sketches Archives - John Paul Caponigro

Making Virtual Contact Sheets

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Using Smart Collections in Lightroom speeds up the process of gathering and revisiting these images. I use Smart Collections―1 Star, 2 Stars, 3 Stars, 4 Stars, 5 Stars, and 3+ Stars. These Smart Collections are critical for focusing and accelerating my visual thought process, helping me to make the most of a location in a short amount of time. I can see what’s working and what’s not, correct mistakes, figure out what it’s going to take to up my game, identify missing shots, and seek out the ones that will bring a set of images together. Smart Collections serve as a chronology of all the ranked images I’ve made. They create a unique kind of journal. Most importantly, they start the process of assembling bodies of work.

I use Collections for assembling like images to develop projects, typically grouping selected images by location or theme. Unlike Smart Collections, I find Collections’ support for a manual sort order essential. Manual sort orders enable me to create image pairs and sequences, continuities that bind groups of images together into bodies of work. (For more on Continuity, Bodies of Work, and Developing Personal Projects, download my free PDFs at Creativity / Storytelling resources here.

Unlike when I used film, where I had to make physical contact sheets to select images, I rarely print my virtual contact sheets. It’s curious to call them by the traditional name “contact sheets,” because they’re not made by contacting film to paper. But, they’re no less essential to my creative process; if anything, they’re more important. Virtual Contact Sheets allow me to edit images at higher levels of thinking. I even use them to select and sequence images for slideshows, exhibits, and books.

I save virtual contact sheets, and sometimes I even save different states of a single contact sheet. I take screenshots of Lightroom’s display of my curated Collections. So many people requested to see them that I started sharing them on my blog. Having to make remarks about my virtual contact sheets helped me obtain an even better understanding of my creative process and my results.

See more Contact Sheets here.

Read about Seth Resnick’s Contact Sheets on B&H.

11 Recent Landscape Drawings

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(Drawn on the iPad with Adobe Ideas.)
Here’s a collection of recent landscape sketches.
Drawing does many things for me. Drawing helps me find, refine, and expand ideas. Because of drawing I’m never at a loss for visual ideas – and consequently I become more discriminating about the ones I devote significant time to. Drawing helps me identify essential structures in existing images. After I draw them, (no longer hung up on the details) I understand them better and can better apply what I’ve learned to other images. Drawing helps sensitize me to fundamental compositional patterns. After I draw them, I recognize them more quickly.
For so many reasons drawing is an immense pleasure – and that’s why I keep doing it.
View more sketches from this series here.
See more drawings here.

New Book – Process

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My new book Process details the many aspects of my creative process.
I hope you’ll find it to be useful as well as interesting.
“An artist’s creations come out of far more than the activities in their primary medium. How artist’s get there is, perhaps, just as important as where they arrive. This is the creative process rather than the creative product. That’s what this book is about.
John Paul Caponigro details many aspects of his creative process – color, composition, drawing, iphoneography, writing and more. He shows how each discipline and different modes of operating with them contribute to the completion of finished works of art. The resulting synergy is stimulating, enriching, and enlivening. Instead of a technical book that shows you how to write, draw, and photograph, this books shows you how seemingly separate disciplines and creations combine dynamically to form a single creative process that results in a life’s work.
Above all, this book reveals that the creative process is a process of exploration, a journey of discovery that offers many insights along the way and never ends. You’ll be inspired to try these activities yourself, practicing them in your own ways for your own purposes, as you progress on your own creative journey.”
Preview Process here.
Preview all of my books here.

Smithsonian Features My Process Sketches They've Collected

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The National Museum of American History’s Blog features preliminary sketches, both physical and digital, that detail my creative process while developing images for my series Correspondence.
Line drawings, pastels, and digital sketches were all used to explore possibilities before committing to the final composited results.
“… by exposing the time and planning the photographer took to create his final print, these sketches highlight the fact that today’s works of art, though digital, nevertheless do not simply fall from the sky. In a world that is increasingly instant, this documentation of a digital art photographer’s process reminds us of the importance of slowing down and going through experimental drafts before committing to a final decision, a timely reminder for artists and patrons of the arts alike.
Despite the time-saving advantages technology affords us, or perhaps because of them, it’s safe to say we’ll always want to know where things come from and how they are made. An idea’s journey from conception to realization will always be something we want to know, and as Caponigro’s attention to process shows us, even the digital world strives to leave its trace …”
Read more on the NMAH blog here.