September 10, 2015

Several years ago a friend of mine, Greg McKean of Master Photo Workshops, shot a video featuring me in Death Valley. And through a series of unfortunate events, we were never able to finish it…until now.

This video is entitled “Discovering Your Vision in Black and White.” It’s a two CD set: one shot in the field and the other at the computer showing my very simple Photoshop techniques including dodging and burning with a pen and tablet.

My biggest concern while shooting was: What if I don’t see any good images, I’ll be documenting myself failing! Fortunately we found a few including “The Road to Nowhere” above. This video will show you how I saw it, shot it and processed it.

To kick start the introduction of this set, Master Photo Workshops is offering a 15% discount between 9/16/2015 and 9/23/2015. Just use the promo code “masterblackandwhite” when ordering. Here’s where you can learn more:

http://masterphotoworkshops.com/catalog/discovering-your-vision

This video an honest representation of what I believe, how I see and the way that I work. I sincerely hope that you will find it interesting and helpful.

Cole

 

 

 

 

March 26, 2015

Set the video to 720 for a better viewing experience!

 

 

March 13, 2015

Let met start at the beginning: It was 1967 and I had borrowed the book Aku Aku from my high school teacher, friend and mentor, John Holland. This is how I was introduced to the Moai of Easter Island.

I became fascinated with the Moai and would spend hours and hours trying to imagine how and why they were built and even more perplexing: why they stopped? Even though this was my only “contact” with the them, they have been on my mind these many, many, many (you get the idea) years.

And interestingly, I have always imagined the Moai as being living beings. 

Fast forward to 2014: I am planning my next photography trip and discussing with my wife where I might go. Easter Island had always been on my bucket list but I never really believed that I’d be able visit due to it’s remote location. But over the next several days I began to question that assumption and a few weeks later the trip was planned.

In keeping with my Photographic Celibacy I did not look at what other photographers had done before me. I wanted my Vision to be pure and unsullied by the ideas and Vision of others. However this approach has some disadvantages: what if I created work that was similar to what others had done, simply because I didn’t know what others had done?

I was willing to take that risk and proceeded blindly.

My trips are never planned, I simply go to a location, wander about and trust that something will inspire me. However this can cause great anxiety if I don’t find something that sparks an idea quickly and I start to worry that I’ll come home empty handed. I’ve had that happen to me several times before but fortunately something always seems to capture imagination and passion.

As we flew to Easter Island I like a child on Christmas eve, wondering what gifts I would find in the morning. And as I wondered what the morning would bring I fell asleep and dreamt, I dreamt that I had met the Moai and invited them to come to my studio to sit for a formal portrait…and they did!

When I awoke I thought to myself, why not? I had always thought of them as being alive and I would create studio portraits of them as though they were. This idea really got me excited, as excited as I’d ever been for a project. It just seemed like a natural for me!

I was certainly out of my depth in several areas: I have no portrait experience, I could not control the lighting and I had never done anything this complex in Photoshop before. But a lack of skills has never stopped me before and instead I viewed it as a challenge.

In my mind I laid out my plan of action: I would photograph the Moai as though they were sitting in my studio, a tight shot and at appropriate angles. I’d try to catch them in diffused light and later I’d try to make it look like studio lighting. And lastly I’d outline the Moai and drop them into a digital backdrop that I would create.

I had to get the shots right because I had only one chance at this. I took a huge number of photographs from every angle and vantage point I could think of. I followed the sun and each morning went to one side of the island and each afternoon I went to other. Because I was looking for subdued light and could not control what I got, I had to wait for many hours at each location for a cloud to pass overhead. 

Once home I started off by creating a portrait background for my Moai. I then blurred it to give the image a shallow depth of field and a three dimensional look. Later when I looked at all of the images as a group, the background looked redundant and so I created several slightly different versions to break things up a bit.

Next I needed to learn how to outline the Moai.  I was very fortunate to be working with objects that had hard edges which made the outlining much easier. A great deal of this work had to be done manually at 300% magnification because the Moai’s background interfered with some of the more automatic methods of selection. This is where a tablet really shines, I simply could not have done this outlining with a mouse!

Next I pasted the outlined Moai into the background but felt that it looked unnatural. I learned that an object looks “pasted in” when the edges of the object are sharper than the object itself. So I took a 3 pixel blur tool and manually blurred the edge of the Moai at 300% magnification.

Then came the lighting: how could I make the lighting look as though the Moai had been lit in a studio? With no lighting experience, I simply experimented with dodging and burning, trying to make the light source appear to come from a particular direction.

With a small amount of practice I found I could bring a Moai to this point in about an hour. But the final refining of the image is what took the longest. 

I would let the images sit for a week and then would come back to see them with a fresh eye. On the first pass I was unhappy with the lighting and modified it quite a bit; lessening the directional lighting effect and opening up the shadows more. I let it sit for another week and tweaked some more. And then I repeated this a third and fourth time until there were no more changes.

Here are a couple “before and after” images to show you the original shot and the final image.

Outlining was easy when the Moai were against the sky and I could use the automatic methods of selection.  But when the background was cluttered as in the lower half of this one, I had to manually outline.

When I shot this image I was not thinking portraits, but these first three Moai on the left worked out perfectly anyway. 

The images from the quarry were harder to put into the studio because they were photographed against the grass. I had to stay on designated paths and that limited my choice of angles and consequently the background. These images were completely hand outlined and often I had to clone out the weeds that were in the way.

In the end I created forty portraits of the Moai and I love them. The trip was a wonderful adventure in itself, but to pursue a project that treated the Moai as though they were alive, really was dream come true. 

This project reinforced three of my guiding principles as a fine art photographer:

1. I must pursue a project that I am passionate about and have a Vision of.

2. Skills come second to Vision. If I don’t have the skills, I can always learn the them.

3. I must create for myself and love what I’ve created.

Cole

P.S. You can see the full portfolio here: http://www.colethompsonphotography.com/MoaiSittingForPortrait.htm

 

 

February 8, 2015

People write to thank me for my blog, saying they can relate to the topics I write about. And while I’m glad my thoughts resonate with others, make no mistake about my motivations: I write this blog for myself!

What I’m doing is writing down my self-affirmations.

Why?

Because my tendencies are to be insecure, to copy others, to care what others think of my work, to seek praise, to compare my work to others, to stray from my Vision and etcetera and etcetera and etcetera.

To become the artist I want to be, I must constantly remind myself of the things that I believe in and what I hope to become.

So you see: I’m not talking to you…I’m talking to myself.

Cole

P.S. The image above is entitled “Ahu Tahai.”

 

 

January 16, 2015


Harbinger No. 22 – Tongariki

I’m back from Easter Island and have begun working on the several thousand images I shot. Many were very long exposures and that gave me lots of time to think, and one thought that I had was:

You shoot a lot, you hope a little and you’re grateful to get just one or two.

And that’s the truth: I shot a lot of images and while I’m hoping for several good ones, I’ll be grateful to get just a few. It’s funny how when you’re viewing images in the field every one looks like a killer, but the reality is that the public will only see about 1 out of every 250 images that I shoot. 

And while it’s important to create great images, it’s almost equally as important to only show the good ones!

~~~

I’ll be presenting my work to the Alpenglow Camera Club in Granby, Colorado on Wednesday, February 4th.

My presentation is entitled “Why Black and White?” and we will be meeting at the Granby Public Library at 7 pm.

If you’re in the area, I’d love to meet you!

Cole

 

 

December 26, 2014

Monolith No. 33

 

I’m heading out for Easter Island Sunday morning and I’m both excited nervous.

Excited because I’ve wanted to visit Easter Island ever since I was 17 and read the book Aku Aku by Thor Heyerdahl. It really captured my imagination and I would dream of the Moai and those unknown peoples who created them. Going to Easter Island has long been a dream of mine.

But I’m also nervous because when I go on a trip like this I worry that I’ll come home empty handed and not meet people’s expectations. And each time someone says “I can’t wait to see what you get!” I become even more apprehensive.

And the more apprehensive I get, the more pressure I put on myself. And the more pressure I put on myself, the less creative I am because I’m focused on what others expect and not my own Vision.

So here’s what I have learned to do, to minimize that apprehension and maximize my creativity:

First: I remind myself that I’m visiting one of the most exciting places on earth and a top destination on my bucket-list. That alone is enough to make this a successful trip, no matter what.

Second: I tell myself that if I create just one image that I love, I’ll be happy.

Third: I will not look at anyone else’s work from Easter Island. I do not want to have any preconceived ideas of what I should create.

Fourth: I’ll spend a lot of time alone contemplating the Moai. I am confident that if I can relax and spend time with them, my Vision will appear.

And Fifth: I will keep reminding myself that I am creating for myself and I’ll put out of my head any internal or external expectations.

What I have learned is that worrying is not only ineffective, it’s actually harmful to my creative process. I just need to relax, enjoy the trip and have faith that something will come to me. 

See you in a few weeks!

Cole

 

November 29, 2014

Monolith No. 78 – Before

I’ve had a number of people ask if I’d do some more “before and after” shots. So here are five from my recent Oregon trip.

~~~~~

I had my eye on this Monolith by Cape Blanco for several years, but I had never found an easy way to get down to the beach. On this trip I found one.

At the hour I get there (never early!) the monolith is backlit and so it’s a difficult shot. I was fortunate to have these great delicate clouds that streak well with a long exposure and I envisioned them becoming an important part of the image, if I could deal with the backlight.

The sun was in the upper left corner and it was washing out the clouds and giving me a big flare. I used my hand as a sunshade for the 30 second exposure, properly placing it by watching where my hand’s shadow fell on the lens. I knew that later in Photoshop I’d have to even out the sky, because it was bright on the left and darker on the right.

Then there was the debris on the beach from the last few days of big storms and high tides, but I knew that I could deal with that in post processing. 

Monolith No. 78 – After

To deal with the debris I cloned out the tree stump and burned down the foreground to remove the rest. I don’t like anything that distracts from the main subject.

For the sky I burned down the upper left corner to bring out detail in the clouds, then I dodged up the right to balance the sky out.  I also used a very small dodging brush to follow the cloud streaks to bring them out more. Adding contrast also helped the clouds stand out against the sky.

The backlighting didn’t hurt me as much as I feared it would. There’s not much shadow detail in the Monolith, but I generally don’t prefer a lot anyway.

Monolith No. 77 – Before

This is one of my favorite images from this trip. I envisioned this Monolith framed by the very dark hills on the sides, the rocks below and the clouds above.

This was a pretty simple image and an easy one…I thought…until I got home and found out that my Vari-ND was doing the dark pattern thing on me. It’s one of the quirks of all variable ND filters, sometimes at wide angles and when the sun angle is just right, you get these weird dark patterns across the image. And here’s a heads up: the cheaper the variable ND filter the more it will do this. That’s why I use the Singh-Ray Vari-ND, it happens much less frequently and when it does, there are a couple of workarounds. 

If I had noticed the patterning in the field I could have switched lens and probably have avoided it.  This was shot with my 24-105 at 24 mm, which is where the problem can happen, when you’re shooting at the wide end of your lens. If I had switched to the 16-35 and used 24 mm the pattern probably would have gone away, because 24 mm is mid focal length for that lens. And of course another option would have been to simply switch to a fixed ND filter for this shot.

This image also had some vignetting in the corners and I didn’t like how the clouds were thin on the right side of the image.

You might notice that I underexpose my images, usually by about 1 stop. I do this for a couple of reasons. First, I like the look of a dark image with pronounced highlights.  Second, it makes it easier to deal with the wide dynamic range in these types of scenes where the sky is important to the image.  If I had opened up another stop, that sky would have easily washed out and I’d have lost the cloud detail. Shadow detail is not very important to my images, so underexposing works for me.

Monolith No. 77 – After

I fixed the dark pattern in the sky with vey some careful and slow dodging (it’s easy for a sky to look blotchy if you use a small or hard brush or you work too quickly) I’m typically dodging and burning between 1-3% strength and for skies I’m generally using 1%. I used the clone tool to fix the vignetting and I also cloned in some clouds from the left to the right for a more balanced look.

I also used dodging and burning to bring out the water detail. I call it local contrast enhancement when I go back and forth between burning and dodging to increase the contrast in just one area.

I was happy with how this image turned out, especially after finding out about the dark pattern in the sky.

Something I noticed in the image above: there’s a thin highlight separating the sky from the monolith. I went back to the original TIFF and it’s not there, but it appears when I convert it to a JPEG for the web. I’ll have to do some work to figure out what that is and how to fix it.

Cape Blanco – Before

People are naturally drawn to lighthouses, as are photographers. But the lighthouse shot is soooooo overdone that I almost didn’t create this one. But I thought I’d see if I could put my twist on it.  I love to put the subject small in a large frame and then added a long exposure for a bit of movement.  I underexposed and used a polarizer because I wanted black skies.

Cape Blanco – After

In the final image, I further isolated the lighthouse by burning down the foreground and the sky.  Looking at this image now, a few weeks after I last worked on it, I think I’ll remove those trees on the far right because I find them distracting.

This illustrates how I work to refine an image.  I’ll let it sit for a few weeks and then look at it with fresher eyes.  I’ll then perhaps modify it again and then put it to bed for a few weeks more before I look at it again.

Now that I’ve removed those trees, I’ll come back in a week to see if I want to keep this change or not.

Isolated No. 7 – Before

I was driving on the road to Cape Blanco when this tree just jumped out at me! I love centered images and struggled if I should center the tree where it hits the ground or the upright of the tree.  Centering the upright portion of the tree looked more centered and that’s what I went with.

It was a windy and hazy day which made the shot a little challenging.  I took about 20 long exposures trying to get the clouds just right and ended up using this one. I didn’t underexpose as I usually do, because I didn’t want to lose the tree detail. It was still a processing challenge and I started over 4 times before I got it right.

Isolated No. 7 – After

Again, I did a lot of dodging and burning on this image. Many people feel that they can do this with a mouse, but I certain cannot! I use a pen and tablet and the control is so much better than with a mouse. I never like to be adamant, but you cannot do what I do with a mouse.  Period.

I got rid of the shadow of the tree, that bothered me for some reason, and left a highlight around the tree.  I darkened the sky and left it bright behind the tree. As I look at the image today, I think that I may go back and open up the trees a bit on the right side.

As I make decisions about my images, it reminds me of how I’ve seen some others make those decisions. They will show the image to someone and say: What do you think I should do to this image? I am very opposed to that approach, I think one should have a Vision and not adulterate it with someone else’s opinion. 

Isolated No. 6 – Before

I was lucky on this trip to have constantly changing weather conditions. Some days it was raining hard, others were sunny and others were constantly changing as on this day. The sun was coming and going and what I was trying to get was the sun hitting the island and the land left and right bits of land in shadow.

I was here for several hours trying to get the clouds and lighting just right. Sometimes the clouds were perfect, but not the foreground. At other times I’d get the shadowing how I wanted it but the clouds were no good.

I didn’t get exactly what I wanted in the shot, but I was confident that I’d be able to create the effect I was looking for in post processing.

Isolated No. 6 – After

I burned the land down on the left and right to put the focus on the island. Then I dodged up the island to make it brighter. Then I went to work on the clouds, lightening the upper ones and darkening the smaller ones just above the island. Then I darkened the foreground to hide the detail and to bring the eye to the island.

~~~~~

So after seeing these “before and after” shots, I hope that you’ll not conclude that you need to learn more about Photoshop. It is not my intent to focus on post processing as the key to an image because that is exactly what I don’t believe.

Instead my approach is to have a Vision of the image and then let that drive the processing. When you have Vision, your processing then has purpose: to bring the image into compliance with your Vision.

And armed with that Vision, you don’t need to ask others what to do with your image, you already know how it’s going to look in your head!

Cole

 

 

October 17, 2014

 

I’m having a great time in Bandon.  The weather is wildly mixed, hard rain one day and beautiful sun the next. I’m working hard to look for the image that presents itself…yes even in the rain.

Today I solved a small but persistent problem: how to get a long exposure when it’s raining. Raindrops on the ND filter are in focus enough to ruin the image. I’ve tried shielding the lens with my hat, but the driving rain still got through.

Finally I came up with a crazy but effective solution: during the exposure I would look for any drops that landed on the filter and then quickly and gently wipe them off with a microfiber cloth. A fast 1/3 of a second swipe has no effect on a 30 second exposure and I do not press on the filter, just lightly brush the surface with the absorbent cloth.

Crazy, but effective. 

I think this allowed me to get a couple of images that might not otherwise have been possible.

So far, it’s a good trip.

Cole

 

 

October 10, 2014

Stone Jetty No 6, Maalaea Harbor

I’ll be spending the next two weeks in Bandon, Oregon for my annual retreat. 

This is a sacred time for me.  It’s a chance to be completely alone, with no distractions and only one thing to think about: creating images.

At first it always takes a couple of days before I begin seeing, and often I’ll worry about the process and why it isn’t coming along. But then it comes…as it always does.

As I prepare to depart for Bandon I’m wondering if I’m finished with my Monolith series which I’ve been working on there for the last several years, or if I’m ready to move onto a new idea. I’ll find out soon enough as I walk those beaches and see if something else catches my eye.

In the past I’d need to go on these trips with a plan and preconceived ideas of what I’d be working on.  Now I simply go and trust that I’ll see something and if I’m meant to go in a new direction…then I’ll be carried away with excitement and inspiration.

As I look at my portfolios, that is how it has always happened: spontaneously and through a sudden burst of inspiration.

It’s taken me a long time to learn to trust in the creative process and to realize that it cannot be manipulated or rushed. 

Cole

 

August 29, 2014

A simple black and white image from Hana

A simple black and white image from Hana

My latest newsletter features five new images from Hawaii.  

I also discuss the challenges of photographing while on vacation.

You can sign up here:                 

http://www.colethompsonphotography.com/newsletter/

Or view the newsletter here:     

Newsletter with New Images from Hawaii

Thanks!

Cole