Thoughts on composition, learning from Ansel Adams

[Alan Klein]

As men discover more and more what constitutes a soul, they will be able to design and program computers that closer and closer emulate that concept of soul. The complexity and versatility of those computers will enable the computers themselves to reformulate the concept of soul and to exceed the ability of any human intellect to understand that concept. Those computers may analyze the response of humans in both lab and in live performances of today's available music, and create synthesized music that will elicit more intense responses from us than can our mere human performances. You want the little mistakes and the idiosyncrasies of human concerts? Better let the computer generate them for calculated effect than leave them to human error and soul.

The countless gods that humans have created throughout history have been based on human desires and weakness. Surely computers can generate a more perfect Divinity than those, one that is obviously to us the one and only one. Ah, what divine music we may then hear on Earth!

We can excite our endorphins with drugs and get a sense of the beyond and unknown. But that is no substitute for God. Computers are high speed idiots adding 0's and 1's according to a human program that is limited to the programmer's ability to create art. We can experience that now by applying the various filters supplied with our post processing programs. How much would you pay for one of my photos where I applied the pencil or charcoal effect, or maybe a watercolor. The art belongs to the programmer, not the computer or program.

[Alan Klein]

...or the photographer.

[Alan Klein]

Well, I think the New Jersey Farm is quite interesting. It makes me think of some pictures of Andrew Wyeth. But that's a first impression. Perhaps it is the loneliness of the farm. Perhaps one could elaborate this loneliness by changing the camera position, because the picture seems to be accessible from the viewers position and this seems to reduce the loneliness. But you said: the ground provides a basis to ground the sky, so perhaps the loneliness of the farm is not important at all. So, why do you show the farm, even in the name of the picture?

The problem is: seeing this picture on the screen of my notebook is not satisfying. I presume that you enlarged it. It has a wide angle character (distant things are far away whereas empty planes are dominating), so it requires an enlargement of 1.5 - 2 meters. Then you will have more texture in the corn, and texture inhibits immersion, by building a barrier that prevents accessability. The farm will appear more isolated, creating a distant relation from the corn here to the farm over there. The spectator will look from below (from the horizon line), so the sky above him will definitely be very impressive, as you percepted it when taking the photograph.

It's neither a dramatic nor an epic picture but a lyrical picture, with a strong subject, the lyrical "Me" here and a described "there", perhaps this is the reason why I think of Wyeth. In Wyeths "Christina's World" the grass is shown to be touched by Christina's hands, moving forward, endlessly, towards the farm.

I think that in this picture the task or challenge is not balancing or disposing or composing but enlargement and the mounting on the wall.

But if you mount it too high, to get a conicidence of eye level and horizon line, the picture could lack foreground. Perhaps a greater wide angle lens could help, positioning the horizon line a little bit in direction of the vertical center of the image, creating more foreground to elaborate the position of the viewing spectator. What about using a vertical format, exaggerating the verticality by using a 2:3 ratio (the 6x7 format seems to be tempered)?

Another possibiliy: perhaps you tought at the american expressionism à la Rothko, disposing a huge sky as a picure parallel area / surface in relation to another area below it with more and different texture and color compared to the cloudy sky. Then Andreas Feininger could be your friend. He isolated builings by photographing them with extreme tele lenses. You could keep the ratio between sky and landscape, but eliminate the foreground, reducing the picture to the relation of earth to sky and human existence in this world. Enlargement could be - perhaps - 60 x 70 cm? Fortunately the format of the RB67 "allows" cropping ...

But this is a question of enlargement, too. The farm is far away, producing an impression to be long-sighted, e.g. like a building in a tuscan fresco. But the wide angle produces an impression to be short-sighted, tilting the ground of the picture space to the spectator, e.g. like the interior of a early netherlandish painting.

Viele Grüsse

What an analysis. I don't think my photo is that deep, just admired the sky. So here's a vertical you suggested.

[jp]

If I may add comment, there is a bit of room for contemporary art comparison with the farm photo. The variety of tones in the grass and distant barn is Wyethy. The super simple shadows on the barn has sort of an Alex Katz or otherwise 1980's painting style. You admired the sky, but you might not have taken a photo but for the ultra simple scene that guided the second nature process of composition. When a photo or other art is intentionally simple, it is because of a decision of the artist to keep it simple. It leads the viewer to appreciate the same.

[Steven Ruttenberg]

If I may add comment, there is a bit of room for contemporary art comparison with the farm photo. The variety of tones in the grass and distant barn is Wyethy. The super simple shadows on the barn has sort of an Alex Katz or otherwise 1980's painting style. You admired the sky, but you might not have taken a photo but for the ultra simple scene that guided the second nature process of composition. When a photo or other art is intentionally simple, it is because of a decision of the artist to keep it simple. It leads the viewer to appreciate the same.

I agree, but I would also add, that many times the artist knows by looking at the scene immediately what they want to capture. Sometimes they can't put their finger on it right away, but they just know. So subconsciously he may have known more than he first thought that went beyond the simple sky. That is what drew him to the scene, but the other elements may have piqued his psychie without knowing it was happening and he scratched that itch by taking the photo of the sky and barn as an anchor not ever knowing really why. And that is why computers will never, ever be better than man, they cannot appreciate, nor process information the way we do. They are all identical, no matter how many made, they are all identical and will all come to the same conclusion, even if we were to develop AI.

[Daniel Casper Lohenstein]

I will die, yelling at God. What!

The thing is we are no more intelligent than our distant ancestors, but we do have more data and fancier tech.

As Mr Natural said, “It don’t mean shit!”

This too shall pass.

So, here's the yelling at the end of my life:

"Oh my gods, why did you leave me?

I always paid all bills, (Halo-)Cortana, to keep covers in all villages and cities I worked.

I never used genetically engineered personal enhancement viruses.

I always terminated pregnancies always when there was a risk of genetically faulty reproduction.

I am proud to bear a charmed existence as human vegetable.

I always let ASMET (Apple Siri Midterm Election Toolkit) decide.

I always voted Google Tensor Flow for World President

I never made an effort to achieve the privileges of the ruling Silicon Boddey class e.g. to go on vacation, to claim continuing education, to go to the pictures or a restaurant.

I always allowed (Facebook default setting) artificial minds to learn behaving like me from analyzing my utterings and solve my social problems by acting on my own behalf.

I always had full self-driving software on all vehicles, even on the three wheelers of my children

OK: I must confess that I hiked around with a tripod in a protected natural landscape where only AI-driven and nuclear fueled Google cars are allowed, taking an unnetworked large format camera with me that can't tell our authority in real time wether my artistic intention would be correct or not, never loading scanned negatives into the almighty cloud with its glorious analysis intelligence that registers me instantly as a potential lateral thinking threat ..."

[Daniel Casper Lohenstein]

What an analysis. I don't think my photo is that deep, just admired the sky. So here's a vertical you suggested.

Yes of course - but admiring the sky leads to at least two prossible ways of pictural thinking: accentuating it by cropping the picture and relating to the farm (the Feininger decision), or enlarging it by enlarging the whole picture to a spectator-adequated size, as a naturalistic view from below.

[Mark Sawyer]

I suspect Mr. Adams would be at least a little disappointed we weren't talking about music composition...

[Alan Klein]

I agree, but I would also add, that many times the artist knows by looking at the scene immediately what they want to capture. Sometimes they can't put their finger on it right away, but they just know. So subconsciously he may have known more than he first thought that went beyond the simple sky. That is what drew him to the scene, but the other elements may have piqued his psychie without knowing it was happening and he scratched that itch by taking the photo of the sky and barn as an anchor not ever knowing really why. And that is why computers will never, ever be better than man, they cannot appreciate, nor process information the way we do. They are all identical, no matter how many made, they are all identical and will all come to the same conclusion, even if we were to develop AI.

I think that's how it happens with me. It's like looking at a girl. You know within one second if she's pretty and you're attracted to her. Trying to analyze her nose and eyes, and makeup to come to a conclusion, just won't do it. So it is with a scene, you also know immediately. The problem is then how to capture what so pleased you when you first saw it. So I used a wide-angle lens to include the expanse of a sky I thought very interesting and large, for New Jersey. I had to ground the sky. Otherwise it would be like looking at a naked lady. A little clothes would make her sexier. The soft look was probably by accident. Since in was a medium format film shot, I had to scan the film and the sharpness is diminished adding to that soft look especially the barns. So it's good to be lucky too.

[Steven Ruttenberg]

How about posting a couple more images of your style to look at?