I am starting a ongoing blog series which explores the relationship between photography and human vision. The aim is better understand the intricacies involved with the way we see before photographs are taken, the way cameras capture our vision, and the way we see photographs when they are displayed. This will help you make better images, Images which can better fulfill your original vision.

1) A photograph is as good as blank space unless its viewed, and to be viewed, human vision is involved.
2) The vast majority of photographs are made by capturing something already seen by a human’s eye. Or a vision of how the light will be captured if we manipulate the light captured. -Exceptions; Hubble telescope and blind photographers etc, but even these photographs are subject to #1

The human eye is the most important camera to consider when photographing, because without it an image is nothing. Can a photographer afford not to train the most important camera he’ll ever use?
A little warning, if you are to take these ideas to heart you will really start to change the way you see. You will find yourself being interrogated by the people around you; “What ARE you doing?” I was sitting at a restaurant eating sushi when I unconsciously started moving my head like a charmed snake, with one eye closed, as I examined how the light was refracting through frosted glass on the wall.

Foveas and Photographs Directory;

-Introduction to Foveas and Photographs
- LDR -Exploiting a Shallow Dynamic Range

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Given the restriction that the guys were to be standing in a line for the group shot, I couldn’t do much in the way of making a story or narrative because they won’t be interacting with each other or the location. So I had to do all the theming with location and lighting.
The location we ended up picking is in the middle of a city park, just a group of trees which are generally nondescript. However when the trees are backlit the warped crooked nature of the trees is really highlighted.

Light setup;
First I setup two lights which illuminate the trees behind them. they are located behind Garret and Brady’s heads (2nd and 4th in the line).
The third light is a shoot thru umbrella about 2 feet above my camera.

Light test;

To avoid having the umbrella illuminate the trees too much the band is positioned quite far away from the trees, and quite close to the umbrella.

Individuals;

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There is probably nothing much more poignantly repulsive to think about on a Monday morning than Colt 45.

I’m sure everyone has/has heard a good story or two involving this beverage of choice, be it a comedy or tragedy i’m sure the story is very memorable. However as you are sitting there in your office chair looking towards the ominous future that lays before you, inside that elegantly designed cubicle which lays below fluorescent lights, the stories and hilarities that follow such a beverage’s consumption seem so distant.

Enjoy, grimace, daydream…

Why I do this? Well why do i destroy peanut butter sandwiches with baseball bats, make silhouettes of lawnmowers , or use a rotting piano in the forest as a location
I have a habit of embracing the chaos and nonsense that runs rabid through my head.
Its like comedian Mitch Hedberg says; “Sometimes in the middle of the night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen’s too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny” The trouble for me is, I am really bad at arguing with myself, and I’m unable to convince myself not to follow through.

And so I find myself sitting in front of a computer writing about Colt 45 on a Monday morning.

I am an advocate for random, for embracing the chaos that lives inside all of our heads, impulsively taking up crazy endeavors. Genuinely interesting images, and approaches to making great photographs don’t often come from a linear process of cause and effect. Instead they come from capturing fleeting moments of unbridled imagination, they are windows to the different concepts and thoughts that you already have. Follow through on them, develop them, embrace their arbitrary strikes of obscure genius.

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Don’t get me wrong, we all love doing it, but is there maybe too much of a good thing?

What about all those people who say ‘quality over quantity’? Must just be a cover up for people who don’t do it all the time for whatever reason. Or are they onto something? It’s not difficult to do it all the time if you have no standards.

I think we can all agree we have seen a lot of ‘McPictures’; high volume, low quality imagery. Often excessively processed because the original ‘creative ingredients’ weren’t good in the first place.
‘Too much’ is every time the act hasn’t been contemplated. ‘Too quick’ is every time details are ignored; ‘Oh i can fix that in PS’

Many now say best camera is the one thats with you, but more importantly the best pictures are the ones taken with purpose, intent, and forethought.

I’ll take a stand for what I believe; quality of quantity, wait for the right one at the right moment before you commit. Take time every time you do it, if its rushed it’ll never be as good.

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I’m giving away 6 of these shirts. To get free shirts do one or both of the following;

1: Post in the comment section below.
Post what? well, post whatever you want to/think would win you a shirt.
A couple suggestions: (which you don’t need to follow) Good stories of good times (skiing or not). Pictures of Tits Deep pow day. Videos of a feat of extraordinary achievement or skill (ex buddy at the bar in ski boots dancing with a gal). Or even why you want to get the shirt. Examples; wear it to your sister’s wedding, or to your meeting at divorce courts. If you are in divorce court and thinking of wearing this shirt, the shirt might explain why you’re there.

and/or

2: Spread the love on twitter;
A) Link to this blog entry giveaway; http://rkp.me/tits
B) Mention @ReubenKrabbe so i know you entered
C) The rest is up to you

Prior to Castle Mountain opening for the winter a family friend’s wife had been skiing with the ski patrol on the untracked mountain. When her husband asked how the snow was, she could only describe it with two words;
“Tits Deep”
When our family heard this story all three brothers loved it, and started talking about what we could do with such a beautiful phrase; bumper stickers… T-Shirts… To my mother’s dismay we talked about it for years on end, all the time she was hoping we would ‘mature’ or ‘grow up’ (whatever that means). We were even on a family vacation in a tropical paradise hundreds of miles from the nearest ski lift and all we could talk about was ‘Tits Deep’
Now several years later I had the shirts made for my brothers’ and father’s christmas presents, and you get to reap the benefits! Oh, if you’re worried about explaining it to people who don’t understand the shirt or our sense of humor, its not that bad. I have already had to explain it to my grandfather as he looked around dreadfully confused as we opened presents at Christmas

‘Tits Deep’ Is a bit of a sad irony for me this season, out with an unknown meniscal injury in my knee I haven’t been on my skis once this year. So the closest my nipples have been to the fluffy white dandruff of the gods has been tripping getting out of a hot tub landing my bare chest on ice.
However, living in a city with pretty good urban features has provided me with some winter play.

At least two (maybe more) winners will be chosen as part of a random draw from twitter entries. The rest will be chosen from the comments below. Judging will be based on whatever I think deserves a shirt; humor, awesome pictures, stories, promise of fame & fortune etc.

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A shoot of this scale is a whole different ball game compared to the residential interiors that I blogged about last. In the last interior I could change the whole lighting in a room by adding a single skrim to bounce or block light. (A skrim is a large piece of white/black fabric suspended by a frame. Mine are 5×7 feet, made of PVC and nylon). Lighting is less controllable in a room ten times the size; you can only minor adjustments without considerable volumes of equipment. Composition also requires a whole new bag of tricks, even a fisheye with a 180 degree view angle won’t capture the amount the human eye is seeing when you step back from the eyepiece. Working with extremely wide angles will start to develop very unnatural looking perspective when looking up or down, photoshop will help correct for these oddities, but pixels can only be stretched so far.

When shooting with a model, or subject the location is a setting or story for the subject’s actions or existence to take place. However when shooting an interior the location is the story and the subject.

So what is a photographer to do? The location is lit, the building is built, the subject is already styled. Simply walk in with an expensive camera hanging around your neck? Go back to the basics; you’ve got a camera and you have control over it’s function and composition.

I drop all my equipment; skrims, tripod, even camera and walk. I close one eye; making myself avoid the way depth will change the way I perceive the room. My viewer is going to see this room on one plane, looking at it with two eyes will present it much differently. I walk back and forth pacing to see how I can rearrange solid objects without touching them, cleaning the visual chaos into simple shapes and presentable objects. Explore space using depth with perspective, repeating objects and familiar objects. Balance and offset objects of different sizes and significance to keep the eye moving and entertained.

As I stood in Holt Renfrew long before your eyes would see the images I was playing Jedi mind tricks with you. I, and any other person who has a camera holds the power to control or even distort your perceptions of anything at all.

I am in control of your mind.

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Architectural and Design photography is a pleasant polar opposite to shooting action sports like skiing. On one of my most recent ski shoots the temperature must have been below -20 Celsius plus wind. When it’s that cold batteries stop functioning, and they need to be warmed up on location; unfortunately the warmest and best place to heat a battery on your body also happens to be the most uncomfortable. I don’t think I need to go further down that road for you to pick up what i’m saying. I was alternating between freezing the only parts of my body that aren’t already cold and hanging out the side of a parkade 20 feet above the frozen ground to get the angle I was looking for.

Compare a chaotic shoot like that to interior architectural work; indoors, warm, dry, very little risk to my own well being. It’s quite a luxury. That said getting the shot still isn’t a simple or easy matter, especially when you have a bit of photography OCD like myself; making the pictures as close to perfect as you can in camera. Shooting interior design requires many tries, tweaks and adjustments to capture great photographs which really flatters the location.

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That word probably means little to anyone anymore. Really, what isn’t digital anymore: TV, phone service, everything possible on a computer, even your toilet. Now that stoic porcelain masterpiece may have more computing power than a 1970s rocket ship.

However the transition into a digital world truly is very new in the scope of imaging’s history, and remarkably influential.

In this century we went from the very first dSLR made by Nikon (actually released in 1999), to the point where hearing a photographer talk about shooting analog is something interesting and unusual. Your camera will now correct for white balance, have a screen, live view, incredibly fast autofocus, video capability, TTL off camera flash… and we can now look forward to touch screens on camera bodies, nearly infinite ISO capabilities and file sizes, better tonal range and image quality. Yet if you stop and think, the idea of a reusable light-capturing device was once an earth-shattering concept new to everyone at the beginning of this decade.

• 1999: Nikon D1 SLR, 2.74 megapixel for $6000
• 2001 Canon EOS 1d
• 2002 Foven X3 chip announced. A really great piece of technology that went nowhere, except to a dead end in a Sigma…
• 2003: Canon’s Rebel is the first dSLR for under $1000
• 2004 Web 2.0 starts making ground, interconnectedness and photographers’ online culture starts to take off. Flickr launched. Kodak stops making film cameras.
• 2005 photographers start taking up blogging, which is growing faster and faster by the end of the decade. Canon EOS 5D; first consumer priced dSLR
• 2006 Red camera announced to be released in 2007; industry soils its pants.. Lightroom launched easing the growing pains of digital asset management for many photographers. Tone mapping and ‘Dave Hill’ now more popular than a chocolate bar on ‘The Biggest Loser’. Strobist blog started by Dave Hobby.
• 2007 Virgin Mobile makes ad campaign from pictures all harvested from Flickr under Creative Commons. No compensation other than ‘credit’.
• 2008 – Polaroid announces it is discontinuing the production of all instant film products, citing the rise of digital imaging technology. Red announces Scarlet/Epic; industry soils itself a second time.
• 2008 Nikon releases d90 first dSLR with HD video, followed by Canon’s 5D II with huge positive response.
• 2009 – Kodachrome film dead. Stock photo runs on Time magazine cover, rights purchased for $30; photog happy. http://www.lightstalkers.org/posts/time-pays-3000-for-cover-photographer-ecstatic Annie Leibowitz overspends like crazy and almost loses all of her work.

Many trends can’t be attributed to a single date, but morever are a shift in trends and habits over time. The ease and accessibility provided by ‘The Naughts’ has brought the quality of amateur/hobbyist photography much closer to that of a working professional. Art buyers, companies and clients have caught on to the bloated amateur photography sector, and seek out many amateurs for the cash saving opportunities. Whether attempting to get a foot in the door, get a relationship started, poor business practices, or any other reason, many photographers have started shooting for low rates or even ‘Credit’.

Traditional visual media disintegrates into chaos; newspapers and magazines roll off their last editions. The remaining scramble in an attempt to reinvent everything they do to stay in business, many staff photogs layed off in favor of freelancers.
Professional photographers now work with nearly disposable digital camera bodies. Expensive black boxes that are dated as quickly as a selectively desaturated image.

Image quality and file sizes skyrocket, digital noise is destroyed by the likes of d3 and 7d. The digital noise of ‘Best Camera’ and naval gazing blogs continues to grow. Digital noise is taboo, while some photographers start to add film grain in Photoshop to their digital files.

The dark room goes… dark? Photographers were once found hunched in the corner of a dark room hovering over a toxic soup of processing chemicals as they develop their film, Instead they are curled over a keyboard with a mug of now cold coffee, but still are suffering from vitamin D deficiency in their pixel pushing pain cave.

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The articles I’ve been reading which try to make sense of The Naughts seem to be suggesting a pessimistic look at this decade; Terrorism, Climate Change, Economic disaster, H191 and other diseases have triumph the headlines. It seems if you have a working body and a full stomach you basically won the lottery. Will the memories of photographers be as downcast as the general populous? The lost jobs, failing salaries, penny-pinching clients, and copyright woes overshadow whatever good may come of it?

Some may call me a raging optimist, which may be a bit true, however I’ll still insist The Naughts were pretty awesome. The affordability and accessibility presented by the golden age of digital photography opened up a creative outlet for the hundreds of thousands of people who now identify themselves as a photographer. Be it beginner, amateur, hobbyist, apprentice or professional, digital photography has brought about wonderful changes for how we are able to perceive, interpret and capture the world, and transmit our ideas. Especially for those like myself who lack the fine motor skills to paint or musical aptitude to sing or play an instrument, this decade of photography was a really wonderful thing.

The photographic process also underwent the biggest overhaul in terms of workflow, and capture that we may ever see. From a single use transparency film with quite limited ISO capabilities to a reusable sensor with unheard of ISO capabilities, from dark rooms full of chemicals to comfortable computer chairs, from shipping insured negatives to online delivery of impeccable derivative files, from images on paper to digital magazines. Digital technology in the very first dSLRs at the beginning of this decade would barely pass as acceptable in today’s point and shoot.

Postproduction workflows will continue to advance at astounding rates and presentation methods will continue to transform with touch interface tablet reading devices looming on our horizon. Video on dSLR cameras will move from its infancy to maturity and continue to blur the lines in between still and video capture. However the fundamental tools that photographers use to capture and process ideas to transpose them into images will never again go through such rapid change all encompassing change.

Looking forward to the next decade. (What will we call this one: The Teenies/Teens/Tens?) There are all the technical advancements to come down the pipe, software upgrades and expenditures, but what will categorize the future of this new decade that we have the pleasure of painting? Will the professional market become more cutthroat, stock prices continue to rush to the point at which they are free, working professionals put out of business, and visual media/advertising budgets slashed? Will amateur photography push towards quantity or quality?

I am looking forward to the possibilities and advancements eagerly, and a dSLR that makes me breakfast too would be nice. (It’s not asking too much more is it?) I hope to see a collective push for quality, cooperation and community among photographers. An effort to make better and more beautiful images for true appreciation of great work, and an attempt to educate all photographers about their work’s value, even if they are beginners.

Happy new years to all, and many thanks to those who have helped me as a photographer in the last decade.

Oh, and Canon/Nikon, it would be nice to see the PC flash sync go the way of the dodo, would be a nice way to start this decade.

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After posting my blog entry ‘Why I have a Camera’ my friend Andrew wrote to me: “What was it about that very first roll of film that allowed for such simplistic creativity? Some of my nicest looking shots to this day were taken on one roll of BW that was the second roll of film I’d ever exposed!’
I’m sure every photographer has a special appreciation for their first roll, the first negatives they developed. The moment when a person sees the product of their creativity, which is completely theirs.
What made the first roll so special? Was it only the fact it was the beginning of an obsession, or is there something else which made shooting those first pictures so invigorating?

Porteau Cove BC; My 3rd Picture Ever

Taking photos now is a much different process for me than it was when I first shot with my father’s SLR in Porteau Cove BC. Most shots are preconceived, many are artificially lit, a lot are tweaked and reshot ad nauseam, they involve models and makeup artists or several athletes. The stakes are raised and there are more hopes and aspirations than my own riding on the success of those images.

When I shot my first roll of film I also had hopes and aspirations riding on the photographs, however I didn’t need to succeed. I was new, inexperienced, naive and unskilled if every frame was blurry and unfocussed i would sure be disappointed, but I was aloud to fail. No one would have looked at my pictures and have said to me; ‘I really expected more of you.’ or ‘Why didn’t you get that shot? I thought you would do better!’ My only concern when I first depressed the shutter button, was having fun, trying something new, and taking any photograph in any way I wanted.
I unknowingly granted myself the right to failure, which is the right to creative freedom. I opened myself to simplistic creativity by removing the necessity for success.

Shannon Falls, My 4th Picture

Brandywine Falls, My 8th Picture

I haven’t intentionally failed a shoot, or a picture for that matter. However I will go out shooting and consciously grant myself license to failure. I allow myself the possibility to attempt whatever I can possibly conceive.

I have failed this shoot twice, this is one of the more photogenic failures.

I have yet to succeed on the shoot; the creativity is quite simple but technically very difficult to execute. Twice I’ve failed, and I still may fail many times to come in pursuit of an image i really want to make. My openness to failure gives me not only a license to unharnessed experimentation, but also the ability to analyze the failures and gain knowledge to correct my shortcomings in the future.

Stop shooting in fear of failure, instead embrace the possibility of failure and open a gateway to complete freedom.

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