How Do You Know if Your Photo's Good?

Excellence. Excitement. Vision. Meaning. In addition to raw technical issues such as exposure, lighting, signal vs. noise, and focus -- when we're making art we're creating meaning. We're creating images that speak to us, that are interesting to look at, and fun to be around. How do you know if your photo has got it -- that special something that provokes people (including you the artist) to think about and consider the image?

For most artists, there's a point in one's technical practice when one is no longer struggling with specific craft issues, and instead, the technique occurs seamlessly and smoothly. This is called skill transcendence, when all of your skills and artistry come together and work as a group smoothly so that you feel in the zone, that things occur nearly automatically. A pianist who practices scales for a long time gains the dexterity and memory to play without thinking exactly where every finger ought to go -- instead, she can sight read the music, translate to another key, etc. If she had to think about every movement of each finger, she'd go too slow to play the tune. If you were learning skiing (or really any sport), you'd see how in the beginning your form was all over the place, skis angling and arms flailing and body wobbly, tentative. In contrast the expert skier appears smooth, efficient, with a quiet and focused form -- instead of concentrating on 'getting my back leg to weight and angle to make a turn down the fall line while punching my ski pole forwards and twisting at the waist' the expert feels and looks simpler and calmer like he is 'just skiing.' After much practice, you just don't have to think about every skill all the time. Your analytic mind is out of the way, and yet you feel wholly engaged. In photography, skills are exposure, focus, planning the camera's settings, and of course composing the image. Probably the creation of meaningful images happens mostly  when skills are so strong that you don't need to always be thinking of them, and can instead focus on the imagery. Of course when something goes wrong, the highly skilled artist can step back from making images and analyze technical issues to adjust and revise the entire process.

The skills you are using to create a photo depend on what kinds of photography you create, which includes what kinds of meaning you wish to provoke audiences to consider. Photographers have spoken frequently about how they recognize quality in their own work, for example...

Ansel Adams emphasized the need to move beyond mere technique when he said: “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” He also centered in on realism, when he noted that photography is "a blazing poetry of the real" but hinted at emotion too: "A great photography is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed."

Alfred Eisenstadt connected skill transcendence with artistry: “I dream that someday the step between my mind and my finger will no longer be needed. And that simply by blinking my eyes, I shall make pictures. Then, I think, I shall really have become a photographer.”

Yousef Karsh emphasized the psychological impact of his portraiture: “Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.” and “Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can.”

Man Ray preferred meanings: “Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson linked reason, skill and emotion: “To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.”

Diane Arbus emphasized the importance of her subject matter when she said: “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them” and “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

Dorothea Lange gave some advice about where artistic meaning comes from: “Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion... the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.”

So I have a question for you: 

How do you recognize your own best work? What's different about it than artworks you've produced that just aren't quite so compelling? Does it look different than your mediocre or poor work? Does making your best work feel different than when you've made moderate work? Do your best images convey more or better meanings than otherwise? Which meanings? Why? What is your motivation to take pictures?

Use the comments to post your thoughts and ideas...

The Cascade

The Cascade, 12"x30" digital archival print [iso100, f22, 1.3s]. I posted it here so that you could see how I revised this image. I was dissatisfied with the overall composition: felt like the gnarled roots in the middle popped up out of nowhere, that the balance of the waterfall with the rock walls was too harsh, the focus a bit off, etc. So I went back to the scene, reshot everything, rebuilt the panorama and arrived at this image:

This has a better sense of depth, a calmer balance from left to right, and a few spots of new interest -- the bokeh at the top middle due to moisture in the air, and a couple zones where ferns have some motion blur due to a breeze during the long time exposures needed to make the photo. The focus is also crisper throughout. Printed at full size 300dpi this would be 12" tall and 33" wide.

The Cascade is a wonderful place here in North Adams, MA… just a short hike from the trailhead, and nestled deep in the woods. Whenever I go there it feels otherworldly and intense, waterfalls thundering in the early Spring.

Professional Photo Websites for Free

Digital art and digital photography can and should be placed online. Unfortunately professional design services and website management software could cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Ugh! But what if I told you that you didn’t need any special software, that making a website could be surprisingly easy, and free, or only ten dollars a year?

There’s two web services that I recommend you use for creating high quality websites that feature your work for free. The first is Weebly.com, the second is Wordpress.com. 

I’ve created an example Weebly website at this link:   http://gregscheckler.weebly.com

Weebly.com is shockingly easy to use, has some good clean templates, and nice photo gallery functions. You could definitely use it as a professional website if you keep the design straightforward and direct.

Currently my professional website is driven using Wordpress: http://www.gregscheckler.com I get about 55,000 visitors per year at this website – much broader exposure than any other marketing venue that I currently use. I use 1and1.net, at a cost of about $10 per year, to register and own the domain name gregscheckler.com, and then have the free Wordpress website (http://gregscheckler.wordpress.com) automatically routed to the name gregscheckler.com.   Wordpress has a lot more functions than Weebly, and you should try it someday, but it's interface isn't as intuitive as Weebly's. 

So here's what to do for today's online project... create a Weebly website:

1.       Go to Weebly.com and sign up for a free Weebly account.

2.       Choose a name and Create a free website.

a.       the website name is probably best if it includes your name, since after all your name as an artist is the main way that people recognize you.

3.       Select an exceptionally clean, simple Template

a.       don’t select complex, hyper, or overly colorful templates or themes… the purpose here is to keep your audience focused on you as an artist and your artworks.
b.    if you select a theme with a large header or photo, customize it w/your own art.
c.     don't select any of the add-ons or teasers (don't pay for anything).

4.       Know that in Weebly, everything works basically by dragging and dropping design elements into the website.

a.       Remember, the goal here is to feature your photography.

b.      Click on 'Save' and on ‘Publish’ frequently to save your work

5.       Create these pages:

a.       Homepage

b.      About the Artist

c.       Announcements (use the ‘create new blog’ function for this one)

d.      Photography

6.       Make the ‘Homepage’ your front page and put a picture or slideshow on it.

7.       Make ‘Announcements’ into the blog page; here you will post announcements such as when you are in a show, when you’ve taken an interesting photo, etc.

8.       For now, write a sentence or two about yourself on the About the Artist page.

9.       Place gallery of photos on the Photography page (select 5 to 10 of your best photos, upload them, and follow directions for making an album in Weebly via their ‘multimedia’ menu)

10.   Click 'Publish' again, and then Post a link to your new website in the comments section of today's post here at gregscheckler.blogspot.com

One of the best parts about Wordpress and Weebly is that if you decide you don’t like the website, you can either change the template or theme and try a different design without losing any of the content that you’ve posted, or, you can easily delete the whole thing. It doesn’t cost anything but a little time to set it up, so you’ve lost no money.

The project is finished once you've posted your website to the comments. The next part of today's post is for reading (not doing...) 

So then what do you do with your new website, if you choose to keep using it?

Here’s one thing that a website is really good for… testing your advertising. The fact is that advertising in magazines, newspapers etc. can cost a lot of money. Photographers sometimes make a lot of money w/a decent ad. But it’s hard to figure out what ads will work well. And if you’re like me then you don’t want to spend $1,000 on an ad that doesn’t work. So, how do you test the market before sinking thousands of dollars into advertising? You use a website.

For example, if you want to see what kinds of your photos people really respond to and might consider buying, link your website through to a printing service (such as Redbubble.com) so that there’s products such as matted or framed prints that people can buy. Then create some low-cost Google Adwords or Facebook Ads. In fact by clicking around Weebly you may have seen that it can automatically synch with Google and Facebook ads – but you’d use ads to get people to go visit your website (not to post ads on your own website). Simply read the directions for ads at Google or Facebook to set your own budget and to test what kinds of imagery and wording people click on when they see your art – it’d cost a couple hundred dollars to reach thousands of people who are likely interested in your work, which is far better than spending the same money buying an untested print ad distributed to a lot of people who may have no interest in your work. Once you’ve figured out what online ads are working well for you, and once you’ve made some money, then maybe it’s time to branch out and use your market testing to create some excellent print ads. I won’t fool you into thinking this is easy… it isn’t. It’s hard to come up with effective ads that sell the art. And you probably shouldn’t aggressively market your photos until you’re 100% confident that they are excellent quality or at least good enough that you’ll be proud to sell them. The main idea here is that you can use your website to test the markets for the artistic photos that you’ve created. In other words the well-designed, free or extremely low-cost website, becomes the centerpiece of your basic advertising campaign.

Copyright Basics

How do you protect your artwork from theft? How do you make sure that you get paid for it and someone else doesn’t? What do you do with your copyright once you have copyrighted art?

Digital photography, and other digital art forms, can be reproduced online and by most any computer millions of times, perfectly. This is both one of the great capacities of digital arts, and one of their drawbacks. Once digitized, your work can be published and seen with greater ease than any other art form. But once online, it could be difficult if not impossible to know if someone has copied your work and sold or repackaged it without your permission.

Advice#1: relax.

There’s so many millions of photographers in the world that until you’re famous or publishing a lot, it’s quite unlikely that someone will steal and then use your artwork. It’s probably more likely that you’ll be hit by lightning or win the lottery. That much said, a little information goes a long way. And the more professional you become, the more important it is to know these basics.

When is your work copyrighted?

                The moment you make the artwork it is copyrighted. It’s yours. Copyright is automatic.

Quite simply you don’t have to do anything for your work to be copyrighted. Nothing. Just do all the usual things such as backing up your files and you really don’t have to worry about it much. But if you ever need to prove your copyright in a court of law, then you need a public record of your copyright. This is extremely easy to do online. You can go to the government copyright website and for a fee you can submit pictures online for full registration. The website for all things copyright is http://www.copyright.gov There you’ll find full directions for copyright and the online center for copyright submissions at http://www.copyright.gov/eco/

But I hope you don’t copyright each photo one by one. You could do that, but it’d cost you $35 per registration – 20 of your best photos would cost $700. Ugh!

Here’s how to copyright a hundred photos for less than $100: batch together an entire body of artworks as a large project. So for example, you could take a set of 100 related photos, and compress them into one large ZIP file using a compressing utility like PKZip (http://www.pkware.com/software-pkzip/file-compression) PKZip is shareware – it has a free demo but then eventually you’d need to buy software (around $50) or find some other compressing utility. Then you upload the zip file of your entire set of photos to the US Government Copyright office, fill out a form online, and pay the online copyright fee ($35). In eight or nine months the government sends confirmation that your set of works is fully registered for copyright. Easy!! 

Of course if you really aren’t publishing your photos anywhere, then it’s unnecessary to register your copyright – everything’s copyrighted the moment you make it, automatically. You should really only bother to register and pay for copyright online if you’re going to be publishing the work widely where people might see it and steal it.

For a while it used to be that the artist had to sign the artwork and put the year and the copyright symbol on it, for example "Gregory Scheckler © 2010." Many artists still do this although it is no longer necessary, thank goodness, because such signatures and symbols are dreadfully ugly on top of carefully composed photos!

The issues surrounding theft of images. copyright, fair use and artworks does imply a few other things:

-          As an artist, as a professional, you should create your own artworks and not steal anyone else’s artworks. Not only is it best for your creativity to make your own work, it's best legally.

-          Give credit where credit is due, cite sources.

-          If you have a website you can decide how you post images, so they can be copied or so that they can’t (many pro photographers use a ‘Flash’ photo album that prevents copying of images).

As I said before theft of images is rare. But it does happen. It’s worst when it’s from artist to artist. For example, the painter Shephard Fairey is being sued by the Associate Press for stealing a photo of President Obama, which Fairey illegally used to create his famous ‘Hope’ poster. (click the link to get a series of articles about Fairey and the case at BoingBoing.net. I’m not a fan of Fairey’s work, but the issues are complex indeed). Artist Jeff Koons got skewered in the courts for having stole a photo of puppies which was a violation of the ‘fair use’ clause. Probably the main reason that both Fairey and Koons got sued is that they’re both rich. And they stole art from artists or organizations who had intended to profit from the artworks – in other words, varying levels of profit and serious money were involved in each case. After all ownership and money are at the core of copyright, because ... what do you do with your copyright?  

You sell it. 

To be more precise, you sell the versions of the artwork along with variations of the rights to copy the art. 
When you agree to publish your photos somewhere, you are allowing the publisher to buy the rights to use the photo. Doing so is often called 'licensing.' Artists often sell

-          Limited Non-Exclusive Reproduction Rights

-          Unlimited Non-Exclusive Reproduction Rights

-          Exclusive Reproduction Rights

So for example suppose you had a nice set of landscape photos that a publisher would like to use for a set of greeting cards. You would arrange and negotiate the kind of reproduction rights that meets your needs. In most cases, you would only sell limited, non-exclusive rights (sometimes called ‘one time publication rights’) for a simple fee – say $1,000 for the publisher to have the right to use five photos for the greeting cards for one run of the cards. Non-exclusive rights means that you can still sell the image to other venues, in galleries, etc. Exclusive rights means only the publisher can use the image – I’d encourage you to never sell exclusive rights. Well, unless you getting a ton of money for them. Similarly you would only sell unlimited rights for big money, because without limitations the publisher can make millions of copies of the artwork for any purpose. Every artist must of course decide what the pro’s and con’s of each situation are depending on the job and your own need for pay.

All of this brings up basic copyright and licensing Advice#2: if you have a contract and you don’t understand it, hire an arts lawyer to help you.

And advice #3: have a contract. 

You can find many examples of licensing and rights agreements online by googling ‘photograph license agreement’ Here's a random sampling: fairly straightforward by Andrew Stottsan; detailed by Carl Schneider; less formal by Marilyn Coey.  You might notice from these examples that when the photographer sells a photo, she is not necessarily selling the entire copyright. Also to illustrate what this looks like, here’s the actual text of a licensing contract from a small job I once did for a record company for an album cover. Note how despite the apparent global terms, this contract specifies ‘non-exclusive’ except for my agreement not to sell the image for any other sound recordings. This is a standard boilerplate contract:

=============== start contract ===============================

From: (Company address removed)

June 30, 2009

To: Gregory Scheckler

(address removed)

RE: (product removed) / Gregory Scheckler Artwork Agreement (1510.09-ART)

Dear Gregory,

The following, when signed by you and by us ("company"), will confirm our agreement

with you:

1. You hereby represent and warrant that you are the sole author and owner of ONE (1)

piece of art, a copy of which is attached to this agreement as Exhibit "A" and by this reference made

a part of this agreement (the "Material"). You hereby grant to COMPANY a worldwide, perpetual,

irrevocable license to exploit the Material in packaging, promotion, publicity, marketing materials,

and merchandising including merchandise for sale for the COMPANY artist professionally

known as “ARTIST” (“Artist”), including the non-exclusive right to reproduce, distribute,

display publicly, and make derivative works of, the Material, and including the non-exclusive

worldwide publication rights and the non-exclusive rights to use the Material in connection with the

Artist for any purpose and in any medium, now known or devised in the future, perpetually and

throughout the world. As between you and COMPANY, you shall be the owner of the copyright in the

Material, subject to COMPANY's non-exclusive rights to use the Material as described herein and the

restrictions on your use of the Material as described herein, and provided that notwithstanding the

foregoing COMPANY shall be the owner of the compilation copyright in the Artist's records and

related materials embodying the Material. You hereby irrevocably authorize, empower, and appoint

COMPANY your true and lawful attorney (a) to initiate and compromise any valid claim or action

against infringers of COMPANY's rights with respect to the Material; and (b) to execute in your name

any and all documents and/or instruments necessary or desirable to accomplish the foregoing.

COMPANYwill give you ten (10) days notice before signing any such document in your name.

COMPANY may dispense with that waiting period when necessary, in COMPANY's judgment, to

protect or enforce its rights, but COMPANY will notify you in each instance when it has done so. The

power of attorney granted under this paragraph 1 is coupled with an interest and is irrevocable.

2. As full consideration for all rights granted herein in and to the Material and your

representations and warranties contained herein, COMPANY will pay you (inclusive of any sales, use

or other applicable taxes)

(a)  (fee stated here)

3. You hereby represent and warrant that you have not and will not use and/or license

or otherwise dispose of rights in the Material to any other third party in connection with the

exploitation of, the marketing advertising and promotion of sound recordings.

4. You warrant and represent that (a) you have the right and power to enter into and

fully perform this agreement; (b) no use of the Material by COMPANY or its licensees for any

purpose authorized hereunder will violate any law or infringe any rights of others; (c) you have not

done or permitted and will not do or permit any act or thing which shall or may impair in any

manner the rights herein granted; (d) there is no litigation, dispute, claim or action in connection

with the Material; (e) COMPANY will not be required to make any payments in connection with the

Material or its use, except as provided in paragraph 2 above; and (f) you will execute such further

instruments as COMPANY may require to effectuate the purpose and intent of this agreement. You

will indemnify COMPANY and any licensee of COMPANY against all claims, damages, liabilities, and

expenses (including reasonable counsel fees and legal expenses) arising out of any breach of your

representations and warranties.

5. This agreement contains the entire understanding of the parties and will be governed

by the laws of the State of California applicable to contracts entered into in California and entirely

performed there. No change of this agreement will be binding upon COMPANY unless made by an

instrument signed by an authorized signatory of COMPANY. Company may assign its rights under

this agreement in whole or in part. You will perform under this agreement as an independent

contractor and not as Company's agent or employee.

Exhibit A (artwork attached)

======================= (end contract) ==============================

More difficult than any of these legal issues, of course, is finding people and publishers who will pay for your artwork. For that you’ll need to contact galleries, publishers, artists and editors for advice, basic business connections, etc. Probably the easiest way to get a lot of addresses and phone numbers in one place is to get a hold of the most recent version of Photographer’s Market. Then start sending out your best photos or other artworks, and keep at it. Once you have 6,000 rejections in a row you can give up. Until then, keep seeking paid work.

Lighting Diagrams and Recipes

This new blog post looks to contain hundreds of ideas about lighting for the staged photo:

20 Resources That Will Get You Lit

I'm not much of a portraitist, but if you'd like to learn more about studio lighting for portraits, Stefan Tell has some very clear blog posts about portrait lighting. 

Curves

Bonus blog post...

Basically, we haven't discussed it much yet but the Curves adjustment tool is a great way to adjust tone and color (and therefore exposure) ranges throughout a photo all in one convenient place. Very useful. See Photoshop menu Image --> Adjustments --> Curves or for similar processes in GIMP try menu Colors --> Curves.

There's an extremely clear and understandable tutorial about how to use Curves over at Tutorial9.net

Curves can be overdone with great ease... but they can also be a convenient way to tweak a lot of color and value settings all at once. And if you want very subtle control using layers options like 'lighten' or 'darken' or 'luminosity' or 'hue' with some transparencies too, try using Curves in a new Layer, or Adjustment Layer. (actually the same is true with any of the processing controls we've tried throughout this class).

Visual example of the differences... using curves to fix the tonal range in the shadows and midtones...

Snapshot versus Fine Art, Part 2

Part 2:  Intersections with Photojournalism

Similar to the snapshot is a strictly photojournalistic approach, in that snapshots and photojournalism tend to rely on unretouched photography. But photojournalism unlike the snapshot can be quite intentional.

The photojournalist's documentary photo is intended as evidence to tell or support the news. With photojournalism, realism is necessary and the photographer aims to tell a story that’s consistent with what’s really happening in the world. For that reason, retouching of the image is forbidden. In contrast, the fine art photo includes much of the artist creating the image in such a way as to draw out expressions, images, and content that the artist finds most important – not merely what’s there to be photographed, but rather, what’s there to be richly emphasized, even altered if needed. The fine art photo could be (but doesn’t need to be) heavily altered and retouched, whereas the photojournalistic photo must not be retouched, and the snapshot photo too is normally little retouched. But unlike the documentary photo's need for realism, the snapshot is not retouched for a different reason... it’s just too casual to bother with much redesigning and retouching.

Our expectations are that fine art photos don’t have to be but could be retouched, redesigned, and altered for aesthetic or symbolic effect, whereas the snapshot probably isn’t altered and the photojournalist or documentary photo had better not be. We expect some photos to be truthful representations, even evidence in a court of law, whereas we expect other photos to be expressive or even wholly fictional.

But at a certain level no photo is entirely truthful, since the photographer must always adapt camera settings, lens settings, and composing to the imagery that she intends to record, thus altering what can be recorded every step of the way.

On the intersections and problems among the differences between careful editorial photojournalism, strange retouching issues, truthfulness versus misleads in photography, there is no better writer than Errol Morris (who made the academy-award winning documentary, The Fog of War). I recommend reading these two sets of his online essays:

It Was All Started by a Mouse (Part 1, and Part 2) – detailing the problems of how to title and caption a ‘truthful’ photojournalism.

Photography As a Weapon (linked here at the NYTimes Blogs) – regarding the unusual retouching and captioning that happens in photos such as the missiles shown here, which is widely recognized as a fake, although it was published by numerous newspapers:

[photo credit: New York Times / Errol Morris]

All of this begs the question... can you really trust any photo? Responding to this question requires being very familiar with the intentions of the photographer, the apparent uses of the camera and its settings, and looking for tell-tale clues in the photo that something may have been manipulated. How do you recognize the fakes? In addition to Morris’s articles, here’s a great sidebar discussion at Scientific American, Digital Forensics: 5 Ways to Spot a Fake Photo.

If you’d like much more detailed information about photo fakes and image forensics, then you should check out the research and writings of Hany Farid, who leads the Image Science Group at Dartmouth.

Sometimes, of course, finding the fakery is delightfully easy. You'll see lots of humorous examples (and some fakes of fakes), at PhotoshopDisasters.  Enjoy!