“Learn how to start with a everyday good image and then make it look like a prize winning photo. This will all be done with some tips and techniques found in Adobe Photoshop CS6. This project combines Adobe Camera Raw, Smart Objects, Adaptive Wide Angle, and finally Puppet Warp to enhance the image.”
View more Photoshop videos here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe describes the transformative power of refreshing your mind for 10 minutes a day, simply by being mindful and experiencing the present moment.
Read more on meditation here.
Find recommended reading on meditation here.
In this episode of Real Exposures, David Brommer and I speak about a variety of topics including the value of photography workshops, harnessing creativity, and integrating spirituality in your work.
View more B&H Real Exposures videos here and here.
View my presentations Process & Game Changers in the B&H Event Space here.
Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on exploration.
“Not all who wander are lost.” – J R R Tolkien
“I’m not lost. I’m exploring.” – Jana Stanfield
“It’s important for the explorer to be willing to be led astray.” – Roger von Oech
“In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.” – Ansel Adams
“You can accelerate your development by giving yourself a fresh set of challenges, or the same set viewed from a different angle, every day. Explore a different path – if it’s a dead end, explore another.” – Paul Foxton
“An artist has to be a little like Lewis and Clark, always exploring in new, uncharted directions.” – C W Mundy
“All art is a kind of exploring. To discover and reveal is the way every artist sets about his business.” – Robert Flaherty
“An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.” – Henri Matisse
“I’m attracted to images that come from a personal exploration of a subject matter. When they have a personal stamp to them, then I think it becomes identifiable.” – Leonard Nimoy
“Acting is constant exploration.” – Paul Builfoyle
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” – E L Doctorow
“Meaning is not thought up and then written down. The act of writing is an act of thought. All writing is experimental in the beginning. It is an attempt to solve a problem, to find a meaning, to discover its own way towards a meaning.” – Donald Murray
“I do not explain, I explore.” – Marshal McLuhan
“This I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.” – John Steinbeck
“That is the exploration that awaits you! Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.” – Leonard Nimoy
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T S Eliot
Find more Creativity Quotes here.
Discover more quotes daily in my Twitter and Facebook streams.
Inhalation I, Nantucket, Massachusetts, 1998
I find this image supremely challenging – because of other people’s reactions to it.
The first time I exhibited this image, over the space of a weekend, in front of this image, four women shared stories of personal loss – a friend, a son, a husband, a father. Over the years, this has happened more than sixteen times. Years later, in front of this image, in the same location in the same room, I found myself discussing the death of my first wife with one of the first women to share her own story of personal loss. I could pass this off as a coincidence, but that would be irrational. While it sheds a little light on this mystery, Jung’s concept of synchronicity furthers rather than solves it. I simply can’t explain this. This challenges me – and others. Though largely formed of conjecture, the discussions are interesting. Specific combinations of qualities, universal color codes, sacred geometry, archetypes, intuition, precognition … theories multiply. The mystery remains.
When I made this image, I wasn’t aware of the themes of death and loss weighing on my mind or heart. I was totally absorbed in making the image. Now, it’s almost impossible for me not to think of it, though I can still see much more in this image.
What people share about works of art may change their own and other people’s relationships to them. What the artist shares about their relationships to the works of art they create often changes the relationships their viewers strike up with them. This process is often encouraged and sought out. It can work the other way too. What people share about an artist’s works of art may change the artist’s relationship with his or her own work. While this type of process is less typical, it raises an interesting set of questions to consider, “When, where, and in what ways is encouraging this exchange most beneficial?”
The process of communicating the experiences stimulated by works of art and the results of those interactions, which continue spreading in many ways, often producing both intended and unintended consequences, is part of the life of a work of art. Though not entirely in the control of the artist, it is not separate from the work of art. Works of art connect us in unique ways.
It’s interesting that the amount of energy imbued in a work of art is not limited to the amount of energy invested by the artist; more is added through others’ experiences of them. How strongly a work of art does this is one criterion, among many, for evaluating its quality and success.
How many ways can you encourage meaningful discussion about your images?
How many ways can you seek useful feedback about your images?
How many ways can you give yourself useful feedback about your images?
Julieanne Kost showcases the most exciting new features from Photoshop CS6 and Camera Raw.
Find more B&H Event Space videos here.
View more Photoshop videos here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
In this B&H Event Space seminar, David Brommer covers the basic concepts of composition as established by the masters of the Renaissance. Commencing with the classic rule of thirds and leaping into theories of color and balance, David touches upon a range of topics, including image construction, positive and negative space, as well as other advanced composition.
Find more B&H Event Space videos here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
I had a marvelous time in Uyuni, Bolivia with Seth Resnick and Eric Meola after our recent Atacama desert adventure in Argentina. (Find out about our Dec 6-14, 2013 Atacama workshop here.)
These three new images are the first of many. They’re quite similar to several continuing bodies of work – Reflection, Exhalation, and Refraction – and they are also distinctly different. (Preview the Blurb books for each series here.) They are also related to another series currently in development that I’ll share soon. Which series are they a part of? Are they a part of many series?Are they a separate series?
Two previously released images are from the same location, but they don’t have the light effects. Are they a part of the same series?
Why don’t I just title the images with a place and date? Because these images are statements about internal truths rather than external facts.
(You can read more about How I Title My Images here.)
(Read my advice on How To Title Your Images here.)
It would be easy to say, “Use any title you want. You’re the artist!” While it’s harder to do, I think that titles work best when they honor the content of the work and communicate that effectively to others.
It takes time to work these things out. There will be more new images. And, my understanding of this work will grow. How long this process may continue is unknown. But I need to title these images – soon.
It’s Untitled for now. But, not for long.
What would you title these images?
Find out more about this image here.
Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on experimentation.
“There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge… observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.” – Denis Diderot
“Observation is a passive science, experimentation an active science.” – Claude Bernard
“The true method of knowledge is experiment.” — William Blake
‘Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.’ — Marcus Aurelius
“Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.” – Steve Albini
“It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.” – Galileo Galilei
“If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.” — Spencer Silver
‘Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.’ — M. C. Escher
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into 24 hours.” — Thomas Alva Edison
‘When you’re experimenting you have to try so many things before you choose what you want, and you may go days getting nothing but exhaustion.’ — Fred Astaire
“It is only through failure and through experiment that we learn and grow.” — Isaac Stern
“The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.” – Charles F. Kettering
“No experiment is ever a complete failure. It can always be used as a bad example.” – Paul Dickson
“There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.” – Richard Buckminster Fuller
“There are no failures – just experiences and your reactions to them.” – Tom Krause
“The true worth of an experimenter consists in his pursuing not only what he seeks in his experiment, but also what he did not seek.” – Claude Bernard
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” – Henry David Thoreau
“The combination of experience and experimentation will ultimately yield a personal sound.” – Mark White
“I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.” – Madonna
“To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.”- George Bernard Shaw
Find more Creativity Quotes here.
Discover more quotes daily in my Twitter and Facebook streams.
Nocturne / Correspondence XII, Newport, Rhode Island, 1999
While studying painting in college, I was given the assignment of painting night. After dark, I took my paint and canvas out into the night – and couldn’t see either. So I found a portable light source, which made them so bright that I couldn’t see beyond them. Next, I used a camera to make photographs to paint from and colors became distorted, and moving objects blurred or disappeared altogether. I ultimately ended up painting from memory, drawing on all of my accumulated memories from these attempts to make the final images.
Much later, working with digital imagery, I returned to this challenge. Wanting to avoid the distortions I had encountered before, I took a clue from Hollywood, shooting by day and color-adjusting those images to look like night. Realizing that the hard multi-colored points of light rendered by the camera eye did not look like what I saw with my naked I, I began digitally drawing stars as I saw them.
I found other people’s reactions to these images fascinating. Knowing that long exposures were necessary to make photographs in low light, photographers would ask me, “How did you get these exposures?” Familiar with the relative relationship of specific stars in the sky, astronomers would ask me, “Where did you find these constellations?” What each viewer knew changed the way they saw, the questions they asked, and their final reaction.
In order to see more, to see more deeply, and to see in more ways, I find myself constantly challenging what I think I know and striving to learn more in as many ways as I can think of.
How many ways does what you know help you make stronger images?
How many ways does what you know get in the way of your making stronger images?
How many ways can you increase the positive and reduce the negative impacts of what you know on your image-making?