Migrant Worker 2 by Peter Liepke

I was running some errands on Monday morning before heading to the tire shop to replace the tires on my vehicle. I stopped by Best Buy to drop some old cell phones in their recycling bins when I decided to head over to Barnes and Noble to pick up a photography magazine to read while waiting for the tires. As so happens I picked up a copy of Silvershotz. This is one of many fine art magazines out there and one with which I was not quite familiar.

It was in the current (Volume 6 Edition 1, International) issue that I first spotted the work of Peter Liepke. At first I wasn't sure if these were photographs in these pages as there seemed to be no focus in the images whatsoever. I learned that the images were mostly gum bichromate prints. This process was developed in the 19th Century and gives a very painterly look to the photograph. The images I am discussing today was printed using this process.

Migrant Worker 2 by Peter Liepke

What can I say about the composition here other than it seems to be perfect? The sky, earth, and person all have an appropriate sense of scale, where the earth is bigger than the man and the sky is bigger than both put together. With the man all alone in the field, we can see the enormity of the task before him. Holding his tools he is looking down and focused on what needs to be done. Although the clouds appear overhead, through them we can see the rays of sun shining down on the man. It suggests that although his labors are hard and long, his reward awaits him in Heaven.

These elements all compete for attention, but no one element overpowers the other. The loneliess of the worker is telling. I have to admit that I myself am ignorant of the mind of a migrant worker, but here the image suggests a loneliness felt. Perhaps he feels forsaken? That could explain why his back is turned to the rays of light. Or perhaps he is so focused on his task that he fails to take notice of the beauty behind him? There are countless theories as to why this is. Here through the whole image there is more clarity than in some of Liepke's other images, but nowhere is the image tack-sharp. This makes the image almost surreal, as to suggest that while we know about migrant workers and how hard they work, as mere observers we can never know truly their life experience, which is the reason we will never know why his back is turned on the sky.

In the Silvershotz article Mr, Liepke discussed some of his philosophy. In general he is against the current trend of showing vulgar and bleak scenes that highlight the failures of society and individuals. He sees himself as more a detached observer who wants to record the inherent beauty, and to show what could be instead of what is. Most of all, he wants to instill an inspiration with his work. With this image, while he shows a reality, there is an inspiration that can be gained.

I'm going to admit right away that this wasn't my first choice from Liepke's body of work to critique. My first choice was an image entitled "Poet's Walk". Unfortunately, that image is not found on his website and the only copy I could find on the web was less than satisfactory. But this image struck me. The balance of the tones and composition could not be ignored. All in all this is a beautiful image that could easily find itself amongst a collector's favorites.

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas on this particular image?

Umm, Yeah... Okay

Wow, I can't believe it's been over a year since my last post here. I started this blog as a way to help track my growth in photography. Shame on me for abandoning it.

I've been a little busy with the camera, though probably nowhere near as busy as 2008. I did manage to take a little trip to Minnesota for the sole purpose of photographing some of the state. I've also shot a few concerts here and there, but nothing like 2008. With the absence of Ozzfest this year I was sure there were going to be a lot of smaller tours going through. I'm not sure if it's the economy or what, but the concert season was unbelievably light this past summer. Other than the trip to Minnesota, my productivity with the camera this year has not been as prolific as 2008.

While I'm striving to take technically correct pictures (i.e. good exposure and, in the case of digital, white balance) I found my vision seemed to suffer a little bit. I'm not sure what's going on, but my photos over the past 8 or 9 months just don't seem to be all that interesting when I look at them. For a lot of rejected photos I will look at the digital negatives again 6 or 7 (sometimes even more) months later. In some cases I find that there is something there I didn't see before... but this year that has been the case very few times. To that end, in the past 2 months I've been looking at a lot of what are considered fine art photos and trying to draw inspiration from them. Perhaps my mind is becoming more discriminating in my own work. If that's the case, I need to sit down and figure out what's causing me to be more discriminating.

Whatever the case, I'm thinking of merging this blog and Primordial Light into one website. I don't know yet what the name will be as there is another website called Primordial Light, which is a hobbyist astronomy site. It will be a little while before I get to that point. Whatever the case, that's still a little ways off as I work through the real-world responsibilities of a job and raising 2 puppies. Also, I will be discussing more of some other work I see out there and talking about how it works for me. This should help me get closer to the answer of what exactly is the nature of my own vision.

There aren't any pictures today as I still have a lot of work to do. I just needed to update my faithful and not-so-faithful readers of my status.

Exposure

Few things can be as confusing to a new photographer as the concept of exposure. I can assure you now that I am not the exception here. Often I find that I missed a good shot because, while my meter said it was ok to go, I did not expose that part necessary to accurately capture my vision.

When the lighting is for the most part even, exposure is generally not a problem because, well, the lighting is even. However, as those who have spent a little time behind the viewfinder know, light rarely is even in any given composition. There are areas of light and dark which run a pretty wide gamut. This is where the problem usually occurs as exposure of one extreme often causes the other to suffer.

Here is a case in point. The first flag picture below was taken with a Pentax 645 with Kodak 400VC film. For this picture I placed the center of my viewfinder over blue sky (I don't remember exactly where) and snapped the picture. The result was a nice blue sky, but the flag, as you can see, was very dark.


I metered the picture and snapped it when it said ok, but I didn't think much about what it could look like until I thought more about the settings. The camera was set at f/22 with a 1/1000 shutter speed (which also happens to be the limit for this lens/body combination). When I looked at the flag again and thought about what it would look like, I correctly predicted that the flag would be dark, but to be honest I really wouldn't know for sure until the film processed. I decided to take the picture again only this time I decided to expose the flag and recompose. The result was a much more vivid flag:


The other thing you may notice about this is the sky went from a semi-bright blue to a bluish gray color. I'm no light scientist, but I would venture to say that this is because the camera let in 4 times as much light this time around (f/22 at 1/250) and the result was a slight overexposure of the sky. When I got the film back from the lab and scanned it in, I was amazed at how much difference existed between the 2 photos when just changing the exposure base.

The reason I can bring this to you now is this marks the first time I made a concerted effort to record my settings after each photo. In the past I metered, shot, and moved on to the next thing. I find in film this can be a little self-defeating as since I couldn't check on the settings at the time of the photo, I wasn't able to make any correlations on why one photo worked and another didn't work (from a technical stance... aesthetics are another matter altogether). I could check shooting digital, but even then with the sheer number of digital pictures it becomes somewhat overwhelming comparing all the settings.

When it comes to digital versus film exposure, there is a fundamental difference. My first photography professor told me that it is better to overexpose than underexpose because an overexposure contains more "information" than an underexposure. Well, I took this information to a concert with me and found that I took a lot of overexposed shots that no amount of digital manipulation could fix. What my professor left out was that overexposure is better for film photography (unless of course you have a 15-second shutter speed at 2:00 in the afternoon). I can't really blame her for that as we were supposed to be focused 100% on film photography. When it comes to film, you should generally expose for shadows where in digital you should generally expose for highlights. From what I can see, highlights can be recovered quite well in the darkroom, but DSLR camera sensors don't handle blown highlights nearly as well as a pack of Ilford paper.

So the biggest lesson here is to record, whenever possible, the settings used to take a picture. It takes a little work in between shots, but when specific settings can be tied to a specific photo it becomes very easy to see what works and what does not. This will hopefully translate into one being able to take the best picture the very first time.

As always, comments are accepted and welcome.

PS - As for the flag picture, a little light and color balancing on the 2nd shot yielded me what I think is a beautiful flag. I call it "Phoenix Rising".