------------ Contents ------------ 2012: main page Entry 1: Abstract vs. Representational  

Entry 2: 21 Aug: Too Many Pixels?

In response to a rumour that 36 MP full frame dSLRs are about to be announced, a variety of on-lie commenters have once again made the point that more megapixels are not going to make one's pictures any better. This is similar to the intent behind the phrase "pixel peeping", which is something I've been meaning to weigh in on for some time now.

Let's say I drive a smart car that does a great job of getting me to work and back every day, not to mention to the grocery store, etc., and all the while generating a fraction of the environmental impact as does a sedan, van, or SUV. So I start spouting off: "I can't understand why everyone doesn't drive a smart car!" We all fall into this seductive litttle trap of seeing the whole world through the rosy filter and narrow blinkers of our own circumstances. The obvious rejoinder to the smart car infatuatee is: "I have three sons and two daughters, each with a sporting activity that requires chauffering". Or: "I'm a plumber. Can't fit a lot of tools and fixtures in a smart car".

Someone who takes family snapshots and vacation pix or who does street photography or who haunts a Formula One racetrack or the local ball field or who does macros of insects on flowers can easily get into a head space in which they can't see how anyone could ever want to print larger than 8x10 inches. And even if they did want to print the occasional larger size, 10 MP makes a perfectly good 16x20 inch print. From that perspective a 36 MP camera is sheer ego-tripping.

Nor does pro photography automatically necessitate larger pixel counts. In fact, many a photojournalist considers anything over maybe 8 MP to be a liability, not an asset. More MP per shot slows down write times, takes up more storage space, takes longer to send back to the copy desk, etc. But take that same photojournalist and plunk him down in a glossy magazine gig – suddenly it's a different ball game. Takes 360 pixels per inch to print on magazine stock. Do the occasional two page spread of one photo and suddenly 36 MP start to look pretty sweet. (Problem is: how to capture 36 MP handheld without blurring away half or more of that resolution?)

But arguably the most common sector of photography with an insatiable demand for megapixels is landscape. This is a curse we all owe to a guy named Ansel Adams. Whether you like or loathe his pictures doesn't matter. He set the bar. We now see the need for pictures, not of a few leaves or a single interesting tree, but of a full mountain side, or of a multi-mountain vista seen at dawn from high up upon another mountain, or a large swath of fall-coloured forest, or of the large sweep of a pampas or a Serengeti plain or an urban megapolis seen from atop the tallest building. These are all compositions that get downright claustrophobic when shoe-horned into an 8x10 print. Yes: you can see what's there, but the sense of space is sucked right out of the print, like your bank account the day after alimony payment number 359.

Now: yes: you can take even a 6 MP image file and bicubic it right up to a 20x30 inch print. But the detail is now as mushy as that half-eaten bowl of cornflakes you left on the table at breakfast. Not much point having a broad sweep of Serengeti dry grass if no one can distinguish one grass blade from the next. Grass is not oatmeal. So yes: megapixels can matter; and yes: there is such a thiing as stitching multiple frames together; but no: doing so doesn't cut the mustard in every situation. Put a flight of honking Canada Geese just levitating from a farmer's field in the frame, backlight it with an obese rising sun, and see what I mean.

Not only do some of us need large megapixel counts, we also need to fuss over their individual sharpness, both in the field and back in the darkroom or lightroom. If you have a 20 MP image but it has just a slight blur – well now you have 10 MP worth of detail wasting 20 MP of disk space.

It all comes down to horses for courses. And being human is having to re-learn that ruddy same lesson about once per week ... at least if I'm a typical example.

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Entry 1: 19 Aug: Abstract vs. Representational

Over the past few years I've gradually come to notice that most of the 2D art I've seen in homes, businesses, and public places is now brightly coloured abstracts. It's not that abstract is a new fad. It was already into at least its second decade as a Western art form back when I was born. But the public seems to have undergone a slow sea change to the point that it now seems to prefer abstract to representational as the primary form of interior decoration. Given the public's taste in representational art, that's probably a good thing. Even the perennial popularity of Van Gogh's paintings may be as much due to his pushing closer to abstraction than even the impressionists dared go as due to his use of saturated colour.

I used to detest abstract art myself, until just a few years ago when I realized that it was the visual equivalent of music. A Chopin Mazurka or a Bach Partita aren't about anything save sound, silence, and emotion; they are original creations built out of purely formal elements. Representational art, OTOH, is a human being imitating/copying nature. That's something I've always been a tad uncomfortable about, whether drawing, painting, or doing photography. I didn't create that sunrise spectacle that I just painted: I cribbed it from Mother Nature, then signed my name on the bottom. That's called plagiarism last I heard. I've long thought that if Mother Nature ever decided to get litigious we'd all end up in court for copyright infringement. At best we can hope she feels like acknowledging us as co-workers (Mommy's little helpers). Or we could reckon it that we will ultimately pay the highest possible royalty on her copyright: we will pay with our very lives.

But when a composer invents a melody or an abstract painter creates a composition, whatever else you can say about it, you can at least give them credit for not plagiarizing from nature. The flip side of the coin is that when we give up representation we give up a hundred million years of progressive refinement to a single visual "language". If I paint the corners of a person's mouth pointing ever so slightly upward vs. ever so slightly downward, I've changed the emotional read on the entire picture in a way that I can count on my potential audience to immediately comprehend.

Of course I'm only talking to the extremes here. There are shades of grey between abstraction and representation, as for example in the impressionistic/expressionistic interpretation of recognizable subject matter. And abstract art doesn't abandon the entirety of our collective visual language: it still relies on the core elements of shape, texture, and colour, which have been encoded in genomes since long before dinosaurs belched methane.

For all that abstract vs. representational remains a pretty quandary, and not a new one. What's new for me is that I increasingly find myself putting down wagers on both sides of the fight, as you can see above. ;)

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Responses

I really like this piece. My first thought was it reminds me of Wassily Kandinsky. He was the first abstract artist that I fell in love with when attending Music and Art High School. I didn't know it when I feel in love with his works back then, but he painted to music. Not necessarily that he listened to music while painting, but he drew his analogies (for lack of a better word) to music. His compositions use the raw elements of art, shape, color, texture, line and space, in much the same way that a composer creates music with sound, duration, pitch and dynamics. Following are some works of Kandinsky that I believe truly catches that spirit of music::

http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/compositions.php

http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/improvisations.php

It is interesting to note that your return to his type of art is preceded by you music sabbatical...

You call your pieces montages. I am curious as to the process that you used. Did you take photographs with the intent of using them in a montage, or did you make montages because you looked at the photographs? It looks as if you did some light painting. Where you moving the light to the camera or the camera to the light? If so, you obviously caught the rhythm with your hand in much a similar way that an abstract artist may paint to rhythm. What is the typical number of photographs in your abstract montages? What part of your process is planned, what part is edited and what part just happens? How much do visualize ahead of time?

I'll understand if you want to keep your trade secrets to yourself. But do in some way share with us the artistic process that you are using.

Goldilocks

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Goldilocks: what a great first response to my first blog post and glad you like the pic! In a way I'm a bit jealous now that you got interested in abstract art in high school. My own passion at that time was Picasso and I shared his disdain for both abstract and photography. Now I've gone over to the dark side on both counts. ;) IAC, the upshot is that I have only a passing familiarity with any of the "classic" abstractionists, including Kandinsky. Taking a quick look at the pix on your links I can certainly see the resemblance and was glad to see it, because I had this nagging feeling that the pictures I've done like Finders Keepers were reminiscent of someone else's work, so now i know who it is. That said, thankfully I also see a difference in that Kandinsky's canvases (at least on the first link) are somewhat more toward the geometrical (which of course ties in with the musical connection). So I can comfort myself that I'm not a complete copycat. ;)

OK: regarding the process. Several years ago I took a little point&shoot camera out at night just around the suburban neighbourhood I live in and look pictures at base ISO and a sufficiently long exposure (say 1/2 sec.); but as you I guessed moved the camera about in various quasi-rhythmic patterns to deliberately introduce motion blur. An example of what that looks like is Pickering Nocturne #10, but that shot is atypical in that it works as a stand-alone composition (or so I think). So I had all these not-quite-good-enough shots that I chanced upon a few months ago. Looking at them again I thought: "what if I combine parts of them into one picture?" (This was because the idea from film photography of doing multiple exposures was already in my head.)

One thing led to another. As you can see I've inverted the colours of some of the fragments, re-sized, changed their angles, flipped horizontally and/or vertically, etc. Most importantly I put each fragment on its own layer then changed blending modes to allow all of them to show through. Once you start juxtaposing even two fragments that seem to go together, you think: "something is missing in this corner over here" and pretty soon you're deeply into it. Trouble is: it's a real time sink and I have quite a few compositions now that took hours of work but even a few days later I could see were abject failures.

- Dale

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