If I give this photo the title "Marriage" is suggests a story

I’ve been interested in all forms of communication for as long as I remember. From songs, stories, poems, books, movies, photographs and other visual arts, I was always engaging in art and story. But not all forms of communication are the [...]]]>

If I give this photo the title "Marriage" is suggests a story

I’ve been interested in all forms of communication for as long as I remember. From songs, stories, poems, books, movies, photographs and other visual arts, I was always engaging in art and story. But not all forms of communication are the same. Anything but, in fact. Indeed, the differences are often greater than the similarities.

Take writing. Over a decade ago I undertook a communication degree at the University of  Technology Sydney (UTS), majoring in Writing & Contemporary Cultures. I absolutely love writing. It’s very specific. It’s full of details. It evokes imagination. It creates and peoples amazing worlds. During my degree I also took photography electives to rekindle my slightly lapsed but lifelong love of the static image as an art form.  And I found it was very interesting to study writing and photography at the same time. The differences intrigued me. They were so utterly at odds with one another.

A few years later I was again drawn into going back to school, this time to take a Diploma of Photography. I wanted to dig deeper into that form of communication as I had done as a teenager, only this time in a more structured way. To make a long story short, I thrived with this form of communication, and now enjoy it as much or more as writing. And here we get to my subject for today’s rant. More after the break…

What are the differences between photography and other forms of communication such as writing or movies? Movies, in many ways, and despite their visual form, share more with writing than they do with photography, but it’s probably fairer to say that movies inhabit a space of their own, sharing bits of both worlds. Stills photography is very dissimilar to writing, except for the fact they both tell stories. Photos however have very limited scope or space to tell the story. We could imagine the photo is the opening paragraph of the story. It sets the scene and gives us all sorts of detail, but only about a split moment in time. So how do we move the story forward – how do we introduce the plot? How do we continue on from the opening paragraph? Enter ambiguity. Let’s have a look at how ambiguity can be used in photography.

One of the major limitations in photography is that you have a single frame to tell a story. You have no supporting text, no context and very limited time to make your statement (they say at an exhibition, you have app. 3 seconds gaze per image). Now of course these are generalisations. There are such things as triptychs, photos do have titles and sometimes supporting essays, and context to boot. But generally, an image must stand alone and communicate its message in very quick time indeed. And with purely visual language. As with written language there are conventions, cliches, social understandings and other devices that can assist in the telling, but nonetheless, a photographer has to use an entirely different form of story telling to the author.

Ambiguity is one such way to draw the viewer in. As in writing, a truism is this:  Show, don’t tell. And surely it is better to show instead of patronisingly and all too specifically spell out the message. But that’s in writing. In photography, being overly detailed and specific is, in a sense, very difficult. One can rely too heavily on cliche perhaps to tell too simplistic a story, but with photography I often find the greater difficulty is in telling enough. A way I find that the best story tellers approach this difficulty in photography is to lead the viewer into a story but leave a large enough dose of ambiguity as to leaver the viewer caught up in the story but left, without resolution, to  stand and ponder the direction or possible outcome of the situation he or she finds himself engaged in. To reinforce the writing analogy it’s like writing a book with a great opening chapter which sets up the story and introduces us to the conflict at the heart of the tale, and then we turn the page to find… just blank pages.

So in a way, photographers need to learn to turn its greatest limitation into a strength. Instead of trying to tell the story as we would in traditional oral or written form, we need to use the greatest strength of visual imagery, which is clearly impact, to draw in our prey, lure and entice them with enough story to engage them, and then leave them floundering in front of the picture, forced to use their imagination to find some form of resolution or closure, before moving on.

To do this we need to leave some clues, some gaps, some elements open to interpretation to entice the viewer to begin to start to construct the story further in their head. We all love stories. They are a deep a part of us as anything. We just need something to latch on to to carry it forward. If it’s all told for us, then the story is over.

So leave a few clues, introduce some conflict or contradiction. Don’t spell it out too clearly, and let the viewer take a ride…

Let’s look at the image I posted at the top of the article. Whether or not it’s the best photo ever taken is not important (kidding, I definitely know it’s not the best photo ever taken.) But let’s analyse the story.

OK, what have we got here? We have a natural environment, right down to a naked women. The ONLY man made element in the frame is her wedding ring. (And yes it’s on her right hand – in some cultures, this is the hand used). What else we got. We have the water of course – lots of it. She is in the water, which in itself could signify lots of things. But she doesn’t look like she’s just taking a dip. She’s naked for starters. And she looks sad. Or troubled. She’s hugging herself and we can’t see her eyes. Is she crying? What has happened in her life? As I wrote on the caption of this shot at the top of the post, if you gave this a title, for example, Marriage, it would all by itself lead people towards a certain story line. Quite a different story no doubt than if we called it, say, “Cleansing”, which might lead us entirely down another path. But these titles only work as they do because there is a lot of ambiguity in the shot itself, and the story is hard to pin down.

Here’s another example. I call it Feet First.

Loads of ambiguity here. We can see that someone is lying down in a fire blackened forest. All we can see is their feet and legs. We can’t even see their upper torso or arms. Do they have any? Are they dead? Is it a man?  (probably, judging from the apparent size of the feet, and the way the jeans sit). What’s the significance of all this? And why in a forest? And what about all the regrowth? Is that supposed to tell us something?

I think a photo like this (one of my absolute favourites by the way and a Silver with Distinction winner at the 2007 APPA Awards) has got so much more to say by being ambiguous than if we could see a huge knife sticking out of him or something obvious like that. I didn’t want to constrain this photo into a straight-jacket of a story. I wanted people to be curious. Its original context was a folio called Still-Life and instead of having a title (Feet First) it had a quote beside it, as a way of leading people in. The quote was this:

“Life is a pilgrimage.
The wise man does not rest
by the roadside inns.
He marches direct to the
illimitable domain of eternal bliss,
his ultimate destination.”

Swami Sivananda

Not as ambiguous perhaps as some other text, but not specific enough either to know precisely what’s going on. OK, it’s very leading. And that was as it was meant to be.

So to recap. I consider ambiguity a very powerful tool to facilitate storytelling in photography. Use the visual impact of a photo to capture a viewer, using its ability to clearly show setting and initial story. Consider also using a title or quote to lead the viewer in a certain direction, and finally, whether you use a title or not,  make sure there’s enough ambiguity in the shot to give the viewer some room to construct the story further. Make sense? Hit me in the comments if you want to discuss it further.

I have to admit, I am seriously impressed with the Digital Photography Workflow website dpbestflow.org. An initiative of the American Society of Media Photographers and funded by the American Library of Congress, it is a fantastic resource for all digital photographers worldwide. It is mainly the work of Richard Anderson and Digital Asset [...]]]>

I have to admit, I am seriously impressed with the Digital Photography Workflow website dpbestflow.org. An initiative of the American Society of Media Photographers and funded by the American Library of Congress, it is a fantastic resource for all digital photographers worldwide. It is mainly the work of Richard Anderson and Digital Asset Management guru, Peter Krogh, but of course let’s not forget there is always a large team behind any endevour of this size and quality.

The site covers pretty much every aspect of digital photography workflow you could think of. The layout and structure of the site is simply awesome – well thought out, logical and very user friendly. There are a wealth of graphics and videos to complement the crisp, concise writing, and the quality of the information is about as good as it gets.

There is also a companion book called Digital photography best practices and workflow handbook, put out by Richard Anderson and Patricia Russotti. This takes a broad look at digital workflow issues, and is partly the basis for the dpbestflow website. Another stellar resource that no doubt informed much of what’s on the dpbestflow site is Peter Krogh’s book on Digital Asset Management, called The Dam Book. Make sure you get the second version, as in that book you will almost 500 pages packed to the brim with top level information, which complements the dpbestflow website, but is very different at the same time. This book is very specific to Digital Asset Management, and together with the Digital photography best practices and workflow handbook and the dpbestflow.org website, is all you need to educate yourself about digital photography workflow.

So back to the website. Check it out. Bookmark it. And visit regularly. There is enough information to keep you busy for several months, and in my experience, it’s exactly the sort of information photographers need but don’t know they need. Of course every photographer wants to focus on shooting, but the business aspects are considered by many to be even more important, and workflow is a business subject as it ensures efficiency and professionalism.

Let’s face it – digital photography is a whole new world when it comes to workflow. Analogue was a simple affair in some ways. Of course, the bar was also a lot higher in some areas. You actually had to get it right “in camera” a skill that many photographers today seem either [...]]]>

Let’s face it – digital photography is a whole new world when it comes to workflow. Analogue was a simple affair in some ways. Of course, the bar was also a lot higher in some areas. You actually had to get it right “in camera” a skill that many photographers today seem either not capable of, or perhaps maybe more accurately, they are simply beguiled by the instant nature of digital and the power of Photoshop and just don’t see the need to nail it in camera.

I understand the lure. Adobe spends millions of dollars on marketing to persuade us to upgrade every other year (either on one of its workflow methods – Photoshop / Bridge / Camera Raw or its Parametric Image Editing cousin, Lightroom). Their widespread adoption and success is subconsciously giving us the message that the image is no longer good enough without it. And it’s true in a way. Digital images do need some editing to look their best.

But looking at photography from a professional workflow point of view, the old school ways are very attractive. Back then, you did the work in camera, and off it went to the lab. Maybe it was pushed or pulled, but apart from some basic tonal corrections, that was the file that went to the client. These days, a file has to be pushed, pulled and twisted in a dozen directions before it sees the light of day. We deal with conversions to dng files, ratings, rankings, metadata , basic processing in Camera Raw and then touch ups in Photoshop before outputting. Alternatively we do the whole thing in Lightroom or Aperture or whatever.

But there are two approaches. One is to just shoot like crazy and work the files to within an inch of their life in Photoshop or Lightroom and hope we can make a donkey look like a stallion. Alternatively, and much smarter for the long term in my book, is to focus on our technical skills and our shooting techniques and try to get as close as possible to the desired final image in camera, so that our workflow is exactly that, and not a workslow.

I suppose being surrounded by students learning photography highlights these issues for me. But it’s not just students. Even shooters who have been doing this for a long time have to tussle with these issues. Hell, I am dealing with them as I write. I look at various workflow methods, and am becoming less and less interested spending hours in Photoshop, dealing with masks and layers and blending modes. Instead I just want to come in, do a levels adjustment and maybe a bit of a clean up and sharpen on the way out.

I accept that not everyone wants to work this way. Some photographers rely on the magic of Photoshop. My friend Jacqui Whiley for instance is a magician in PS and her images couldn’t exist without it. And all power to her. Her vision is amazing and she is realizing it through the power of pixel pushing. But I am heading down another road, looking for a shooting style that will minimize my workflow and enable me to get busy on other stuff besides Photoshop.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I have been playing with my new iPhone all weekend, and digging around on the net for useful apps and the like. During my travels I came across this very useful little slide show app, not necessarily for the iPhone, but it’s getting to the point where automated galleries for web [...]]]>

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I have been playing with my new iPhone all weekend, and digging around on the net for useful apps and the like. During my travels I came across this very useful little slide show app, not necessarily for the iPhone, but it’s getting to the point where automated galleries for web sites and blogs are the only way to go. I’m sure if I researched this area some more, I’d find a wealth of this sort of app out there. Sure beats building a gallery by yourself.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’ve probably heard that Chase Jarvis has once again come up with a great idea (his last one was The Best Phone…)

CreativeLIVE is a new website that is going to offer FREE live presentations (I hate the word webinars) on all sorts of creative topics, like photography, [...]]]>

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’ve probably heard that Chase Jarvis has once again come up with a great idea (his last one was The Best Phone…)

CreativeLIVE is a new website that is going to offer FREE live presentations (I hate the word webinars) on all sorts of creative topics, like photography, DSLR video, painting, html etc.. They will be free if you sign up and follow them live, and you can buy them afterward to watch again, or in case you missed them. The presenters are very highly regard folk, like Vincent Laforet, Art Wolfe, David duChemin & Zack Arias just to name a few.

I’ll certainly be watching with great interest. Way to go Chase, You really are an inspiration.

Digital Asset Management is going mainstream. And most people don’t even realise it. With the development of Lightroom to version 3 (currently in beta) and the recent release of Aperture 3, sophisticated stand-alone DAM tools are reaching photographers everywhere. They may not be perfect at all aspects of DAM, or suitable for every [...]]]>

Digital Asset Management is going mainstream. And most people don’t even realise it. With the development of Lightroom to version 3 (currently in beta) and the recent release of Aperture 3, sophisticated stand-alone DAM tools are reaching photographers everywhere. They may not be perfect at all aspects of DAM, or suitable for every scenario (multiple users in a studio setting or those that need multiple catalogues etc), but for the single user they are a very good one stop shop option.

They are both catalog applications and parametric image editors. In other words, they process the images and keep a catalog over the entire collection. And now that Aperture 3 allows you to export your image settings back into the DNG file,  it’s a cross platform and OS solution (who really wants to be locked into both OS and application forever – come on, that’s just not cricket!)

Microsoft seems to have been left floundering in the dust with its poorly-developed catalog software Expression Media. Once upon a time the predecessor to Expression Media, iView Media Pro was the professional’s choice of DAM software, along with Bridge and Camera Raw. Now, many have replaced all three with Lightroom, and Mac users have the extra option of Aperture.

Users who wish to stay with the triumvirate of Bridge/Camera Raw and Photoshop still have an incredibly powerful and excellent set of tools for image management, parametric image editing and and powerful bitmap editing, but using just these three apps, the cataloging side is missing. There’s not too many good stand alone catalog apps aside from the powerful yet flawed Expression Media, and besides, with the maturation of software like Lightroom and Aperture, there is less and less need for the non-integrated approach. True, a stand-alone catalog application will be more powerful than any of its integrated cousins, but a combined approach will suit many photographers right down to the ground. In many situations, even Photoshop is going out the door. Increasingly it is becoming possible for certain types of photographers to manage their entire work flow, from file ingestion through processing to output like prints & web galleries just in Lightroom alone.

The other bonus is that it spreads Digital Asset management principles out there (despite Kelby’s less than stellar attempts at educating the public about DAM {see my earlier post}) and enriches the DAM side of  a photographers work flow, even if many of them don’t realise that yet.

I’m still on the sidelines, preferring my Bridge / Camera Raw approach for the moment, as there is something difficult to define, that I don’t like about Lightroom. I’m still trying to figure out what it is though. It feels like it’s hiding things from me. Maybe I just don’t know it well enough yet… Is it really time to migrate to a single app solution? It’s sure looking like that time is coming. Microsoft paid a lot of money for the leading DAM app at the time, yet it seems like Adobe and Apple are leading the way with integrated solutions. Whether they are fully robust from a DAM perspective is not entirely clear to me as yet, but I can see we are getting very, very close.

This is getting interesting.

But I do have other, more valid reasons to think less of Scott’s latest book. And it’s this: he [...]]]> In a way I suppose it’s partly jealousy. After all, Scott Kelby is the author of many international bestsellers, all of which focus on the art and craft of photography. I could be so lucky. Or clever.

But I do have other, more valid reasons to think less of Scott’s latest book. And it’s this: he has SUCH influence and he’s peddling rubbish. With influence comes responsibility!

I’m trying to plough through his latest book on Lightroom, the incredibly long-winded “the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 book for digital photographers“. Now while I’m no expert on Lightroom, I do know a fair bit about digital asset management, and over the course of the last 4 years or so, my views on the subject have been largely informed by the world’s leading expert on the subject, Peter Krogh. Digital Asset Management is a broad subject that covers the management of images from the time they come off the camera all the way through to their permanent homes in our archives.

Lightroom is of course an application that covers a lot more than digital asset management, but if you use it, it does have a large  role in that process, so it’s good to understand the basics behind DAM to get the most out of it.

And it’s here that Kelby’s book falls over for me.  It covers all aspects of Lightroom, and I’m quite happy with what I’ve read in the other sections, but the first section, the section on the Library, is what I’m struggling so much with. It is in there, understandably, that all “digital asset management” type functions occur.

If you are not really aware of what sort of program Lightroom is exactly, well it’s no real surprise. In a way it’s trying to be everything to everyone. And it seems to do a damn good job of most of it. It looks slick. It aids workflow, and allows you to focus on the photography. But ignoring the beautifully designed interface and all the bells and whistles, under the hood it is a parametric image editor, coupled together with a cataloging application. Of course it can also spit out galleries, slideshows and prints like there’s no tomorrow. It has a modular design, so these modules can be added to in the future (if and when Abode can think of some new ones – hdr anyone?) But at its heart, it’s a catalog and an image editor. It looks like it does the image editing really well (as I said I don’t use it regularly yet, but have looked it over), and I’m not surprised, as it uses the latest Camera Raw engine to do the heavy lifting. But from what I can see, and from many other informed reports on the DAM forum, it doesn’t do quite as good a job on the cataloging side. Never mind, no program is perfect at release 2.5.

Digital Asset Management can be seen to be built up of two parts – a part that is (or at least can be) software independent (file naming conventions, folder organisation, metadata, star ratings, labels, all that stuff that sits in the dng or xmp file and is read by a host of programs like Bridge, Lightroom, PhotoMechanic etc.)  And then there’s how we can use those files in a catalog application.

My problem with Scott is that he gets the first part utterly wrong. Lightroom is an application that takes responsibility for a large number of those core DAM issues, so it’s very important that they get implemented well. And it’s not Lightroom that’s at fault here. It can do what needs to be done. But it does have to be told how to do it by the user. And this is where Scott loses me. He is responsible for the training of hundreds of thousands of people, not only in how to use Lightroom, but also how to approach DAM. Because for many, this will be the first time they encounter any sort of cataloging program, and they need instruction in the very basics. Instead what do they get? Kelby’s very uninformed approach to DAM. He’s teaching hundreds of thousands of people how NOT to do it. It’s hard to read. It’s even harder when you realise the damage this is doing.

Let me take the most offending example, so you can see I’m not just jealous (note the word just). On page 42-43 he talks about star ratings, a feature so ubiquitous now that even Microsoft is supporting them natively in Windows. Initially, Scott’s sage advice (not) is to rate your best photos as 5 stars. ‘Who gives a damn really about 2 or 3 star images’ he says. Either you delete ‘em or you love em. (paraphrasing here, I don’t have the book in front of me).  Well Scott, there are many reasons you are totally wrong, including something called the ratings pyramid. What happens in 20 years when you have 20,000 out of your 40,000 images as 5 star and the other 20,000 are no stars… Where’s the pyramid then? What value does your collection have if you can’t separate your absolute best images from your good ones and your OK ones. The value in a ratings pyramid is being lonely at the top. You don’t want it crowded up there. And by using 5 stars immediately, he’s leaving no romo for growth. What about in ten years time, when you’re a better photographer (everyone gets better if they keep at it). You can’t start marking your best shots at 6 stars…

And then it gets worse. Not only does he sooo not get the whole star ratnig system and why that is an absolutely integral part of any Digital Asset Managment plan, he then tells you to not even bother using them, but to use flags instead. Flags? Are they supported in Bridge? PhotoMechanic? Expression Media? Any other cataloging program? I don’t think so. Do you want to lock yourself into one application? Isn’t it smarter to use a system where the info lives in the file and can be read by a large number of programs? The star system (and labels to a slightly lesser degree) are a defacto standard.  You can change applications and the system goes with you. Scott should know that.

I think it’s staggering someone as educated and influential as him could peddle such downright poor information. I like Lightroom to a degree, and I think that it will become the leading DAM application (if it’s not already). Microsoft seem to have given up on Expression Media (which in any case is only a cataloging app, not an editor as well). But if Lightroom is the future, it’s even more important that people are shown how to use the DAM sides of it in a logical, extensible and transferable way. That’s exactly what Scott hasn’t done.

Scott, if you come across this, I’d like an explanation!