Contrast is everything . . .

Creativity is intelligence having fun.
-- Albert Einstein

As I was leaving an architectural salvage store in San Diego, bright sunlight created lovely shadows behind a decorative piece of ironwork. Had to photograph it. Not only was I attracted to the shadows, but the juxtaposition of the organic form of the spiral and the heavily linear criss-crossed metal bits was (to me) striking.

I'm noticing "contrasts" like this more and more. If there's something soft and curving, combining that element with straight, severe lines adds interest.

If there's something "real" and well-defined in the foreground, lighter and somewhat amorphous shadows in the background add to your visual story.

We see something similar when we compose a photo of, say, an old railroad depot in front of a modern skyscraper -- old against new. Or an in-focus flower against an out-of-focus background.
Opposites. Contrast. Light and dark. Squares/circles. Smooth/textured.

How often do we notice differences such as these? How often do we consciously (or un-) include/create them in our own work?

All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you for your understanding and kindness.

Daily bit of creativity, #011: Burned driftwood

I burned marks into a piece if driftwood to see what it would look like. Well, it's kind of cool, but not cool enough for me to put on a wall in the house, so I strung it up in a tree in the front yard.

It's near the handmade paintbrush that hangs from another tree . .  on the other side of the yard from a barnacle-covered piece of wood dangling from a different tree . . . next to a mobile I made in Nevada City, California out of cherry tree twigs and beads and a piece of obsidian . . .

I won't bore you with the rest!

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh.

Daily bit of creativity, #005

The fun part about keeping a journal is that it reminds you of things that were going on in your life, or things you were creating, at a certain time.

In July of 2010, I was apparently quite chuffed at creating this image of pen nibs. So I made a small note of it and added a few colorful things.

Art journals, journals in general, don’t have to be fine masterpieces. A few words, a few colors, and a memory is honored.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh.

A page from my journal . . .

I've seen this in a number of my students. There are some who flit from this to that, eager, excited, passionate about photography, but there's no direction.

And there are others who are so meticulous about their process that they are blinded to what they are trying to say with their work, leaving it cold and empty.

To combine the two concepts, ah, there's the goal. It all comes down, once again, to balance, doesn't it?

And in case you can't read my handwriting, which is cool but often illegible, it's a quote from Twyla Tharp, a dancer and choreographer:

"Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life."

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh.

What's your quest?

I’m going to harp on this because I think it’s important. If you’re serious about your photography, about improving your work, about making your work your own, unique to you and nobody else, a “quest” of sorts will encourage you to experiment, to try, to fail, and to try again.

This month’s project is to post a picture of the number “3” every day. There are 31 days in March, and I have only twenty-some pictures. I need to create more. Aaaarrrrgggghhhh! No pressure, right?

If I were a different sort of person, I might blow off the last week of the month, figuring enough is enough. But it’s a cool challenge, and it’s a challenge I know will help me grow. Everywhere I’ve gone this month I’ve been looking for “3s,” so it’s an exercise in seeing (always a good thing). And I’ve also been encouraged to look through my own files for pictures of “3s” I might have forgotten about. And I’ve also been encouraged to find a boring “3” and try to pump it up. If it ends up looking horrible, that’s okay.

The important thing is that at least I’m trying, and in trying I might just learn something new.

That’s what happened with this morning’s “3.” Let me give you a peek into what I did.

I found a “3” that I’d photographed on the side of a metal fishing boat in March of 2011. The photo is boring, but the “3” is cool. I took the picture knowing that I would tweak it later and create something new with it. This was my starting point.

So yesterday I wondered, what if I added some dots to it? What would that do? I scanned a piece of tissue paper, white with black dots on it, and added it to the mix. Hmmmm. Not bad. But still boring. So then I added a photo of painted paper, paper from my studio that I’d used to clean paintbrushes and rollers (last photo).

I then did a few other things, added some shadowing around the “3,” etc. and declared the picture done. I liked it so much that I uploaded it yesterday to Fine Art America. Will it sell? Probably not, because few of my number photographs do, but that’s okay. I think it’s good. I’m proud of it. And (pay attention now) NO ONE ELSE CAN CREATE A NUMBER LIKE THIS.

Can you say that about your own work? I’m not saying go make your own photomontages. I’m saying please experiment. How can you shoot a slot canyon and make it unlike all the millions of slot canyon photos out there? How can you make a photo of a California poppy that stands out from the rest? How can you make your quilt, your collage, your assemblage art, whatever, be unique to you?

You start with baby steps. Begin experimenting, whether it’s with software, composition, technique, viewpoint, fabric, papers, etc. Give yourself a quest. What will you work on this month that could take you out of your comfort zone?

If you’re a photographer, oh, man, it’s so easy! Got a cellphone? Got an app? Pick one app and work it for a month. I mean really work it. Look online for tutorials. Keep testing. Can you use that same app on pictures you’ve taken with a DSLR as well? What pictures do you already have that maybe can be transmogrified using that same app?

 You’re going to create a lot of crap. Who cares?

Keep creating. Eventually you will either discard the idea entirely, or you will suddenly be inspired. Aha! Yes! That worked great. Are there other images to which I can apply that same technique? Can I make a series of this, or that?

I’m babbling. What I’m trying to say is that throughout your creative life, it’s all just practice. You work on something, maybe you perfect it, maybe you don’t, but everything you do increases your artistic knowledge and your skills. So you continue. Building on what you learned before.

Maybe dots isn’t the right component for something, maybe it’s squares. Maybe it’s silver squares! Maybe it’s silver squares, duplicated, then flipped horizontally and toned green. Try it! Who cares if it’s garbage? Eventually you’re going to discover something that works and it will surprise the hell out of you. It’ll be an “aha” moment that will push you further into your own unique way of seeing and making.

I took a plain photograph of an ordinary “3” and made something completely different. Something that’s unique to me. Something I like well enough to offer it for sale.

All because I gave myself a quest and acted on it. That’s all. A simple little quest. What’s your quest these days? Hmmmmm?




©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Preparing to be wrong . . .

A friend of mine is interested in creating things, in art, but he rarely sticks with one area or genre. He'll try something and if it doesn't quickly come out "perfect," he loses heart and moves on to something else. And then something else. And then something else. And then bemoans the fact that he doesn't seem talented at anything.

He admits it's a fear of failure that's holding him back. And he's not alone. So many of us travel that same road.

There's something I wrote in my journal a couple of months ago that struck me as being pithy (oh, what is life without a little pith?):

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original." -- Sir Ken Robinson in a talk about how education kills creativity

To illustrate (I hope) what I'm talking about, let me show you something I did to a photo I took of the juvenile barred owl that showed up the other morning. The last photo I took of him is the second image in this post. I was shooting at ISO 3200 and the photo is very grainy. I was shooting handheld at f/4, but the shutter speed was a slow 1/20 second and so my photo is blurry. Not usable at all.

But what I liked about the photo was how the owl was perched on a thin branch, his shape is well-defined, and he's looking right back at me. To me it's classic "owl" and some might even consider it a bit spooky.

I didn't delete the picture because I thought maybe it had potential.

The shot was grainy and soft. What if I were to emphasize those "flaws" rather than try to hide them? So I used a drawing program in Topaz to blur out the details a bit, to remove the color, and to create texture rather than try to smooth out the grain.

But for me that wasn't enough. I tried using a variety of textures in the picture to add even more "tooth" and to make the image look a bit spookier. The first six or so textures I tried didn't work for me. But then something did, and so I used it, flipped it, used it again, and the top photo is the result.

Is it wonderful? Good enough to sell, maybe? Nah, I don't think so. But I think it's still rather cool, something different, not perfect, but not so bad, either. I like how there's sort of a wintry feel to the picture, how the owl stands out (created by my cropping the image down to a square), and how there's no question he's watching me.

What's my point? If I'm looking for perfection, if I'm afraid of failure, I should have thrown away my original blurry/grainy picture and moved on. But because I felt there might be something more to the image, I decided to play with it. Not create something perfect. But play. Take delight in the process rather than being rigidly attached to the outcome.

Because no matter how much I want my work to be perfect, my joy comes from the experimenting, the playing, and I learn something each and every time. I learn what works, what doesn't, what might work even better with a different picture. Nothing goes to waste. And I am having fun.

Perfectionism, I believe, is highly overrated. It can be boring, stifling, and restricting. And if the first time you sat down to make a basket or paint a watercolor or make a clay pot it came out perfectly, what then? Where's the fun in that? Art, to me, is all about solving problems. How can I create a mood with this image? How can I attach this piece of paper to that piece and create a collage that looks like a landscape? What if I attach this fabric to that wire and then mount the thing on a piece of driftwood? How can I do it better or differently next time? And the next? And the next?

Art isn't rocket surgery. (My favorite phrase of late.) Art is play. Art is experimentation. Art is process. And if the outcome is amazingly wonderful, then hooray for you! And if it's not, you still had a good time just playing. Children don't make sandcastles to make them perfect. They make them because it's fun. The process is simply fun.

Wishing you a week full of fun, no matter what you do.

©Carol Leigh
 All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Celebrating the unplanned

This piece was created yesterday, apparently with circles (see previous post) still on my mind.

I never know what's going to happen when I put these photomontages together. I usually begin (these days) with a blank canvas and then start adding photographs. Part of what you see here are to-go coffee insulators (corrugated cardboard) and round bits of metal.

What I like about the result is how I've got all those straight, linear lines in repeating patterns, on the diagonal, that contrast with the round forms of the disks.

Also appealing to me is the monochromatic palette, the contrast of dark and light, the way the diagonal lines top and bottom point your eye to the peek of the "planets" going past in the middle. I made the center "moon" with a bit of red in it to create more interest and to add more of a sense of mystery.

There's no way I could have envisioned something like this ahead of time. So when you read articles about how to make composite photographs, and they tell you to "collect the photos you want to use ahead of time," fuhgeddaboudit.

Put something down on a blank canvas. Add something else. Add something else. And eventually you'll be in your own weird little world, experimenting with this and that.

Talk to a collage artist (one who works with physical papers and glue and paint) and she'll tell you the same thing. Talk to a painter. She'll say the same. Start gluing stuff down. Start making marks on paper. Remove parts of some papers. Cover others with paint. Use some graphite on top of the paint. Smear it.

Something less than wonderful may result. That's okay. You're learning, you're playing, and nothing you do is wasted. It all builds over time.

But every once in awhile, something cool emerges. Those are the times you savor, you relish, and that make you especially happy. And that encourage you to keep on keeping on. Not only are you building your portfolio, but you're building your confidence.

Play + experimentation + confidence = a delightful and ever-changing body of work, whether your "work" is cooking, photography, watercolors, fashion, etc.

Have a creative weekend!

©Carol Leigh

Shaking things up . . .

Speaking for myself only, I think that as artists we need to get out of our little ruts, shake things up, create things that are outside our comfort zone, and outside our viewers' comfort zones.

Glorious things are created daily. Hourly. But after awhile an artist (and his or her viewers) grow weary of seeing the same things done the same way.

So we try to shake things up. Make our work look different from the (albeit wonderful) things people have been seeing. Sometimes what we do works, sometimes not. But at least we're experimenting, trying different techniques, different colors, different media. Whether it works or not is inconsequential. What matters is that we're learning, changing, having fun, and shaking up our viewers from time to time.

Can you imagine how boring it would be to always have every technique work all the time? Where's the challenge? Where's the problem to be solved?

I've been playing around with using a variety of techniques and textures, trying out different looks, and lately this combination that you see here has been appealing to me. (It's so convoluted I had to create a little "recipe" to follow that keeps me on track.)

I've been tweaking and altering the technique, and it doesn't apply to all my photos, it's often hit or miss, but it's fun and I like the lighter, brighter look I'm getting on certain coastal images, such as these first two from Maine and the bottom one from here on the Oregon coast.

I hope you enjoy seeing them. Whether you like the effect or not is immaterial (sort of). The point is that I'm attempting to shake things up a bit, not create the same old thing day after day.

If all someone made every day was wonderful muffins, even that would become tiresome. Well, photos, paintings, quilts, stained glass windows, doodles, music, etc. can suffer from the same "ho hum, what else ya got?" affliction. What are you doing to shake up your little art world? Your little corner of creativity in this all-too-short lifetime?

©Carol Leigh, who is expecting snow on the Oregon coast today . . . see, even the weather needs to shake things up a bit every so often!

Empty calories

Within and without Photoshop, there are a lot of ways to tweak one's photos. And a lot of photographers are doing it, including me. By simply adding a texture, pressing a button, selecting a filter, we can change the look of our images instantaneously, easily, and (often) mindlessly.

Here you see two different versions of the same photo. The first one, the red one, is the original. It's a photo of a sign on a red door at the Waldport Marina. I was drawn to the red color and the rustic look of the fish and the lettering. I photographed it a year ago — November 24, 2011.

This morning, I wondered what I could do with it. I wanted to make the fish a bit grungier, so that its texture would be lighter and brighter and would stand out more against the dark red background. But I got distracted. I instead went into Topaz Adjust to see what different overall looks I could give the photo. I selected an effect I never use, which was one of the "solarized dreams" effects.

I liked the way the color turned turquoise at the bottom, how the texture on the door really stood out, how the texture on the fish came forward, and how the letters turned from white to black. All I did was click the button for the effect. I played with the sliders a bit to see what else I could do, but ended up doing nothing more.

In my eyes, the resulting image is fine. It's fun. It's colorful. But it's not very rewarding to me. And I began wondering why. I think it's because my tweaking the photo was really a mindless act. All I did was wonder what would happen if I clicked a certain effect. Yup, that's cool. Now what? There's nothing of me in this photo. There's no real artistry here.

Quite often, when I create a photomontage, there's this solid "knowing," a knowing that something is unique, different, composed well, and makes me feel proud. Do you feel the same way about your work? Do you solidly know when you've done something beyond the ordinary? And you solidly know that it was your talent, your knowledge, your hard work spent learning your camera, your software,  that led you to a fantastic result?

Marianne takes a glorious photo of a butterfly and she knows it's the result of years of daily practice, constant research, as well as a highly developed eye that led her to be in the right place at the right time in the right light with the right skills to create that photograph. Jim climbs a hillside to be in the right place at twilight to fill his frame with the city lights below. He knows his camera, knows how he can enhance that glorious cobalt color, and knows he's created something more than terrific. And I photograph a piece of metal embedded in a sidewalk, knowing that later on that bit of metal will become a headland in a final image that may look like a stormy seascape.

We all are trying to set ourselves apart as photographers, artists, painters, whatever. Unfortunately, I believe a lot of us are turning to "instant art," thinking that by pressing a button, clicking on an aging effect, or turning something that was red into something that's turquoise, yellow and orange (as I did above) we have instantly set ourselves apart from everyone else.

Speaking for myself, I just don't feel like an artist when I do that. So I don't consider my fish photo an artistic one. I clicked on an effect, framed the image, and hung it here in this blog. There was none of that "knowing" that I've gone beyond myself. There was no solid sense of having used an artistic eye. No solid sense that I've used my past learning and creativity to come up with this picture.

What's my point? As usual, I'm not sure. In my own work, I'm aware of empty calories. Effects that are fun at the time, but that in the long run just don't feed my artistic soul. So what about you and your own work? Do you get that solid "knowing" feeling when you've really worked to create something unique, something that shows how much you have practiced, learned, and experimented? Or is a lot of what you (and I) create simply empty calories? Fun, filling, but not very satisfactory in the long run?

©Carol Leigh, who now has a slight craving for a cookie...