Sean Duggan Blog

Look Beyond the Obvious

Water Fountain [Canon 5D]
Chimayo, New Mexico  April 30, 2009
(click in the image for a larger version)

On the fourth day of the New Mexico Creative Eye class, after spending the first half of the day in the digital lab working on our images, the class took an afternoon trip to Chimayo. This is a town that is famous for it's small church, the Santurario de Chimayo. The church is renowned for the healing properties of the soil at the site.

Though the church itself is very picturesque in the classic Southwestern New Mexico style, as is the small graveyard nearby, the most interesting image I made that day was of a simple water fountain and its shadow on the wall of the church courtyard. This may be due to the fact that I have visited Chimayo several times in the past and was already primed to look beyond the obvious, but it brings to mind something I have noticed about how we relate photographically to the places we visit.

When we travel to scenic and well known locations, a common expectation is that the most significant images we will make there will be of the "main attractions" (for want of a better word). But I have found that images of simple details, or unexpected ordinary scenes, are more likely to be the visually meaningful and significant photographs made at such locations. The key is to be open to this idea and to practice looking beyond the obvious. By all means go ahead and take the shot of The Church. or The Ruins, or whatever happens to be the primary draw of a given location. You'll see more clearly once you have that out of your system and be more open to finding new and different images where you least expect them.

Coming up June 7 — 13 is my Real World Digital Photography 1 Workshop at the Maine Media Workshops. There's still some room in this class. Click the title for more info.

After that I have a Creative Digital Darkoom Workshop in Connecticut (early July), A Real World Digital Photography II class in Maine (early October), and a Photoshop Creative Collage class in southern New Mexico (early November).

On the Edge at Ghost Ranch

Photographing Chimney Rock  [Canon 5D]
April 28, 2009  Ghost Ranch, New Mexico
(click in the image for a larger version)

On the second day of the New Mexico Creative Eye workshop, the class spent most of the day exploring the area around Abiquiu, with our final stop being Ghost Ranch. This where Georgia O'Keefe lived for many years and created some of her most famous paintings. Today, Ghost Ranch is an education and retreat center. The photo above shows Mark, one of the class participants, perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking Chimney Rock. The hike from the parking lot to here took about and hour and a half and the view from the top was splendid.

There's still room in my upcoming Maine workshop (June 7 — 13). Other classes are coming soon in Connecticut (early July) and southern New Mexico (early November).

Dan Burkholder

Dan Burkholder  [Canon 5D]
January 29, 2009  (click in the image for a larger version)

In late January I was in south Florida at FOTOfusion, the annual festival of photography and digital imaging that is hosted by the Palm Beach Photographic Centre . One of the things that I enjoy most about coming here every year to be a presenter is the chance to see friends and colleagues from all over the country and one of the people whom I always look forward to spending time with is my friend Dan Burkholder.

Dan is a noted fine art photographer and master platinum printer. He was also a pioneer of the digital contact printing technique, creating his first digital negatives in 1992. He wrote the first book on this topic, Making Digital Negatives for Contact Printing, and it is still considered to be the definitive work on this subject. On top of all this, he is a really great guy, with a warm and generous spirit and a wonderful sense of humor. I'm always laughing a lot whenever I spend time with Dan!

In 2006, Dan's experiments with the High Dynamic Range (HDR) digital imaging technique coincided with several visits to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans. The result of these explorations is an amazing new book, The Color of Loss: An Intimate Portrait of New Orleans after Katrina . This collection of 55 painterly images shows a haunting personal side to the destruction wrought by Katrina through the portraits of ravaged home interiors still filled with the belongings of the residents who fled the flood waters let loose by the breached levees.

In the Foreword, author, poet and New Orleans resident Andrei Codrescu writes:

""The wonder of these photographs is that they look like paintings, yet the objects depicted within them are not idealized. The dying domestic objects of the people to whom these interiors belong are no longer of this world. They have been captured on their journey to becoming indistinct trash. At the moment of their capture, they still looked like what they used to be, but moments after they were photographed, they no longer were anything. Their last breath of life is in these photographs; their only other existence is in the memories of their owners."

Related Links:
Web gallery of the "Color of Loss" photographs
Autographed copies of the book 
See a short video about the project
Dan's web site

River of Shadows

The Horse in Motion ("Sallie Gardner"), June 1878 by Eadweard Muybridge
(click in the image for a larger version)

We were snowed in yesterday with over a foot of snow that blocked our road and left us without power for most of the day. It was a good opportunity to step away from the scheduled rush of an ordinary work day, spend some time with the family and enjoy the winter wonderland all around us.  It was also a good day for reading and by the soft, snow-reflected window light aumented by a few candles, I took the time to finish a very good book: River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Penguin, 2004) by Rebecca Solnit. This is a fascinating exploration of Muybridge's time in California and his ground breaking images that captured the unseen realm of motion by freezing high-speed movement photographically for the first time. Solnit's writing touches on the history of photography and California with San Francisco, Yosemite, Leland Stanford's Palo Alto Ranch and the stark lava beds of the Modoc Indian War providing the backdrop for Muybridge's pioneering work in California. In addition to Muybridge, railroad baron and former governor Leland Stanford also figures prominently in the book and Solnit advances the idea that Muybridge's motion studies and Stanford's creation of the university that bears his name laid the groundwork for the development of both motion pictures and the thriving technological engine of of Silicon Valley. In addition to this rich historical tapestry, Solnit's deft and intellectually agile prose also explores the concept of Time, our relationship to it and how that relationship was forever changed in the 19th century by the introduction of rail travel, the telegraph, and standardized time which set in motion "the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life". If you're a lover of photography, history and excellent, insightful writing, then I highly recommend this very satisfying book.

At the SF MOMA...

In an intriguing coincidence, I found myself with a free afternoon in San Francisco last week and was pleased to find a fascinating photography exhibition at the SF MOMA that included some of Muybridge's pioneering motion studies. The exhibit is called Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900 and it presents a collection of vintage images that show how the emerging technology of photography was used by scientists and photographic pioneers to reveal glimpses of far off galaxies, the terrain inside the human body,  microscopic worlds, the intricacies of motion, magnetic and electrical energy and other phenomena that previously were unseen, and therefore unknown, to human comprehension (the image at right is by Étienne-Léopold Trouvelot and shows a photographic impression of a direct electric spark). The exhibit runs through January 4, 2009 and is worth a look if you find youself in that area of San Francisco.

The Gears

The Gears [ZeroImage 6x9 Pinhole camera]
October 10, 2008  Snake River Canyon, Southwest Idaho
(click in the image for a larger version)

This is a new image from my ongoing series Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin. It was made nearly two months ago when my brother and I made a trip to southwest Idaho. You can see a photo of the camera in action taking this image in a previous post (the gears are in place in that photo, but the camera is blocking the view of them). As I mentioned in that other post, I had first envisioned this location, an area where I had spent a fair amount of time in my youth,  as a "stage set" for one of my Artifacts photographs a few months before I knew that a family trip would take me here. It was creatively quite satisfying to be able to make the pilgrimage to this special place and finally create the image that I had imagined (though I envisioned this particular view of the landscape, I had not decided on the gears as the main players in the tableau until shortly before leaving for Idaho) .

Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin 2009 calendar

View the Artifacts gallery (though this image has not yet been added)

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Coming January & February in Sacramento, California:

Photoshop for Photographers I: The Basics
January 17 - 18, 2009
More information about this class

Photoshop for Photographers II: Beyond the Basics
February 7 - 8, 2009
More information about this class

Coming this February in southern New Mexico

The Art of the Photographic Collage
Mesilla Digital Imaging Workshops – Mesilla, New Mexico
February 19 - 22, 2009
More information about this class

And Now for Something Completely Different...

Arranging the Lighthouse  [Canon 5D]
Marshall Point, Maine  August 13, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

A bit of silliness from the field trip my class took to Port Clyde and the Marshall Point Lighthouse. Of course, this image is straight out of a "Fun with Photography" book, but having a good time is definitely one of the qualities you should work towards in your photography!

It's Friday now and as usual, the week has gone by in a blur and a busy schedule and less than reliable wireless connections have made updating the blog more of a challenge than usual. Class ends tomorrow and then I have a day and a half of down time until my "Real World Digital Photography" class starts on Sunday night.

Onward!

30 Seconds with 25 Year Old Film

Waikiki 19  [ZeroImage Pinhole Camera]
Honolulu, Hawai'i  April 16, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

Last year I traded some expired film with photographer Brett Harrington. Although most of my images are created with a digital SLR, I still use medium format film in a variety of pinhole cameras, as well as plastic "toy cameras" such as the Diana and the Holga.

So, I sent Brett three rolls of medium format black and white infrared film that had expired in the early 1990s and he sent me three rolls of medium format Kodacolor II that had expired in early 1983, making them 25 years out of date!

I hung onto these three rolls for over a year. Most of the time they stayed in my film cabinet, but they also accompanied me on trips to Hawaii, Maine (twice), New Mexico, San Francisco, and other locations in California. It was not until a second trip to Hawaii a month ago, however, that I finally used the film. I chose to expose it in my ZeroImage pinhole camera since that wonderfully low-tech, low-fidelity method of image making seemed a good fit for film that was a quarter century past its sell by date. When film is long expired, it tends to "slow" down quite a bit, meaning it loses some of its sensitivity to light. Plus, I had no idea how it had been stored during the passing years. To compensate for this expected loss in sensitivity, I rated the normally 100 ISO film at 25. This loss of film speed was another factor that made me shoot the rolls in Hawaii: lots of bright daylight. But even with plenty of light, my shortest exposure times in the bright sun were still 30 seconds. Under overcast skies, or for images of darker subjects, the exposure times stretched out to 45 seconds to over a minute.

There was a 1-hour photo lab a couple of blocks from the beach, so I was able to shoot one roll and then inspect the negatives to see how my exposure calculations were faring. I was pleased to see that they were right on and I was getting good density in the negs. This freed me up to use the remaining two rolls with confidence that my exposure times were good. Given the dominance of digital in the consumer photography market today, I was somewhat surprised to find that 1-hour lab, but I'm glad it was there!

Over the course of three days I shot the three rolls of 25 year old film on and around Waikiki Beach and I've been very pleased with the results. As you can see from the image above, the "ancient" film yielded very good photographs. The shots taken in the shade or under overcast skies had a distinct cyan/blue color cast, but the ones taken in full, bright sunlight required remarkably little in the way of Photoshop color correction. And there are some images where the slight color cast is actually an interesting part of the photo. I will be posting a few of the shots here in the next several days and the entire short series of about twenty images will appear in the Galleries section of my web site sometime time in the next few weeks.

Now, these images may raise the question of why I shoot with pinhole cameras, or why I would even waste my time on long expired film that many people would just toss out. Both fair questions, which I will address here in the near future. But the (very) short answer is...the Possibilities.

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Upcoming Workshops

My next major workshop takes place in mid-August along the New England coast at the world renown Maine Photographic Workshops. Real World Digital Photography I is the perfect class if you want to get a jump start on truly understanding the controls on your digital SLR, learning good exposure technique, shooting in raw, special exposure situations and making the most of your exposures back in the digital darkroom using Lightroom and Photoshop CS3. Click the class title to learn more about this class. A second level version of this class will be offered at the Maine Photographic Workshops Oct 5-11.

Also coming up this September in northern California:

Creative Camera Raw
Sept 20, 21 Berkeley, California

Secrets of the Mask: Selections & Masking in Photoshop CS3
Sept. 26, 27  Santa Cruz, California

The Clocks

The Clocks  [pinhole photograph]
January 31, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

This was taken in a snow storm a little over a week ago (see the previous post). It is part of an on-going series of pinhole photographs I am working on called Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin. I do not have the entire series (15 images at the moment) posted in one place, but you can view several of them in the Pinhole section of this blog. The previous six posts are all from this series, too. I am in the midst of redesigning my main web site and the full series will be posted there once I get that done (hopefully in another week).

The Journey of the Clocks
I purchased these clocks at a garage sale in Maine in late June 2007 and I first photographed them for this series on July 1st at the base of a cliff. They were on rocks and the incoming tide swirled around them.

But I was never really pleased with those photos because I could not get the camera close enough to the clocks. One of the pleasures and compositional strengths of a wide angle pinhole camera is the fact that you can place objects very close to the pinhole to create some interesting foreground/background relationships. In the photos by the sea the clocks were just a bit too far away for my tastes.

So, I brought them back home to California (along with the old letters and the ledger) and put them on a shelf in my studio and waited until the muse would speak to me again. In the week of snow we had at the end of January, the muse rang me up and the clocks went for another journey into the forest around my home. Close to water once again, but this time frozen water in the form of snow. And I finally got the image that I had in my mind's eye when I first worked with them along the rocky Maine coast. Of course, I didn't imagine the snowy setting, but this is the general positioning of the clocks that I was thinking of. The wintry landscape is just an unexpected bonus.

Sometimes, you have to wait for a good photo. Even it is one that you set up, like this arranged still life in nature. For this image, I waited 7 months, but it paid off.

Upcoming Creative Collage Workshop

If you live in California near Monterey, Santa Cruz, or the San Francisco Bay Area, then you may be interested in a new weekend class that has just been added to my schedule. I'll be teaching a 2-day version of my Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop workshop at the Monterey Adult School on March 1st and 2nd.

For a complete listing of other upcoming workshops, click on over to the Workshops Page at my web site.

Pinhole Photo Setup

January 31, 2008 [Canon 5D]
(click in the image to see it larger)

We had a lot of new snow up in the Sierra foothills last week. Of course, this is quite relative and the 18 to 20 inches that we received is nothing compared to what they get in some parts of the country. Still, it was enough to make things interesting and for me it served as a creative muse to get out my ZeroImage 6x9 pinhole camera and work on the Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin series (see the previous 5 posts for images from this series).

In the image above you see the camera setup for photographing two clocks half buried in the snow. It was snowing heavily during this photo session and you can see the layer of snow that has accumulated on top of the camera at left. After an hour and a half out in the snow and freezing temperatures, it was a great relief to come in and warm up in front of a blazing fire.

Yours truly...suffering for my art.

The negatives from this session should be back from the lab sometime this week, but it will take me a couple of weeks before I get time to work with the images. The final version will find its way here eventually.

Upcoming Creative Collage Workshops

If you live in California near Monterey, Santa Cruz, or the San Francisco Bay Area, then you may be interested in a new weekend class that has just been added to my schedule. I'll be teaching a 2-day version of my Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop workshop at the Monterey Adult School on March 1st and 2nd.

For a more in-depth exploration of this subject, with plenty of time to work on your own images, I have a 5-day version of this same workshop that I'll be teaching June 2 - 6 at the excellent Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging on the central California coast near San Luis Obispo.  These classes tend to fill fast, especially at that time of year, so if you are interested in participating, click the class title for a link to the workshop's page at the Lepp Institute site. The computer lab at the Lepp Institute is really first rate, with fast Windows computers kitted out with dual monitors and Canon 5100 printers (as well as larger format printers adjacent to the main lab area). Tiered stadium seating ensures that everyone has a clear view of the main screen. I've taught there several times over the past five years and I always look forward to going back. It is truly one of the best digital lab facilities I've taught at.

For a complete listing of other upcoming workshops, click on over to the Workshops Page at my web site.

The Creative Digital Darkroom

This is the cover of the new book that Katrin Eismann and I have written. We have been working on this for quite a while and it feels great to finally see the finished product. Well, almost, that is. The book is at the printer now and any time now (perhaps even as I type) ink will be hitting the paper and the sheets will be rolling off the press. I cannot say exactly when it will be on store shelves, but based on what information I have been able to gather, it should be by Dec. 18th or 19th. Here's a link to the book's page at Amazon.

Katrin and I have been teaching digital imaging to photographers for quite a while and in this book our goal is to present a clear guide for working in the digital darkroom that explains not only the How and the When, but also the Why. The book covers Photoshop CS3 and as well as some of the development module capabilities of Photoshop Lightroom. But in addition to teaching what I like to call the Photoshop "dance steps", we also go into some of the more conceptual reasons behind why you might choose to lighten or darken specific areas of an image, and how to identify the basic visual components in an image in order to decide how those areas might be treated in order to enhance the whole photograph.

Katrin and I were both photographers long before there was Photoshop and our respect for the history of photography and the integrity of the photographic image as a creative medium is a big part of this book. We're also honored that Stephen Johnson, a pioneer in the field of large format digital fine art photography, has contributed his thoughts and perspective in the Foreword for the book.

Here's a list of the chapters:

1.  Silver to Silicon

2.  Digital Nuts and Bolts

3.  Scan, Develop and Organize

4.  File Preparation

5.  Tone and Contrast

6.  Dodging, Burning and Exposure Control

7.  Color Correction

8.  Creative Color

9.  Creative Enhancements

10. Enhancing Focus

By the time the book hits the store shelves, a companion web site will be posted where you can download most of the tutorial images featured in the book.

*Upcoming Workshops *

My next workshop will be a 5-day class called  Digital Black and White at the Lepp Institute along the beautiful central California coast February 18-22. Click the link for a course description.