The Cruelest Cut:
culling your litters

Version 1.1, © 2007 by Dale Cotton, all rights reserved

Every year I spend a week visiting my father who lives near a small man-made "lake" or large pond in northern Ohio. I've long since exploited the lake and surrounds photographically, to the point of exhausting every iota of photogenic possibility it possesses; but still I dutifully take a camera with me on my daily circumnavigation of its girth, just in case. This year I tried something a little different. Instead of looking for art/landscape compositions, I deliberately set out to document the shoreline with the 9:16 aspect ratio of my LX1 pocket cam for a little project that didn't work out. Nevertheless, you can see the results in the following LightRoom generated Flash album.

The first few shots that include the lake itself, such as:

Fig. 0: 04_PawPawLake2007_166.jpg

are ones I imagine a casual snapshooter or fairly new hobbyist photographer might have taken. "Look, Ma! Look at the pretty lake!" Mid-summer, mid-afternoon ... and with nary a scrap of visual interest (there's actually a boy fishing on the far shore, but that can't really be seen in these reduced-size JPEGs).

Despite feeling I had pretty well mined out this location, the conditions at dawn were promising enough one day that I gave it the ol' college try. It occurs to me that it might be interesting not just to tease out the few potential keepers, but to present the entire sequence of frames I took during the 45 minute walk about. Except for a few frames to bracket an exposure here and there, here is the entire set of raw originals, just as I saw them myself in LightRoom, before editing and culling. You may or may not want to plod through these. More germane is this adjusted set of the same raw captures after culling a few of the worst and making some preliminary adjustments to correct white balance where needed and to open up the shadows and mid-tones in those images that I exposed to keep from blowing the much brighter sky. What I want to do with this collection may possibly be educational for certain art photographers at a certain stage in their journey. I'm going to critique my own images ... and do so quite ruthlessly at that.

Because I was working with a digital camera and therefore free of cost-per-frame concerns, I followed a when-in-doubt-shoot approach to the outing. Whenever anything caught my eye, I simply framed as best I could in the dim light, set the exposure as best I could without spot metering, and clicked. I fully expected that most or all the resulting frames would go into the discard heap, so I had no emotional attachment to any of them as I started the editing process – and that is what I want to share with you. (Reminder: as always, click on any image to view a larger version.)

1/21

The first one is actually pretty decent in what I think of as a classical or mature/conservative style. Strip it down to grey scale and it resembles something that might have been shot by any number of well-known B&W art photographers of the mid 20th century. The fragment of the house on the left takes the scenery out of the realm of pure nature and anchors it to the human condition – this is a piece of somebody's world. The US flag limp on the flag pole adds to the human story. The composition as a whole has enough movement and variety to involve the viewer (or, at least, me) without jarring the pre-dawn mood.

2/21

This next one is a different story. Set just a few paces farther along the road down to the lake, we can see a portion of the same yard+lake view in this frame as in the first one. The curve of the road leads the eye into the scene and is mirrored in colour and shape by the strip of sky reflected in the water above it. The row of triangular trees dominate the middle ground ... but don't go anywhere. They're not bad, but they tend to go plop, plop, plop across the frame. They are also strong enough visually that they tend to fragment the frame into a series of weakly connected slices. The colours are nice.

3/21

#3 has camera shake in spite of the best efforts of Panasonic's OIS at 1/25 sec (mea culpa) so was an initial disappointment, since I really did want to get a shot of Mr Mallard standing at the edge of the water. However, the blur reminds me of Seurat and his Pointillism. Totally out of character with the rest of the sequence, but on its own – well: time will tell whether I file it under Keeper, or no.

4/21

#4 is a bit of a poser. You can probably see why I couldn't resist this shot. There is a bit of an echo between the line of the boats' noses and the line created by the reflection of trees in the water. The aluminum boat's colour echoes the colour of the sky in the water and the grass green resonates with the tree green in the water.

But there are a few bigger questions that need to be answered. Have we not seen this before? Well, yes: painters and photographers have been doing boats on the shore for a few centuries now. OTOH, there is a bit of tongue-in-cheekness that these are small, commercial pleasure craft and not some venerable old fisherman's crafts ... And everything does fit nicely together... Another question: even if someone is taken by the scene at first, does it have enough interest to keep him/her coming back for repeated viewings? Once again, I'll have to punt.

5/21

#5. Easy to pass by, but this one is beginning to grow on me. The reddish brown paint on the wooden parts of the bridge really needs to be toned down (why do we preserve wood by making it look like rusted iron?). I don't suppose one could find much depth of meaning or comment on the human condition here; but I love the lazy downward swoop of the road and the spattering of green leaves right across the frame. The nearly-white sky is weak, but I'm not sure how much can be done with it &ndash possibly a two tone division of clear vs. clouded sky. Also the leaves create a bit of a jagged/jittery texture that just may kill the shot for me; it may take a print to decide that one.

6/21

#6. Bingo. Obvious keeper. I'd hate to line up all the shots I've taken over the years within a few feet of where I took this one, but this is the first wholly successful frame of the lot. Maybe there is something to this 9:16 business after all...

If you're wondering where all that ruthless critique I promised comes in, just hang on a few more frames – I can't help it if all the good ones bunched up at the start. And, incidentally: you're allowed to have your own opinions about each of these frames. If you tend to disagree with me a lot, my theory is that you are likely either well behind or well ahead of me on the artistic path. If you're fairly new to doing visual art and you tend to disagree with my takes, it would be instructive to see if your opinion will change over the years, and if so whether it will tend to converge with mine or no. Feel free to write me every ten years or so and let me know...

7/21

While I liked #7 from first viewing and was eager to print it, I have to confess that seeing the first print on RC paper dispelled any lingering doubts. And this may well be due to properties of the print itself than anything intrinsic to the image. The mist and atmospheric haze show through both the darker land areas and in the steam off the water. This would be extremely easy to blow by too much of a boost to contrast or trying for too much black at the bottom end, but I got lucky the first time. One reason to work bodies of water and especially combined with mist is to strike a balance between detail/complex regions and smooth regions. We salvage the smooth regions from boredom by not having them take up too much of the frame and by having sensual gradations in hue within them. And ye olde mirror symmetry, created by reflections on smooth water, makes for an easy compositional device.

The rise in the shore line as we read left to right is due to its curvature combined with a bit of down angle from the camera's somewhat elevated postion. This creates a certain tension that the horizon might simply be skewed, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

8/21

#8 is a good workmanlike composition – unfortunately one I've used before. I took this and a few other shots like it more to salute an old friend than with any expectation of topping a previous success. Although this frame looks more to the south, I jerked up the white balance to match the salmon sky to the east just to give it a bit of interest. I would probably abandon the 9:16 aspect ratio and crop off a bit on both sides if trying to make use of this shot.

9/21

I remember a Twilight Zone episode from my childhood titled Number Nine Looks Just Like You. Hopefully, this #9 doesn't look like you or any of your own compositions. Sure, it has the atmospherics, the dawn colours, mist over water, and boats. But the composition is ... urrr ... dead in the water. No motion. No energy. The shore line might as well be the rim of your bathtub. Plus, the large mass of dark firs on the left seems set to upend the whole image and sink it into that same tub.

10/21

#10 is a variation on #8. Maybe this is the time to talk about clichés. Every single picture in this set, and probably every single picture you or I have ever taken, could be called a cliché, meaning someone somewhere did something similar before we got there. If you can hold your picture up next to the famous one that defines the cliché and say "mine is better", then your pic is the new king of the hill and everyone else's – including the famous one – becomes the cliché. Otherwise, you have to cook up an it-doesn't-matter speech and practice it in front of a mirror.

11/21

And speaking of clichés, what do we have here but the king of clichés itself: the silhoutted foreground at sunrise or sunset. Does this one have any saving graces? Nyet. A minor technical pat on the back that there is actually some detail available to be teased out of the silhouttes, if wanted. That noted, toss it in the trash.

12/21

#12. Yes, the puce wildflowers are pretty; and, yes, every year they sucker me into trying to work them into a composition; and, yes, I failed again this year. I can deeply relate to Charlie Brown taking the yearly football pass from Lucy. This is one of several such frames from this year and is useless as the others. What exactly is happening here? A row of misty trees is toddling left to right across the far ground and a smattering of flowers are scattered across the foreground in no particular pattern. I feel my life-energy being sucked out of me ... I can't quite move my eye from any one blotch of tepid detail to the next ... I'm fading more quickly now ... I'm dead.

13/21

#13 is probably another sucker trap. Cropping slightly left and right will probably help. I'm not quite ready to give up on this guy; there are areas of interest; and they don't fragment so thoroughly as the previous picture does.

14/21

#14: when was the last time you saw this picture? I mean, since your last viewing of Apocalypse Now. Yes, this is a classic scene: dawn mist; sun breaking through backlit trees; river or similar in foreground. Before we cast the first stone, however, let's spruce it up a bit. The dark halo around the orange peek-a-boo through the trees to the left of the sun needs to go. The whole dark mid-ground needs opening up a bit. Additionally, I opted to change the sky colour (perhaps I'm just tired of that shade of salmon by now) and crop a bit off the top of the sky:

14/21 version 2

Now let me ask you: could you throw this little sweety out of your portfolio? cliché or not, I'm a-keepin' this gal.

15/21

Look: I like trees, OK? So shoot me. For me this is a group portrait of three close friends. Each is a distinct individual, but they work together to form a reasonable composition. The whole shot probably needs to be opened up a bit by boosting the middle values. But I probably won't bother, because it doesn't do anything I haven't done before ... even as recently as the first frame of this shoot.

16/21

I don't know that I even need to say anything about this one, except this:

16/21 version 2

And let's stop on that high note. I'll leave the rest of the frames in the set for the as-yet not-bored-totally-stuporous student to critique.

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