I remember once a photographer said to me that "Ansel Adams was the Helmut Newton of the landscape." I understand what they were getting at and I'm not sure I can disagree. Like most other media of artistic expression, photography loves the pretty. Pretty girls, pretty sunsets, pretty flower blossoms, pretty landscapes, pretty trees, — we photographers have pretty on the brain. Is that a strength or a weakness?

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LW1511 - Ignored, But Possibly a Treasure

When I photographed in China in 2009, I assumed that the exotic landscape would create exotic pictures. I was wrong. One day in particular, we were photographing in the landscape on a day that was oppressively dreary and dull gray, heavily misted (or polluted), and boring. China was fascinating, but the photography was anything but. For years, I've ignored those images in my archives because I couldn't let go of the experience. I was wrong, again.

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Every Picture Is a Compromise, a series at www.brooksjensenarts.com.

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"How to" tutorials and camera reviews are everywhere on YouTube, but if you're interested in photography and the creative life, you need to know about the incredible resources you can access as a member of LensWork Online.

One of the supposed virtues of artmaking is that our art becomes a vehicle of immortality. I'm not so sure. Testament, yes. Immortality? Not a chance. Recently we've lost Jay Dusard, Carl Chiarenza, Duane Michals, and Jeff Schewe, all LensWork alums. A week doesn't go by without a letter from a grieving LensWork subscriber's relative letting us know their lost loved one will no longer need to receive LensWork. With each instance, I take a moment to remember them, be grateful for the opportunity to have known them, and remember that our time for producing our artwork is limited, finite, and precious

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Boy, I'm going to stick my neck out with this one. As a general rule of thumb, the shorter the focal length of your lens, the less personal the resulting image. Consider, for example Monument Valley. The wider the lens the more your picture will look like Monument Valley. The more the viewer identifies the location the less the image is about your response to the location. The implication of this is that we need to work even harder to make the picture our own vision.

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When determining exposure, especially in high-contrast scenes, we often need to bias our settings to protect either the shadows or the highlights. With my cameras and the way I tend to process images, I'd much rather underexpose and protect the highlights after which I can always pull up enough in the shadows give a hint of life in the darkest tones.

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In the early 1980s, I fumbled a lens swap and dropped an expensive view camera lens into the Pacific Ocean. I grieved then and still grieve to this day. Why is stuff so important? Every photographer I know has a piece of gear they lament selling — or losing. Isn't it silly that we can be so attached to stuff? I used to think this had something to do with the loss of potential, but now I'm not so sure. I once had a client who owned a Western store and I learned a great deal about stuff and our sense of self-identity from that experience.

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Although they are both forms of music, listening to a piano recital is a completely different experience than listening to a fully orchestrated symphony. The same can be said when comparing the single, standalone image and the multiple-image project. In the orchestra, each instrument contributes its part to the whole. In the multi-image project, each image contributes its uniqueness yet still exists in harmony with all the others. This is the key to selecting the images to be included in the project.

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It's difficult to admire one grain of sand while we are standing on the beach. I offer this as a metaphor for photography today. You and I sweat bullets to make a photograph we can be proud of, but if we look about a bit, we see trillions of photographs being made every year here in the digital age. Even if our masterpiece is spectacular, it is difficult to get it noticed in the tsunami of images being produced every day.

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Knowing my love for photography, a non-photographer friend of mine recently asked if there were images that literally changed my life. I fumbled an answer at the time, but I've thought a lot about this in the recent weeks. I realized I have two sets of answers: images I produced that changed my creative life, and images others produced that have had an enormous impact on me. The most interesting part of this thought experiment is to compare the two sets of images.

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Can you think of an artistic expression that doesn't involve, in some way, the drama of good versus evil, innocence versus the diabolical, the weak vs the strong, dark versus light? (You don't suppose I slipped that last one in for a reason?) If the central themes of art are rooted in drama, why would art photography not also be rooted in drama? If so, that leads us to the question How do we build drama into a photographic image? Perhaps even more informative is the question How do we build drama into a photographic project?

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