Ugly photographs of nothing

[William Mortensen]

Better than pretty pictures of nothing...

Fine work!

[Struan Gray]

I too think the wild things are great, and have a sense of formal composition that belies John's self deprecation. These are not snaps.

I like the colour more than the B+W. I have always loved that coming-out-of-winter mix of browns and earthy tones which gets lost in B+W. I don't like the blue skies though, which is an argument for shooting on overcast days if possible.

I do wonder how and how much you edit John? Have any weeding criteria emerged as the series have built up, or is it just an unexamined gut feeling that drives your selection process?

[Walt Calahan]

Beautiful. Especially the color and B&W comparison views of the same scene.

[John Brownlow]

come on, somebody must hate it. Van Camper, are you out there?

@Struan: the editing is hard. Because the photographs have no obvious subject it's really hard to find any particularly useful criteria for success. Worse, as soon as they have a conventional subject they stop being interesting and become familiar photographs of trees. So the pictures that work are the ones that walk a tightrope. So basically it is a gut feeling, but I do also look very hard at the formal elements such as resonance of shapes, depth, balance and how the frame is filled. One ideal for me is that your eye should have no easy resting places so they are generally bereft of large negative spaces... in order to do this I expose for the shadows and print them as open as I can. As soon as you print the shadows down and create some areas of black, the photos start to be much less interesting somehow.

The main editing is of course when you are making the exposures. I generally shoot about 24-36 frames over a two or three hour period. Then I edit again when I scan, but err on the side of scanning anything that looks vaguely interesting, then I edit again before making up one of these galleries. Usually I'll put up somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3 of the exposures I make as kind of digital workprints for my friends (people like you and the folks on Flickr, Streetphoto and the Contemporary Landscape forum (and the semi-associated Flickr pool).

So basically these are a pile of workprints, and then I just live with them for as long as I can. Usually the strong ones float to the top in my head and I can then pick out the final selections in a few minutes.

I feel that it's good to keep the editing light because sometimes unexpected pictures turn out to have staying power or -- more importantly -- have a germ of an idea in them which you can return to in later shoots. That's really how this whole project started... from this single picture which suddenly gave me a new way of looking at the trees.

Thanks for looking and commenting, everyone.

[John Brownlow]

PS. A further thought on editing: it is always easy to pick out the 'lollipops', ie the really strong single pictures that make people go 'oooh'. It is much harder to pick out the strong pictures that speak quietly. Robert Adams is the master at this. The strong, quiet pictures are the really important ones. You discover this whenever you try to edit down to a portfolio (like I'm doing now). You end up with a dozen lollipops, all yelling at the top of their voice 'look at me! look at me!'. It's like sitting in a room with a dozen cable news talk show hosts.

That's when you realize how important the quiet ones are.

[Dan Jolicoeur]

I also think you need to load some B&W film. In my opinion you are loosing a lot in the conversion. The B&W pictures look like they where taken in harsh light and washed out. Although I do like the color pictures, and 99% of my photo's are B&W. For example the 1st one was in very low light. The secound was about the same as your photo's, but I used B&W fuji acros film. The prints are scanned so some detail is lost.

[Gary J. McCutcheon]

Wonderful visual feast! I'll have more after dinner.

Photo on

Gary

[Paul Metcalf]

As an engineer by training and practice with a passion for photography, this posting really goes a long way in portraying the struggle I have with truly being satisfied with my photo work, that being the issue of why can't anything (or nothing as suggested herein) be a valid subject for a photograph? If "the formal elements such as resonance of shapes, depth, balance " are adequately "filled in the frame" a good photograph should be, well, good, shouldn't it? Maybe that's an uneducated (in art) viewpoint. I'm curious, would this pass the grade at art school's for those that have been educated in such? If it wouldn't, well too bad for the art world, there's a lot of nothing out there to be photographed.

Thanks, John, I now have a lot more "better" photographs (of nothing!).

[Don Miller]

Oh come on......

Is this some kind of group think experiment?

[Chad Jarvis]

Looks like Robert Adams' Cottonwoods. He made a career of photographing "nothing".