uh but we have three years of podcasts on this show and I've covered a lot of those beginning Concepts on here um in various details so you know if you go to the art of photography. TV you can watch all the previous episodes or if you subscribe on iTunes they're all there as well just search my name or The Art of Photography and and you'll find it in your podcast um so if you have questions on things those are a really good resource to go to um there's tons of stuff online like if you Google photography lighting you'll find a whopping load of tutorials so it really is not hard to find this information and which is another reason I wanted to go more advanced and give you something that that is just not something that's normal to find um online although you know other people have kind of covered some of this but uh anyway materials and this is what you're going to need for the class and it's real simple you're going to need a camera obviously uh you're going to need a notebook and a pencil that you can carry with you and this is very important let me show you what I use hang on um you can uh if you go onto Amazon or if you just go to your local bookstore I would recommend that because you can actually pick up and look at them uh this is a mol skin notebook I have a ton of these um they're a little overpriced for what they are but the M skins all have the the uh elastic band and you can open them up take your notes drw pictures whatever you want to do they come in different styles this is the reporter style so it's kind of a a horizontal flip here or vertical flip um and so you're going to need one of these for taking notes um we're going to kind of go old school a little bit with pictures and you're going to see in this first assignment that we're going to cover today um there's a lot you're going to be writing down and taking notes and and you know uh as reminders for yourself so a notebook and a pencil don't go overboard don't spend a lot of money on it the mol skins maybe not recommended just cuz they cost a little bit too much uh the problem that I have with mol skins that I've always had with them is that I'll buy them a lot and because they cost a lot of money I'm afraid to mess them up and ride in them sometimes which is kind of defeats the whole purpose of buying a notebook um for some reason I think there's going to be a special project that I want to reserve it for and um this is your special project so get something you feel comfortable with that you can get messy with uh and also for software um I'm sure most people in here especially if you shoot digital uh have Photoshop something like that the one that I recommend actually and I'm not going not reading these out loud I'll go through uh but I'm recommending Adobe Bridge let's let's go back a little bit and let's talk about the camera real quick um I jumped ahead of myself and in the notes I said you're going to need uh actually you're not going to need the camera until week two um in fact you have work to do before we even pick up the camera so wait until this happens to decide what you want to use so if you're the kind of person who has a lot of cameras and you're real indecisive about that just just get through this first week before you decide but we're going to narrow it down to one camera so you'll need one camera that's right one and that means one lens as well so if you decided during the course of the workshop that you need need to switch to a different Lids or camera that's fine but don't go back and what I'm doing with this is I'm trying to eliminate distraction what we're doing is we're um a lot of times cameras because especially with modern cameras with with digital functions and menus and things like that that kind of thing is going to distract from what we're trying to do in here and I think that's really important to understand um that you want to eliminate that distraction this doesn't mean you're permanently going to stick to one camera but what we're trying to do is improve skill so that eventually um you know you're going to make the decision of what camera to is based on what is in your mind and what you're going after visually uh rather than just picking up a camera and I think this is really cool too because you don't need a fancy camera for this class and I'll kind of go on here here comes the ambulance I live next to a hospital too um cameras and lenses have an impact on the image on a technical level but that's not what we're going for here which I just described uh we are trying to develop your eye and get your personality and voice to show in the image yeah you will see this has nothing to do with the tool you're using you don't need a good camera at all in fact a cheap camera is fine your talent vision and personality are stronger than any piece of gear uh could use so no matter how expensive so I think that's really important to understand and uh don't think that you need to go out and buy you know the latest Canon Nikon most expensive thing you can find uh whatever you have will work um I would suggest however I'm on page two now that you do use a digital camera and the main reason for this logic is we're going to take a ton of images um in fact this first week you're not going to be taking any images uh but you're going to be doing other stuff but once we do get in images you're going to be taking a ton of them and I think it's really going to be difficult if you're shooting film U and I wrote in here unless you're you're used to using a light table and you want to go old school and you can read a negative um if you're not familiar with that then I don't recommend it um also it could get expensive if you're getting things developed at a lab and so I would rather that not be a a hindrance here this is probably one of the the few times I recommend not using film on something it's just a practical reason that's the only reason for it um so anyway and I also recommend you keep the camera as simple as possible point sh is ideal actually and you can even use your cell phone um there's nothing wrong if you got an iPhone some kind of cool Android that has a decent camera in it even if it doesn't have a decent camera that's not the point here we're going for a visual image not so much megapixels quality um color tones things like that at this point um so anyway so at least for this first week that's what you're going to need um and actually all the weeks that's what you're going to need uh notebook I already went over you're not going to need anything spe specific I use the mol skin you can use whatever you want spiral bound is fine you can spend a dollar on one at the store if that work works for you uh but just make sure I do recommend that that you keep the size down and one thing I like about this is it's small and it fits in my back pocket or not really my shirt pocket but anyway um uh you'll want to carry it around a lot as will the camera you're going to carry that around a lot too so that's why actually I recommend a point and shoot or your or your phone camera um mainly because you just need to have it with you um I love my my Canon 5D Mark I but uh it is massive and it is a base to carry it around and you'll find yourself leaving on your desk a lot or something like that so anyway and finally the software uh you're going to need a photo browser okay so basically you need something that you can open up and look at your images light table Style with minimal fuss and so I actually recommend Adobe bridge for this it's simple and does exactly what it needs to do um I don't recommend uh Lightroom or aperture and the reason is is I I recommend them for General post- production but that's what they are they post- production tools and for this what we're doing is we're working on um on really honing in on taking a lot of photos and and and looking at composition and things like that so I think it's really important if you're going to use a photo browser um to stick with Adobe Bridge something like that you can use uh Lightroom obviously and aperture they both have kind of a light table mode where you can move thumbnails around but the problem with both those applications is they do post- production as well and so there's a lot of buttons there that are vying for your attention and you're going to start wanting to correct levels you're going to start wanting to change the exposure and we're not talking about post- production uh that could be another class that we do um this is getting it as right as possible coming into the camera so um I don't recommend those just because the temptation to start editing um we're not really going to be talking about a lot of post-production in here I want to I'm I'm more interested in looking at what you can capture with the camera and so that's that's Adobe bridge is going to be easier for that um because you won't have that Temptation so that's basically the outline of what we'll be doing in this class and we're going to start getting into the nitty-gritty right now um one thing I want to point out before we get too far along into this is I actually made an error on the lesson plan here um you can see on the last page I go into part four which is uh photographic meditation we're not doing that this week that's next week it's a preview um I will correct that so if you're watching this um as a pre-recorded thing uh your your uh your thing may you know um somebody just asked in the chat room if there are any free alternatives to Adobe bridge probably so um I should have researched that I did not um with if you're on a Mac just uh there are ways just to use the finder to preview images and that's okay um or you can use something like preview it's a little more cloy Adobe Bridge comes with everything I don't think you actually have to pay for it and I don't know if you I think if you do the free trial on Adobe software I think you may get to keep Bridge don't quote me on that I'm not sure but I remember at one point um at least a year or two ago that was the case uh Windows has some stuff actually um the Windows Live yeah Picassa is a good one actually that is a good uh Bill Cunningham mentions Picassa might fit I would recommend Picassa you can download that that's free or if you're on a Mac you can use iPhoto that's fine too but again those have postp processing options so just don't be tempted if that's what you're using um what we're doing is looking at images so anyway but uh I I did put next week's lesson in here so you can ignore that or if you're watching this later um I probably will have it fixed in the file that you download so anyway so what we're going to talk about today the whole point of this class the uh definition is developing your style as a photographer and so what we're looking at is is okay what separates you from somebody else or if you look at the photographers that you're interested in what makes them stand out and usually it's their personality or their inner voice um their creative mind that speaks things like that and that's really what we're going to be looking at um uh through all this and what defines a style well you have basically styles of Photography okay and so you know we're going to kind of cover those in a second um but when you think about it really as human beings we're all different everybody's born different everybody has their own set of experiences and accomplishments and disappointments that they deal within their lives that affect and shape their personality and so right off the bat I think the first thing you need to realize is that you are already an individual and that is probably about 75% of the battle here the rest of it is trying to figure out how to take that inner voice or take that personality and have that come through in your images and this is a lifelong process um this is something I don't feel like I'm got a total grip on yet I feel like I'm better than I used to be at it but I don't think it's ever over with and it's something that you could spend a lifetime doing and I think most of the great photographers in the world would agree with that um in fact I think they all would uh it's really something you're constantly doing and I think with creative work no matter what that is whether you're a photographer whether you're an artist whether you like to draw whether you like to code uh applications for the computer you know whatever you're doing that has a creative side to it I think that's the process that draws Us in over that Lifetime and if it weren't a challenge and there weren't something to strive for I think we'd all get pretty bored at it um you know if I could go out and shoot exactly the photos that I want to take all the time what would be the point um I think it would lose a little bit of its of its Allure uh to do that so you know the first thing to realize is that you're already an individual and what the challenge here is as I said is to try to get that personality to come through uh with the camera and it's hard to do um it takes a long time when we talk about styles of Photography there's there's your personal style and this is the hard part about this class is that if you look at just photography history as a whole there are a lot of styles of Photography that exist uh basically you you could subdivide them into two categories and what's weird is I kind of googled this when I was you know coming up with the curriculum and making my notes and it's amazing how all over the map uh and I I hesitate to use the word bad but but the results were not what I thought they were going to be and mainly because people like to personally subdivide things which I think is okay um but in a more General historical definition of styles of photography I think that you have two main styles that that you're dealing with there's photography that's commercial in nature and there's photography that is fine art in nature okay and what is the main difference and I've heard uh actually a friend of mine described a long time ago who was an illustrator uh he did both fine art and Commercial illustration and he mentioned that you know the difference between illustration and art is an illustration uh you know what you're going to get paid to do the job and you go do it and in Fine Art you have to go do the work first and then figure out what it's worth later and so that's kind of a funny but broad definition of it but within those you have sub definitions of what styles are so within commercial photography you have things like product photography you have um you could have landscape but it's probably going to deal more Under the Umbrella of architectural photography um if you listen to the photography show the audio podcast that I do um Wade is really good at that kind of thing who's my co-host on there um he's awesome at architectural photography for commercial application he gets a lot of clients doing that and that's I'm not going to say his whole style is that but it's it's definitely um you know an element of his style and something that he excels in so that's kind of a substyle of commercial photography there's also photojournalism um and photojournalism kind of falls under both categories but uh because there are people that do kind of a photojournalistic style as fine art um there's also Paparazzi photography um that you know has kind of reared its head in the last oh 40 years or so um you know to varying degrees so anyway photojournalism is a little bit different because you're not out just capturing a landscape or a building or a product you're out trying to tell a story and so it's very different than a commercial application such as um you know shooting tabletop uh product stuff you know it's just going to be completely different and people I think really good photographers can be good at Several of these things I think the best photographers have something that they obviously enjoy and prefer and Excel in particularly when you get into the Fine Art category and Fine Art could be anything I mean you have people like anel Adams who did commercial work as well but a lot of his fine art stuff were the beautiful landscapes he did um you have uh people who do abstracts you do uh you have people who do portrait photography portrait is is one of the subsections that could be either commercial or fine art depending on what your approach is to it but you know these are all styles of Photography um and where do you fit in with all that um if you're younger or just starting out don't feel like you have to decide that immediately I think the best option is is if you're kind of a beginner and you've only been doing this a couple years or so is actually to do to not Define yourself as something I would get out and shoot as much as you can and let those opinions start to shape sometimes it can have the opposite effect they have a more practical definition to them because especially with street photography um that's something that I think a lot of people uh you know see uh hre C Bron images or uh Frank cap images or something like that and they want to be a street photographer and they go out and they realize that they're not really comfortable shooting strangers in public that's a really hard skill to to to get down or maybe people want to go into shooting portrait photography but you're not the kind of personality Who develops a rapport with the client or the person being photographed and and that can kind of shape your direction you know maybe that's not for you therefore something else becomes more enjoyable so if you're just starting out I would explore as much as possible if you've been doing this a while you probably already have started to explore some Avenues and I think maybe it's good to push yourself into some things that you're not as comfortable with um I try to do that from time to time too I certainly have things that I shoot but I really haven't fallen into something that I feel is my thing and um again that's part of the the carrot that keeps you moving over the years and so anyway so um talking about Styles photography now what we're going to do is I want to go back for the next couple bullet points and we're going to scale back and this may seem really Elementary but I think it's important to at least at the beginning of this class is to to Define some parameters uh definitions of what photography is so anyway one thing we have is what is a photograph and I think this is really important uh even though it seems pretty basic um but a photograph and this is my definition is a representation of an idea that is created using light sensitive materials okay so a photo in the traditional sense is a visual recording of a scene but could also be manipulated scenes that can be reconstructed into a final image so we've seen a lot of this uh I think in the pre-digital era there were photographers or our photographers like Jerry yelman uh guys like that that did a lot of photo manipulation in the dark room and obviously now with Photoshop being such a common tool that people use I think this boundary gets pushed even further and obviously there are um some issues that you might have um with where is that line you know when is it long longer a photo and it's a Photoshop composition and I'm really not going to Define that in this class obviously I think there's a line but to some degree especially with commercial work you will get into post-production that's pretty heavy in photo manipulation so it it is a part of Photography and so I've I've gone ahead and listed it as that um you can do things in the camera that I mean the whole thing is is if you're just capturing what you see that's not really photography that's documentation and my personal definition is anybody can do that um you know uh any of my friends who anybody who picks up a camera can do that you can document a scene especially now where everything on the camera is automatic um but what defines this as visual art is going to be something different so there is a degree of manipulation whether it's in camera or post- production um and we'll get into this as we go um what is visual art and this is a really important definition because this is something that we're dealing with here but visual art is the organization of visual elements in empty space to form a composition okay stop there and I want to think about this one line um visual art is the organization of two things visual elements and empty space that's the key to form a composition you have to have the empty space and the empty space is kind of uh sound like Star Wars here using the force but it's it's kind of this overlooked thing because it's invisible and less obvious but if you don't have the empty space it's harder to Define elements in your composition I think the easiest way to think of this is like real minimalist art or minimalist photography or here's one if you think of typography so the study of U creating fonts uh legibility if you're reading when your eye reads things on a page the letters all have shapes to them and we learn these letters as we go it's a visual element but your eye actually defines those letters using the white space that comes around them and if you think of if you've ever seen posters that are done because typography can be hard to read at times if you have too much background noise it distracts from the letters and your eyes actually you can make out the letters but it becomes more difficult to read because your eye is using that negative space to Define what it's going after so that's a really important thing to keep in mind is that you know within a composition that negative space is a very important element that goes into it so you're using visual elements and these are things like shape line contrast uh color um objects uh light and then you're using that empty space which is harder to Define because is sometimes it's not necessarily White Blank Space um it actually is filled with like a sky as a background or something like that but something that is it contrasts in its level of distracting you know what I mean it's uh it's not distracting so you have that contrast of of of um objects within a composition so that's very important to understand um the composition typically serves to react with the viewer okay and this is kind of a debate too and this reaction can range from anything from an emotional reaction communication or simply existence so if you think of it this way somebody you're always creating your art or your image for somebody to see okay uh that could be argued sometimes people do create stuff and they don't want people to see it but maybe that art is for them as an artist but if there's no reason to look at it later then why would we try to make it so you can think of it that way and so this reaction that you're getting from whatever audience this is whether it's just yourself or whether it's other people whether it's other artists whatever um there's some kind of reaction that you're trying to get out of that okay and so that could be with highly conceptual stuff which we're going to talk about in a minute that could be you know changing the way people think about something um it could be trying to communicate an idea it could be trying to get a reaction you could be trying to irritate somebody or get them emotionally involved make them happy sad upset um there's a lot of artist especially within advertising I think in the last 10 to 20 years that has tried to spark you know some kind of emotional reaction like that to make people think especially political ads things like that and so you know that's certainly a function um and then there also is the function too of just being able to uh you know make something that's aesthetically pleasing that's beautiful to look at and I think the best stuff is kind of an amalgamation of these things and we're going to get into that in a minute um real quick I want to define the process of a photograph and I think especially people who are newer to this and never really uh experienced photography when it was film and all of this analog nature and it's digital to really keep this in mind but traditionally a photograph is a two-dimensional representation of a three diim space and I think that's important too because though you can shoot video in 3D and you can shoot um photos in 3D the bulk of what we're dealing with here is is this two-dimensional representation so a print on paper or on the screen of a three-dimensional Space phography is really easy to deal with this in because we have things like contrast we have lighting we have depth of field most of that is already exists in the scene so creating recreating a three-dimensional space isn't as problematic but I think it's a good thing to remember to get your head around that that's what you are in doing um anyway this two-dimensional representation was created originally by a process using light and chemical reactions as opposed to drawing by hand and in the 21st century we've seen substitutions of electronic components and machines that become alternatives to the chemical process but it's all still the same you have something that's light sensitive it records what it's seeing visually through a lens or pinhole or something that's that's shaping that light and Records it so this could either be uh a chemical process um that you would need to treat or it could be uh traditionally using silver gel and other materials or it could be digital um and it's it's all the same it's just a kind of a different way of recording it okay I want to talk about aesthetic versus concept okay um a lot of times art can fall under one of two categories or parts of both and I think that's where the strong stuff comes from and if you think of something that's aesthetic that means it's something that is visually pleasing on some level it's something that's nice to look at or I think more specifically it's a u Way of shooting it's a way of composing that creates interest within that composition and in some of the older podcasts that we've done we've talked about things like rule thirds uh we've talked about uh you know we've touched on contrast things like that things that you can make your composition more interesting you know for instance if you want to draw emphasis to something that's in the frame you put it near the edge and that makes a stronger statement because it's kind of contrasting with your ey with what your eye wants to see or your brain wants to see is pleasingly centered um so disturbing that kind of symmetry uh there things like that those are aesthetic Concepts um I think lighting can be an aesthetic concept uh and then there's conceptual which is completely different rather than dealing with an aesthetic you're trying to tell a story or make a point or draw some kind of reaction and you see photographers or even artists that fall sometimes really strongly on one end if you think of like a Continuum so you have the aesthetic interest over on one side you have your conceptual interest over on the other some usually people fall somewhere on that Continuum somewhere and so you might see things that like you know Robert Frank is a photographer that I talked about a couple years ago on the podcast and uh he's one of my favorites and if you look at uh you know his Grand thesis of Photography or his big project was called The Americans and the Americans is is extremely unique and cool and interesting but he's not a rule of thirds guy he's not a Perfect Exposure you know do it all in the dark room zone system kind of guy it's really kind of a raw take but with the Americans he was document in um his the the I guess the view of of the United States through his eyes in the ' 50s as he traveled across the country and some of the images are a little bit disturbing some of them are you know kind of sad in nature but they all make you think and I think this is more of on the conceptual end of the Continuum and it has a lot of Mer Merit and value to it even though it's not as visually beautiful as somebody like anel Adams who really didn't have a whole lot of the conceptual thing to his work but dealt more of the aesthetic components there's no right or wrong there's no one's better than the other um personally I feel like the stronger work um that is best conveying your own personality shining through is somewhere in the middle of that Continuum um and so I guess what I'm trying to say is if you're somebody who's been heavily on the conceptual end try to start thinking about the aesthetic or I think most people start out on the aesthetic end because you before you learn how to really communicate these things that's the more natural path to go down but start thinking more in conceptual uh terms like you know is there something you can say with the image is there's something you can visually represent um a lot of people refer to the is storytelling and you know what is the story uh that you're trying to capture there and sometimes a story I'll say too if you're shooting still life or if you're shooting uh stationary objects or landscape that story isn't going to be you know the beginning middle end kind of traditional story but there maybe something you're trying to say with it and maybe that's some kind of if you're ding a landscape maybe there's an environmental concern that you want to capture within the photograph and so that would affect the way you compose it and the way you shoot it and what's being said to the viewer um these are just examples um but anyway that's something to think about um important photographers now I think because I have a big music background um if you don't uh haven't heard before um that's I started out as a guitar player and I went to college and majored in composition and I really wanted to do film scoring at one point in my life and even as a photographer was kind of a second thing but that was going to be my occupational thing and uh the music business is pretty brutal and and did not work out but what so anyway long story short I'm doing photography um and I'm just starting to do some music again but what's interesting is having come from a photography background and other photographers that I know that are musicians this is kind of a weird thing because with music you're kind of trained as an early age to pick people that you like and be influenced and you kind of have these well mentors or Idols that you look up to uh people that you really want to try and emulate as as a guitar player or a violinist or whatever it is as a singer um you have your Heroes and I found that with photography generally speaking uh maybe a little less so with visual art people don't do this as much and I think it's a really important part of learning and you're not setting out necessarily to copy somebody but you want to be influenced I'll get into that in a second but it's really important um to have an understanding of of Photography literature and to know who the key photographers are um I'm not going to go through all these because I think that falls under the prerequisite heading and there are a ton of places that you can you can find this stuff I recommend just finding a good photography history book at a used bookstore that's enough um and find out what some key photographs have been over the years um photography is not that old in the grand scheme of things and so there's really U you know kind of a narrow window of history that you're looking at uh but I think it's important to understand those I think it's important to understand visual art um especially stuff that came before photography and and where all that came from so you know knowing who Edward Sten is and knowing who anel Adams is and knowing who even contempor like Anie leitz or Dan wyers or somebody like that uh knowing who these people are I think that's really important to understand um understand the different styles the different backgrounds the important images why they're important why they're famous you know that kind of thing um and Finding Your Heroes is the next subject and I think this is really really really important and if you don't have people you look up to and I'm not talking about FRS of yours on Flickr or Google+ or something like that there are obviously an enormous amount of talented people in those places but I'm talking about people who generally and this is a side track I would like to see um some key contemporary photographers do more social media like uh Google+ Facebook things like that uh just to have a voice in that but I found that that kind of traditionally that hadn't happened I think there's a generation of people that are going to be very good that are really involved in social networks but I would not limit yourself just as what you see within social media I would really recommend um starting to buy books starting a collection even if you're doing stuff like like finding people on the internet just famous artists and keeping a notebook and printing images out to refer to and really finding what you like and uh what you like to see and there's kind of um there's two things that I want to talk about along this this term and there's kind of two schools you can you can kind of fall under as far as um as far as uh you know being inspired or being influenced by an artist and I'll probably show some visual examples here but I have some of my favorite photographers and again this is aesthetic versus conceptual again but uh there's people like uh if you're familiar with the work of Tom Burell and let me show you his stuff he was uh one of his big jobs he he uh this is his book it's just called Tom Burell and Tom does these wonderful things he shoots a lot of pen hole a lot of codian process um and he is just simply a beautiful photographer um stuff like these tulips this is a very famous image of his I don't know if this is showing up really well um and Tom Burell is a big hero of mine um he's not one of the most famous photographers in the world but he certainly is one of my favorites um he did a series of architectural images in New York City I don't know if you can tell right here or not uh this is the uh Chrysler Building in the background shot from a empty office space and but the use of light the use of contrast the the black and white tones that he gets uh the subject matter um one of the things he became very well known for I may have the wrong book for this oh yeah is the series of Botanical images so they're just images of flowers and so this is a sunflower and I think one of the things that influences me the most about Bell's work is that he didn't just shoot it as a flower um he kind of takes a lot of influence from somebody like Carl blossfeld um probably to a dangerous Lev uh but really trying to capture the essence of something that's common in every day but in a different and new visual representation so this is a dying sunflower it's upside down uh it's wilting it's shot from behind these are not what you are used to seeing as traditional images even though he uses traditional process like uh codeon wet plate here's another one where three sunflowers shot from the backside and so um you know obviously he's somebody that I've kind of think I feel like in a bad way I've become dangerous and coping a lot and I don't mean that as an arrogant thing or an egotistical thing because I feel like some of my still life work looks like second rate Tom Burell and that's something that I've tried to curb in recent years um but I think that's okay especially when you're starting out to find people to aesthetically try to copy their work uh because you're going to learn a lot doing that I think it's unacceptable um once you get part past a certain part in your career and this is what I'm kind of bringing on myself but I think it's kind of unacceptable at that point to start making a career or name for yourself copying somebody else's work but I think in the early stages the beginning I think it's a great place to start so I hope that makes sense it's not too much of a ying and yang um but that's really important it's really important to find people that you enjoy their work and um that speak to you and you know that's really important but I think on the other end of things um there are photographers such as um if you guys have seen some of the recent art photography episodes I did a whole episode on Hiroshi sujimoto and that's somebody that I'm very influenced by and very inspired by and it's different because I don't my work doesn't look like that um at all I don't go for the same kinds of things aesthetically at this point uh that Hiroshi goes for but it's more his conceptual thinking it's more um kind of how he shoots an image like for instance anel Adams is another one I don't really do a lot of lscape Photography at all but I'm very inspired and very influenced by Ansel ABS I love his work I've got a ton of anel books over there um if there's an anel show in town I'll go see it uh because I'm inspired by that I don't shoot anything that's anywhere in the ballpark of what he does I don't do do a lot of landscapes in black and white but what I am influenced by is his sense of composition uh his attention to detail his you know dying aspiration to have the perfect black and white image when he's done uh finding ways to manipulate to bring out tones to bring out contrast just this obsessive thinking about how the image should be represented and I think that is you know just for me mind-blowing and so there's two things there's copying versus finding your own voice and I think it's good to find people you're interested in maybe aesthetically their work isn't your interest but there's something else there that you are influenced and inspired by and uh I think that's really important um I'll show some more work in a minute I'm going to keep going and maybe when we do in the Q&A I'll I'll show some other people that that I'm very inspired by um the last thing is an ego check and I know this has been a lot in this episode but I started out by saying you know you're already an individual and if we're you know the class subject here is developing your style as a photographer to understand that you already are there you're an individual you don't think like me I don't think like you I don't think like my heroes um and so already I'm different I'm unique I stand out and so are you um it's just a matter of finding that and I think it's really important to start believing that um a lot of times especially when you're starting out it's real easy to see the results of your own work and get a little bit shy about it and come down on yourself about it and maybe it's not exactly what you want to be looking for um I'm kind of particularly highr strong and I tend to beat myself up over it and I think it's important to keep your ego in check you want to stop doing that and you want to start really believing in yourself and believing that yes you can do it because I don't think you can do it unless you believe it and I think it's really important right off the bat to understand that you're already unique you're already an individual and you're going to get that to shine through on this stuff but be very careful because what you don't want to do is develop a sense of arrogance around that it's one thing to be proud of the work that you do and to show off your images and it's another thing to kind of take that too far and we've all known people who have come under that category and just keeping the ego in check is all um don't beat yourself up but just keep it in check is all I'm saying in fact it's really hard because you you can't beat yourself up over it if you're going to get results this has to be um you know uh obviously a priority here okay so we're going to get into here uh and then I'll take some question answer is our first assignment which is photographic memory and I want to kind of describe where this is coming from a little bit um and the first bullet point on here is I wish I had my camera and we've all had a situation where maybe you're driving down the road or maybe you're out on a walk or maybe you're on your way to work and you see something that captures your eye and you don't have your camera and you think wow that' make a great picture I mean we've all done it I do it all the time and it's interesting because I've also you know there's kind of this belief that well you should always have a camera with you to capture those moments and there's nothing wrong with that I agree with that you probably should but what I think in developing our own voice is I think a really important part is to not use a camera this first week and really learn how to tap into that voice of I wish I had my camera with me okay and what we're going to need for this is uh we're going to be talking about keeping a journal and most important we're talking about learning how to see and anel Adams I'll go through the assignment in a second but anel Adams had a technique that uh he referred to a lot that was called prev visualization and uh for him he was dealing with zone system and his work was all black and white uh in the end he didn't shoot a lot of color he's known for his black and white Landscapes and they had these really rich tones to them and sometimes he created these real dramatic moods using contrast that may not have been present in the initial scene that he was looking at at the landscape but the whole prev visualization is learning how to see what you're photographing get that in your mind and learn how to prev visualize what that final print is going to look like and it's a real Challenge and it's something that I think a lot of photographers don't or even people who take pictures don't consider you pick up the camera you set it to Auto you go or you start messing around with the settings to experiment and there's nothing wrong with experimentation but what you want to do is learn how to get that prev visualization to see what that final image you're going for is and then the process is learning how to tear down those walls to get from point A to point B from what you're photographing to what the final uh situation is with your print or your image or whatever it is that you're you're doing and learning how to prev visualize and so I think a great technique is this whole I wish I had my camera concept using that to learn how to prev visualize so for instance I think on the very most basic root level um you see something it catches your eye and you say to yourself I wish I had my camera okay why and what would you shoot and what would it look like and starting to think about that and get it in your mind um I think a lot of times for me like I'm really sensitive to how clouds and light look particularly before and after a rainstorm cuz they can do some really beautiful things I live in a part of the country that is very hot and doesn't rain a lot um in Texas and so when we do get these things they're a big dramatic contrast to what I see on a day-to-day basis and I think that's probably a lot why they catch my eye um and so I think it's really important not just to say wow that's really cool I wish I had my camera but what is it that's interesting about it and getting that in my mind so I know what you don't want to think about and I'll get into this with the assignment in a minute is practicality like oh well I have to have my camera now because that would never come back don't think about that yet what we're thinking about is we're trying to develop that creative muscle in our mind that knows what it wants okay later if you're doing a real photo shoot so either you're shooting fine art or you've got a client or you you're shooting something for commercial reasons or you have deadlines and things and you got to get out there and do it then you can start peeling those layers away and dealing with okay this is too expensive to do this way I can't have this or this light isn't going to you know I'll be waiting for it too long um you start to deal with those practicalities later but it's more important to not think of those in the beginning you want something that you're going for you know kind of this Gestalt uh as they say in Germany um but this Gestalt of the the the grand work what the perfect work would look like and that's what we're going for here so the second document I have which is the assignment for the first week and I I'm going to be doing these along with you and what we may do uh there's no photograph that comes out of this in the end but once we get get to where we are photographing things U maybe we can put them in the flicker group or something and we can kind of talk about them as we go um if you don't have time to participate with these that's okay you can do these later most of these exercises or these assignments are kind of written not as a one-time thing but something when you feel like you need to go improve on some creative aspects in your life you can kind of revisit um and some of these are based on things that I've had for years and I still revisit to this day but anyway this is first assignment and it's called I wish I had my camera and uh mainly I've already said most of this but we've all had moments where something catches our eye Etc but this is how our brain works thoughts are okay here's the deal though um you realize you don't have your camera with you or maybe you're in a hurry and you don't have time to fiddle with the camera on your iPhone but chances are the moment will go away and you won't remember it later it's gone that's how your brain works um when I did a lot of music composition sometimes you get an idea and a lot of times those ideas and you this happens with photography too you get an idea for a portrait shoot that you want to do or something like that usually those come at weird times and the two times they come to me are when I'm in the shower or when I'm about to go to sleep at night and your brain is working on a different level in those two situations I'm not going to start to go into the technical aspects because I'll get most of it wrong and there are a lot of books on it but there is a reason why your brain does that and at night um it's starting to relax you're starting to not think is um as detailed as as maybe other times of the day and so thoughts come to you at that point uh the shower is kind of same kind of thing I just got up in the morning I'm relaxed I haven't been stressed out yet in the day and so ideas will come strangely enough those are the two places though that that uh you're not around to record these ideas or it's it's it's um kind of a hassle to do or you don't have a pen and paper or you don't have a camera something like that and chances are within sometimes even a couple minutes you forget these things a lot of great songwriters talk about that if they don't remember it write it down record it something they'll lose it and so that's what we're really getting strong with doing is let's say we don't have our camera how do we find a way to record that and how do we find a way to think about that okay and so what we're going to do is create some of these moments and learn how to make the most of them and then go on to talk about anel Adams and the previs visualization technique which I won't go through again um but anyway here's the important part on the fourth paragraph here you will not use a camera in this week's assignment you will leave it at home seriously forget it we are learning how to see and this is really really important at this phase the camera is nothing but a complete total distraction in other words you're trying to figure way to take the image and I don't want to do that I want we're going to just concentrate on thinking about it right now and we want to learn how to see and how to think we want to get better at thinking through all the possibilities this technique is much like developing your physical muscles it is cumulative though the more you do it and the better you get at it it becomes easier so if you think of an athlete uh you know somebody plays professional basketball or football or something like that you train for these things um you think of the Rocky movies he was a boxer and you'd see these these long scenes of intense training and this is the kind of thing you do when you're training to do something specific um I found that if I'm not doing this it becomes really hard to do because it's kind of like a muscle it atrophies uh you've got to keep it in shape and you've got to keep keep it going okay so um what is the assignment and what will you do okay so what you're going to do is this week you're going to choose three visual locations okay these could be outdoors or indoors in a public place and you could also use something as every day and mundane as your kitchen or your bathroom or your bedroom or something I just need you to pick a situation so if you feel like you don't have time to go out you just need 30 minutes to set aside and you need to sit somewhere and anywhere is visual so that's all you need to do um again we're just keeping Journal we're not writing things down but we're going to learn how to think okay so what we're going to do is set aside 30 minutes to an hour and sit somewhere in your chosen location and I would recommend uh actually using all three of these so go somewhere Outdoors that's public go somewhere indoors that's public maybe stay in your home at one point but do three if you don't have time do one but do something this week so what you're going to do is set aside 30 minutes to an hour to sit somewhere in your chosen location one of two things will happen you will either think that nothing is interesting to make a photograph of which is very likely or something will catch your interest immediately and this is why we left the camera at home because neither of these is what you want okay so what we're going to do is use the notebook you've assigned for the class you're going to write down your gut reactions this is your first reaction so this means if there's nothing here great say why uh this is there's too it's too busy uh it's too uh common uh maybe you're in a tourist area or something like that it's been photographed to death or maybe you're in your house and you think well there's nothing here to shoot because it's all my stuff and I've Seen It All Before um but write that down figure out why or if your gut reaction is wow there's the most beautiful thing over there that I want to capture there's something that's really interesting over here um or I have an object in my living room that would really make a nice subject for still lives I have some flowers or something write that down that's your gut reaction so it's either positive or negative but write it down and and talk about why ask yourself what is happening in your current setting then what we're going to do is dig a Little Deeper is there a story or narrative you can tell maybe maybe not is there something in the scene that represents your surroundings more than something else is there something that you see that you hadn't noticed that you might find interesting now if you sit there for at least 30 minutes you're going to start to notice things that that you didn't know noticed before maybe there's small details maybe it's something just for whatever reason you hadn't looked at that should have been obvious but you're going to find these and that's why we want the time to sit there and look at them okay so is there a way to make this interesting uh do you need to move your Vantage Point do you need to sit on the other side of the room do you need to move on the other side of the park do you need to move is the scene better from one side or from another side or angle uh anyone can document a setting but we're looking to do something unexpected and unique and remember that that's really really important highlight that if you printed this out anyone can document a setting all you need is a camera but what we're looking to do is do something that's unexpected and unique okay this is hard and it takes time and I will be very honest with you it's not sometimes it's weird you'll be sitting there going what the heck am I doing here I don't have a camera this anything to do with photography it's ridiculous stay there and think it through and write things in the notebook don't be afraid to destroy the notebook write things if you think they're dumb you're the only one looking at it so it just needs to be basically what a notebook is to serve is is to come back later and Trigger your mind on stuff and that's the most important thing about it so just don't be in be inh inhibited what I'm trying to say with it don't uh sit there and say well um you know uh this is silly I'm not going to write down nothing is silly write everything down because what you're trying to do is open it later and get back to that same state of mind the same state of thought so it's not supposed to be beautiful literature or beautiful Pros it's supposed to be triggering thoughts so write it all down anyway so this is hard and takes time that's why you need to set some time aside and think about it so don't do it if you've got to be somewhere and you're stressing out like if you're in school and you got a test in 30 minutes it's not a good time to do it uh do when you really have 30 minutes to an hour to sit there and really think about it and maybe some time afterwards we you go to dinner and maybe it changes your mind or thoughts or something like that that make sure you set aside the time to do it okay after you work at becoming aware of your surroundings you can begin to think about how you would make a picture here the most obvious is to use a wide angle View and just document the location the less obvious would be to use objects in the location that maybe you haven't noticed before and even less obvious than that is how an object or objects relate to their surroundings okay for instance how do you get uh this recorded as a photograph what are the obvious angles conditions what are less obvious does the entire mood does the entire mood shift depending on the time of the day or the weather so let's say you're in a park and you're looking around how would this be documented would it look different if it were cloudy or rainy or if it were at night there's no right or wrong answer in fact I think you should be pushing yourself to think about maybe there's something that's the right answer that I didn't think of before that's the whole point of this exercise so if you're for instance like let's say you're downtown and there's a lot of buildings and you're thinking okay this is really interesting this would be really interesting at night or this would be really interesting if it were bad weather and it were raining and people were wearing rain cloes with umbrellas you can get really neat shots doing that and I think a lot of this was inspired like when I was writing it out because I see people make comments uh to me via email flicker group uh where they're talking about well the or we've had a lot of this on hogga projects that's where a lot of this comes from where people like well it's it's this is terrible weather here it's raining it's not a good time to go out and shoot well I'll be honest with you I'd rather shoot in in Gloomy weather like that cuz I think it's more interesting as far as the the heavy contract than it is to go out when there's bright sunlight I think that's harder for me but not everybody feels that way so what I'm trying to do is push you guys to think differently um except rainy weather go out and enjoy it so anyway so uh there's no right or wrong answers here the right answer is you responding and thinking about the photograph okay we're not actually making this Photograph you're just trying to think it through and you're trying to visualize it in your head you're trying to to see it before you even well we won't ever take it but you're going to see it so using uh all right now here's another thing I forgot to put up use your framing templates and to start experimenting I'll talk about this in a second actually let's talk about it now um I did not get a chance uh when I was making all this stuff I ran out of time and I will put these up so if you're watching this after it's been recorded I will have these on the links there but I'm going to create some framing templates and I didn't even make one for myself but what this is here um you guys saw this on the dark room episode This is actually a negative carrier that goes in the enlarger so you put your negative in there you sandwich it together and the light projects through here and then you make your print underneath but what we're going to do this is not for printing but I'm going to use this and you don't have to have a negative carrier in fact I wouldn't walk out in public with this people think you're nuts um I would make one of these and I will put some templates up for you to to use to just cut out but this is a 35mm um um you know um ratio here you could do a square you could do 4x5 whatever you want to do but I'm just using this to visualize so you can make one of these out of black paper or um cardboard something like that I would recommend using something that's a little more stable than just black and or white paper uh but what we're going to do is actually use this we'll call this the framing template here um we're going to use this to start expanding experimenting uh are there objects in the way that are distracting to your composition okay so for instance if I just hold this up and I look through it you kind of have to shut one eyee to do it I'm going to start framing up my composition and you'll notice as you pull this is very crude but if the closer you hold it to your eye The Wider angle lens is going to be and the when I put it out that becomes a zoom lens so maybe there's something that's way over there but what you're going to do is close one eye and start framing this up and start seeing what your picture is cuz we've kind of thought about the situation or the setting we've have in our Mind's Eye and now I'm starting to think about what would the picture actually look like and this will be a visual aid to help you just make one of these out of cardboard I'll put some templates online so this is what a framing template will be um so are there objects in the way that are distracting to your composition that's one of the first questions you need to ask because generally you already know what it is you're trying to shoot maybe it's a portrait uh and maybe there's some trees that are distracting they really don't form an interesting pattern they're just there so maybe you need to change your Vantage Point and that's what you're going to look for when you actually just start framing things up um so you want to look are there objects in the way they're distracting are there objects that you would want to bring and set up so for instance there's something missing in the scene uh for instance is the location perfect for a model to be doing something in your picture so do you want a person there um you're not actually making a picture as I keep saying we're learning to see one so don't put limitations on yourself don't think of in terms of what's difficult or impossible think of what's possible okay make as many notes as you can in your J write things down and describe what you're thinking no one but you will see this so it can be as random weird honest emotional or strange as you make it don't worry about it at this point you're communicating only to yourself you're recording so you can recall this prev visualization in your mind later so what I want you to do is write down words you can draw pictures start sketching out the composition nobody's going to see it so it doesn't matter if you can't draw or not I I draw stick figures really well so you know take advantage of that you're just trying to get something to show the key elements in fact you don't want to be a really good um artist at this point you just want to get sketched out what's important like you know maybe there's two objects and where are they in just position with one other are they close to the edge of the frame are they more in the middle are using rule of thirds what what is it that you're going for what looks the best and you're going to learn that by moving this around and experimenting um if you could do this with a camera but if you have a camera you got buttons to start pushing so don't do it with a camera um because the whole point is to really get this prev visualization thing down so most importantly enjoy this learn how to see photographs that you want to make later on we're going to figure out whether they're possible or practical that's a a separate skill and and not one to worry about this stage uh so for instance maybe the park you're sitting in would look better shot from a helicopter and that's okay it's better to make that decision and figure out one day how to do it than it is to learn to think in limitations and this is so important um a couple years ago I just showed you some of Tom Bell's work and uh I long story of how it came across but I did a phone interview with him one time and my God I was on Cloud9 here's one of my ultimate Heroes and I'm getting to ask him questions that I came up with over the telephone and so I was interviewing him and he did a series of images that are particularly interesting to me they're pinhole images that were done at a place called Jones Beach that's on Long Island somewhere up in New York and they're just absolutely surreal and beautiful and kind of blurry but still some sharpness to them and I was asking how those were created and I didn't ask well that's the question I asked and the answer I got was to a question I should have asked but anyway what I asked him was I said well you know those are interesting and they were pinhole images he said there were actually people on the beach that day so used a um was either I think it was an orange filter over the pinhole and there were two reasons one to get more contrast and two to knock it down a couple stops so the shutter speed would be longer so they were about a 20 second 30 second exposure and what happens when you use that Recreation of time in your image is first of all if there's people on the beach and he said there were they won't show up as long as they're moving they won't be in one place you might get some ghosting but if the exposure is long enough if people are walking through they're not sitting still long enough to get the image out of so um open up that shutter and keep keep it long so that got rid of that problem but what it did was on the on the beach stayed clear and in focus for a pinhole but the waves and the ocean and the um horizon line had this really surreal kind of glowish blur to them because it was open so long and they were moving and kept coming through that uh that was the effect that came in with the overall picture and so that's what I was asking about and he mentioned that he it took him five trips or so out to Jones Beach to get the images he wanted and it kind of blew my mind cuz I thought wow here's a guy who really had an image in his head that he was trying at all cost to get and that's what I want you guys to start thinking about because that's where your personality is going to come out you've got an image in your head that you're looking to get and you don't get it right the first time you don't get it right the second time I know people who have had images I've had it happen where there's there's something you're interested in shooting there's an image and sometimes it takes years to get that image finally captured um I have a few in my mind I haven't gotten yet and so for instance I mentioned kind of comically using an aerial image out of a helicopter and I'm serious with that you know if you really think that there's a cool shot of what you're looking at that would require something expensive like running a helicopter that's fine we're not making these images right now but I want you to get you used to thinking in those terms because if you don't that'll never be a goal that you shoot for so if I immediately dismiss renting a helicopter because it's expensive or improbable it'll never get done I can't afford a helicopter today I can't afford one tomorrow I probably won't be able to afford one next year but who knows 10 years from now the situation could arise and I'm thinking you know I know the perfect perfect shot for this and you never know how that happens so learning how to think in those terms when you are at a point where like I said before if you're doing commercial work something of that nature and you have a deadline associated with it or you have images you need to get done and get shipped maybe you have a show if you're a fine artist or you have a gallery that wants work you know the helicopter may not be realistic to do in that case and if that's the image you're going for you might find another way to do it maybe there's a crane maybe there's a building you can actually shoot from and get close and that's when you start thinking about what's practical what's not but if you train yourself to never find anything practical then you're never going to push that envelope and that's what I want you to learn how to do with this exercise is to really start pushing that envelope um it's really important and I think probably one of the most important things about photography so that is the first assignment um that is the lesson uh I'm not going to go through part four if you're coming in late I actually put next week's bullet points in there sorry about that uh if you're watching this after the fact I may have had it fixed in your show notes so don't worry about it and next week we're going to move on we're going to start with the camera and do some things there but try and do the assignment this week um have fun with it uh if you don't have a lot of time I know we all get busy I certainly am real busy this time of year uh try and do just rather than three different scenes just do one but learn how to think in those terms uh and the most important thing is don't do it when you're in a hurry really try to set aside 30 minutes to an hour to do this make sure you've got some kind of I'm calling it a framing template and I'll put these online you can make these out of just dark paper or something and learn how to visually uh you know compose uh what's the scene and another important thing is change your vantage point because it's really easy to just sit there and dial in the zoom and okay it looks good from here was that a nice composition or what would it would it look better if I sat over there would it better if I got closer with a wider angle those are things you want to start exploring and why what's in the picture what sits near the edge what's in the middle what falls on the rule of thirds um those kinds of things I want you to start thinking about what speaks to you can you tell a story um is there something that is less obvious um here's another thing is think how would your Heroes do this so let's say there there's a photographer that you really like the work of what would they do in that position you know uh how would they shoot it you know sometimes you're not so much looking to copy people but you are looking to think outside of your your current comfort zone so anyway I will look in the chat room now and see if there's any questions and we'll go a little while longer I'm not going to go too much longer cuz um the folks recording it we've been about an hour so if you guys have any questions you want to shoot me or anything um I am totally happy to look at it I need a little water because I've been talking for an hour and I'm worn out hang on so um yeah so that's the deal and uh next week we're going to get into shooting and some some other cool stuff but uh I got no questions I can show you some more work if you want let me show you a couple other guys that I like if you got questions uh pop them up in the in the chat room uh I showed you brell's work um here's a guy I'm very inspired by who's a very standard guy you've probably heard of this is a wonderful retrospective of HRI Cartier Bron and uh oh the photographer spelled his last name it's it's spelled Barrel b a r i l Tom barrel and uh it's on the spine here you see that Tom barrel and it's pronounced barell in fact I used to call him Tom barrel and I remember when I did the interview with him uh I uh called him on the phone his wife answered it says Tom Burell there or Tom Barrel there and she goes yes Mr Burell is here okay um yeah that's it's pronounced barell but it's b a r i l uh you can use your hands for framing templates um if you don't have one I would make them though because uh part of the cool thing let me show you on this is this black area around it really blocks out things and it's just easy to you know frame up better you could use your hands there's nothing wrong with that um I recommend a framing template personally but uh I see people using their hands generally you want to do that if you don't have a template with you but uh but there's nothing wrong with that but anyway uh car bran this is one of his famous images you got to know who this guy is this is some people having lunch in Paris I think uh it's on the banks of the the Mar in France uh anyway hre car Bron was a street photographer or kind of came known as that uh I covered him if you go watch the podcast I did on rule of thirds I showed a lot of images from this book this is such a beautiful image and one of my favorites it's not one of his his more famous images but these uh these boys down here that are looking at a sculpture and Museum I assume and you have such this triangle effect here of you have this this visual point of the statue up here looking down this one's looking at the boys and they're looking back so you kind of have this three-way triangle uh effect in the composition these are probably hard to see on streaming video but um uh that's kind of what we're going for anyway some great stuff uh this Bron he's uh as far as photography lit goes you need to know who he is he's one of the big famous photographers uh and I think if you know who he is you need to know who he is um some of these I've shown in podcast before and I won't belabor you with them again Carl blossfeld who does uh the Botanical portraits I did a whole episode on on Carl blossfeld and so that's uh that's an important one um another one this is a book that I got recently and I'm going to do a podcast um talking about his work but this is a Russian photographer named Alexi tieno or Teter enco and uh this is some really interesting stuff he's not very old he's a younger guy I think he's 50 or so and he uh has done these images that he does this is probably going to be real hard to see on the video but this is uh basically a street scene where he left the shutter open for a long period of time and you see these people walking through it and these ghosting on the images which is amazing uh there's a lot of cool scenes like that so I think a lot of times like I think a Common Thread that you can see here it's people going upstairs you kind of see that sorry I'm using the monitor up there to see where the lights's reflecting uh anyway I'll do a whole podcast on him uh I think he's brilliant um but this whole representation like you know when you have it looks like smoke coming down these stairs the people walking but I think much like sugimoto's work um who's you know I obviously sugimoto is how you pronounce it who I covered in a couple podcasts ago you have this element of time this thread that goes through it's this this dimension of time that that um that you're seeing and so I think that's a really important thing like that's something that you can be influenced by which is just going to shape your thinking and not so much copying what you're doing so um um Ted you mentioned you have ideas pictures you've taken do you keep a record of that or write down uh not all the time and I should and I'm telling you to and I'm going to try and get better at it uh generally speaking yes I do have some that that are just burned in my mind that that that I want to get one day um and usually they're images that occur in locations that are not here or they're physically impractical actually the helicopter thing is an example because I do have some aerial things in mind that I would like to do one day and so generally I try to write those down I think what's really important though like for instance if I could do this this afternoon go write some of those down and start thinking through them how does it look what's the weather like what's the lighting like you know start kind of coming up with some of those things in my mind of what I think is interesting um I may not get that shot for another couple years because either it's financially not feasible or physically impossible but don't think it only relates to that one photo it's going to relate like I said this is a creative muscle that you're building so that can influence other pictures that I take or other things that I can think of and that's what you want to get out of this that's why I say the guy is not the limit and it doesn't matter whether you ever get the photo or not but it influences other work that you do and that's why it's important to uh to think about um you guys have seen Saul light uh saw lighter he's another big influence of mine I did a whole it's in the episode called color I go through a lot of the images in this book sa lighter is just brilliant another Street photographer see I'm not I'm not much of a street guy um but I'm very influenced by people who are um it's just some beautiful images these are early color images but like this is this this guy back here in a hat that's blurred out these are just like just such brilliant compositions kind of Slice of Life stuff um yep Thomas says it by writing down ideas you build up a buffer of stuff yeah you get to it some point but just just the whole Act of thinking that's what that's what you get better at um maybe it's not that image maybe you know whatever um Do You Believe like me the black and white shoots The View really see the image um black and white it's it's interesting because black and white um here I'm looking at a book of color images but black and white that's a whole another subject for maybe another class but I think the thing with black and white is that you know as visual artists you kind of you know you could deal with black and white like if you're a painter or something you could you could do charcoal or something that is deals with scale and value but you know it's easier to go with color with with with photographers I think that's one of the easiest ways to knock things back from reality is just to shoot it in black and white it's just a simple um you know early innovate in early uh innovation in photography just from a technical level is that it was too hard to make color I mean you we have the tech technology for it early on so black and white came first but it's a really easy way for photographers just to knock knock that down and all of a sudden remove it from reality right there and there's this whole visual aesthetic I love black and white images most of what I shoot is black and white um I do some color for work rated stuff but I just I'm enamored with black and white but I don't know if it has as much to do with here or not you may pre-visualize something as being black and white and they're maybe a reason why that you can either explain or maybe there's a reason that you can't explain that you're trying to figure out but why would something be more that's a question to ask yourself is why would how would this look better in black and white than in color uh sometimes I saw a photo taken by another photographer thinking about these composition shot with a different angle or different lighting um yeah I mean that is prev visualization but you need to get out and learn how to deal with your surroundings I think um yeah both are valid you could do that but I wouldn't do that for this assignment I would just try to get out get somewhere um yeah it is definitely part is I'm agreeing with Thomas here Thomas is a good guy he's he was the first hulga project guy to come off the roll um but yeah but but yeah someone else's prev visualization I mean what what you're learning how to do though uh if you do exclusively that I think you're missing learning how to react to the setting that you're in because you're eventually will be taking your own photographs and so it's real important to um be able to prev visualize what you're trying to do and what your conditions are um somebody else taking a photo and you thinking how you could do it better you're given a big chunk of information right off the bat it's just kind of this gift and that's not what we're going for here we we're learning how to conceptualize that information that stuff can certainly influence you there's nothing wrong with that and don't not do it but that's not what we're going for as part of this exercise so um yeah Thomas is famous he's he's the man let me show you another book this is um and I need to do a podcast on this guy I want to meet this guy one day he's still alive he teaches at school up in m Metts this is Abelardo Morel and I think he is one he's up there with um for me with sugimoto is one of the uh great minds I think in photography today and what I love about morel's work is I don't think that he sets out to be a great mind I think he's himself and I think that just comes through in his images um he shoots uh there's several styles that he kind of shoots within he does a lot of camera obscure work that I'm going to show you um and then he does kind of these simple still with objects around his house and I think if I recall correctly one of his motives behind that uh having small children was kind of trying to see the world through their eyes and and how that impacts also through teaching um he does a lot of illustrative Concepts that he did for his class which have just in their Brilliance have become wonderful Fine Art photos in their own right like for instance here's a self-portrait he shot postcards falling on this book I've been through this book a lot uh self-portrait he shot through his eyeglasses sitting on his desk and and obviously illustrates the refraction of light being focused through the lenses cuz he's blurry except through the glasses I just think this is brilliant I mean my God what a mind and and like I said if you don't want to go out somewhere in a public space just sit in your own home and and sit in a room and look at objects around you and what could they do what what is interesting about this um that's important uh some early work get into this yeah these are some of the Through The Eyes of a small child kind of objects the the horse over here and the building blocks on the left hand side just absolutely brilliant beautiful he shoots all 4x5 film does his own printing he is a monster I love the Crayons just a simple box of crayons you know it doesn't get much more beautiful than that it's just so awesome I love the Simplicity of it it's not a minimalist composition but it's a minimalist subject and the fact that you don't see color they're all in black and white um this is brilliant too this is uh it says Laura and Brady in the shadow of our house so you can see that this was shot in like probably the driveway outside something like that and it's done in the shadow of the house and they drew the windows in and the girls are lying down the girl and the boy and it's just genius I mean just taking things that you never thought would make an interesting photo a shadow and improving on it and trying to figure a way around it and I just think it's absolutely brilliant uh he shoots some pretty conventional stuff too but um like for for instance here's one that that I Illustrated in the one of the I think it was the very first uh Art of Photography class the camera obscura um and he's done a beautiful I did a weird podcast he did a wonderful photo of this where you see a light bulb over here a lens attached to a dark box and you can see how this projects on the inside uh with the second light bulb you can see it's upside down just absolutely gorgeous some people are having stream problems and I'm sorry uh don't worry will put everything up you will be able to see it later uh these are a little harder maybe to make out on here but uh these are some of the camera obscure shots and let me explain what he does he builds a camera obscure out of a room so uh one of the things he'll do is put um black trash bags or whatever cover the wall of the window so they're completely dark and then you cut a pinhole about the size of a quarter and what happens is this projects whatever is happening outside the window onto the wall in the back so he does these beautiful camera obscure shot so he shoots the camera obscure when he's done this is one of New York City you can see it's upside down takes up the full wall these are really long exposures and I imagine they're really hard to do he's doing some of these in color right now which is um just you know stunning uh look at his website you can see a lot of this work I mean I would love to just like this guy is so amazing this is cool too here's some using some objects in the room that you might initially find distracting um and finding something to do with them like so camera obscura so dark paper over the windows small pinhole IT projects the image onto the back wall cracks the building on the bed I mean that's just awesome I mean I would my gut reaction is that bed's in the way we need to move it but uh yeah his website is definitely worth looking at uh he's one of my favorites and I for whatever reason I haven't covered him on a podcast yet and I really would like to um he has a whole series of images that he did using books this isn't I want I just want to rip this guy off it's like it's brilliant like for instance here's just a neat shot of a huge book from a library it's just a simple shape composition very simple still life it's it's amazing thanks for joining us gut adult um we're almost done here you won't miss much you can catch the in later um this is interesting too if you hold um an image in the right light you get the way the light reacts on the paper it becomes a negative um just simply unbelievably awesome I really can't say enough good things I've never met this guy he's not very old um he teaches uh it's just like my God I mean just his stuff just totally speaks I think it's it's completely awesome go look at his website I won't try and show you the stuff over a stream I think it's uh it's it's uh kind of cheesy anyway guys um I think we're going to go ahead and shut it down now we've been an hour um and I'm going to put all this up later so I don't want to have more video than I know what to do with so thank you so much for stopping by and watching um I don't know how many people we've got in the chat room now but uh says 50 um that's quite a few good stuff any other last questions um all right if you have questions save them for next time maybe we'll do a little Q&A before we actually start the show and you guys can ask them away then we'll meet you next week so what what you're supposed to do this week is is do the assignment what we're learning to do is think about the photo we're not taking anything yet and what I bet will happen this is what I wager is that when we get to the the next assignment where you are going to be taking pictures and using your camera your approach is going to be completely different and that's really what I want you to do so if you can help it don't take any photos this week just just do this assignment just learn how to think learn how to see think about this all the time that's that's the important thing so thank you guys so much I've had a great time uh thanks for the questions thanks for tuning in and we're going to do this again next week so um I'll have a podcast live in the next couple days we're going to do one on some hogga tutorials which I think is going to be cool and so uh we'll see you on the flip side there so anyway uh thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time\n"