Are You Expressing Your Creativity or Just Pressing Buttons? | Adam Marelli

[Music] so I'd like to thank everybody this is my second car there's my third talk here at B&H Deborah said the number of you had requested that I come back so I'd like to thank anyone who asked for a repeat and for everybody who didn't don't worry we've got the youtube comment thread you can leave all the remarks there you guys know how this goes I don't want anybody to let me down so today we're gonna talk about photography and creativity and one of them is really easy to get into the other one can be a little bit harder it's a little harder to find so getting into photography it's pretty simple right you just you go outside you go to the counter and you say like I want a camera what do you guys have I think they've got like you know they've got a few options for you out there the challenge is though when you want to get into creativity because if you ask the same guy at the counter you know which aisle has the creativity right it'd be great if you said like it's downstairs it's behind the max screens we got a whole shelf creativity we've got little boxes of it you know for like Instagram size creativity and then we got really big boxes for like MoMA level creativity which you can't find these things you know they're a bunch of essentials that as photographers we kind of wish we could buy and you just love to have this whole aisle stocked with stuff right you got your creativity while you're there you get like a little bottle of patience right don't worry it's like TSA compliant you can fly with it it works really well for landscape photography and for listening to photo lectures you put two drops in your tongue one hour just like evaporates like that you're good next to that you're going to need like a little bit of success so it comes in three different sizes you got small tubes medium tubes and large tubes depending on how you know whether you want to be known in your hometown and you want to be like internationally successful be great if you could just go buy that that would be awesome the last bit and the hardest bit to find is the little pouches of self-awareness and I find that this is one of the biggest challenges for photographers is trying to figure out what are you doing what is it like what are you up to why do you have a camera like why are you taking pictures and why would somebody else be interested in it and that bit of self-awareness is something that we're gonna try and nurture though it's really hard to talk about so you know when it comes to the arena of creativity and especially as it applies to art there are a lot of people say like you shouldn't talk about it right like you can't talk about art you can't put like words to these types of ideas and emotions it is it's really challenging I was thinking about this from a different angle right imagine if other industries said the same thing right could you imagine Albert Einstein sitting there and saying you know you know we looked at the universe it's complicated so we just decided we're gonna leave it we're not even gonna try and talk about it I mean to me the idea is like absurd just because something's complicated or hard to talk about doesn't mean that you can't try and put words to it and that's what we're gonna do today is to try and understand and put words to some of the more difficult concepts in creativity and how it relates to photography so let's start with the easy part right the cameras photography right a long time ago it started like this somebody had asked the question about large format cameras this camera was 900 pounds right large format photography which I learned on it was like something you'd find on a pirate ship it was like somebody took a treasure chest and put it on top of a three-legged pirate and that was your camera it's absurdly heavy it's difficult to carry around I sort of had the idea looking at this picture that if these guys didn't get the shot they could probably take whatever they were photographing and put it in the camera just take it home and try it again the next day it was huge so things you know over the course of time they got smaller and they got easier to use which is why you know when it gets to when it gets to photography today if you take a bad picture today you can't really look at the camera you can't look at the camera and say like there's something wrong with it like high ISO it's like kind of mediocre like when they come out with the next model my picture will be better everything's gotten really really good things started to shrink down you know in the next say 150 years ago when photography started right somewhere around like the middle the 1900s things start to get smaller alright so I'll set my father's here today alright so he's a baby boomer how many baby boomers here not a few of you here right so you guys remember the Cold War I was sort of like an infant when that stuff happened but the Cold War was it was great for photography because in order to make pictures in a Cobra you had to use a little teeny tiny camera no these spy cameras so things got like they got smaller and smaller and it allowed for a certain level of portability now you didn't need a railroad track to move around your camera you had something you could just slip into your pocket and it was great you know those sort of scary times the Iron Curtain Cold War surveillance state all of this stuff it didn't do too much for global security but it did a whole lot for us as photographers because our gear all of a sudden for anybody who's got cameras I see like kind of on your necks it's easy to count around you can put it in your pocket right so as we move forward I'll date myself a little bit I was born in 1980 so this was a scary time but for totally different reasons and bad hair terrible colors awful design and I think like a lot of people who were born in the 80s if you learn photography you learned on film right so who learned photo on film like pre digital right most people in the room that's how I learned right so how do you how does it go with film right you start in black and white right you kind of had to like earn your pictures you couldn't just pick up a camera and just start firing there were things that like you actually had to get good at and there were all kinds of surprises it came along the way you know some like put a roll of film in the camera go out and shoot your think like okay roll 36 I'm good two hours later you discover twirled 24 and you're out of pictures you know and then all the interesting things happen you know these are the types of surprises that you get in film it happened to you I'm sure right yeah and then you'd get your your negatives back it wasn't like you take a picture and look at a digital screen and like all of a sudden like bang you got a picture no you've gotta wait process the film get it back you get a contact sheet it's black you know all the pictures everything is underexposed right anybody do this I've done this before I take in a whole roll of pictures all the sprockets didn't catch a shot a whole roll nothing get contacts back it looks like little blurry triangles and squares I can't figure out if I photographed like a beach umbrella or if it was like the flipper of the Loch Ness monster right like this was like this was the realm of film photography which anyone who's learned now on digital you don't have this you take a picture look fail next you go to the next one right then we get to color you graduate so we've gone big cameras small cameras black-and-white color called a chrome right life as we actually see it kind of all right does anybody remember Kodachrome film right so it works really well in a few lights and for everything else it was like they decided like Willy Wonka was going to do the color profiling for people so everybody's skin tone looks sort of weird if he's shot inside you know you remember like you look at old family pictures from the 80s and I remember this like you know grandma's hair looks like kind of purple you know you look at your cousin Jimmy he looks like he's got jaundice so you know like everything's like all over the place so it was like almost as we saw it you know but it allowed us to get sort of one step closer to getting good pictures now this was the golden era for professional photographers anybody know why these guys were the only ones who can actually get a picture that looked like what you saw you know National Geographic was like in its heyday everyone else took travel pictures they didn't look like Nat Geo right it was something that was really unique to professionals they had an absolute lock on the market if you talked to any professional photographer who worked in the 60s the 70s the 80s this was like they had salary jobs you know people bought pictures from them it was really it was amazing you know and I remember the first time that I met a professional photographer and it was kind of a weird experience because when I thought about it the first professional photographer that I met was the guy who did the school portraits hey you remember this guy comes in with a bunch of backgrounds looked like Star Wars everybody in your 5th class looks like they were an extra from Return of the Jedi you know they tell you like it's picture day make sure you do your hair wear some outfit that you're bound to regret for the rest of your life because this is going to be the only evidence you were ever in the fifth grade you know anybody spot the guy in the middle it's Brad Pitt even Brad Pitt had a terrible school picture right and this is like this was the introduction to you know to professional photography what made it even more confusing is when the guy went to take your picture right you remember this you'd like he'd sit on the stool he's like turn your back this way shoulder this way head forward no Kate lean a little bit more it feels totally natural you know that's the picture you feel like the hood ornament on a rolls-royce when he's making the shot but somehow it turned into a picture and it turned into a picture that your parents would look at it and say you know what I need 175 identical versions in 19 different sizes so I can give them to everyone I know you know we can thank Facebook for eliminating this experience but I saw that and I thought like this professional photography thing seems kind of like you know it seems kind of interesting now over time technology catches up and we get digital right I was not an early adapter of digital didn't interest me at all because when you took pictures of people portraits looked like that you know one megabyte picture you know if you if you if you printed the picture like the size of a quarter it looked pretty good if you try to make an actual photograph it looked like Mario it was really just not impressive but there was this critical mass that actually developed where technology move forward we've got the internet Facebook and iPhone and then things were like they were never the same this completely changed the landscape you know I think back to this sort of the Cold War thing where you think like remember all their like all the government agencies that wanted to spy on their populations remember this right like East Germany you remember the stories about the Stasi and things they had neighbors reporting on neighbors all they needed was this it was like they just got together and they're like you know what guys it turns out running a government takes a lot of time we're busy with other stuff here's what we're gonna do we're gonna put a camera in your phone and what we'd like you to do is take pictures of yourself with your friends everything you do even stuff you eat place as you go and if you could just just tie it just let us know like exactly where you are and a map and then put it together in a huge database so that we can just like search through it and well remember make sure that your your mug shots or profile pictures we want to call them are kept up to date so we can like keep track of everybody and this is what happened I think with digital photography but where it ended up and where everyone whose phones we asked to be turned off at the beginning of the presentation is that the pictures that come out of them they are so good that you don't need you really there's no way to blame the camera anymore there's really no excuse so in the process of photo and creativity we can eliminate the camera as the problem the problem is sort of the guy behind the camera this is where the issue is this is what we want to work on all right so most people given the opportunity to have a talk they give you they give you like the highlight reel right they tell you about the projects that went well books that are selling all of the things that went really well when when they were making their work I'm gonna do the opposite because I learned more from my mistakes and my guess is you guys will learn more from my mistakes too so I'm gonna tell you about the worst critique that I ever got on my work and I've been my I've had my work critiqued since I was like around 10 I started an art the way some people like they give you a violin this is where I started I started early so I've had people in an art context looking at my work and giving feedback so this is nothing really new but I decided that it'd be interesting to get to get a critique from someone who was just in the just in the photo world so it was a you know it's a little different has everyone had their work critiqued before portfolio review who's done a portfolio review not every who's never had their work critiques who's never gone through this experience don't be shy it's not like a thing you don't like have to do it's the idea of sitting down with a perfect stranger to criticize you for like an hour and like they're gonna you're gonna pay them for it it's sort of weird that's why it's it's kind of like it's a bit like therapy right you know you bring in your work you lay it out on the table they ask you like so tell me about your problems and how are you feeling what was your family life like you know this is like how critiques go you know what's a lies like what's the difference between art school and therapy anybody know the cost no no they're both blindingly expensive it's not the cost the difference is in therapy if you get emotional and use a tissue you throw it in the garbage and you never think about it again in art school if you get emotional and use a tissue you throw in the garbage and then you take the garbage and put it in the center of the room and he discuss the garbage for another hour and that's contemporary art so I signed up for a critique with a guy named Alex Webb alex is a pretty well-known photographer he's a magnum photographer does a lot of street stuff a lot of book work and it was a really weird critique because when it started out he came you know looked at the work and he said you know this work kind of reminds me of sebastian Salgado but in color I thought wow not a bad start Salgado is a good photographer world famous but the thing was that wasn't a compliment Alex went on to say that when he looks at a Salgado book after about three pages he's infinitely bored I thought okay so the critique has just gone off the rails so I asked him you got any suggestions what would you do from this point because that's generally what you're going to critique for you're looking for feedback something that you can't see that somebody else can see he said I don't know maybe people you photograph what if you've followed them home and like we saw more of their like home life and what they did in their free time I thought it was a really strange suggestion one because his work isn't anything like that almost everybody in Alex's work is just kind of impersonal and - I didn't really have any interest in like going home with people to dinner that just seemed like a it's sort of like a weird activity I figured I just I'd shoot him that was enough and you know they could have their personal lives to themselves so he said um send me an email I'll send you some suggestions three emails later no suggestions but I learned three very important things in that critique that are going to relate to how we look at creativity today right so here's what here's what I got Alex never really gave me a criterion like I never really understood going into the critique different from an art guy to a photo guy what was he looking for I had no idea and then I looked at myself and realized well what could I have done differently I went into the critique and said can I have some feedback well if you ask a very vague question you might get a very vague answer so I realized that like I didn't really have a criterion myself what was I looking for what kind of feedback did I want to hear and then the sort of the last realization was that if you're gonna give feedback to people you've got to give them some sort of parameter they've got to understand like what you judging them on and like what kind of criterion you apply you know to your own pictures so fast forward a few years and I've started running photography workshops not because I wanted to give critiques to people but because people asked to visit the places where I was photographing and then my workshop seemed like a logical step this way people could come into the pictures and I started to get questions that people would ask and regardless of whether they knew each other people seem to be asking the same questions what's wrong with my picture right this is an informal way of essentially saying help I don't even know where to begin just help in some capacity look at my picture tell me what am i doing right what am i doing wrong so I kind of interpret that as just a starting point for paint I need feedback everything's falling apart here that's one the second one is when I looked at their pictures they would say like what are you looking for in my pictures you know you said they're like I can see you're sitting there and I love your beard and scratch your head sometimes you rub your eyes like what do these all mean you know what is what's the interpretation of that and then the last one is what do I look for when I shoot so what is it that I'm doing when I pick up a camera so this book picture this that I that I'm putting together has really come out of those questions in a really organic way because people would come on workshops and they'd say like is there anything I can read before the workshop and I didn't really have anything to recommend because most of the books that I learned on there like this they're art books they weren't really written for photographers so I wanted to write like a really concise version that I could give to somebody and say like look just read this we'll just use this as like a starting point but I wasn't sure I'd never written a book before I didn't know if anyone was actually going to read it because what do you do with manuals buy a camera open the box take the manual it's in 19 different languages you don't care about reading it about it in Korean you just throw the thing to the side you never read them manual that's what manuals are for therefore the recycling bin so I didn't really think that like a book was going to be a good approach and I took a lesson from some of the workshop participants that I had and one of the things that I found was a lot of them were they came from successful backgrounds but in other industries and they would say something to me like they'd ask a question like can you tell me something about perspective me said like okay well the beginning of the Renaissance blah blah blah they're like yeah hold on can I get the short version of that like can we just not go all the way back and touch just give me like that just give me that like the executive summary of that I just want like a little bit so I can go take my pictures and that's the way that I designed the book and I designed the talk today is that there's like a short version and a long version we're going to go through the short version today and I'm going to explain it with pictures but this way like when you open the book you can just read across the top flip the page short version flip the page short version so that if you just want to like get in and out quickly you're good you don't need to read everything you know I think the advantage of asking somebody for book recommendations if you've got 10 people who've read 10 books right 100 books you ask them what's the best book they each give you one book it's now you have 10 books you don't have to read a hundred to get down to it so I sort of look at the idea of putting something into a book is to save you time and effort so that you don't have to read all the stuff that I felt like I had to read in order to put this info together that makes sense so one major criticism that I see on photo blogs websites here and other talks is that there are things that you can't teach all right that you can't teach creativity you can't teach genius there are certain things like genius if you can't teach it and we're not going to try to teach it but there are loads of other parts that you can teach so I'm just gonna make a few distinctions as like a bit of a framework just so you get where I'm coming from and kind of my perspective you don't have to agree with it it's a belief system that I have doesn't require you believing it to get any useful information that out of it I just want to kind of give you the angle that I'm coming from so that you get where you know where the where the info originated so first one I said we do this like a road map right I picked a globe I figure it's easy enough to remember there are three major categories that we're going to look at we're going to look at point of view form and content right this is the basic map of what we're looking at I think the illustration of a globe kind of works because when you think about your own work you're the globe right so if you travel through form and you go out of form you're going to end up in point of view you travel around point of view you end up back and form and then you go back through content your world of photography is like an expanding globe and the more you add to it the bigger the globe gets but it's still your world it's always going to be like your world and your perspective so the reason I put two of these in green and one in white is that the green ones I can't teach you I can facilitate it like we can discuss it I can encourage it but I cannot teach you it absolutely requires your participant participation in order for it to develop the form form you can teach right so there are some things that are going to be very straightforward and like teachable and other things that they're going to be questions that I'm going to put to you and you guys are going to answer and the nice thing about teaching with questions rather than answers is the same question everyone's gonna have a different take on it so we're not going to get 100 photographs that all look exactly the same now the next one is the other criticism you hear there's no formula for a good picture this is correct there is no formula for a good picture it's not like making recipes the way that I see this is a little bit more like ingredients you would like to understand the ingredients but the ingredient is not a guarantee of a successful picture all right what do I mean by that take cinnamon for example cinnamon is an ingredient everybody knows cinnamon cinnamon is not a dish unto itself you can't serve someone a bowl of cinnamon unless you want to make a youtube video of them choking on it you think you've seen some of this so the ingredients that go into a picture they tend to be kind of common if you look at ten of your favorite photographs and you look at the ingredients that are in them there tend to be shared elements so the way in which you put them together the recipe the formula whatever you want to call that's up to you but we're gonna discuss what the ingredients are the next bit is and this is a classic one I feel like you'd read on common threads all the time especially when they talk about composition is the idea of there being no rules in art or in photography there are no rules but then they say you've got to know the rules to break the rules well if there are no rules how you knowing what it's just like it's a weird circular conversation that doesn't really go anywhere so I don't look at this stuff like rules I'm not gonna present a bunch of rules where you do this you do this you do this these are like tools and the thing with the tool right that's a carpenter's hammer and a blacksmith shop actually right you can use that to hit the back end of a chisel that's like what a tool that's what that tool does you could also use that to extract a tooth it will also do that but I'd rather go to the guy who uses it on a chisel and not the guy who calls himself a dentist with that thing so what you're trying to figure out is what are the tools which ones do I want to use and when do you want to use them you know I did a video called the photographers toolbox I went up a while ago and the idea is that like I've got in my studio number of different tools in the wall I don't use every tool on everything I make you know this you're not going to use everything all the time there are certain ones you're going to use at certain times and that's what you'd like to be able to distinguish is first like what's the tool how do you use it when do I want to use it and the last one is why do I want to use it that becomes kind of the most important one so for all the I know we have a lot of people watching online on the live stream or it's going to be on YouTube for all the short attention span listeners viewers out there I'm gonna give you the list up front right 23 things I think about when I when I take a photograph it's bad right you can screen capture this take a photo of it whatever take a picture you like you're good you can wrap up if all this makes sense you can head out you're free to go enjoy the rest of the afternoon it's a nice day outside like don't worry about it that's on the house I'm gonna explain this and it's broken up into the sections right remember the green sections of yours these are the ones that you guys really have to participate in the white section of stuff that I can teach so at first section one through five this is all point of view and the thing is we don't really have a point of view when we start photography you know usually what we have are interests you have things you're into you're into like old cars right you're into Cuban smoking cigars you're into photographing chunks of ice on the beach of Iceland I mean like whatever it is that you're into it's not really a point of view and that is perfectly normal I've never seen someone get into photography and have like a fully formed point of view at the outset it generally have stuff they're into they're into genres I'm in the street photo or like I'm into landscape or I don't like portraits I don't really like working with people you have the things you know and you didn't things you know that you don't like and that's about as far as you can go but what we're gonna try to do because I can't really I can't teach this exactly is I'm gonna run you through the questions and I'm gonna explain how I passed through them I'll give you my example and you see if it applies to how you know to how you might work you know so this pic I made this picture in Venice at Tremonti nan feely they're gondola makers in Venice a lot of people go to Venice to take pictures of gondolas iconic whatever my interest is I'm interested in like where they made where does that culture come from like I want to go into the shop and see the guys and meet the guys who make it so that I'm looking at the culture like from the inside out that's to me that's how point-of-view develops because one of the other concerns that people have is like they want to develop style you know anybody feel like they could improve their style anybody everybody styles perfectly or fun and one on this guy come on if you have style without point of view it's just a gimmick it's just like a lighting setup it's just kind of a way that does something but if it doesn't make sense within your whole point of view the whole thing it's just kind of a gimmick you know you want to be able to have a point of view that other people understand so that they get some sort of framework as to how you approach taking pictures you know for me a lot of it is cultural I am interested in both the visible and the invisible things that shape culture that's what I'm into and when you look at a picture of mine you can usually think about that and say like how does that idea relate and you'll be able to connect it to the picture so the interests here the questions we're going to run through first one what do you want to see what do you wanna take pictures off what is it that gets you to pick up a camera and go take a picture what compels you to do this you know my reason was that so I was born in a place that is you know it's not exactly a World Heritage Center you know UNESCO does not have this listed on the global map you may have heard of it's called New Jersey right so it's a place that has it's not really known for culture but this really developed in me this interest of the world outside of where I lived I saw things on television and books and magazines and the world I saw there was really different than the world that I had outside of the front door of my house so to me that was like it was a motivation to go explore other things I think it's one of the primary reasons why I'm so interested in you know families who've done things for like 16 generations I mean we hardly live in a country that goes back 16 generations forget about like you know a family that's been doing things since like yeah I mean and go back 2,000 years I mean it's to me that's like it's an unbelievably interesting concept and I think that's where I got it from so the second question you ask yourself where's it hiding where are your interests you know sometimes I'll have people they'll describe an interest to me right they'll say like you know I'm like I'm I'm really into wildlife I really enjoy like being out in nature and we're having this conversation in Manhattan I'm thinking like dude you're the wrong spot you got to go out to where your interests are so I know for me I started buying plane tickets got out of university any extra cash I would have I'd buy a plane ticket didn't matter where it was random plane tickets cheapest plane tickets I just go to places just to go see like what was out there and one trip that I had which was kind of influential this this overlay there was a woman who asked about large-format I had two realizations on a trip to Guatemala I took a break from work and friend of mine was travelling in Central America and I was supposed to meet him in Costa Rica I sent him an email and he said like I'm in Antigua and I was like I don't really want to go to the Caribbean he goes no no no Antigua Guatemala I'm in a city alright I'll come down and like check that place out so I'll packed up my stuff went down to Guatemala didn't know anything about the place went to Antigua and to college so the picture on the left that's in the city the picture on the right is to call you know go out to the ruins and the temples and I to realizations out there that came through some of the people I met one when I was in - call so you're in the jungle and I'm carrying around a backpack with a Hasselblad and three lenses and a tripod alright so I don't know 20 some-odd maybe 30 pounds worth of junk and I met a girl while I was going through the temples and she looked at me she goes why is your camera so big so I don't know I shoot medium format she's like why don't you shoot a smaller camera aren't you hot yeah isn't that heavy yeah she's asked me all these like really basic questions like I never really considered I just shot medium format I like the quality and you know it stuck with me it was a really weird question it just totally caught me off guard and I realized maybe she's right maybe being in like a hundred percent humidity rainforest with a backpack a tripod in a medium format cameras not exactly the best way to go about this so eventually I scaled down you know now I shoot like a system it's shoot something small because I don't like carrying a lot of stuff the other thing was that I met a lot of interesting people on that trip you know I met a guy who opened a cigar shop you know he was telling us how he had been held up at gunpoint three times he's run us through his life story and it was absolutely fascinating another guy who worked for the EPA you know for the Environmental Protection Agency helping the Guatemalans work on their sewage system when you're trying to figure out why everybody's getting sick you said it's easy the sewage goes back into the water supply you drink water with sewage in it you get sick it's very basic but you know he was working on rebuilding the infrastructure and the thing that I understood when I got back to New York is you look in the pictures there's snow people the experience that I actually had in the place wasn't visible in the pictures there was this weird disconnect so the things that I was interested in like they weren't getting in the photos and it's one of the reasons why when I work with people I will ask you what are you interested in because very often the things that are most compelling to you aren't yet visible in the work and we've got to bridge that gap so that the things that you're into are in the pictures so other people can be into them too next question you want to ask yourself is is it unique and this is one I didn't really think about until much later you know this is we're on a workshop here this is yeah so here I hear a cow he's a fifth generation blacksmith in Japan he makes knives swords scissors his apprentice who's in the black sitting next to him and this is a workshop so I had photographed at Suzuki it's the workshop named for a number of years and then I brought a group of people in there and I stumbled upon this because people had asked to go into the pictures and I realized like this is what I would have loved to do with National Geographic as a kid you look at a picture you like I want to go to the picture on page 87 that's what I want to do I want to click I want to go in there I want to meet those people like how do I get there so that's kind of how I developed to open up the experience so that other people could really enjoy it because that aspect of it was unique a lot of these places you can't go to you call them up bring them up I'd like to take pictures it's like it's know if it's a private space they won't let you in so when you think about what your interest is where it is how you find it and what's unique about it you know a lot of people how many people in this room are less than ten years old none right you're all adults adults have experience I don't know how many people come to photography they're like I'm too old I started way too late you know I just I'm past the mark it's never gonna happen you know I used to be I used to be in one profession now I'm switching to this and they just want to take all their life experience and just throw it to the side what you'd like to do is take the life experience that you have which you've earned and bring it into the photography the things that are unique about you the things that you already have professional expertise and knowledge whether it's in the approach or in the material you don't want to throw it out you know I left art school I worked as a professional builder for over a decade that building experience allows me to work inside of spaces that other people are not allowed in because I'm used to working in shops I'm used to working on job sites I'm used to working in dangerous work environments where craftsmen like they don't mind having me poke around so as you look at your own work you know don't take landscape pictures because somebody else takes pictures of mountains you know bring something that you have from your years of experience that's unique into the work because it's something that very few other people will have in the way that you can combine it this will help you emerge and have a point of view and a point of view is not an opinion it's not like a judgment on something it's just kind of a a lens in which other people are going to view your work so one thing that's a tremendous interest to me is the master apprentice system I went through like an informal version of it with some of the teachers that I had the master builder that I worked under in New York we had this relationship and it was completely different than like a university education it wasn't like there was a program that you learn and you go through and you take the prerequisites and then you take the rest of the classes and not like this it's totally different and the thing that surprised me was that across the globe there are commonalities to the master apprentice system it's almost like a culture on its own you know a lot of people think about culture and they start thinking about like nations it's like this is Chinese culture this is Italian culture this is Brazilian culture you can split culture up that way but you can also split it up you say like this is political culture or this is military culture or this is craftsman culture you know this is kind of the way that I approach it and this is the type of work that I make so as you think through your interest and your experience just see how that emerges into a point of view and when you get it my suggestion is the best way to test a point of view explain it to someone who doesn't know anything about photography if they can get it in like three sentences you're you've got it if they're kind of confused scratching their head like not figure or not you've got to rework if the aim is to make this like a simple introduction to your work so when people look at your pictures they get a sense as to what they're looking at misuk colton here it's like 30 degrees outside and 27 degrees in here at least everybody brought their jackets so for point of view you can think about without a camera in hand form this is the stuff that you think about like when you're actually shooting and this is these are the things that you can teach so I'm gonna run through some examples of it not all of them but just enough to give you an idea as to how all of these questions relate so first one short version what's the subject when you take a picture think if you start out with some grapes you mash it down you're not trying to make grape juice you try to make like wine or grappa you want to like distill and experience down to something very concentrated from a big raw product if you shoot it as a big raw product it's just like going out with a video camera and just like panning all over making a million pictures and then picking out which ones that work this is a terrible way to shoot it it's tiring uses up a ton of storage and it's really not very fun what you're trying to do is distill this down so it this is like a fundamental question you will ask yourself every time you put the camera up to your face really what is my subject right so what's the subject here it's a light there's architecture in it but it's the light right the reason that I say like that it's the light is because it's the dominant feature inside of the scene and it connects to the concept so these are two spaces in southern Italy in a town called matera where I've been making some work these spaces were locked up for 60 years no one was even in them for 60 years to my understanding nobody other than the people that I brought in there nobody's photographed inside these spaces these spaces are like untouched and they're gonna change in a year from now they're probably going to be renovated you're never going to see them so there's a connection between the light is the subject but also the conceptual idea like these things are coming back to life the light is literally coming back into them for the first time the boards were taken down off the doe's the gates were removed from the front of the entrances you know this is now changing next picture this one's in Venice if you want to take a picture of a lighthouse it's the light of it you do this picture in a day time it doesn't work so sometimes a lot of the a lot of the things that you will photograph will be things that like you can't quite pick up and take home you know you can touch the lighthouse but the the light you can't it sort of appears at a certain time of day and then it disappears but when someone looks at your picture you'd like the subject to be clear right off the bat you know every time someone looks at one of your photographs first question they ask what am I looking at what is this you know if you do it on Instagram it's just like this scroll can't tell scroll next skip like if you don't get people in when they first see the picture if they're confused they just tend to they tend to go so it to me it doesn't it doesn't really matter what type of environment and I'm working in I want the subject to be clear right the subject of him working it's not a portrait of him it's the working part that's the part that's most important how he's working this is the thing that interests me the most second question is is it a good expression I see portfolios of students all the time they they show me a picture and it's like it's a version of something but there's probably like a better version of it you know if you want to take a picture of say you know an old ruin that's overgrown do you'd like for there to be some sort of unity to it so that there isn't anything inside the picture that doesn't have to do with what you're trying to convey so that could be where you go to find the picture it could also be like when you go to shoot it it's the same picture eight hours difference there they have two very different characters now you might say oh no I like to picture on the left or I like the picture on the right all I want you to figure out is what are you trying to do and does your picture relate to it does it does the aesthetic does the way the thing look is it reflected in the photograph so that other people can understand it because these things don't speak for themselves you know it's a picture goes up it doesn't have you next you know if you be great if you go on Facebook and there's like a little box on the side you face and you could explain the picture as someone's looking at it and like you know that would be great for the picture problem is it looks more like that and you don't have that opportunity so when you make a picture it's done it's out of your hands it's got to speak for itself one of the things I think about I spend a lot of time photographing in Japan you know Japan and the wabi-sabi aesthetic this is everybody heard of this well it's a it's a it's a term that's used to describe a certain type of aesthetic in Japan one of the defining characteristics of wabi-sabi is asymmetry it's it's sort of in opposition to what you get in European art where you have symmetrical compositions it's asymmetrical so I think it makes sense in the environment of certain types of or certain aspects of Japanese culture to allow for that aesthetic to inform the pictures so that the idea that supports the way things look is evident in how they actually appear next thing you'll think about is the background all right now with all present news situations I'm slightly reluctant to give the example that I was going to give but I'll do it anyway and understand that this has nothing to do with what's going on in the news usually when police or anyone who walks around with a firearm is trained to use said firearm the first thing they tell you to do is look behind your target see what happens if you miss the same thing applies in a non deadly way for photographers look at the background first look at all the junk behind your subject because your subject is going to give you tunnel vision once you start seeing the things that you're into you tend to focus on them very intensely and just forget about all the other stuff so I talked about it as like setting the stage so I'll set the stage for things and I will often try and find backgrounds first and then wait for an activity to happen here's an example in southern Italy guy standing next to me he asked me he goes Adam what would you do with this scene I said well the setup is good there you know architecture is nice there's good light you know we've got warm values coming through the through the tunnel cool values around the rest of the space no distracting elements no subject yet and then an old guy comes walking behind us and I said get ready you're gonna get like two shots he's gonna pass through the light you need two photographs and he got it and that's the picture so if you plan on the background first it's amazing how many times subjects materialize and develop but I couldn't have done this shot had I not spotted the background first if I just follow the guy around I probably wouldn't have done it this way it would have been at a much different scale so it's an approach that I use when I do more street oriented work that I look for the background first and then wait for the activity to happen it's where that little bottle of patience comes in because you end up sitting around quite a bit waiting for things to happen this was a shot that I did in Delhi this little kid passing through the doorway I'd shot the doorway first and I was just like plunked sitting waiting for people to pass through the scene and I thought this scale of one why is this kid alone right like you never see like a kid in New York City just like wandering through Central Park never this is like in India you could find this it's really it's something that's a little distinct where kids are just like they're off on their own doing their thing but this type of scene I'm not chasing that kid around I wait for the kid to pass through my picture I take the picture and I move on so there's a there's a real asset being able to spot the backgrounds first and then recognize when the opportunity happens it really takes the speed out of shooting a lot of people have this concern that like they don't shoot fast enough this is really slow shooting I mean a lot of street stuff that I will do it's like I could much have like a stool and be sitting on the sidewalk and just the world is moving around me all I have to do is like turn and shoot you know it's it's really it's pretty easy and it's not to say that every picture also needs somebody in it you know sometimes you set up you set up a shot and the scene on its own just atmospherically it kind of look good look like a film still it's just the scene that works and I'll take like a slight detour for color here just because color theory is a little complicated and I think that in its entirety color theory is not really necessary for photographers if you mix paint color theory is good it's useful you have to make every single color inside of your painting you want to know color theory photography you don't really need to do this what you'd like to understand at a very fundamental level is that if you make a color picture the configuration for is that you are either going to have a generally cool picture made of greens blues violets with a warm note right yellows orange and reds or you're gonna have a generally warm picture with a cool note this is your configuration right so this is a generally cool picture with a warm note when you think about backgrounds that's generally what you're dealing with when it comes to color backgrounds because if you don't have this play of like of warm and cool right if you don't have this like this sort of blue-green with this yellow orange you've got a monochromatic picture right a picture that fades from yellow to red it might as well just be black and white you know it it's monochromatic in order for color theory to really come into play or for color to do what color does which color interacts with other colors you need warms and cools right so you're either looking for cool seen warm note or warm seen cool note and they don't all need to be super obvious feel like a lot of times you know when people think about color pictures they make photographs that look like basketball jerseys they're like oh it's got to be like purple and yellow it does not need to be this strong you know let the arena of coloring pictures with crowns go to toddlers itch things can be more subtle and be effective at the same time you know like this picture is it's generally warm and it's got a shadow and the shadow is slightly cool it doesn't need to be like blue and orange doesn't need to be that strong so generally warm scene guys cool here shadows blacks blacks are generally cool so it's a warm scene with a black note on it so it's just this like little play that you can when you're looking for backgrounds and you're trying to think like well I have said that I could go find the background first but what am I looking for and it's like you look for a scene that has an opportunity in color for something warm offset by something cool or the reverse you can hedge your bets this is easy to do at night because you've got lights you know make things simpler for yourself as you're learning once you get through this and you're doing it regularly and you can constantly make color pictures that work you can move into more advanced setups but in the beginning you know I'd say try and make the thing a little easier for yourself so if you have a warm light in a cool scene it's going to give you something that will be serviced ibly good in terms of how the color works the next one is is there light on the subject this happens more frequently than you might think but just because something is in your picture doesn't mean that the picture is of that subject you know this is not a sort of surveillance evidence based game we know we're not trying to present our pictures in court as evidence it's like no you can see like you see the boat in the background that's my subject it's like done you can't really see it there's no light on it you you'd like to have light on your subject you know this is an example this is two pictures of the same exact building I took the picture like this this picture here is this side this picture is that side it's like I don't even move my feet it's just like that's one picture that's the other picture one is dead and lifeless the subject in this thing if anything is the floor it's the area if this area right here like this is the area of high contrast than the scene I'm not looking to take a picture of the floor I want a picture of the columns and just like just the pencil line of light on the columns let's you know that the columns is the subject and everything else is supporting it so just as you're shooting sometimes you will find a good background a good subject but you might not have the light on the subject just really try and do whatever you can to get yourself around so that the light lands on the subject and there's the relationship of this I've talked about this another video so I won't spend an enormous amount of time on it but this is called figure to ground it's an art term it's kind of adapted to photography I've heard it as figured a background subject to background there's a few different ways to word it I find for consistency figure the ground makes the most sense because you can have a figure to ground relationship that may not be in your subject if you start saying subject to ground it gets even more confusing so figure the ground you either have a dark figure on a light ground or you have a light figure on a dark ground it doesn't matter what you're photographing you can take pictures of mountains or puppies no difference this is irrespective of subject matter once you are doing this every time so that every picture you take has strong figure to ground and we can see the subject it's well lit and you can start messing around with it you can have a light figure on a dark ground and then a dark figure on a light ground you can put the two of them together that's that's totally fine and if you want to do it in three moves or four moves or five move however many chess pieces you want to get on the table that's totally up to you but you'd like to be able to do this every single time if you don't the easy consequence to think of this is if you put a guy in a gray suit up against the gray wall he's invisible if you put someone with scattered lights and darks in a background with scattered lights and darks that's what camouflage is so you don't want to make camouflage and you don't want to make invisible you'd like things to be easy for people to see once you can see it you'd like to be able to use the illusion of scale to your advantage so notional space this is I don't really see this in the photo world discussed all that much again it's a term that's borrowed from art the easiest way to think of notional space is take your subject pretend like you were going to ship it via FedEx just put it in an imaginary box and it will let you know approximately how big your subject is inside of your frame alright so it looks like this same subject to different distances the notional space is the box that I'm going to put around her or around her okay smaller notional space larger notional space it gives the impression that things which are little can become bigger and things that are big become small and where you stand with the camera not like what lens you use you know you can use a super wide angle lens you can use the super telephoto lens this is more like how do you want to depict something does it fit in your point of view you're trying to make it bigger or smaller than it really is I find churches to be interesting places to photograph churches are designed to make you feel small that's the a churches temples all of them the idea is that there is somebody in charge who is not you and you are supposed to feel very tiny in relationship to them their institution and the building that's how all of these religious structures work so you need in order for this guy who's having his little you know moment of existential crisis here if I ran up close and took the picture like this it kind of undermines the idea of what the architecture is doing with him so I step back the notional space that he's in is really it's quite small and it supports the idea of how the space functions so you can run it either way you can make something life-size you can make it bigger or smaller than it really is but this idea of notional space is something that will come into play because when you put together collections of images there is this very popular idea that you use just like one lens and you have one viewpoint the weird thing is that most of your viewing audience watches television and movies and they tend to switch between lenses so you get like really tight views really wide views and then human size views every time you watch a television program you will notice they change every three seconds the cuts are like really quick and all of its all it's doing is it's going through scale because that change of scale keeps you entertained you know it's why like you know photo lectures get boring because I don't shrink and grow you know if I could go up and down the thing would be much better but I can't so it's it is it's something that you can use so that when you put together say an exhibition there is a level of variety in the way that people come in and out of scenes so it again it's something you can play with there is also a merit to using a single lens and having everything at a consistent point of view and again this is why it's like a tool like you can do one or you can do the other if you'd like to be able to do both you don't want to be locked in a way we're like all your pictures are taken from exactly the same distance with exactly the same lens and everything looks same same same same you also don't want to come in and out so it looks like someone just discovered like the zoom in zoom out button on a camcorder you remember those days and they came out and people mm-hmm and then you just go in and out and in and out you get like a seizure trying to watch it right minimum shutter speed so this is something that is kind of a byproduct I find it particularly in the Leica community I think it probably applies to other cameras also but aperture priority is a real problem for people who are beginning because they end up with a lot of blurry pictures and they think they have focus problems and it's camera shake you know the old adage about minimum shutter speed used to be you take your lens 50 millimeter lens and put like a 1 over 50 millimeter so your exposure like sixtieth of a second it's going to be like your slowest exposure that's going to give you like no visible camera shake that was great in film in digital it doesn't work it doesn't work the the sensors pick up that movement so what I find is like if you can start your minimum shutter speed get off an aperture priority my recommendations you learn manual I don't think anyone learns to be a race car driver on an automatic car you learn on manual and then go to electronic systems learn the thing manual inside and out if you shoot it on a mode it's the shutter speed generally that's gonna relate more to whether your pictures are blurry or not so if you're having issues with blurry pictures and you're on aperture priority just get off of it set the minimum shutter speed it like five hundredths of a second this way like you can take the picture even if there's like a little bit of movement or your subjects moving it's good this like dead zone a shooting like 90th of a second sixtieth of a second thirtieth of a second I see this all the time was like a shooters take a picture it's like five six at a thirtieth of a second and like others focus problems it's like just don't think it's perfectly in focus you're just not a robot you can't hold your hands out of thirtieth of a second and it be clear so no based on what you're shooting what you'd like your minimum shutter speed to be you know shooting inside of workshops where people are doing stuff there's there's movement but the other thing that I often find is it's really dark they're not like brilliantly lit spaces it's not like you know shooting inside of like a laboratory it's it's dark and it adds to the atmosphere but usually I'm like just at the threshold of like a hundred and eightieth of a second you know really kind of like bracing myself when I shoot because he's gonna move if I move the combination of the two are not gonna work you know it's something that I cover more in workshops and not in lectures you can't really do it so well but I see this all the time I don't know why people do we got a camera in like close by anybody a camera I could borrow you got one she's like kicking around I just want it's there we go there you good okay so one thing I guess they don't show people when they get cameras for the first time is how to hold the camera this sounds completely obvious I cannot tell you how often I see people holding a camera in an unstable way right I caught it's like crab pinching right they don't hold the camera they pinch it they do this and like this you can't hold anything stable like this these are the smallest muscles you got going so holding a camera like this pinching the lens like this you know you get this three finger thing I just watched the movie by my girlfriend she's like why she hold the camera with her fingers out like that it states someone who doesn't actually hold the camera you hold the camera this hand does the holding right cuz you can do this until Friday you could hold this forever this one the one that does the pushing doesn't hold any weight you don't want to like hold the camera with this this is just to fire the shutter so that you don't pull the camera when you shoot and when you shoot you're disturbing the stability of the camera at the absolute minimum so this does the holding this does the shooting and everything else is like stable if you're not sure about it put your elbows against your chest this whole like wings out thing rear this is kind of like flying around in space like this is not going to serve you too well try and like get yourself stable ice an awful lot of time I don't know Matt how low the the video goes to the ground but photographing guys like this I spend a lot of time like this like down on the floor with my knees as a tripod trying to make the shot because I need it stable and I'm in little tiny Japanese workshops where there's no room to back up thank you that's a slight detour but if you are having trouble with blurry photos look at your minimum shutter speed and how you're holding the camera if you have very slow moving objects it's fine you know these guys aren't going anywhere no problem you can shoot them thirtieth of a second you can lean up against something like this make a false tripod and you know you're good how the next one so a top two answers when I ask people what do you want to work on in your pictures two answers I get lighting composition know the lighting part we kind of went over the composition is a it's kind of a weird one because composition is a it's a subject that lands in an arena known as dynamic symmetry and it is really boring art academic stuff there are systems of design there are people who have written loads of books on them J Hamm was an American educator who my drawing teacher taught a lot through ham system and you could understand all the different types of dynamic symmetry rectangles it's where the golden ratio goes all of that comes in in composition now the funny thing is a 35-millimeter negative does not fit the golden section rectangle right a 35-millimeter negative has a ratio of 1 to 1.5 golden ratio is 1:2 1.618 and the number goes out the door it's super long the point is that you you cannot use a compositional tool that does not fit in the rectangle you're using composition is not figure placement figure placements like where you put stuff in a picture composition is the relationship of the frame to the objects inside that relate to the architecture of the frame so every rect has a native architecture and you can see I'm losing you guys already it's super boring this kind of stuff goes on forever and if you are out of canvas and you can plan this stuff out like composition exists but when I see online people talking about like all well karti brisson used the golden section like he used the golden ratio I honestly think when I listen to him in interviews he used it as like a shorthand to answer a journalist who didn't know anything about design he just like dynamics Cemetery golden section it doesn't fit you know the the golden rectangle in in 35 millimeter photography I liken it to like you know when you put a key in you know you go to you go to you stay at your friend's house and give you a few keys like trying to ki can't figure out which one works it's like putting a key in a lock but it doesn't turn it like the the rectangle it doesn't really fit so if you ever see online a picture that has Fibonacci spiral on it with a golden section and there's this bit on the top and the bottom that's missing it's because the rectangle doesn't fit so anyone who's learned composition through dynamic symmetry the way that it's like it actually exists it doesn't work you know I think of composition more like for say foreigners looking at Japanese like the language looks pretty but you can't really read it most people can't read composition they never learned it and the basic composition rule of thirds that's like knowing like which sign on the Japanese toilet is like flush and like which one is the lid that's not really reading Japanese you could just make out one or the other the thing that you can start with which is more essential is to understand the dominant directions in your pictures so again I like I did this in one of the other talks it's part of the basic grammar of the visual language but we'll just kick through it really quickly because you have a few different directions you're going to deal with and you want to be thinking about this as you're shooting because your camera is oriented horizontally it's not oriented vertically I feel like a lot of times I look at pictures that should be verticals that are horizontal because that's the way the camera comes and for some reason when it comes to a camera lay no not a I phone people keep it horizontal at points when it should be vertical but for some reason on the camera on the phone rather it's fine everyone is taking pictures of screen it goes off you turn it horizontally you orient the frame of your camera to the screen itself but with a camera there's some weird disconnect so anyway just something to consider as you're shooting all right you've got horizontal dominant direction in the scene horizontals dominant direction verticals dominant vertical vertical picture is going to echo it it doesn't mean you can't take a horizontal picture of a vertical subject I'm not saying that what I'm saying is that you'd like to be able to orient your subject to the frame you can break this convention you can mess around with it you could shoot it at a canted angle Cezanne was famous for making pictures that were like everything was like on a slight angle like before photojournalist started messing around with this like he was doing this in painting he'd take the mountain yank it that way he'd take the path yank it that way take the roof of the house and yank it that way and it creates like a seesaw movement throughout the picture this was not pioneered by by photographers the way that I've seen some people say like well I just started doing pictures like this yes Cezanne was doing it in 1800s so just because you don't know the reference doesn't mean you've invented it you just didn't study the history where it was where it came from verticals right you may have a diagonal inside of your vertical but the dominant direction of the picture is a vertical then you got diagonals all right following the pattern here it's really like whatever you shoot it doesn't matter what your subject matter these directions are going to be embedded in it and one direction will be stronger than any of the other directions inside of your picture right diag they're not all straight lines you can get curves and arabesques right I don't have a layover over this because I think it's fairly obvious like this there is a curving gesture curving you know you get as complicated as you want you can have one curve in there you're gonna have ten curves totally up to you alright are there any bad overlaps no this is something that sneaks into the background it still it happens to me it happens to everyone you start shooting something you get tunnel vision and then you lose it so I was I took this picture in Kuwait the girls just mesmerized by her bubbles I'm not paying too much attention as I'm like messing around taking the picture to catastrophic errors in this picture right the guy in the background behind the bubble and I chopped her feet off she moved to me I'm too close right so I got bad overlaps I got bad overlaps of the frame don't cut the feet off you lose all the gravity all the weight of the person in the scene and watch for those things in the background it's that high oh I missed it and it doesn't work so there are some where if you miss it it's gone it's like this is not gonna happen this is this picture is going nowhere I'm not in the camp where you Photoshop him out you know I'm not going to where they say like McCurry the picture this is not my thing that's a Miss didn't work there are other ones that are like concessions it's kind of like the best you could get in the scene so I try to get his face on something serviceable I've got these bit you know I've got another lamp down here I've got paper up there I'm trying to get him in a space that's as good as possible it it's not the best picture but don't go for perfection just get the shot learn the lessons that you can sometimes it will be serviceable enough for your intentions right these are the overlaps I'm talking about you see those the lamp overlaps at the hand the paper overlaps of the head it's not great so again just as you're shooting just check the back crowd constantly glanced at the background and just like just see what's going on back there to see if you can kind of get these things out of the scene the next one is are there any lights that violate the subject right we talked about the light that is on the subject but sometimes there are things inside of the scene that the area of high contrast is too strong they tend to dominate things so there's a temple in in Kyoto to Fukushima I think it's the name and to give you a little plastic bag to carry your shoes around in it Bruins just about every single photograph you can take in a place it is a white plastic bag it's like someone's going like New York City recycling take it out inside the temple it's awful anyway there's no changing it but the picture works well as an example because the bags are like screaming right the the things that are jumping out in that picture are you've got the plaster wall the bags and a sign up on the door right see these things they're rough it's they're all areas of high contrast that are outside of the subject they are a light that violates the subject itself right if I just I'm going to drop just like a black box over them just so you can see like if I just knock it down a shade now you can start to see the rest of the picture but this type of stuff happens all the time especially is you're photographing like in candid situations people show up they got ID like a yellow backpack on you know they got like pink shoes that you didn't really want in the scene so just keep an eye out for it so that these things don't dominate it it happens a lot like in street photography it just gives me like a migraine to look at some of those things that like work their way into the scene the landscape camp generally gets this a lot better so depending on the genre what's acceptable and what's not shooting on the street is one of the more challenging places because you can't arrange like the fire hydrants you can't arrange the street signs like all of these really high contrast things that are trying to tell you like don't walk there throw your garbage out over here that sign says you can go hit like all those things are inside of the frame and look if they're part of the joke of the picture great if they're not and you don't want them in there you got to make sure that they're out of your way so with all this lighting game alternating rhythms I like to make a commutable analogy I think of light like the bass on an equaliser and I think of the treble like the color right so like if you crank up the treble you get HDR it's impossible to hear anything just know nothing works and if you crank up the bass it's like super high contrast you know it's like try X like on steroids like it just it's too heavy if the bass is too high you cannot hear anything else in the music so you want to be able to balance this so that when it comes to the lights it's gonna it should pulse you know like a picture it's got a pulse it's got like an on/off like it goes on off on off on off as it goes light dark light dark and it develops its own rhythm you know if it's a quick change it's got sort of a flicker to it you know just tap tap tap tap tap if it's a big change you know I think of the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto he does these seascapes right so you've got big sky long exposure of the ocean you know to me those things like they sound like a Japanese temple bell it's just like boom like it's just one sound so this sort of on-off rhythm is something you'd like to bring to the pictures because it brings some life and vitality to it so here's a picture like there are alternating rhythms in this and we're just gonna cut out like a swatch we're just going to take this section out and just look at how the picture changes from light to dark because in reality this and this and this it's all pretty much the same material right it's a plaster wall with plaster sculptures that everything is the same but the light is the thing that changes right so if we block out the top and bottom we see that like pick sure starts on a dark here this is dark and fades to a light and it alternates dark light dark light dark light as we move across this gives the picture a bit of a rhythm you know I tend to enjoy a picture that behaves like a skipping stone you know you just like whip it out if you whip it out into the water and it just goes like and just like trails off until it goes off into the distance and just fades out I find that that is a it's a temperament that's kind of easy to look at right you see this so you've got a dark section that fades to like so this is light up against dark you get out to here this line of light the highlights on his face these are a light against this dark see like the the ridge of his nose is light in comparison the dark fades across now all of a sudden this same spot which was dark in comparison to this is now light in comparison to that right this is then dark then you have the lights on the face again and goes back to dark so it's this rhythm as you go through if the whole thing through is either light or dark you have gotten yourself a white panel or a black panel they sell these down in Chelsea at the galleries they're like 250,000 dollars a painting you buy your white canvas you go home it's perfect if you want to this in a photograph you probably like to alternate these things so that you can control the rhythm as to how people see them you know it looks a bit like a piano right you can kind of think about it that way so lights darks like darks and with the with the piano you want to know how to play all the keys but you don't play every single key in every single song you just play some of them now the next one is we've got our lighting we've got our subject we want to decide do we have a good view of the subject right now I'll use a portrait as an example it's a good tool to learn on whether you do portrait work or not just because it's straightforward right because there are good and bad views of the human head so artists this is I was photographing and artists drawing another artist okay so she's learning how to draw she's modeling for her friend when artists learned the views of the head there are six views of the head okay it's six that's it you've got a frontal view you've got a three-quarter view the thing to notice the three-quarter is that the the nose for most of you looking at me the nose is captured within the cheek it does not extend so that the tip of the nose and the edge of the cheek touch that's a no-go that's a three-quarter view then you have what's called a lost profile which is a profile where you can see the curvature of the eye bone on the far side then you have a profile like you find unlike a coin you have 3/4 for the back which works very well for somebody doing their hair or you have completely from the back six views of the head at eye level from above and from below so you've got 18 different configurations Arty's kind of worked this out in the Renaissance they had a pretty good system because if you're doing a Last Supper for example and you have a bunch of different heads you want to have different views of the heads but you want them all to be clear so whether you're doing this in landscape in street in wildlife you know the same thing applies to animals they have all these different views of their heads the nose may look a little different depending on the animal that you're photographing however it is something that you'd like to be able to practice right so you've got 3/4 from the back for the artist doing a 3/4 view of the model and then we have a frontal view of the model so as I'm shooting I am thinking about these so that I'm aware that I have good views of the head if I have a bad view of the head the picture doesn't work here now we have a 3/4 view of the model 3/4 view still on the drawing view of the artist so when you have multiple subjects inside of a scene you if you look at classical painting here you go to the Frick you go to the Met when you look at paintings that have multiple heads in them you will see that they are usually clear views of the heads they are one of these six views and I didn't invent this this is not like my innovation this is I don't know maybe fifty thousand years old it was refined and canonized in the Renaissance and everybody used it but you know it works and I learned like on this plaster busts and they're easy to work from because they don't complain there's no modeling fees you set it up on a table you can take as many pictures as you want you can post the pictures and nobody complains but it's a good adaptation of an art lesson that you can kind of apply to to photo help that's form that's all like the TG stuff that's all the academic key kind of slightly boring but you know essential things that like you need to have inside of the pictures in order for the pictures to read the last bit the content this is all the stuff that's like in front of your lens like what are you now pointing the lens at and what does it what does it really mean so one thing that I think about all the time because I work out a country so often is that if I'm shooting outside of country it should not look like I'm in New York to me there's like nothing worse than a picture that's taken in Burma that looks like it could have been done in London like that to me like there is a cultural specificity to a place that makes it unique you'd like for that to come through and it can come through and a little obvious you know in little ways and there may be obvious you know like it's not English you know we're in Japan right or based on the location so photographing kyudo archers in Kyoto like we're dealing with archery they're like these little details that you try and bring in so that very often when people go on trips they come back with all like the homerun shots but the thing that they forget is that everyone who's looking at your pictures they haven't traveled from your home to where you are you want to kind of get them there you want to leave them little breadcrumbs of details to know like where are you an easy place for you to see this isn't film film does this really well and it does it all the time Hollywood has this thing ironed out because they want to bring you into scenes and if they change scenes they want you to follow them along you know you can have significant pieces of architecture inside of a scene they don't need to be the feature like that Santa Maria della salute day you know the water that's in Venice but like it doesn't need to be that you know subjects here but it's a supporting thing so that when you look at it you kind of know like where you are after you shoot in a place and you come back and look at your pictures like what I the example that I gave you for for Guatemala is it sometimes you will have an experience and when you look at your pictures you realize like it's not in there you didn't really get it it's why I go back to places year after year because getting to know a place to photograph is like getting to know a person you know there's a huge emphasis on like people saying they want like just their first impression they like that's the best one I honestly to me I feel like as you get to know someone usually the relationship develops it's more interesting over time at least with a good relationship with places it's the same way like my first impressions of a place usually I don't get it I don't get it takes me time like going around figuring out like what am I looking at what's going on to really get a sense of how it works so this is a picture this is an example only because so this picture I did and this was a picture went well won an award blah blah blah although like all the markers for like good job good photo but to me it didn't really do what I wanted it to do there was something else about the fact that when you're inside of this space it's like it's almost like you feel like you're underwater in a weird way but I realized that's not in this photograph you can't really tell that so when I went back the next year the alleyway was under construction that is the same exact photograph from the same exact viewpoint with the same exact lens and it was under construction and you can see it like it's daytime it's like we're same same thing looks totally different so that year was a wash didn't happen the idea that I had in my head came from a painless always fascinated me called the Empire of Life by rene magritte who was a surrealist and he has this sort of daytime nighttime configuration thing and it's it's always fascinated me I died in joy the impossibility of the scene and the idea of like this being underwater but in a city in a city that like portions of it used to be underwater you know here these a lot of the stone in the city where that's taken from has like marine fossils in it so everyone in the city will tell you that like the quarry where it was taken out of that used to be underwater you can tell because of the fossils that you could see but that wasn't in this so a few years later still going back then I made this picture and I felt like this started to connect to that idea in a way that made a little bit more sense there was a little bit more of a connection so that's what I mean like when you get to a missing element if you have an idea that really strikes you work to get it into the picture it may not come out on the first impression it may not come back on like even the second trip or the third trip but if you keep at it eventually I think that you can work it into what you're trying to do so that other people can understand it the next one is how are you looking at a scene right so in an example that I give all the time is some you can go out a little field look at a tree right now depending on what your profession is you may see it in a very different light if you are a botanist you will look at that tree in one way if you are a furniture maker you will look at that tree in a completely different way and if you are in a real estate business you know a developer may be like the trees gonna go gone you know what you do and how you look at things changes how they are so it's something that like you really want to consider you know I've been working in Japan for a few years and I one of the guys who I met was a he was a bamboo craftsman the guy used bamboo as an analogy for life in all capacities and one of the things that he mentioned cuz he makes these bamboo fences amongst other things he makes everything for tea ceremony musical instruments everything everything that is used in Japanese culture that is bamboo like it comes through him so he told me this thing about a Japanese garden that I hadn't really considered because I never studied Japanese gardens specifically he said that it's made up of things which are eternal things which are living and things which are dying so the stones are eternal the trees are alive and the fence is in a state of death it's decaying it dies and it's this this sort of cyclical nature of life that he pointed out every garden I ever go to in Japan from now on I see through that lens he gave me a great framework so that when I look at that picture and now when you look at that picture we're kind of on the same page now you might say I'm not into Japanese gardens I find it totally boring that's a matter of taste but it's just like is the idea does it communicate is it come through in the picture based on the way that you're really looking at something I think the same applies in a different manner for this right too a lot of people will say that every piece of art an artist makes is in some way a self-portrait you've heard this before it's somehow a reflection of them and what they're doing and I feel like as an art student one of the things that you have to do is you have to contend with your work your abilities yourself and then this sort of weight of history because you learn everything under somebody else you learn under a teacher you learn under a school you learn under examples and it's like this is the development of how an artist emerges you know so she's still young and developing making I mean she's literally she's making herself in some regard so I think that you know that's how that the ideas that you have about the way you see things can affect how the pictures are read by other people too now once you get enough pictures you got to decide what to do it you know unless you just want like populate hard-drives and fill up boxes to put in the attic for somebody to discover later things are gonna come together into something they can't all go on Instagram you know there's got to be something you want to do with them so I tend to split them up into a few different categories some projects to like novels it's like a big long story this is a project that did lost ceremony I photographed it for five years put them together into vertical and horizontal panels designed to kind of make reference to calligraphy screens and Scrolls in Japan you know and that was a long project that took many trips and many hours but it came together in a way where a large body of images together worked more like a novel than anything else now you have other projects which you've seen snippets from it's kind of like a short story you don't want to write Moby Dick every time you go take a picture it's exhausting you know like you can you can do this stuff it's fun right you know I encourage you to spend how a long-term project but just make sure it's not your only thing a lot of good writers start out doing short stories right Hemingway's famous short stories f scott Fitzgerald great short stories and then novels you tend to kind of like build it up so see if you can make a distinction between work you make that's like a book or work that's like an essay you know it's like a novel is like a short story the other one is like it's just like a sentence though I've been photographing craftsman I cannot tell you how many pictures I have of craftsmen's hands doing stuff all over the globe and no matter what country you're in there is a commonality to it but these that's not a project that's like that's not a project on its own it's like an idea and a theme that's loosely linked but I look at it more like a bunch of sentences there is no narrative it's just like it's like all these little bits that go through so instead of having a mass of pictures as you shoot you'd like to distill them down to something because you know the only person who reads the transcripts of a writer is the editor it's the only person who's gonna make it through that otherwise it's like maddening to read it's like reading through somebody's journal it just me Anders and goes all over the place so a part of getting your point of view and your way of doing things across is also like this final edit and you could do this this could be like a week-long seminar and just editing alone but it is something that a lot of people I find like all I see are the homerun shots and just see like the five star photos and it's not like well what do they like and are there a few others that actually go with that or is it just that like on its own the last two parts are when you finish making pictures a lot of people get to the me part why do I make the picture and it's important it's important for you to understand why you are making pictures for yourself so that you get an understanding of what you're doing and what you can do better so for me I am fascinated by the process of things being made the idea of creation to me is really interesting when I went to Japan to do the project on the craftsman one of the questions I had was how do you make something that lasts you can't just chip it out of granite or make it out of titanium it's just gonna last for a thousand years it's not there is a relationship between how culture preserves certain ideas myths practices and objects and the people who make these because the oldest remnant of civilization that we have the oldest thing that we have made by humans is actually tools that were fed and they were found in a dry lakebed in Africa so the oldest mark of humanity is actually in tools it's not an art it's not an architecture it's not the things that we made it's the actual tool that we use to make it and I don't think that makes it the most important but it is sort of a significant point that you know making things in creating is something that is inextricably linked linked to culture so you know I'm interested in that and it's something that builds for me also in multiple mediums so like photography is one part of what I do you know I will take photographs and I turn them into paintings and it's a painting that I just finished so it's like I'll go from photo into other mediums it may turn into a painting or it may turn into a sculpture these are photographs I've worked with an architectural render for a installation for matera for 2019 for there they're the European cultural capital so the idea is to make an ocean room inside of one of the ruins you know one of the buildings that like currently has no roof is to put this water roof on it so this is what it does for me but that stuff to everybody else is like it's irrelevant until it actually happens so good to know what you're doing the better question to get to is like what's it going to do for somebody else and I feel like this is one of the real dividing lines between like enthusiasts and artists it's not in skill it's not in capability it's not a gift it's not ingenious this is not the thing that distinguishes for me what you can do versus what somebody else can do the crossover is when somebody else starts to see themselves in your work so you kind of go through this funnel this artistic funnel or like you get in you've got some interest you go through some genres you pick some mediums you make these projects spend all this time and energy all on your own you get to the bottom of the funnel and then all of a sudden it like explodes out the other end and people start to see themselves or their own story in your work and this is the point where I find that a lot of people who I asked this question to it's not that they can't answer it they've just never asked it they never really thought about it so you know identify what it is that you're doing figure out your driving motivations and whether you're getting that into the picture and then you want to be able to kick it out so somebody else can really enjoy it so the way that you'll be able to use this so I can split this up we got three lists because like 23 things you're not going to do all 23 at once right if you are a beginner right so if you are not doing all of these things at once just do the ones in orange just do those those are like those are the starting points so that if you can work through those ideas one by one and get familiar with them every time you do them you know eventually you're gonna become familiar with it you know it seems like a long each list but I'm telling you it's like I asked a I asked one of my I do train in Muay Thai there's like Thai kickboxing if you don't know what it's like it's like boxing with a Thai accent means you can use your elbows and your knees right so I asked one of my coaches said if you had to explain written text what you do when you throw a punch how many pages would you write you know what he said to me probably three to five so three to five pages to describe everything that goes into like a single jab into something that if it happens in half a second it's slow so the idea that like this big long list can't be assessed this takes me about four seconds inside of a scene with a camera in my hand for these things to be processed and it's not because I'm brilliant this is not like a gift this is just something I've done so frequently you know if you had to describe all the all the muscles that you used when you walked up a flight of stairs it could be really long but you just go so beginners here advanced the next section that you get to do all the ones in red take the ones you got an orange just add the ones in red I kind of broke them down in complexity so that you don't you know it's it's not that you're working through this in an exactly linear way not doing like one two three it doesn't work that way it might be nice if it lined up that way it just doesn't and then the last is called the elite list you do all of it take a picture of it keep it on your phone keep it on your camera just look at it you're out shooting you stop for coffee just kind of go through it and figure out like where you are after you start getting familiar with these things once you answer these questions in your head you will never need to revisit them you know like what is your subject you will just process this every single time the camera goes to your face you will not need to like consciously think about it you want to switch this process from being like frontal-lobe analytic thought to being more like you're just reacting inside the scene but like here's where you do the learning and here's where you actually play the game so you in order for that to move back you know like neurologists have studied now this process as to how this works in the brain it's gonna be you're gonna do a lot of forehead rubbing in the beginning I'm sure of it it's it there anything new is awkward and kind of complicated if you don't believe me just go to a dance class you know you can see that like when you're trying to do something for the first time it's a little awkward clumsy but once you get the hang of it you don't think about it anymore music plays and you go so that's it that's the map where you guys go with it it's completely up to you and how you put it into your photography again you know we've got 23 questions we're gonna get a million different answers so I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with I want to thank you all I know it's a long presentation but I really appreciate it [Applause]

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 166,422

Keywords: b and h, b&h, bh, photo, B&H Photo, Video, BH Photo, video, bhvideos, bh photo, are, you, expressing, your, creativity, or, just, pressing, buttons?, adam, marelli, photography, adam marelli

Id: lRDTLS4WIY0

Length: 100min 49sec (6049 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2017