Zeb Andrews Photography » photography

Those who think they are the only ones looking, tend to be looking at far less than the rest.

Zeb — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 00:33:19 +0000

Ok, before I get into this, let me preface by saying it has been a long week. I am fairly worn out and as such perhaps a bit more grumpy and rant-prone than usual. But nonetheless, what I am about to rant about is behavior that has bugged me for a little while now, I generally just don’t pay much attention to it. At the same time, it is behavior I don’t understand, at least fully, so I am willing to hear counter arguments to my following rant. If you disagree, please speak up, argue your point, let us have a discussion. A side rant of mine is I tend to enjoy too little discussion on here, but that is beside the point.

One rant at a time. :-p

So here goes. What gives with photographers who believe they need to keep places all “secret”? I see this most often with landscape photographers. They will go off to a place, generally one that is hardly undiscovered, and come back from it with their photos which they will gladly share, and often boast of, but will make sure to mention that it is their “secret” location. Now, I am not talking about the habit of not including location data, I mean, I don’t always post where a photo is. Generally this is because it is not anywhere specific or I don’t know how to describe where it is. Such as with some of my photos of the Palouse. Sure I could get down the map and scour it for 30 minutes finding the exact coordinates of where I took that photo. But I don’t. If someone asks, I will try to give them as good of directions as possible.

So I understand the lack of location data. Rather, what makes me scratch my head a bit is photographers who go out of their way to brag about how a location is secret and they are not telling.

I mean, why? Really?

In a sense it always makes me wonder if the photographer is a little insecure about their own abilities, isn’t this generally why one boasts? Because they feel some need to impress others by letting everyone know how special they are? Ok, maybe I am being a bit harsh. Maybe. Told you I was feeling rant-prone.

Insecure or not, I think it is kind of bad form and etiquette. If you don’t want to share where a place is, I guess that is your decision, but bragging about your secret spot is a bit over the top.

And then there are those photographers who make full use of places like Flickr or Photo.net to locate spots that others have shot, asking questions on where locations are and such, and then refuse to share that information themselves. Kind of self-serving and selfish. I had a customer in the store once who was talking about how foolish most Flickr photographers were to share so much information, that he did not post because he did not want people to know where his favorite spots were, but he did like to get on there now and then to see where everyone else was going and thought it a good use for that. He was a bit of an arrogant scumbag too. But perhaps that is beside the point.

So the question I keep coming back to is, why? What is the reasoning behind this behavior? Are they afraid others will get down there and steal their photos? Can you really steal a photo? If so then perhaps the problem doesn’t lie with the availability of info on where that location is, but rather with your own ability to be creative. And I think that gets to one of the hearts of the matter. With so many landscape photographers out there, many areas get saturated in terms of how often they get photographed, and so the competitive nature (another silly piece of behavior) drives photographers to not only range farther afield to “new” areas but to try and hide that info from other photographers so they cannot get out there and make their own pictures.

I have two responses to that. First, I have a whole series of the St. Johns Bridge created over several years. I find that I take my best and most creative photos in the places I am most familiar with, that I have visited the most. Sure I get nice photos in new places too, but those pictures tend to be based on experience I have gained experimenting in those places familiar with me.

And second, I learn a lot more from seeing others photograph in a place I have been to, than I could hope to on my own. What I mean is, by seeing how others photograph the Palouse, or Painted Hills or the Alvord Desert I learn about other comps, conditions, techniques. Way more than I ever probably would have on my own. So in the long run it is a benefit to myself to share that info and encourage others to those spots to photograph their own perceptions. At least that is how I think about it.

Now to be fair I have heard a good argument or two for keeping locations secret, but these tend to be the incredibly small minority. One was a photographer who was taking pictures of a Mennonite community in New England. He did not want to share the location of this rural community because he did not want photographers bum-rushing out there to take photographic advantage of this quiet community of people. I can appreciate him trying to protect them while still trying share their experience with the world. The second good excuse involved the Boiler Bay headlands along the Oregon coast because the popular trail to the coast involved crossing private property, specifically someone’s front yard. Most photographers will behave themselves, nonetheless I probably would not appreciate a flood of photographers sneaking across my front lawn all the time in the pre-dawn darkness. Now an alternate route has been laid out that avoids the property and respects these people’s privacy much better.

But that is about it, at least that I can think of.

I dunno, I struggle with this one, because on one hand I really don’t care much. To each their own, or such. But on the other hand, it also strikes me as bad etiquette which can lead to bad habits and the teaching of. But even more so than that, because I think allowing yourself to fall into that trap of location hoarding is not a healthy perspective for a good photographer. I think it is a symptom of some underlying problem. I am not a psychiatrist though. Imagine that though, photographic psychiatry!

Anyway, as I was saying, if you think the success of your photos relies on you hiding where you take them, then you probably are not a terribly good photographer. Perhaps competent, maybe even good, but probably not great. Because a great photographer isn’t limited by his location, secret or not, he carries all the secrets of his or her success with them. They are called vision and imagination. Between those two things, they make secret locations irrelevant. In my opinion.

So my advice to all you location hoarders? Don’t. It’s ok. Share information, encourage those around you to go there and shoot. Help them get better because by doing so, they will help you get better too. It is not a contest, nor should you feel like you can be collecting these spots. And if you do insist on keeping your secret locations, don’t show us photos of them. Keep them secret. It is mildly obnoxious to dangle them in front of us and not be willing to share where they are. Chances are, somebody else already knows anyway. You probably were not the first one there. In fact, that is almost certainly the case. And if you still insist on going this far, then at least have the decency to stop taking advantage of other photographers who are willing to share their information. Because that is just selfish and I am out of excuses for you at this point.

Ok, wow, that really was quite a rant. Have not done that in a while.

So to sum all this up, let me just say this one last thing, sort of as the icing on the cake. That is, I have a lot of serious thoughts on photography, but I try not to take any of them too seriously. Even this rant. Sure, it was worth the twenty minutes of typing to put it out there, but at the same time, it really is not that important because I am going to keep doing what I do, in a way that I feel good about doing it. And all the location-hoarders in the world cannot affect that.

This shot by the way was sunrise at a super ultra secret location called Hug Point along the Oregon Coast just south of Cannon Beach. Don’t bother to ask me where it is, I’m not telling. I visited here back in February with (who got really wet), (who makes awesome videos) and (whose pinhole is present in this frame if you look hard enough).

Light and time may not be endangered species but we are still always losing them.

Zeb — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:18:04 +0000

“Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.” — George Eastman

It is not often I post things to my blog that were not taken by me, but this is one occasion. Simply, this is a glass negative found across the street at the Salvation Army. If I had to guess I would say it is probably a bit over 100 years old, considering that was the era when glass plates were being shot.

So at about 3 pm today I found myself holding a piece of glass with an image of three gentlemen on it over 100 years old.

I love my job.

But more importantly, I love photography. This really just sort of blows my mind. I start thinking about the fact that I am holding a once-sensitized piece of glass, that contains the imprint of light that bounced off of these three men over 100 years ago. In a sense it is almost a “light shadow” cast by them and captured on this glass.

And here I am using a state of the art scanner to digitize that image and bring it on to the web. Once again, amazing.

I don’t want to make it seem like I am taking a dig at digital photography (digital imaging is why this image exists on the web right now) but this is a very big reason why I shoot film. The tangible nature. Being able to hold a piece of film that was struck by the very light that came off of the subject. Thinking that, that very same piece of film may one day be pulled from a box in someone’s attic 80 years down the road, and that someone can hold it up to the light and see what I saw. They will even be able to still print it or scan it.

But it is not the ability to still print it or scan it that so amazes me. It is the physical evidence that light has left behind on this particular piece of film, or paper, or glass. Digital doesn’t have that. The sensor carries no trace of that light, rather it is converted into electronic bits and bytes. A digital copy. A replica of what that light cast. There is nothing tangible, nothing physical to hold unless a print is made, which so often it never is.

And in some way this makes me deeply uneasy. I don’t like thinking of the work of my life as being so intangible. It scares me in a sense and I never feel quite easy with digital images, despite the many amazing shots I have taken on digital cameras. And also despite how careful and redundant I am in backing those same images up. But it is not just my work. I think of all the pictures snapped every day. All those snap shots of sons and daughters. Mothers and grandmas. Beautiful sunsets and sunrises. And I think of what awful percentage of those images will have ceased to exist within ten years. Or twenty. Let alone a hundred years from now.

I know that even film is not permanent, nothing is really. Not our negatives. Nor us. Or our planet, or even our universe. But nonetheless, I am pretty certain that I will not be able to pull any of my CDs of digital files out of a box in 100 years and still have them be usable. Nor any CF cards. My external drives won’t last more than 10 years I bet. My digital files won’t ever be anything more than bits and bytes. Sure I can print them, but those are just copies of copies. Better than nothing, but still far lacking.

And so I shoot film, because I like to think each of those negatives carries the physical effect of light off of a beautiful waterfall striking it. Or the light bouncing off of my son Owen playing when he was 6 months old. And then again when he was 12 months old. Or even the very light that reflected off of an old friend no longer living. It is not so hard to hold a negative, or a plate like this, in your hand and feel like you are holding just a tiny shred of some past time itself. The last physical remainder of a moment long extinct, and that when I hold a negative in my hand, I am touching that light again. And that is one of the things that drives me to shoot film. That deep sense of not just recording light and time, but preserving it.

“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

” — John Berger

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If you have not browsed through it, the run by the Library of Congress is amazing. Really sit down and take your time taking it in. Don’t just browse, really give yourself the time to look.

Getting to know me a bit more

Zeb — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:44:30 +0000

Cape Kiwanda

… I dream to be an artist. I pray that someday, if I work with enough care, if I am very very lucky, I will make … a work of art. Call me an artist then, and I will answer.

I consider myself a photographer…stop. Not a fine art photographer, nor a master, or a photographic genius. Not a savant or a guru. I guess if you pressed me I might label myself as a landscape photographer, but only hesitantly as I am reluctant to confine the definition of my photography so. Simply put, I take pictures, therefore I am a photographer.

The words art and artist are tricky titles to apply, there is a lot of gray area. I try not to think too long about what is art and what is not, it really is not usually that relevant to what I do. I shall say though that I believe art is not something one does haphazardly or on occasion. Just because you smear paint on a canvas, does not necessarily make you an artist, nor does one’s ability to press a shutter button.

The mild rant aside, recognition as an artist, is not what drives me. I do not actually dream of being an artist. What I do dream of is being a teacher, or at least someone who facilitates the spread of ideas and knowledge, specifically relating to photography. There is little that is more rewarding than sharing an image like this and seeing it excite (rather than impress) others. Knowing they will go out and incorporate those ideas into their own personal vision of the world, which will have just become that much wider because of the new inclusion of perspectives. Then knowing they in turn will share those visions and ideas back again with the rest of us. That to me is a much richer reward than any list of accolades.

To speak a bit of the technique used to create this image, I first saw this idea demonstrated by the photographer Ted Orland. I was visiting Yosemite and happened to stop in at the Ansel Adams Gallery where Ted had an amazing photo of Mono Lake done in this style. His photo was a lightning bolt to my imagination and not too long after seeing his image, I found myself standing along this stretch of the Oregon coast hoping for a nice sunset. It was an amazing afternoon, and I spent it up on the cliffs reading The Princess Bride and taking photos, but I was certain the sunset was going to fizzle because of the layers of clouds on the horizon. Sure enough the sun sank behind the thick band of clouds and the sky started to gray out so I hiked down off of the cliffs and figured I would linger on the beach…just in case. The sun reached the horizon and the burst through the thin layer of clouds there, lighting up everything for about 10 minutes. I double-timed it far enough down the beach so the sun was not behind the cliffs and close enough to Haystack Rock to photograph. Before I left I shot this panoramic with almost an entire roll of film through my Holga. The final photo ended up being the product of eleven separate shots scanned and layered together in Photoshop. It is an interesting technique, and an excellent way to burn film. But it is fun, and it has allowed me to find yet another way to see and capture some of the amazing things I see in life.