MasterClass Live - Week 4

Developing Your Style as a Photographer: A Masterclass Live Series

As photographers, we are constantly seeking ways to improve our craft and develop our unique style. However, many of us struggle to find this style, and instead, end up producing work that lacks consistency and personality. In this masterclass live series, we will explore the concept of developing your style as a photographer and provide you with practical tips and insights on how to achieve this.

One of the key takeaways from our conversation is that having no style at all can be just as valuable as having a distinct style. Contemporary artists often push the boundaries of conventional aesthetics, creating works that are experimental and challenging. By embracing this kind of thinking, we can gain new perspectives and insights on how to approach our own photography.

The importance of being a thinker with a camera cannot be overstated. As photographers, we have the unique ability to capture moments in time and tell stories through our images. However, this also means that we must think critically about our craft and not simply rely on technique or convention. By taking the time to reflect on our work and consider new ideas and perspectives, we can develop a more nuanced and sophisticated style.

Working with an art museum has provided me with valuable insights into contemporary art and the ways in which artists are pushing boundaries and challenging conventional norms. Many of these artists have no discernible style at all, yet their work is still highly effective. This raises interesting questions about the nature of style and how it can be achieved even when one seems to be deliberately avoiding it.

One of the most important things to remember as photographers is that our audience may not always appreciate our unique perspective or approach. Some people will love what we do, while others will find it confusing or challenging. This is why it's so essential to stay true to ourselves and our vision, even when faced with criticism or skepticism.

The concept of style is complex and multifaceted, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution for developing your own approach. Some photographers may find that their work becomes more refined and polished over time, while others may experience a significant shift in direction. This can be both exhilarating and terrifying, as it means that we are constantly challenging ourselves to grow and evolve as artists.

The power of visual media lies in its ability to convey ideas and emotions through images. When we take the time to consider how our work is perceived by others, we can refine our approach and develop a style that truly reflects our unique perspective and vision.

I must admit that I've been working in an art museum for four years now, which has given me access to some amazing contemporary artists who are pushing the boundaries of conventional aesthetics. One thing that strikes me about many of these artists is their complete lack of style. They seem to be deliberately avoiding conventions and embracing the unexpected. Yet, even when they claim to be anti-style, I still see a distinct aesthetic emerging from their work.

It's interesting to consider how this kind of thinking can come back around on itself. Even in cases where an artist is claiming to reject style altogether, there is often a hidden pattern or thread that emerges from their work. This raises important questions about the nature of style and how it can be both elusive and present at the same time.

I think what's most interesting here is that some people will find this stuff really useful, while others won't. And that's just kind of how it is. We all approach our work in different ways, and there's no one "right" way to do things. What's important is that we stay true to ourselves and our vision, even when faced with criticism or skepticism.

I'm glad you guys found this helpful. Mark says thanks again Ted, this has really kicked me up a gear with my photography. I hope so Mark! It was good to meet you at the Meetup last week – um uh and we'll do more of this in the future. I'm not done – I say – I think this was really good – this is something that I've tried to do a little bit with the Art of Photography shows that I've done, but they're just too short to really explore these ideas thoroughly.

The key to success lies in experimentation and taking risks. As photographers, we must be willing to try new things and push ourselves outside our comfort zones. This can be both exhilarating and terrifying, as we navigate uncharted territory. However, by embracing this kind of thinking, we can develop a more nuanced and sophisticated style that truly reflects our unique perspective and vision.

One of the most valuable insights I've gained from working in an art museum is the importance of being versatile and adaptable. By exposing ourselves to different disciplines and approaches, we can gain new perspectives and insights on how to approach our own photography. This might involve exploring new techniques, tools, or technologies – whatever it takes to stay inspired and motivated.

As photographers, we often find ourselves torn between two opposing forces: the desire for control and order versus the need for spontaneity and creativity. By embracing both of these forces, we can develop a more balanced and nuanced approach that truly reflects our unique style and vision.

In the end, developing your style as a photographer is all about taking risks, being open to new ideas, and staying true to yourself and your vision. With patience, persistence, and a willingness to experiment, you can create work that truly stands out from the crowd – and leaves a lasting impact on those who experience it.

The final word of wisdom comes from our host Ted, who has been leading this masterclass live series with infectious enthusiasm and expertise. Thank you for joining us on this journey into the world of developing your style as a photographer. Remember to stay true to yourself, take risks, and always keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay so developing your style as a photographer what we're going to do today is wrap this up a little bit and I have some stuff to show you and um there's a really cool lesson involved today that I'm pretty excited about so that's what we're going to talk about and uh let's see um we'll go ahead and get going sorry something's floating through the air here um okay so developing your style as a photographer this is part four I believe and in our series and uh you just to recap a little bit I'm going to come back and recap later because this will be the last show that we do on this uh particular subject uh for now uh I think there could be some more stuff that we do later um and this is I want you guys to remember this is an ongoing process this is something that you get better and better and better and better at and I think hopefully one day you get really good at um but it never stops remember that and I've tried to design this course with the exercises that we've talked about and keeping a notebook and all that stuff in a way that uh you can kind of come back to these things and personally I found you know we all get busy in life whether it be uh you know in taking photos or or day jobs or whatever it is family obligations um you know and sometimes you get out of practice with some of this stuff and you feel like you need to come back and so these exercises are designed so they're really they can be independent of one another um or you know they could be Standalone obviously or they can fit together so you know you could hopefully revisit this class in the future if you wanted or or you know take notes and revisit what what it is you've been working on so anyway um that being said today um one thing I've been very careful about with all these exercises and you probably noticed this as if you if you've gone through and done any of these is that uh you know there's an expression you don't want to put the cart before the horse right you want to make sure the horse is before the cart and so we've done things like actually going and sitting and thinking um and actually uh you know not having a camera there and forcing yourself into kind of this mode of thought um where you're really learning to think before you shoot and I think that's the important takeaway here um and that is really important is is is that kind of sensibility um photographs do not come from the camera they come from your mind they come from your talent your skill level your experience your sense of creativity um you know for instance I heard somebody say the other day you know they were doing a commercial job and it went really quick they did some portraits and they got them done in like you know 15 minutes and you know the client made a comment and said wow 15 minutes it's really quick and this friend of mine said well it didn't really take 15 minutes it took 15 years and 15 minutes and you hear people say that a lot and I think that's true because you know what you are as a photographer is a sum of all of your experiences and you know everything you've done to this point that's what you know comprises your skill level so anyway that being said um you know we've been very careful in each one of these exercises to kind of make sure that thought process is coming first and in the exercise I'm going to show you today we're going to talk about storytelling and uh more literal than what we talked about in the last one and this is really important to get your camera out and take a bunch of photos this is kind of a little bit different exercise because that is encouraged in this so anyway uh last time we talked a little bit about photographic well actually the last couple times we've talked about photographic meditation and where you take a subject and you try to get it from as many angles as possible and what we're doing when we do this is you're trying to expand your um sensibilities or your approach in terms of things like aesthetic composition uh lighting mood all those things that that really will help your your personal style as a photographer and forcing yourself into a meditative state of doing that will help with those things uh because what'll happen is meditation you're going to go for a long time so whether that be 45 minutes an hour 2 hours whatever all day uh you're going to exhaust your common like in in music if you play guitar you're going to exhaust all your licks pretty quick you know all the stuff that you play all the time and it's going to force you to start doing new things and not just repeating the same thing over and over and that's really important and so we talked about doing that and then we talked about being able to capture a mood a feeling an emotion um and being able to communicate that in a still image and we're going to expand upon that a little bit today and what we're going to talk about is actually storytelling in a more literal sense now if I don't know how many people in the chat room I found that it's it's usually you know really divided um with with show audiences like this uh you know obviously we have the kind of this convergence idea now of uh being able to shoot video on still cameras and I don't know how many people actually shoot video on Ste cameras I do I know that like for me when I'm doing it they they're two completely different things it's not like you're just going to flip back and forth to and doing video and still I mean you could do that but video requires a little more setup a little more thought it's different than doing still images but what we're going to do is we're going to talk about storytelling kind of like what you would do with with video where you're actually going to have scenes that go across but we're going to do it with still images and if you've ever done Film Production and you've ever done anything with storyboarding that's a lot like what we're talking about today and so the idea is you're going to do a series of images so this could be um uh in in fact when you start out you can do as many images as you want um uh oh real quick Bob uh has me Bob K 815 has mentioned in the chat um uh yes I have tried and the audio limitations make it more troubled than actually using a quality video camera absolutely I mean there's I'm not going to go into this whole video versus thing but I just wanted to make the point that uh what we're doing is we are doing still images we're not shooting video but we're going to um do with more of a cinematography approach to use a really weird word for that but anyway it's you know uh it's a cinema type approach that we're using this so what you're going to do is you're going to take a series of images and you're going to tell a story with these images now I've actually already done this exercise and I'm going to share it with you today uh in this this thing but before I get going I want to kind of describe what we're doing so what you're going to do is take a um you're going to tell tell a story so you want to kind of come up with something and we'll talk about kind of ideas that you can come up with on something like this and how complicated it needs to be um I would start by just doing lots of stuff so I wouldn't make them very complicated I wouldn't write novels and try to you know execute them even though maybe you could think of a scene with two people and you could actually do it um the one I actually did this morning is I made softboiled eggs for breakfast and so I documented that process and I'm going to show it to you in a minute they're not great images but uh that's not the point here the point is is are they telling a story as they go and so in when you do film whether you do documentary stuff uh even TV commercials if do uh you know particularly movies there's a technique called storyboarding and what storyboarding allows you to do is kind of figure out what the scenes are going to be and so typically you can take a blank sheet of paper you can draw them you can use a camera and go photograph things which is kind of like what we're doing here and you go through and you basically it's it serves the point to make sure that you're telling that story and what it's going to sort of look like hopefully when you're done uh gives you that sense um and it also uh begins to a little bit think about composition um especially if there is compositional techniques they're going to assist in that story for instance if you are Alfred Hitchcock and you're making a movie like vertigo and there's scenes that you're trying to express this fear of height or psycho where it's you know this woman checks into a motel and she's in like the famous shower scene well the shower scene wasn't just like improvised I mean that was really thought out and probably storyboarded uh where you actually think of sharp camera angles that are going to intensify what you're trying to communicate in that scene and so that's kind kind of what we're doing with this what we're going to but we're telling a story and so the story could be something just extremely uh basic and simple like for instance I I I did a little story of myself cooking breakfast this morning it can be that easy these for instance that that's a weird topic but I wanted to do something and I needed to do it today to show you um but the story isn't the point as much is am I telling it you know what I'm saying so for instance uh you know I I kind of went with it with the mode of okay let's say somebody doesn't know how to soft boil an egg what are the steps involved and you're telling this with pictures and not with words and I think that's kind of key here um to mention um a photographer that I knew years ago who is no longer with us but uh uh this guy he was considerably a couple years older than my I am and I looked up to him he was a mentor of mine and he I remember we when we were I was helping him we were working on his first website he wanted to do the whole thing with no text at all now this was the early days of the web where you know people would do these entire things in Flash and that's what we did but I always thought that was a cool idea especially as a photographer is being able to communicate with images and pictures and not with words so it's non-verbal communication which really is exactly what we're doing so if you're going to do this exercise what I would do is is shoot freely and edit later okay so what you want to do is be thinking about okay what what are the steps in here that are essential to telling the story or in my case quicking breakfast here but what are the steps that are essential to that and then you go back through and you call out things that are non-essential so for instance when I was cooking it's kind of hard to cook and shoot at the same time because you don't want to overcook things but um I ended up probably with about 30 images and I've narrowed it down to nine okay so that's where that editing comes in and you're going to actually go through these and decide what are the key points what's essential okay so I served my softboiled egg on toast and I actually had shots of the toaster and the toast being made well I kind of thought that's probably not essential because the point of what I'm trying to communicate is how to soft boil an egg not how to get into cooking toast I assume people probably know how to make toast particularly with a toaster um there's not a lot of exciting steps involved there um so anyway let me show you what I've got here and what I'm going to do I need to minimize a couple Windows here and uh sorry let's see I need to bring this down oh and we are having freezing issues this is great all right can you guys still hear me in the chat okay it unfroze all right good got to love live video on a budget okay so I'm going to collapse that window and let's go ahead and open these and now what I'll do is show you the desktop um so we'll flip over to that okay you guys should see my desktop here so I can show you in the future I will find a much smoother way of getting this done let me just check and make sure that this is on and yes it is okay so this may be hard to see and I will blow these up but okay so we have I'll go through these first of all let's look at the thumbnail View and I know it's it it may be stretching if you're on the live broadcast if you're watching this on YouTube I'll have it sorted out by the time it releases but we have nine images here that basically tell the story of making a softboiled egg and uh you know obviously you start with two eggs in the upper leftand corner uh you get some water boiling which is the second image third image is the time to set them which uh when you blow this up you'll be able to see it's 4 minutes uh on my stove and next image you see dropping the eggs into the boiling water and then finally rinsing the eggs cutting them with a knife how to peel they're on the toast in the eighth image and finally you see some broken eggshells in image number nine now I'll kind of talk you through this this was done in a hurry obviously and it was just to illustrate the point and I think this is the important takeaway here that these nine images are designed by myself to go as a set of images okay so they're not um the idea is not to make each one of them uh stand on its own at this point so these are go going to go together in a set and you can see as you tell this Progressive story here that's going along here in in this case uh you know how softw and egg that if you're successful in that things like the aesthetic uh especially um if you get there's a lot of photographers that get really over obsessed with counting pixels and how many megapixels they have and how sharp it is and how you know in fractions of the lens and things like that none of that really makes a bit of important difference when you have told a story correctly all those things are a lot less important in fact some of them are not important at all if you've done it correctly uh and I I think that's the important thing to take away here um if it was all about modern lenses and digital cameras then well we can ignore you know the pretty much the history of photography before 1990 or so which wouldn't that be a shame you know so anyway so that's what I've done here and you know this is the kind of project where if I were really you know thought this was cool and it made sense and I wanted to display it I would probably go back through and aesthetically address um the images a little better as far as style goes and things like that but you know their documentary at this point um there's a little bit of sense of compos position but I promise I did not premeditate this at all this was I picked up the camera while I was cooking this was all one take so anyway that's not the point the point is is is successful in telling a story I think it is for the most part I'll analyze my own work here but um I think that the second image because everything else is so big in scale like you know they're they're almost not really macros but close-ups of this egg or eggs and even the phone as the timer that one shot is a little odd being out of place there and that may or may not be a big deal but maybe one thing I would want to do is actually um you know go back through and and retake that um I don't know that the eggs need to be in the background of the boiling water you know what I mean uh maybe too much to read and maybe that's more appropriate and technque I'll talk about second but anyway as you go along and also the final shot of the crushed eggshells I'm not sure that's important either that's more of um you know more of an artistic addition or an aesthetic addiction addiction aesthetic addition if you know what I mean um so anyway but the rest of them I mean you could probably boil no pun intended sorry you could probably boil this down to uh instead of 9 images 7 images um retake the one and be eight images so anyway but that's my point is is is you know are we telling a story here and I'll go ahead and blow these up so you can see them in sequence too which gives a different effect so we have the eggs here um you know pre-cooked and here we have boiling water with eggs in the background with a really terrible shot uh the iPhone set to 4 minutes um maybe an egg timer would give a little bit cooler vibe to this or something I don't know uh eggs being boiled or coming out of the boil uh rinsing cooling down finally where to break the egg and then once it's peeled how to get the spoon in there eggs on the toast and uh there's the crushed eggshells so anyway my point being is that what I've done here is I've I've selected nine images that um you know I've attempted to tell a story with so anyway let me get this back over to the video now and uh let's see what we got here so this computer kind of behaves strangely uh I need the cam twist sorry about the this is the definitive lowii production here all right I think we're back on but we're on FaceTime sorry all right there we go okay so you see what I'm doing here is we're doing storytelling so you could you could pick a variety of subjects for something like this so for instance you could pick I just happen to do making an egg you could do all kinds of cooking ideas um where basically what you want to do in fact it might be more interesting to make it challenging so you're describing only pictures with no words how to cook something that's more complicated soft boil egg is pretty easy so it lends itself well to this very easily um whereas you know making bolog a is different and you know how do you deal with measurements and things like that and how do you do it a creative way now I think one thing that's interesting too about what we're doing today is this really has a practical application in the real world as well a lot of the things that we've done in these episodes up to this point are exercises for yourself so they're going to do things like work on you know um you know how your mind works and getting better at something you know that kind of thing whereas this kind of exercise really is applicable because people who shoot editorial work for magazines deal with this a lot of times you're hired to do a story um that would deal with a sequence of images where you're you're you're illustrating what is being said in the text if it's a magazine for instance um and what we're going to do actually is go through and and you're doing that without the text you know but it's supplemental to the text but what we're doing is taking text out completely on this and we're trying to tell most important story we can or the most detailed story we can without using words and something like this so the next step I would do is is you know obviously like what I did I didn't show you all 30 that I originally took and some of them were double takes making sure the you know light was right and you know whatever um focus was correct um but I had other steps to this too like I mentioned the toast being pulled out so what I would do is is is when you when you pick kind of what you're trying to communicate and you go ahead and shoot a bunch of pictures is to go back through and edit those down so what you're going to do is take away non-essential shots and you can see like I said those crushed eggs at the end were probably nonessential that would be one I would take out um especially if you're pairing down from you know 30 images that's a lot to have in a set perhaps and so maybe what you would want to do is see if you can cull some of that out in kind of a minimalist sensibility um to where you're actually uh trying to say the most with the least amount of pictures okay so uh you know you would pull that down and I think what would be interesting too is to go back and see if you can do it with even fewer images than that think of what maybe there's a different image that could kill two steps in one something like that um you know there's a lot of different things you could do and then finally I think the ultimate is to see if you can't tell a story with one image which is really what we're going for with all this um and I think that as photographers you know we are visual communicators and we are storytellers uh in a sense uh and that can be argued especially with contemporary Aesthetics where you're probably doing something that's more abstract or of onard but in general though and I think even if you are dealing with something abstract or avangard even though what I was doing was very non-abstract um it was cooking and egg if I was doing something abstract there's still remember the very first episode of the master class that we're on now that we did we were talking about um making sure that uh well not making sure we were talking about the definition of Art and we were talking about uh the point of doing something that is Art is to interact somehow and to get a reaction from the viewer okay that could be argued because I think in the 20th century you could say well maybe there's art that exists to get no reaction at all but and sure okay whatever but most of it is is trying to get something from your viewer and whether that is a positive uh reaction whether that's a negative reaction uh whether you're trying to make somebody angry make them think make them sad uh or it's something that's supposed to make people feel good or maybe it's not an emotion it's something that's just telling somebody something and I think those are all part of it and that's what we're doing here so we're starting with a sequence of images and we're going to reduce these down as much as possible to the fewest amount of images and I think the the Gestalt uh so to speak would be getting it down to one image um specifically so if anybody has any questions I'm going to open up the chat room and we'll we'll talk here um there's some photographers who have done this very well um the the guy that comes to mind um who I think is is really good at this is a photographer from New York named Dwayne Michaels and Dwayne he's been around a long time uh he did uh a series of well he was a series but he he did he kind of became famous in the 80s for a bunch of the album covers that he did and the one I think that was probably the one that stands out the most to me and I think it's brilliant is if you guys are old enough to remember the 80s and anybody had the police album synchronicity which is a genius record um I'll just go ahead and say but uh Dwayne had done the photos on the cover of that and I don't have a picture of it in front of me but the the the cover just Google it synchronicity by the police uh it had um pardon me it had um like three color Stripes it was a red a blue and a yellow and then inside each one of the stripes there were black and white photos of the different band members uh doing weird things like Sting is sitting there with a skeleton in a doctor's office or something anyway very cool stuff and uh um anyway really cool uh let's see uh Vargas Miguel sorry I can't read some of these names sometimes on the Fly uh I'll address your question in just a second um I wanted to say one more thing about Dwayne Michaels Dwayne is interesting because he has done and I've seen him speak before and you can find books of his and I'll look them up on Amazon and I'll put something in the notes here um but Dwayne has some exceptional work that he's done where he's done this storytelling technique um he's done it in different ways with obviously he's really good at telling a story with a single image uh he's done things with double exposure that are really interesting and he's done image serieses and the series stuff is interesting to me and I remember the one I saw had I think it was Richard G Richard Gear and Cindy Crawford in it and if this is I mean this was probably 10 years ago so pardon me if memory's not serving correctly but he kind of had this story that he was telling um that had to do with them as a couple and walking down the street and holding hands kissing or whatever getting an argument or I don't remember what it was specifically but it was a really interesting use of Storytelling through multiple images now when you have celebrity friends it makes it a lot more fun and most of us don't um but you could you could grab two people that you know and try and set a scene up like like you would have in a movie and and actually go through the same exercise and shoot like that I think that would be uh that would be very cool Bob K says think Grandma Moses with a camera another view yeah absolutely um you know uh I think there's a lot of photographers who have done this really well and and don't when you're when you're looking for sources of inspiration don't limit yourself just to photography uh in fact I would go look at mediums that do this kind of thing on a regular basis like uh you know some of the people who do comic books that are that are essential to the you know aesthetic of our 20th century uh comic books deal with that they're in pains and they tell a story and it's with image um I think that's a really great source of inspiration uh Fine Art is another one um one I was thinking of oh well film obviously um you know go look at directors and I'll give you a few names here of people that I'm very influenced by uh verer Herzog who's a very well-known German um director the reason I mention him is because he really just has this beautiful eye for composition um he has a feel it's almost like he's a photographer that's shooting motion really to me um he has a wonderful uh sense of Storytelling involved uh I think that uh you know from an artistic standpoint there's a lot of film directors who direct wonderful films but but V Herzog does really beautiful work and I think photographers would find interest in there felini is another one uh just absolutely beautiful cinematography um each shot is so well composed um they're like moving pictures you know they are moving pictures but but they're like moving Stills is what how these guys kind of address that and there's a ton more I mean there's there's some little one-off movies that are wonderful one I saw last week is a movie called in Brugge which is a kind of violent comedy about these uh these two guys who've committed a murder and the their boss tells them to go hang out in the city of Brugge which is in Belgium and it beautifully beautifully beautifully shot movie um you know or each scene you can tell there was a considerable uh you know attention paid paid to story telling and story boarding within this so anyway good stuff so anyway I would I would definitely go stretch out and look at some other mediums in addition to photography and you know with photography I I can only think of probably a handful of people who've done this type of Storytelling um if you're talking about narrowing all this all the way down to one image to tell a story definitely photographers who I've been talking about over and over and over again uh on this show um and in the series um you know definitely guys like I think Abal Morel who's one of my favorites who's alive and and photographing today um I think he has a wonderful way of communicating or telling a story using one image only um he narrows it down to that uh there's a lot of images that you know in the book and and if well here I can show them to you um that here let's see here it is I mentioned because he's a photography teacher there were a lot of photographic phenomenon that he was uh illustrating for his classes that he was teaching you know this is the famous one here bring it back and they're just beautiful shots I mean you know what he's illustrating is how a lens works okay and so you can see the light bulb uh I hope everybody can see it I got two cameras to work with you see the light bulb in the the camera obscure the dark box with a lens attached and how the light bulb is projected upside down on the back wall and you know he's telling the story but it's such a beautiful aesthetic in this shot it's not just a snapshot like what I just showed you that I did this morning I mean this was a wellth thought out um beautifully composed and lit shot very simple but very elegant and it it does tell a story I even think that he does um you know a good job of that for instance these camera obscure photos that he does where basically what he does is this is a hotel room above Time Square uh covers the windows with uh probably Hefty trash bags or something like that to block out all the light cuts a pen hole in the middle and this image gets projected on the wall well it's just a simple technique but this really communicates not so much a literal story but I think it the captures the mood of Time Square extremely well you know um the activity the the noise the the just the stuff that's going on on um and you know I think on the opposite end there's some scenes in here where it's very pastoral and very simple um speaking of Storytelling I I showed these in the last one but there's these images of books that he's done uh these children's books where he's cut them up here's Alice and Wonderland these are a few scenes from this and here's telling a story with one image you know that is I think I'm showing you the yeah that's Alice looking up at a tree and the book is folded in half to show the tree in three-dimensional form um on the other side there's the Queen of Hearts who's been cut out of the book so anyway just absolutely stunning stuff even this one is I mean I don't know if this tells the story more sets of mood but this is just showing the optical illusion of of what happens through eyeglasses and uh that's a self-portrait of Mr Morel and uh anyway so you know I think he's really good at that I think uh even more pointed towards this are some of the guys I've showed you like hre CTI Bron um the French photographer um uh guys like uh like Kappa I'm trying to think like classic photo journalists I think are really good at this I think there's some people like Richard avidon and I did an Art of Photography podcast on Richard avidon a while back and avidon is an incredible photographer um was he's deceased now um a huge inspiration to me and I think he did a wonderful job of Storytelling my favorite work of his um he's known for kind of these minimalist contemporary Works he did for some a museum in the um oh gosh probably about the ' 80s but his work from the' 60s and70s where he was doing fashion work um and I talk about this in that podcast that at the time there was a real set style for shooting fashion um the models always look very serious I mean you still see this now um but in kind of an abstract way but but there was a definite mode of how it was being done at the time let me find this image oh well there's a bunch of them in here and I've showed these in the podcast um but like just a simple thing like this I think this is a perfect way to illustrate it right here okay this is an image uh fashion image I didn't look at the caption probably shot for a magazine let's see what it says it doesn't say but uh this was probably shot for an ad or a story or something and it's a couple sitting over drinks the woman's turned around the man's looking at her neck and she's something's caught her attention and this completely tells the story it's with one image okay and uh I think it's it's just simply stunning he didn't always do that I think this is another one with these these circus elephants um so this a huge book but you know obviously the compositions involved with the line in her arm and the way she's ju exposed with the elephants the shallow depth of field um the elephants begin to blur a little bit uh it's just you know I think genius stuff I wish I had a Dwayne Michaels book and we can do a recap in fact he would make a really good uh um subject for an Art of Photography episode just on on his work uh but Dwayne Michaels has actually done the series work that I'm talking about where you have um seven images or 10 IM that that comprise and tell a story um there's there's some other pieces that I've seen too and actually I should bring this up too before we uh before we close out on the topic but um I think uh to make another music analogy uh and you see this particularly in drawing a lot I think for visual medium comparison um in Fine Art uh particularly with sketching things like that but there's an idea in music that's existed for years and years uh Bach used to compose this this way it's an idea called theme and variation okay so in a theme and variation uh as Bach would would compose it is that you have a simple melody or a musical idea of some kind or sometimes it can be a rhythmic pattern anyway some audible concept and you write a series of pieces based around that theme so it's a theme in variations so for instance if you listen to something like the Goldberg Variations which was a keyboard piece that was written and there's a ton of variations on this uh 32 variations I believe and so the First theme is echoed in the last so it kind of brings itself together uh in a musical composition and in the middle the tempos change the keys change the uh the the the the scales that that they're composed around major minor I'm trying not to get too much into this they change and so it's like this this 32 little short pieces completely exploiting all the possibilities or 32 possibilities of a particular Musical theme and so I think that's a really interesting idea um and so you know what you can kind of think of as something like that is a theme and variations this breaks away from the story concept we were talking about a little bit but uh and may maybe ties this in a little more with the uh photographic meditation thing we were talking about a couple weeks ago but anyway but that's the idea so for instance um you know uh and I wish I could remember the name of the photographer it was a piece that's up right now at tape Britain that I saw when I was over there and it's this beautiful piece it's on my phone which I have no idea where that is um it's this beautiful piece it's it's probably it's probably something like 30 or 40 images that are you know the it's oh probably the size of one of these but but you know horizontal and they're all lined up and it's it's a uh a dancer who is dressed in black on this white chair with a white background doing all these image poses and so it kind of has this Echo back to figure drawing where once against the theme and variations exhausting all the possibilities of the model posing on this chair in in this black turtleneck and pants and and it was really striking because of the high contrast with the black clothes with the white background um and what you really start to see is this figure against a background so I think that was executed extremely well um I'll put it in the notes I can't remember the artist's name right now so um anyway photographer's name in that case but uh you know theme and variations is another thing to explore you know maybe um I'm trying to think for instance here's a good one um maybe if you were to if you're a landscape photographer and this is a big project this would take a while to do but you have some kind of landscape you're shooting so it's either outdoors in the country or maybe it's a city Urban landscape kind of thing uh and you go shoot it at you know the variation it's like from one angle but all the variations become like the same weather or different weather conditions different times of the day it would take a long time to do and it' be really hard to get precise and keep all these identical looking so you know the end result is if You' never moved the camera um You're simply shooting a theme in variations the theme being the scene that that you have there and the variations being times a day uh lighting conditions weather conditions all those kinds of things and being able to see all those as a set I think that that would be kind of interesting um there's a contemporary artist olifer elas who or allas I can't remember how to say it um from Europe who who does some interesting stuff he does kind of these techy science type projects with lights and motors and and prisms and wonderful stuff like that but he also does photography a little bit and he has these pieces that are themes and variations on landscapes like that uh a bunch of them were shot in Iceland he's got this real Affinity with Iceland that he likes to communicate a lot and so a lot of the photos um you know are of that nature so anyway so themes and variations storytelling all the kinds of things anybody got any questions on this um I I kind of want to say a few things to wrap up all the episodes that we've talked about because this will be the last masterclass live on this particular series um I don't know I it seems like the guys I'm seeing in the chat room have joined us every time and I I know the time maybe not good for some people good for others give me some feedback if you've got something on that I mean I'm flexible it's noon here so I can I can move around actually it's one now but uh anyways um but to kind of recap what we've talked about all you know a lot of these things they're just exercises that you're going to do that hopefully will lead to better uh I don't know uh that lead to different things you want me to do the enclosing next week I can if you want um if it's getting too late for John Doe 87 I certainly understand or you could watch on YouTube um but what we've done here in this series of episodes is we have kind of taken some ideas to try to make yourself think differently do different things to improve your sensibility as a photographer to improve your style to make it more personal and um it is scheduled for next week but I'm going to do film next week so um we'll we'll go ahead and uh we can back it up today unless anybody has anything they want to share for next week or anything like that um let me wrap it up in closing right now and we can kind of address that um you know when we when we get there but anyway okay so what we've done is we've done a series of exercises we've done uh um you know it's a series of meditations if you will to try to make you think differently as a photographer and a lot of people think think about developing your personal style has nothing to do this is the same old stuff I always say has nothing to do with lenses it has nothing to do with cameras it has nothing to do with equipment you need to have them obviously to make a photograph but you don't need to sit there and pine over having the latest and greatest whatever because that's not the important thing the important thing to remember and to take away from this entire series is this is that photographs are not made with your equipment or the camera doesn't make photos you make photos Okay the camera doesn't take pictures you take the pictures and that's the hard part it's the hard part about anything and that's why so few people do it and I think that's why so many podcasts so many YouTube videos all these things that you see tend to dwell a lot on equipment based ideas and specifically uh they'll talk about equipment reviews and gear and what you can do and how to do and there are techniques involved with equipment and obviously talked about you know some stuff I'll do in the future with that but it's really important not to let uh basically the millions of dollars of marketing spent by two large Japanese camera manufacturers dictate what you do as a photographer I mean that's great everybody has um everybody has moments in your life and and those of us that are older in here we all can understand that you go through periods where you have extra money all the time and you can kind of spend money and buy lavish things and you go through times that are quite lean it is always cyclic and it can be frustrating if you feel like you need to have the latest wide angle Cannon lens or whatever it is the version two of this you know and if there are times where you'll be able to do that but don't ever like waste all your time thinking about that because you know it comes in and out uh you know like like Marcus saying right now the right Tools in a master Craftsman's hands can make a difference he'll do great things with the wrong tools if he has to that I Mark that's a quote I mean that's that's brilliant that that I think that says it all uh and that's what we all are striving to do as photographers if you weren't interested in getting better one you wouldn't be watching me definitely at this point in the podcast talking about it um and you would also uh uh I don't think you would shoot a lot of photos and there are people who do that they collect cameras and collect lenses if you go to these camera shows there's a lot of collectors there they'll never take a single shot on any those they there's something obsessive about the decorative art aspect of this object that makes photos and that's okay too but that's not what we're here doing um like I said particularly if you're still what with me at this point um and so we're all aiming to get better and I think that's what's important um to say one thing about equipment though I think it's really important uh as a photographer to learn the equipment that you've got and let me talk about what I'm talking about with that obviously reading the manual and stuff but I I found and I'm like probably everybody else especially in my younger days I used to especially when I'd travel I'd pack a whole bag full of cameras and I wouldn't even use some of them and i' spend more time fooling around with what Lind I was going to bring with me and and doing that kind of thing than I would actually taking pictures of course that ended and I got more serious about it um but even then I I I found that if I switched equipment too much and it's fun to do because I mean you know that's what what what they you know like I said the two large Japanese camera manufacturers you know want you to to be into buying a lot of equipment um but I found that if I switch around like for instance if I'm using a lens that I'm not used to using When You're In the Heat of the battle of actually on the photo shoot particularly if it involves other people there's a lot of distractions so if you're doing people shots if you're doing um if you're shooting uh professionally you have a client standing there watching what you're doing there's so many things to get your mind around and I found like little things like not understanding completely how the autofocus works or not remembering to have sat on a digital camera whether I'm in raw or whether I'm shooting jpegs little things like that can just kill you you know and I think it's really important not so much to spend a lot of time with your camera manual but to be constantly shooting with the same equipment and that even goes for film photography I used to when I got into that I you know it's real fun to go by a bunch of developers in a bunch of different kinds of film and you mix and match and you're having fun with all that but when you start getting serious about it it's like what we're talking about here you need to minimize what you're using and that way when you're in the heat of the battle when you're out there when you're actually on a photo shoot and you're doing it you know your stuff inside out and it's like an extension of yourself and that way that gets your mind off of that and it gets it on to making great images which is what we're all setting out to do and so you know there's a lot of things that comprise of that so you know whatever camera you have now use it and treat it with respect uh like Mark was saying there was a 9-year-old that the photography meet up and she was she was making these goofy images where she was painting a face on her finger and shooting them against backgrounds and stuff and it was cute but and you see that with kids a lot because they're not um censoring their own thoughts like adults are like I would never do that because everybody here is going to think I'm a lunatic you know and so it's cute to see kids do that and it's important to kind of kind of break down some of those walls and this could lead to a whole another series of podcasts and kind of you know this methodology that we're talking about which is too much for what we're trying to do today and maybe we can revisit this in the future but you know what we've done here is we've established uh a series of four lessons with over an hour long each uh with uh you know some exercises to do and these are supposed to try to train your brain to think a little better okay and so that's that's what we're going for here and I found and I've said this before in these I if you remember but um I found that personally it's like working out and you know part of the deal and I will be the first to admit that right now I have been not working out enough and probably eating too much and that needs to happen again and right now one of the things that I'm experiencing is the lack of motivation to actually get out there and start getting exercise and I promise I'm going to make myself started doing it very soon but you know it's easy to make excuses for being busy whatever the real reason I don't want to get out there and work out cuz it's hard I'm going to get out there I'm going to go jogging I'll get quar of a mile I'll be winded I'll be dead tired and I'll come home because I'm out of shape and I think your brain works the same way uh especially when you're doing creative type work like what we're talking about here when you're doing creative work um it's like a muscle it needs to expand it needs to uh you need to be doing it a lot uh Vargas Miguel says I've been think I've been like that for the past month I don't know whether you're talking about exercise or or getting into the spirit of photos but but I think that that's important and I found that particularly if you're doing this for a living okay say this um which I do it's sometimes if I haven't been exercising creatively I'll be in a situation and I find it particularly showing itself when there's other people involved so if I'm with a group of people we're trying to brainstorm topics for something or trying to figure out what we're going to shoot or what it's going to be and I have other people that are having input on that if I haven't done it in a while I'm almost embarrassed because it starts making me feel like gosh I I just I can't get my mind around it particular around somebody who is really creative-minded and and really good at new ideas on the Fly and fresh stuff but I found that if you can keep these things up that's what it takes and so the next time you're feeling flat or you're feeling like you know I think what inspired this thing to begin with is uh you know not having or or feeling like you don't have a personal style as a photographer and it's really easy to do it's hard to have a personal style as a photographer because you're not drawing or anything you're interpreting something literally out of a camera um it's really hard to draw that out and that's where all this stuff comes in and that's why you're making yourself think you're you're pushing yourself you're thinking you know exhausting the possibilities in your mind um you'll find sometimes your mind is on a different track and when you finally execute something that you're going to consider a work of art or a job for a client or whatever it is sometimes they don't always come out like you envision in your head and maybe for some people they don't ever come out like they Envision in their head but that's at least moving you in the right direction and if somebody's not in your head they don't know those things but uh but that's what you're shooting for is is is trying to close that gap between what's in your head and and and what you're doing with your work and that's really important to remember um you know uh anyway all that being said I think that is probably a good place to wrap all this up unless you guys have any I think now is the time if you have any questions or anything we have one more week on the schedule for this and I would be happy to use that talking about developing your styles of photographer if you guys are so interested um when I originally did all my outlines for these um I obviously had a lot to say with the first batch of them and then I think I was giving a week for each idea on the later ones so uh Bob K thank you for joining us got a split looking forward to film absolutely we will we will go over all kinds of it will be all things film will be the next topic so I'm starting the YouTube Archive of this a little bit later than I am um we talked before I turned the camera on basically what I'm trying to say so film is going to be the next topic we're going to do for Master Class live um it's going to be a lot less meta and a lot less heady than this was it's going to be more practical um with some examples and stuff and I think uh the reason I don't want to do more hey stuff is one for me they're hard to plan and and and um you know outline do a curriculum for but I think for you guys too I think this will give you some chance to digest some of this stuff uh you know watch these in the archive um I've tried to create a series of of lessons and exercises that are kind of Timeless in a sense so um you can revisit them anytime you want in fact I'll be honest some of these are kind of uh oh gosh they're really old probably like 20 25 years old I'm going tell you how old I am when I was in high school and I was really getting serious and I thought I was going to be a guitar player for a living one day and I was really getting into this um I went through a lot of this same um kind of idea of Discovery so you know I was really interested in that point of developing my style as a guitar player you know I the guys that I looked up to you know the jimmi Hendricks or the jazz guitar players that I liked you could tell who in fact let me say this before we close I think this is important just to talk about where this came from but uh you know when I was when I was playing guitar I was young I was getting going uh you know I looked up to guys like Jimmy Hendrick uh I like jazz guitar players like West Montgomery uh Charlie Christian a little bit uh and then more contemporary people at that time like guys like Pat maeni or r toown or guys like that and the really good guitar players even with the rock stuff I was listening to like I was a big yes fan so listen to Steve how and you could tell Steve how with like three notes you know he had such a voice in a sense even though he's not singing he's playing guitar but but the any good musician who has a personal style and and it always bothered me that like how do I develop that and I don't know that I ever did musically um and as I grew up I ended up in a different profession and all that but it's something that's carried with me on into my own work as a photographer uh particularly when you're dealing with art and I've always wanted to be able to have kind of a style to myself where if somebody saw an image they could say hey yeah that's Ted for or whatever and I'm definitely not at that point um but you know a lot of these things are are research that I've done back when I was music and they've been repurposed into the four episodes that we've done here into a visual medium um and they're a little bit far out but you know I think they're really important I think they get you thinking and that really I can't say it enough what we're we're we're photographers but we're really thinkers with a camera and uh you know that's the takeaway here and that's what you want want to uh want to think about what's interesting though is is since I've been working in an art museum for four years um you know particularly with Contemporary Art when you get into contemporary artists um not so much photographers but visual artists and you get into the really weird far out stuff there are guys out there that their thing is having no style at all and what's interesting is like this kind of comes back around to itself because I think in having no style at all you still have a style it's having no style at all um but there are guys that that kind of do shows every now and then and nothing ever looks the same and it's all conceptual but even those guys I mean I know they're arguing that they they're anti style and their anti- you know aesthetic or anti-l look but that has become their thing even at that and so I think that's perfectly plausible to do and I still don't see why the stuff we've talked about here wouldn't help you expand your mind with whatever it is you're trying to do with whatever you're trying to communicate uh some people are going to be comfortable with these kinds of things some people won't I mean that's just kind of how it is and anyway I hope you guys have all found this useful um I haven't been looking at the chat sorry um Mark says thanks again Ted this has really kicked me up a gear with my photography I hope so Mark and thanks it was good to meet you at the Meetup last week um uh and we'll do more of this in the future I'm not done I'm not finished I say um I I think this was really good this is something that I've tried to do a little bit with the Art of Photography shows that I've done and they're just too short to really do that with uh they're 15 minutes I can say a few things we can get into a few ideas and stuff but you know it's so funny I me they they're kind of like the two-minute photo tips you know in away even though they're 15 or 20 but it's still really talking about one thing and it's really hard and I thought it would really be good with these master classes and I'm still working out KS here obviously with using two cameras and I had a computer die and blah blah blah and so they're not the most professional things you've ever seen I know um but we'll get better at that as time goes by too just like we will get better at being photographers um so it's important yeah John thank you for watching I appreciated uh Mark says I think sometimes applying something from one dis discipline to another can really open up possibil absolutely in fact I think um you know I I don't think I I have a music degree actually and I wouldn't have I mean sometimes I miss not having uh studied photography more formally um but I've done enough of it on my own I don't know that I would have needed that in fact I almost prefer the way it's worked out where I've had that exposure to different disciplines and and even film too because I do a lot of video work that's what my day job mostly comprises of is is is doing film work and uh you know I it it's real close to photography but it's another dimension that you're adding into this time element motion and all these other things but but uh I I I like staying versatile and I like not that I'm great at it but that's kind of my thing is I let all these things influence each other and that's that's what that's what I enjoy it keeps things interesting for me um so anyway so anyway thank you so much guys I'm going to go ahead and turn off the camera now thanks for joining this has been the masterclass live series on developing your style as a photographer I'm going to go ahead and turn off the YouTube feed if you guys guys want to hang out in the chat room for a little bit I have some time um but thank you for watching I really appreciate it and join us on the next one where we're going to actually uh change our topic and we're going to do a series of uh master classes on film and so I've got to start planning those so we'll start those actually next week uh since we wrap this up todayokay so developing your style as a photographer what we're going to do today is wrap this up a little bit and I have some stuff to show you and um there's a really cool lesson involved today that I'm pretty excited about so that's what we're going to talk about and uh let's see um we'll go ahead and get going sorry something's floating through the air here um okay so developing your style as a photographer this is part four I believe and in our series and uh you just to recap a little bit I'm going to come back and recap later because this will be the last show that we do on this uh particular subject uh for now uh I think there could be some more stuff that we do later um and this is I want you guys to remember this is an ongoing process this is something that you get better and better and better and better at and I think hopefully one day you get really good at um but it never stops remember that and I've tried to design this course with the exercises that we've talked about and keeping a notebook and all that stuff in a way that uh you can kind of come back to these things and personally I found you know we all get busy in life whether it be uh you know in taking photos or or day jobs or whatever it is family obligations um you know and sometimes you get out of practice with some of this stuff and you feel like you need to come back and so these exercises are designed so they're really they can be independent of one another um or you know they could be Standalone obviously or they can fit together so you know you could hopefully revisit this class in the future if you wanted or or you know take notes and revisit what what it is you've been working on so anyway um that being said today um one thing I've been very careful about with all these exercises and you probably noticed this as if you if you've gone through and done any of these is that uh you know there's an expression you don't want to put the cart before the horse right you want to make sure the horse is before the cart and so we've done things like actually going and sitting and thinking um and actually uh you know not having a camera there and forcing yourself into kind of this mode of thought um where you're really learning to think before you shoot and I think that's the important takeaway here um and that is really important is is is that kind of sensibility um photographs do not come from the camera they come from your mind they come from your talent your skill level your experience your sense of creativity um you know for instance I heard somebody say the other day you know they were doing a commercial job and it went really quick they did some portraits and they got them done in like you know 15 minutes and you know the client made a comment and said wow 15 minutes it's really quick and this friend of mine said well it didn't really take 15 minutes it took 15 years and 15 minutes and you hear people say that a lot and I think that's true because you know what you are as a photographer is a sum of all of your experiences and you know everything you've done to this point that's what you know comprises your skill level so anyway that being said um you know we've been very careful in each one of these exercises to kind of make sure that thought process is coming first and in the exercise I'm going to show you today we're going to talk about storytelling and uh more literal than what we talked about in the last one and this is really important to get your camera out and take a bunch of photos this is kind of a little bit different exercise because that is encouraged in this so anyway uh last time we talked a little bit about photographic well actually the last couple times we've talked about photographic meditation and where you take a subject and you try to get it from as many angles as possible and what we're doing when we do this is you're trying to expand your um sensibilities or your approach in terms of things like aesthetic composition uh lighting mood all those things that that really will help your your personal style as a photographer and forcing yourself into a meditative state of doing that will help with those things uh because what'll happen is meditation you're going to go for a long time so whether that be 45 minutes an hour 2 hours whatever all day uh you're going to exhaust your common like in in music if you play guitar you're going to exhaust all your licks pretty quick you know all the stuff that you play all the time and it's going to force you to start doing new things and not just repeating the same thing over and over and that's really important and so we talked about doing that and then we talked about being able to capture a mood a feeling an emotion um and being able to communicate that in a still image and we're going to expand upon that a little bit today and what we're going to talk about is actually storytelling in a more literal sense now if I don't know how many people in the chat room I found that it's it's usually you know really divided um with with show audiences like this uh you know obviously we have the kind of this convergence idea now of uh being able to shoot video on still cameras and I don't know how many people actually shoot video on Ste cameras I do I know that like for me when I'm doing it they they're two completely different things it's not like you're just going to flip back and forth to and doing video and still I mean you could do that but video requires a little more setup a little more thought it's different than doing still images but what we're going to do is we're going to talk about storytelling kind of like what you would do with with video where you're actually going to have scenes that go across but we're going to do it with still images and if you've ever done Film Production and you've ever done anything with storyboarding that's a lot like what we're talking about today and so the idea is you're going to do a series of images so this could be um uh in in fact when you start out you can do as many images as you want um uh oh real quick Bob uh has me Bob K 815 has mentioned in the chat um uh yes I have tried and the audio limitations make it more troubled than actually using a quality video camera absolutely I mean there's I'm not going to go into this whole video versus thing but I just wanted to make the point that uh what we're doing is we are doing still images we're not shooting video but we're going to um do with more of a cinematography approach to use a really weird word for that but anyway it's you know uh it's a cinema type approach that we're using this so what you're going to do is you're going to take a series of images and you're going to tell a story with these images now I've actually already done this exercise and I'm going to share it with you today uh in this this thing but before I get going I want to kind of describe what we're doing so what you're going to do is take a um you're going to tell tell a story so you want to kind of come up with something and we'll talk about kind of ideas that you can come up with on something like this and how complicated it needs to be um I would start by just doing lots of stuff so I wouldn't make them very complicated I wouldn't write novels and try to you know execute them even though maybe you could think of a scene with two people and you could actually do it um the one I actually did this morning is I made softboiled eggs for breakfast and so I documented that process and I'm going to show it to you in a minute they're not great images but uh that's not the point here the point is is are they telling a story as they go and so in when you do film whether you do documentary stuff uh even TV commercials if do uh you know particularly movies there's a technique called storyboarding and what storyboarding allows you to do is kind of figure out what the scenes are going to be and so typically you can take a blank sheet of paper you can draw them you can use a camera and go photograph things which is kind of like what we're doing here and you go through and you basically it's it serves the point to make sure that you're telling that story and what it's going to sort of look like hopefully when you're done uh gives you that sense um and it also uh begins to a little bit think about composition um especially if there is compositional techniques they're going to assist in that story for instance if you are Alfred Hitchcock and you're making a movie like vertigo and there's scenes that you're trying to express this fear of height or psycho where it's you know this woman checks into a motel and she's in like the famous shower scene well the shower scene wasn't just like improvised I mean that was really thought out and probably storyboarded uh where you actually think of sharp camera angles that are going to intensify what you're trying to communicate in that scene and so that's kind kind of what we're doing with this what we're going to but we're telling a story and so the story could be something just extremely uh basic and simple like for instance I I I did a little story of myself cooking breakfast this morning it can be that easy these for instance that that's a weird topic but I wanted to do something and I needed to do it today to show you um but the story isn't the point as much is am I telling it you know what I'm saying so for instance uh you know I I kind of went with it with the mode of okay let's say somebody doesn't know how to soft boil an egg what are the steps involved and you're telling this with pictures and not with words and I think that's kind of key here um to mention um a photographer that I knew years ago who is no longer with us but uh uh this guy he was considerably a couple years older than my I am and I looked up to him he was a mentor of mine and he I remember we when we were I was helping him we were working on his first website he wanted to do the whole thing with no text at all now this was the early days of the web where you know people would do these entire things in Flash and that's what we did but I always thought that was a cool idea especially as a photographer is being able to communicate with images and pictures and not with words so it's non-verbal communication which really is exactly what we're doing so if you're going to do this exercise what I would do is is shoot freely and edit later okay so what you want to do is be thinking about okay what what are the steps in here that are essential to telling the story or in my case quicking breakfast here but what are the steps that are essential to that and then you go back through and you call out things that are non-essential so for instance when I was cooking it's kind of hard to cook and shoot at the same time because you don't want to overcook things but um I ended up probably with about 30 images and I've narrowed it down to nine okay so that's where that editing comes in and you're going to actually go through these and decide what are the key points what's essential okay so I served my softboiled egg on toast and I actually had shots of the toaster and the toast being made well I kind of thought that's probably not essential because the point of what I'm trying to communicate is how to soft boil an egg not how to get into cooking toast I assume people probably know how to make toast particularly with a toaster um there's not a lot of exciting steps involved there um so anyway let me show you what I've got here and what I'm going to do I need to minimize a couple Windows here and uh sorry let's see I need to bring this down oh and we are having freezing issues this is great all right can you guys still hear me in the chat okay it unfroze all right good got to love live video on a budget okay so I'm going to collapse that window and let's go ahead and open these and now what I'll do is show you the desktop um so we'll flip over to that okay you guys should see my desktop here so I can show you in the future I will find a much smoother way of getting this done let me just check and make sure that this is on and yes it is okay so this may be hard to see and I will blow these up but okay so we have I'll go through these first of all let's look at the thumbnail View and I know it's it it may be stretching if you're on the live broadcast if you're watching this on YouTube I'll have it sorted out by the time it releases but we have nine images here that basically tell the story of making a softboiled egg and uh you know obviously you start with two eggs in the upper leftand corner uh you get some water boiling which is the second image third image is the time to set them which uh when you blow this up you'll be able to see it's 4 minutes uh on my stove and next image you see dropping the eggs into the boiling water and then finally rinsing the eggs cutting them with a knife how to peel they're on the toast in the eighth image and finally you see some broken eggshells in image number nine now I'll kind of talk you through this this was done in a hurry obviously and it was just to illustrate the point and I think this is the important takeaway here that these nine images are designed by myself to go as a set of images okay so they're not um the idea is not to make each one of them uh stand on its own at this point so these are go going to go together in a set and you can see as you tell this Progressive story here that's going along here in in this case uh you know how softw and egg that if you're successful in that things like the aesthetic uh especially um if you get there's a lot of photographers that get really over obsessed with counting pixels and how many megapixels they have and how sharp it is and how you know in fractions of the lens and things like that none of that really makes a bit of important difference when you have told a story correctly all those things are a lot less important in fact some of them are not important at all if you've done it correctly uh and I I think that's the important thing to take away here um if it was all about modern lenses and digital cameras then well we can ignore you know the pretty much the history of photography before 1990 or so which wouldn't that be a shame you know so anyway so that's what I've done here and you know this is the kind of project where if I were really you know thought this was cool and it made sense and I wanted to display it I would probably go back through and aesthetically address um the images a little better as far as style goes and things like that but you know their documentary at this point um there's a little bit of sense of compos position but I promise I did not premeditate this at all this was I picked up the camera while I was cooking this was all one take so anyway that's not the point the point is is is successful in telling a story I think it is for the most part I'll analyze my own work here but um I think that the second image because everything else is so big in scale like you know they're they're almost not really macros but close-ups of this egg or eggs and even the phone as the timer that one shot is a little odd being out of place there and that may or may not be a big deal but maybe one thing I would want to do is actually um you know go back through and and retake that um I don't know that the eggs need to be in the background of the boiling water you know what I mean uh maybe too much to read and maybe that's more appropriate and technque I'll talk about second but anyway as you go along and also the final shot of the crushed eggshells I'm not sure that's important either that's more of um you know more of an artistic addition or an aesthetic addiction addiction aesthetic addition if you know what I mean um so anyway but the rest of them I mean you could probably boil no pun intended sorry you could probably boil this down to uh instead of 9 images 7 images um retake the one and be eight images so anyway but that's my point is is is you know are we telling a story here and I'll go ahead and blow these up so you can see them in sequence too which gives a different effect so we have the eggs here um you know pre-cooked and here we have boiling water with eggs in the background with a really terrible shot uh the iPhone set to 4 minutes um maybe an egg timer would give a little bit cooler vibe to this or something I don't know uh eggs being boiled or coming out of the boil uh rinsing cooling down finally where to break the egg and then once it's peeled how to get the spoon in there eggs on the toast and uh there's the crushed eggshells so anyway my point being is that what I've done here is I've I've selected nine images that um you know I've attempted to tell a story with so anyway let me get this back over to the video now and uh let's see what we got here so this computer kind of behaves strangely uh I need the cam twist sorry about the this is the definitive lowii production here all right I think we're back on but we're on FaceTime sorry all right there we go okay so you see what I'm doing here is we're doing storytelling so you could you could pick a variety of subjects for something like this so for instance you could pick I just happen to do making an egg you could do all kinds of cooking ideas um where basically what you want to do in fact it might be more interesting to make it challenging so you're describing only pictures with no words how to cook something that's more complicated soft boil egg is pretty easy so it lends itself well to this very easily um whereas you know making bolog a is different and you know how do you deal with measurements and things like that and how do you do it a creative way now I think one thing that's interesting too about what we're doing today is this really has a practical application in the real world as well a lot of the things that we've done in these episodes up to this point are exercises for yourself so they're going to do things like work on you know um you know how your mind works and getting better at something you know that kind of thing whereas this kind of exercise really is applicable because people who shoot editorial work for magazines deal with this a lot of times you're hired to do a story um that would deal with a sequence of images where you're you're you're illustrating what is being said in the text if it's a magazine for instance um and what we're going to do actually is go through and and you're doing that without the text you know but it's supplemental to the text but what we're doing is taking text out completely on this and we're trying to tell most important story we can or the most detailed story we can without using words and something like this so the next step I would do is is you know obviously like what I did I didn't show you all 30 that I originally took and some of them were double takes making sure the you know light was right and you know whatever um focus was correct um but I had other steps to this too like I mentioned the toast being pulled out so what I would do is is is when you when you pick kind of what you're trying to communicate and you go ahead and shoot a bunch of pictures is to go back through and edit those down so what you're going to do is take away non-essential shots and you can see like I said those crushed eggs at the end were probably nonessential that would be one I would take out um especially if you're pairing down from you know 30 images that's a lot to have in a set perhaps and so maybe what you would want to do is see if you can cull some of that out in kind of a minimalist sensibility um to where you're actually uh trying to say the most with the least amount of pictures okay so uh you know you would pull that down and I think what would be interesting too is to go back and see if you can do it with even fewer images than that think of what maybe there's a different image that could kill two steps in one something like that um you know there's a lot of different things you could do and then finally I think the ultimate is to see if you can't tell a story with one image which is really what we're going for with all this um and I think that as photographers you know we are visual communicators and we are storytellers uh in a sense uh and that can be argued especially with contemporary Aesthetics where you're probably doing something that's more abstract or of onard but in general though and I think even if you are dealing with something abstract or avangard even though what I was doing was very non-abstract um it was cooking and egg if I was doing something abstract there's still remember the very first episode of the master class that we're on now that we did we were talking about um making sure that uh well not making sure we were talking about the definition of Art and we were talking about uh the point of doing something that is Art is to interact somehow and to get a reaction from the viewer okay that could be argued because I think in the 20th century you could say well maybe there's art that exists to get no reaction at all but and sure okay whatever but most of it is is trying to get something from your viewer and whether that is a positive uh reaction whether that's a negative reaction uh whether you're trying to make somebody angry make them think make them sad uh or it's something that's supposed to make people feel good or maybe it's not an emotion it's something that's just telling somebody something and I think those are all part of it and that's what we're doing here so we're starting with a sequence of images and we're going to reduce these down as much as possible to the fewest amount of images and I think the the Gestalt uh so to speak would be getting it down to one image um specifically so if anybody has any questions I'm going to open up the chat room and we'll we'll talk here um there's some photographers who have done this very well um the the guy that comes to mind um who I think is is really good at this is a photographer from New York named Dwayne Michaels and Dwayne he's been around a long time uh he did uh a series of well he was a series but he he did he kind of became famous in the 80s for a bunch of the album covers that he did and the one I think that was probably the one that stands out the most to me and I think it's brilliant is if you guys are old enough to remember the 80s and anybody had the police album synchronicity which is a genius record um I'll just go ahead and say but uh Dwayne had done the photos on the cover of that and I don't have a picture of it in front of me but the the the cover just Google it synchronicity by the police uh it had um pardon me it had um like three color Stripes it was a red a blue and a yellow and then inside each one of the stripes there were black and white photos of the different band members uh doing weird things like Sting is sitting there with a skeleton in a doctor's office or something anyway very cool stuff and uh um anyway really cool uh let's see uh Vargas Miguel sorry I can't read some of these names sometimes on the Fly uh I'll address your question in just a second um I wanted to say one more thing about Dwayne Michaels Dwayne is interesting because he has done and I've seen him speak before and you can find books of his and I'll look them up on Amazon and I'll put something in the notes here um but Dwayne has some exceptional work that he's done where he's done this storytelling technique um he's done it in different ways with obviously he's really good at telling a story with a single image uh he's done things with double exposure that are really interesting and he's done image serieses and the series stuff is interesting to me and I remember the one I saw had I think it was Richard G Richard Gear and Cindy Crawford in it and if this is I mean this was probably 10 years ago so pardon me if memory's not serving correctly but he kind of had this story that he was telling um that had to do with them as a couple and walking down the street and holding hands kissing or whatever getting an argument or I don't remember what it was specifically but it was a really interesting use of Storytelling through multiple images now when you have celebrity friends it makes it a lot more fun and most of us don't um but you could you could grab two people that you know and try and set a scene up like like you would have in a movie and and actually go through the same exercise and shoot like that I think that would be uh that would be very cool Bob K says think Grandma Moses with a camera another view yeah absolutely um you know uh I think there's a lot of photographers who have done this really well and and don't when you're when you're looking for sources of inspiration don't limit yourself just to photography uh in fact I would go look at mediums that do this kind of thing on a regular basis like uh you know some of the people who do comic books that are that are essential to the you know aesthetic of our 20th century uh comic books deal with that they're in pains and they tell a story and it's with image um I think that's a really great source of inspiration uh Fine Art is another one um one I was thinking of oh well film obviously um you know go look at directors and I'll give you a few names here of people that I'm very influenced by uh verer Herzog who's a very well-known German um director the reason I mention him is because he really just has this beautiful eye for composition um he has a feel it's almost like he's a photographer that's shooting motion really to me um he has a wonderful uh sense of Storytelling involved uh I think that uh you know from an artistic standpoint there's a lot of film directors who direct wonderful films but but V Herzog does really beautiful work and I think photographers would find interest in there felini is another one uh just absolutely beautiful cinematography um each shot is so well composed um they're like moving pictures you know they are moving pictures but but they're like moving Stills is what how these guys kind of address that and there's a ton more I mean there's there's some little one-off movies that are wonderful one I saw last week is a movie called in Brugge which is a kind of violent comedy about these uh these two guys who've committed a murder and the their boss tells them to go hang out in the city of Brugge which is in Belgium and it beautifully beautifully beautifully shot movie um you know or each scene you can tell there was a considerable uh you know attention paid paid to story telling and story boarding within this so anyway good stuff so anyway I would I would definitely go stretch out and look at some other mediums in addition to photography and you know with photography I I can only think of probably a handful of people who've done this type of Storytelling um if you're talking about narrowing all this all the way down to one image to tell a story definitely photographers who I've been talking about over and over and over again uh on this show um and in the series um you know definitely guys like I think Abal Morel who's one of my favorites who's alive and and photographing today um I think he has a wonderful way of communicating or telling a story using one image only um he narrows it down to that uh there's a lot of images that you know in the book and and if well here I can show them to you um that here let's see here it is I mentioned because he's a photography teacher there were a lot of photographic phenomenon that he was uh illustrating for his classes that he was teaching you know this is the famous one here bring it back and they're just beautiful shots I mean you know what he's illustrating is how a lens works okay and so you can see the light bulb uh I hope everybody can see it I got two cameras to work with you see the light bulb in the the camera obscure the dark box with a lens attached and how the light bulb is projected upside down on the back wall and you know he's telling the story but it's such a beautiful aesthetic in this shot it's not just a snapshot like what I just showed you that I did this morning I mean this was a wellth thought out um beautifully composed and lit shot very simple but very elegant and it it does tell a story I even think that he does um you know a good job of that for instance these camera obscure photos that he does where basically what he does is this is a hotel room above Time Square uh covers the windows with uh probably Hefty trash bags or something like that to block out all the light cuts a pen hole in the middle and this image gets projected on the wall well it's just a simple technique but this really communicates not so much a literal story but I think it the captures the mood of Time Square extremely well you know um the activity the the noise the the just the stuff that's going on on um and you know I think on the opposite end there's some scenes in here where it's very pastoral and very simple um speaking of Storytelling I I showed these in the last one but there's these images of books that he's done uh these children's books where he's cut them up here's Alice and Wonderland these are a few scenes from this and here's telling a story with one image you know that is I think I'm showing you the yeah that's Alice looking up at a tree and the book is folded in half to show the tree in three-dimensional form um on the other side there's the Queen of Hearts who's been cut out of the book so anyway just absolutely stunning stuff even this one is I mean I don't know if this tells the story more sets of mood but this is just showing the optical illusion of of what happens through eyeglasses and uh that's a self-portrait of Mr Morel and uh anyway so you know I think he's really good at that I think uh even more pointed towards this are some of the guys I've showed you like hre CTI Bron um the French photographer um uh guys like uh like Kappa I'm trying to think like classic photo journalists I think are really good at this I think there's some people like Richard avidon and I did an Art of Photography podcast on Richard avidon a while back and avidon is an incredible photographer um was he's deceased now um a huge inspiration to me and I think he did a wonderful job of Storytelling my favorite work of his um he's known for kind of these minimalist contemporary Works he did for some a museum in the um oh gosh probably about the ' 80s but his work from the' 60s and70s where he was doing fashion work um and I talk about this in that podcast that at the time there was a real set style for shooting fashion um the models always look very serious I mean you still see this now um but in kind of an abstract way but but there was a definite mode of how it was being done at the time let me find this image oh well there's a bunch of them in here and I've showed these in the podcast um but like just a simple thing like this I think this is a perfect way to illustrate it right here okay this is an image uh fashion image I didn't look at the caption probably shot for a magazine let's see what it says it doesn't say but uh this was probably shot for an ad or a story or something and it's a couple sitting over drinks the woman's turned around the man's looking at her neck and she's something's caught her attention and this completely tells the story it's with one image okay and uh I think it's it's just simply stunning he didn't always do that I think this is another one with these these circus elephants um so this a huge book but you know obviously the compositions involved with the line in her arm and the way she's ju exposed with the elephants the shallow depth of field um the elephants begin to blur a little bit uh it's just you know I think genius stuff I wish I had a Dwayne Michaels book and we can do a recap in fact he would make a really good uh um subject for an Art of Photography episode just on on his work uh but Dwayne Michaels has actually done the series work that I'm talking about where you have um seven images or 10 IM that that comprise and tell a story um there's there's some other pieces that I've seen too and actually I should bring this up too before we uh before we close out on the topic but um I think uh to make another music analogy uh and you see this particularly in drawing a lot I think for visual medium comparison um in Fine Art uh particularly with sketching things like that but there's an idea in music that's existed for years and years uh Bach used to compose this this way it's an idea called theme and variation okay so in a theme and variation uh as Bach would would compose it is that you have a simple melody or a musical idea of some kind or sometimes it can be a rhythmic pattern anyway some audible concept and you write a series of pieces based around that theme so it's a theme in variations so for instance if you listen to something like the Goldberg Variations which was a keyboard piece that was written and there's a ton of variations on this uh 32 variations I believe and so the First theme is echoed in the last so it kind of brings itself together uh in a musical composition and in the middle the tempos change the keys change the uh the the the the scales that that they're composed around major minor I'm trying not to get too much into this they change and so it's like this this 32 little short pieces completely exploiting all the possibilities or 32 possibilities of a particular Musical theme and so I think that's a really interesting idea um and so you know what you can kind of think of as something like that is a theme and variations this breaks away from the story concept we were talking about a little bit but uh and may maybe ties this in a little more with the uh photographic meditation thing we were talking about a couple weeks ago but anyway but that's the idea so for instance um you know uh and I wish I could remember the name of the photographer it was a piece that's up right now at tape Britain that I saw when I was over there and it's this beautiful piece it's on my phone which I have no idea where that is um it's this beautiful piece it's it's probably it's probably something like 30 or 40 images that are you know the it's oh probably the size of one of these but but you know horizontal and they're all lined up and it's it's a uh a dancer who is dressed in black on this white chair with a white background doing all these image poses and so it kind of has this Echo back to figure drawing where once against the theme and variations exhausting all the possibilities of the model posing on this chair in in this black turtleneck and pants and and it was really striking because of the high contrast with the black clothes with the white background um and what you really start to see is this figure against a background so I think that was executed extremely well um I'll put it in the notes I can't remember the artist's name right now so um anyway photographer's name in that case but uh you know theme and variations is another thing to explore you know maybe um I'm trying to think for instance here's a good one um maybe if you were to if you're a landscape photographer and this is a big project this would take a while to do but you have some kind of landscape you're shooting so it's either outdoors in the country or maybe it's a city Urban landscape kind of thing uh and you go shoot it at you know the variation it's like from one angle but all the variations become like the same weather or different weather conditions different times of the day it would take a long time to do and it' be really hard to get precise and keep all these identical looking so you know the end result is if You' never moved the camera um You're simply shooting a theme in variations the theme being the scene that that you have there and the variations being times a day uh lighting conditions weather conditions all those kinds of things and being able to see all those as a set I think that that would be kind of interesting um there's a contemporary artist olifer elas who or allas I can't remember how to say it um from Europe who who does some interesting stuff he does kind of these techy science type projects with lights and motors and and prisms and wonderful stuff like that but he also does photography a little bit and he has these pieces that are themes and variations on landscapes like that uh a bunch of them were shot in Iceland he's got this real Affinity with Iceland that he likes to communicate a lot and so a lot of the photos um you know are of that nature so anyway so themes and variations storytelling all the kinds of things anybody got any questions on this um I I kind of want to say a few things to wrap up all the episodes that we've talked about because this will be the last masterclass live on this particular series um I don't know I it seems like the guys I'm seeing in the chat room have joined us every time and I I know the time maybe not good for some people good for others give me some feedback if you've got something on that I mean I'm flexible it's noon here so I can I can move around actually it's one now but uh anyways um but to kind of recap what we've talked about all you know a lot of these things they're just exercises that you're going to do that hopefully will lead to better uh I don't know uh that lead to different things you want me to do the enclosing next week I can if you want um if it's getting too late for John Doe 87 I certainly understand or you could watch on YouTube um but what we've done here in this series of episodes is we have kind of taken some ideas to try to make yourself think differently do different things to improve your sensibility as a photographer to improve your style to make it more personal and um it is scheduled for next week but I'm going to do film next week so um we'll we'll go ahead and uh we can back it up today unless anybody has anything they want to share for next week or anything like that um let me wrap it up in closing right now and we can kind of address that um you know when we when we get there but anyway okay so what we've done is we've done a series of exercises we've done uh um you know it's a series of meditations if you will to try to make you think differently as a photographer and a lot of people think think about developing your personal style has nothing to do this is the same old stuff I always say has nothing to do with lenses it has nothing to do with cameras it has nothing to do with equipment you need to have them obviously to make a photograph but you don't need to sit there and pine over having the latest and greatest whatever because that's not the important thing the important thing to remember and to take away from this entire series is this is that photographs are not made with your equipment or the camera doesn't make photos you make photos Okay the camera doesn't take pictures you take the pictures and that's the hard part it's the hard part about anything and that's why so few people do it and I think that's why so many podcasts so many YouTube videos all these things that you see tend to dwell a lot on equipment based ideas and specifically uh they'll talk about equipment reviews and gear and what you can do and how to do and there are techniques involved with equipment and obviously talked about you know some stuff I'll do in the future with that but it's really important not to let uh basically the millions of dollars of marketing spent by two large Japanese camera manufacturers dictate what you do as a photographer I mean that's great everybody has um everybody has moments in your life and and those of us that are older in here we all can understand that you go through periods where you have extra money all the time and you can kind of spend money and buy lavish things and you go through times that are quite lean it is always cyclic and it can be frustrating if you feel like you need to have the latest wide angle Cannon lens or whatever it is the version two of this you know and if there are times where you'll be able to do that but don't ever like waste all your time thinking about that because you know it comes in and out uh you know like like Marcus saying right now the right Tools in a master Craftsman's hands can make a difference he'll do great things with the wrong tools if he has to that I Mark that's a quote I mean that's that's brilliant that that I think that says it all uh and that's what we all are striving to do as photographers if you weren't interested in getting better one you wouldn't be watching me definitely at this point in the podcast talking about it um and you would also uh uh I don't think you would shoot a lot of photos and there are people who do that they collect cameras and collect lenses if you go to these camera shows there's a lot of collectors there they'll never take a single shot on any those they there's something obsessive about the decorative art aspect of this object that makes photos and that's okay too but that's not what we're here doing um like I said particularly if you're still what with me at this point um and so we're all aiming to get better and I think that's what's important um to say one thing about equipment though I think it's really important uh as a photographer to learn the equipment that you've got and let me talk about what I'm talking about with that obviously reading the manual and stuff but I I found and I'm like probably everybody else especially in my younger days I used to especially when I'd travel I'd pack a whole bag full of cameras and I wouldn't even use some of them and i' spend more time fooling around with what Lind I was going to bring with me and and doing that kind of thing than I would actually taking pictures of course that ended and I got more serious about it um but even then I I I found that if I switched equipment too much and it's fun to do because I mean you know that's what what what they you know like I said the two large Japanese camera manufacturers you know want you to to be into buying a lot of equipment um but I found that if I switch around like for instance if I'm using a lens that I'm not used to using When You're In the Heat of the battle of actually on the photo shoot particularly if it involves other people there's a lot of distractions so if you're doing people shots if you're doing um if you're shooting uh professionally you have a client standing there watching what you're doing there's so many things to get your mind around and I found like little things like not understanding completely how the autofocus works or not remembering to have sat on a digital camera whether I'm in raw or whether I'm shooting jpegs little things like that can just kill you you know and I think it's really important not so much to spend a lot of time with your camera manual but to be constantly shooting with the same equipment and that even goes for film photography I used to when I got into that I you know it's real fun to go by a bunch of developers in a bunch of different kinds of film and you mix and match and you're having fun with all that but when you start getting serious about it it's like what we're talking about here you need to minimize what you're using and that way when you're in the heat of the battle when you're out there when you're actually on a photo shoot and you're doing it you know your stuff inside out and it's like an extension of yourself and that way that gets your mind off of that and it gets it on to making great images which is what we're all setting out to do and so you know there's a lot of things that comprise of that so you know whatever camera you have now use it and treat it with respect uh like Mark was saying there was a 9-year-old that the photography meet up and she was she was making these goofy images where she was painting a face on her finger and shooting them against backgrounds and stuff and it was cute but and you see that with kids a lot because they're not um censoring their own thoughts like adults are like I would never do that because everybody here is going to think I'm a lunatic you know and so it's cute to see kids do that and it's important to kind of kind of break down some of those walls and this could lead to a whole another series of podcasts and kind of you know this methodology that we're talking about which is too much for what we're trying to do today and maybe we can revisit this in the future but you know what we've done here is we've established uh a series of four lessons with over an hour long each uh with uh you know some exercises to do and these are supposed to try to train your brain to think a little better okay and so that's that's what we're going for here and I found and I've said this before in these I if you remember but um I found that personally it's like working out and you know part of the deal and I will be the first to admit that right now I have been not working out enough and probably eating too much and that needs to happen again and right now one of the things that I'm experiencing is the lack of motivation to actually get out there and start getting exercise and I promise I'm going to make myself started doing it very soon but you know it's easy to make excuses for being busy whatever the real reason I don't want to get out there and work out cuz it's hard I'm going to get out there I'm going to go jogging I'll get quar of a mile I'll be winded I'll be dead tired and I'll come home because I'm out of shape and I think your brain works the same way uh especially when you're doing creative type work like what we're talking about here when you're doing creative work um it's like a muscle it needs to expand it needs to uh you need to be doing it a lot uh Vargas Miguel says I've been think I've been like that for the past month I don't know whether you're talking about exercise or or getting into the spirit of photos but but I think that that's important and I found that particularly if you're doing this for a living okay say this um which I do it's sometimes if I haven't been exercising creatively I'll be in a situation and I find it particularly showing itself when there's other people involved so if I'm with a group of people we're trying to brainstorm topics for something or trying to figure out what we're going to shoot or what it's going to be and I have other people that are having input on that if I haven't done it in a while I'm almost embarrassed because it starts making me feel like gosh I I just I can't get my mind around it particular around somebody who is really creative-minded and and really good at new ideas on the Fly and fresh stuff but I found that if you can keep these things up that's what it takes and so the next time you're feeling flat or you're feeling like you know I think what inspired this thing to begin with is uh you know not having or or feeling like you don't have a personal style as a photographer and it's really easy to do it's hard to have a personal style as a photographer because you're not drawing or anything you're interpreting something literally out of a camera um it's really hard to draw that out and that's where all this stuff comes in and that's why you're making yourself think you're you're pushing yourself you're thinking you know exhausting the possibilities in your mind um you'll find sometimes your mind is on a different track and when you finally execute something that you're going to consider a work of art or a job for a client or whatever it is sometimes they don't always come out like you envision in your head and maybe for some people they don't ever come out like they Envision in their head but that's at least moving you in the right direction and if somebody's not in your head they don't know those things but uh but that's what you're shooting for is is is trying to close that gap between what's in your head and and and what you're doing with your work and that's really important to remember um you know uh anyway all that being said I think that is probably a good place to wrap all this up unless you guys have any I think now is the time if you have any questions or anything we have one more week on the schedule for this and I would be happy to use that talking about developing your styles of photographer if you guys are so interested um when I originally did all my outlines for these um I obviously had a lot to say with the first batch of them and then I think I was giving a week for each idea on the later ones so uh Bob K thank you for joining us got a split looking forward to film absolutely we will we will go over all kinds of it will be all things film will be the next topic so I'm starting the YouTube Archive of this a little bit later than I am um we talked before I turned the camera on basically what I'm trying to say so film is going to be the next topic we're going to do for Master Class live um it's going to be a lot less meta and a lot less heady than this was it's going to be more practical um with some examples and stuff and I think uh the reason I don't want to do more hey stuff is one for me they're hard to plan and and and um you know outline do a curriculum for but I think for you guys too I think this will give you some chance to digest some of this stuff uh you know watch these in the archive um I've tried to create a series of of lessons and exercises that are kind of Timeless in a sense so um you can revisit them anytime you want in fact I'll be honest some of these are kind of uh oh gosh they're really old probably like 20 25 years old I'm going tell you how old I am when I was in high school and I was really getting serious and I thought I was going to be a guitar player for a living one day and I was really getting into this um I went through a lot of this same um kind of idea of Discovery so you know I was really interested in that point of developing my style as a guitar player you know I the guys that I looked up to you know the jimmi Hendricks or the jazz guitar players that I liked you could tell who in fact let me say this before we close I think this is important just to talk about where this came from but uh you know when I was when I was playing guitar I was young I was getting going uh you know I looked up to guys like Jimmy Hendrick uh I like jazz guitar players like West Montgomery uh Charlie Christian a little bit uh and then more contemporary people at that time like guys like Pat maeni or r toown or guys like that and the really good guitar players even with the rock stuff I was listening to like I was a big yes fan so listen to Steve how and you could tell Steve how with like three notes you know he had such a voice in a sense even though he's not singing he's playing guitar but but the any good musician who has a personal style and and it always bothered me that like how do I develop that and I don't know that I ever did musically um and as I grew up I ended up in a different profession and all that but it's something that's carried with me on into my own work as a photographer uh particularly when you're dealing with art and I've always wanted to be able to have kind of a style to myself where if somebody saw an image they could say hey yeah that's Ted for or whatever and I'm definitely not at that point um but you know a lot of these things are are research that I've done back when I was music and they've been repurposed into the four episodes that we've done here into a visual medium um and they're a little bit far out but you know I think they're really important I think they get you thinking and that really I can't say it enough what we're we're we're photographers but we're really thinkers with a camera and uh you know that's the takeaway here and that's what you want want to uh want to think about what's interesting though is is since I've been working in an art museum for four years um you know particularly with Contemporary Art when you get into contemporary artists um not so much photographers but visual artists and you get into the really weird far out stuff there are guys out there that their thing is having no style at all and what's interesting is like this kind of comes back around to itself because I think in having no style at all you still have a style it's having no style at all um but there are guys that that kind of do shows every now and then and nothing ever looks the same and it's all conceptual but even those guys I mean I know they're arguing that they they're anti style and their anti- you know aesthetic or anti-l look but that has become their thing even at that and so I think that's perfectly plausible to do and I still don't see why the stuff we've talked about here wouldn't help you expand your mind with whatever it is you're trying to do with whatever you're trying to communicate uh some people are going to be comfortable with these kinds of things some people won't I mean that's just kind of how it is and anyway I hope you guys have all found this useful um I haven't been looking at the chat sorry um Mark says thanks again Ted this has really kicked me up a gear with my photography I hope so Mark and thanks it was good to meet you at the Meetup last week um uh and we'll do more of this in the future I'm not done I'm not finished I say um I I think this was really good this is something that I've tried to do a little bit with the Art of Photography shows that I've done and they're just too short to really do that with uh they're 15 minutes I can say a few things we can get into a few ideas and stuff but you know it's so funny I me they they're kind of like the two-minute photo tips you know in away even though they're 15 or 20 but it's still really talking about one thing and it's really hard and I thought it would really be good with these master classes and I'm still working out KS here obviously with using two cameras and I had a computer die and blah blah blah and so they're not the most professional things you've ever seen I know um but we'll get better at that as time goes by too just like we will get better at being photographers um so it's important yeah John thank you for watching I appreciated uh Mark says I think sometimes applying something from one dis discipline to another can really open up possibil absolutely in fact I think um you know I I don't think I I have a music degree actually and I wouldn't have I mean sometimes I miss not having uh studied photography more formally um but I've done enough of it on my own I don't know that I would have needed that in fact I almost prefer the way it's worked out where I've had that exposure to different disciplines and and even film too because I do a lot of video work that's what my day job mostly comprises of is is is doing film work and uh you know I it it's real close to photography but it's another dimension that you're adding into this time element motion and all these other things but but uh I I I like staying versatile and I like not that I'm great at it but that's kind of my thing is I let all these things influence each other and that's that's what that's what I enjoy it keeps things interesting for me um so anyway so anyway thank you so much guys I'm going to go ahead and turn off the camera now thanks for joining this has been the masterclass live series on developing your style as a photographer I'm going to go ahead and turn off the YouTube feed if you guys guys want to hang out in the chat room for a little bit I have some time um but thank you for watching I really appreciate it and join us on the next one where we're going to actually uh change our topic and we're going to do a series of uh master classes on film and so I've got to start planning those so we'll start those actually next week uh since we wrap this up today\n"