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How To Strike Up A Lively Conversation With Your Images

Decades ago, my friend Jeff Schewe asked me, “We both know how to do a lot of things to our images but how do you decide what to do to your images?” My response surprised him, “Talk with them.” Let me expand on that for you, as I did for him so many years ago.

We often deepen our relationship with other people by having a conversation with them. We can do the same with images. Even though they don’t speak, we can speak for them. There are many ways to do this.

Write

Before I go into more detail, let me offer you a crucial piece of advice. Make sure you write this stuff down as you go. You won’t be able to remember everything you come up with and the act of writing will allow you to come back to it and pick up where you left off, help you find more insights, forge deeper connections, and increase the chances that you’ll act on it.  All of these benefits happen more strongly when you write by hand but that’s slower and not as easily retrieved, so more often than not, I use the notes app on my phone, which can be accessed from any of my devices. I recommend you try many ways of taking notes to determine which ways work better for you.

Conversations start with questions. Ask a lot of questions. Then answer them as if you were the image. Write that down.

Ask Questions

Conversations start with questions. Ask a lot of questions. Ask way more questions than you ever thought to ask. I usually set my goal at 100. Why? The goal of this exercise is to get beyond the obvious and the conventional. Sure, ask those questions too but go well beyond them. Ask the kinds of “crazy” questions kids ask. (What does this image eat?) Pretend you’re someone or something else and ask the questions he/she/they/it might ask. (If you’re the frame … Who put these things in me? And why did they put me here?) Imagine you are the work of art and ask the questions it would ask if it could. (What do I have to do to stay out of that closet?) The skill of asking more questions gets easier if you simply rephrase the same question in different ways to get different perspectives. Change the w word – who, what, when, why, where, how. (What is this about? How does it go about it? Who goes there?) Reverse questions; ask the opposite question. (Why is it lower? Why isn’t it lower? Why isn’t it higher?) Or, add not to any question. (Is it dark? Is it not dark?) Once you have your list of questions scan it for patterns. What kinds of questions did you ask? What did you ask questions about most frequently? What questions stand out as most interesting? Asking questions may be all you need to do to find useful insights. Answers are optional. I recommend hypothesizing what they are and to look for opportunities to answer a single question in more than one way. Remember, write it down. You can revisit your list later and you’ll most likely have a different perspective with different outcomes. You can also repurpose many of the questions in your list to use with other images. This is a skill that gets easier over time. Make asking a lot of questions a habit.

Imagine that you’re the image.

If I were you, what would I do? 

If I were you, what would I feel?

If I were you, what would I want?

If I were you, what would I think?

(You can expand these questions by adding “about ___” at the end and filling in the blank.)

Walk a mile in your mind with your images. Just treating your images as if they are sentient creatures will instantly make you feel more connected to them, which will show in your final results, and people who see your images will be drawn closer to them because of that quality.

I recommend you do this more than once at different times. Your moods, influences, and perspectives are constantly shifting, sometimes only a little, sometimes a lot. In fact, practicing these internal conversations is one way of proactively influencing your internal flow. (And yes, we all have a mind-body connection.)

Associate

Let’s talk about you. When you look at an image … 

What emotions do you feel? What’s the mix?

How does your body feel when you look at it? Where?

What memories does it bring up? What’s the connection?

What other images do you think are related to it? Why?

What other things does it remind you of? 

What single words and phrases would you use to describe it? 

Make a list of nouns. What is it of?

Make a list of verbs. What is it doing?

Make a list of adjectives. What qualities do the things and actions possess?

In these kinds of … call them exercises or studies or research sessions … it’s supremely important not to judge or censor yourself. This will stunt the growth of this process, your growth. Write it all down. Nothing is too ridiculous. In fact, if you don’t let a good dose of that irrational stuff out you won’t find as much magic. For the moment, stop making sense. Make sensitivity. Let your inner child out to play with wild abandon. You can clean up your room later.

Ask why five times.

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Two Generations Talk : Paul & John Paul Caponigro – Online MMW

Receive this ebook free.       26 images – 26 quotes

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Recorded May 10, 2022 – 1 PM EST

 

Two Generations In Conversation, an afternoon with father Paul Caponigro and son John Paul Caponigro cohosted by Maine Media Workshops. During this captivating hour, the Caponigros, after a brief viewing of images, will share their thoughts about the soul of photography, the joys of printing, and how the two are related. Then we’ll finish our program with a lively question and answer session open to all participants.

Enjoy this shorter video as either an appetizer or a dessert.

Three Simple Lines / Natalie Goldberg & John Paul Caponigro

 

 

Tuesday, May 24 – 6:00 to 7:00 pm MT – Online At The Santa Fe Workshops

Creativity Continues at Santa Fe Workshops when author Natalie Goldberg joins John Paul Caponigro for an intriguing conversation about how words make images and images make words. Natalie sets the tone and the stage for the evening by reading from her newest book, Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage Into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku. Then John Paul and Natalie discuss the larger themes of how writing and perception are deeply intertwined and how writing can be both inspiring and useful for visual artists. The program finishes with a lively question and answer session — first between Natalie and John Paul and then open to all participants.

Natalie Goldberg, author of 16 books, including the bestselling Writing Down The Bones, a delightfully companionable exploration of writing as a practice of mindfulness. In Three Simple Lines, she highlights the history of haiku poetry, dating back to the seventeenth century; shows why masters such as Basho and Issa are so revered; discovers Chiyo-ni, an important woman haiku master; and provides insight into writing and reading haiku. A fellow seeker who travels to Japan to explore the birthplace of haiku, Goldberg revels in everything she encounters, including food and family, painting and fashion, frogs, and ponds. She also experiences and allows readers to share in the spontaneous and profound moments of enlightenment and awakening that haiku promises.

 

below – a comparison between Basho’s most famous haiku in Japanese and English

 

Recommended Reading On Haiku

Writing & Enjoying Haiku – Jane Reichold
If you only read one book on haiku, start here.
This is the book I occassionally give to my students.

Haiku – The Sacred Art – Margaret D McGee
An accessible western perspective on haiku as a spiritual practice

The Haiku Seasons – William R Higginson
Focuses on the importance of seasons in haiku
Written by one of the west’s great haiku scholars

Haiku: A Poet’s Guide
Paints a broad picture of the diverse practices within haiku
A classic by one of the west’s great scholars

The Haiku Handbook – William R Higginson and Penny Harter
A concise history
A classic by one of the west’s great scholars

A History Of Haiku / Vol 1 – R H Blyth
A History Of Haiku / Vol 2 – R H Blyth
An expansive history
A classic by one of the west’s great scholars

Ikigai And Other Japanese Words To Live By
Details Japanese words/concepts important to their culture’s philosophy/aesthetic
Not a book on haiku but includes haiku
Includes 28 photographs by Michael Kenna

Find Natalie Golberg’s new book Three Simple Lines here.

How To Double Process One Raw File For Optimum Shadow & Highlight Detail

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Colin Smith shows you how to bring out maximum detail in highlights and shadows editing in Photoshop and Lightroom.
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How To Get More Control Over Photoshop’s Content-Ware Fill

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Colin Smith shows you a lesser-known way to easily remove distractions from photos by getting a little more control of Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop.
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How To Avoid Making Viewers Squint At Your Images To See Their Highlights

Highlights are crucial to most images, with a few notable exceptions. If highlights are too dull, the whole image feels flat and suppressed. So, many people try to make them as bright as possible without losing detail. (This is a classic practice that’s part of a style, but some photographers prefer even fuller highlights. Edward Weston and Minor White were two such photographers.) In an attempt to make their images glow more, some people go so far as to make images overly bright, washing out midtone contrast, saturation, and clipping highlights, removing detail at the very top of the tonal scale and producing flat white areas. This is a graphic style more than a photographic style – or at best lo-fi rather than hi-fi solution that often requires additional compromises to image quality to feel convincing. Plus, it renders the frame no longer rectangular.


Don't take ETTR to an extreme.


Do make your exposures light without clipping.


Process your files darker.


If you've got clipping in both shadows and highlights, use HDR bracketing.

Exposure

Good highlight detail starts with exposure. Get it. You have to have it to optimize it. This is one of the two reasons to monitor your histograms during exposure; the other is shadow detail. As long as you don’t “hit the wall” on the right-hand side of the histogram, your file will be fine. Remember, the histogram on your camera is based on the JPEG your camera would produce, while the as yet unrendered Raw file has even more data in the highlights. Don’t take ETTR (expose to the right) to an extreme. At some point, data will be clipped, and just before the point data starts to clip, it will start to lose gradation and shift in color.


Basic Panel


Parametric Curve and Point Curve

Processing

You’ll get more contrast by having something to contrast with; in this case, highlights contrast with shadows. Set them first. The darker shadows are, the more contrast you’ll get. (Losing shadow detail is avoided in a classic style but may be done intentionally for more graphic, gothic, or grunge styles.) Similarly, if you weigh midtones lower, highlights will appear brighter. Every range of tones (shadows, midtones, and highlights) can have its own kind of contrast. To produce more separation in highlights, focus on setting the point where they transition into midtones as low as possible without making the image look too dark. What’s too dark? Subjective. Trust your gut and do it your way.


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