works of wanderlust

Tag: photographer

  • urban sketch, five

    I have a mere three sketches left in this October (sub)urban sketching challenge I set for myself.

    Good thing, too. The weather is starting to become a factor to my outdoor sketching efforts. The one rule that I set for my October month of daily drawing was that they were not just doodles of the houseplants. I had to draw some kind of outdoor scene that could be considered suburban sketching or adjacent. I have tried to meet this goal head on by ensuring that there was something “human made” in every scene, whether that was just a park bench or a fence post. Because the problem with the suburbs is that its all mostly single family homes, cookie-cutter shopping areas, sprawling parks and cars.

    I also loosely set myself the goal of avoiding when possible drawing from a photograph. The caveat to that was, of course, weather. Sure, I have sat in my vehicle and sketched what I saw through the windshield, but there have been two occasions where the weather was less than cooperative for my efforts and/or I put the sketch off for too long avoiding the weather and I found myself sitting at the kitchen table later on after dark drawing from the photo on my iPad screen. But only twice.

    In other words, all these vague and quasi-restrictive rules have done the thing that often drive proper art: conflict with simplicity and opportunity. I made the rules loose enough that I didn’t create so many obstacles that it became impossible to find a subject. I also made the rules strict enough that—as I wrote above—I couldn’t just draw from my couch or kitchen chair every day either. I had to go out. I had to go on walks and find scenes. And when I couldn’t find scenes I had to just draw what I saw.

    And that’s the rub, isn’t it.

    I went into this combatting another mental obstacle: my inclination to think like a photographer. And photographers want perfect scenes and clear subjects and all those things that seem like they would naturally apply to a good sketch, too. But there seems to be a subtle difference that I just can’t put my finger on—it’s something to do with drawing the mundane and the ability of a pen and ink piece of paper to become something far more interesting than a snapshot. Maybe it is the passing of the visual data through a human brain. Maybe it is the focus of detail through the fingers of a person with feelings and memories. Maybe it is the emphasis that comes from the interpretation that stops being as literal as a lens and a pixel sensor is forced to be by its own nature. Art is subjective not just in the consuming of it, but also in the creation.

    A single tree might be interesting enough as a photograph, but takes on a subjective interpretation when the shapes and colours and shadows pass through my eyes, swirl around my brain and shoot out my fingers as pen strokes. It is no longer a pixel perfect image, but an evoked feeling of a tree in that moment.

    heavy pen

    reluctant as I have been to use heavy pens, I have leaned into fine liners for much of my urban sketching in the last couple years. understanding and becoming friends with strong, bold black ink on the page is a work of confidence as much as it is skill. i am yet to be skilled, but i have learned a kind of confidence in finding the places where solid fills of black ink are not only welcomed but adored when they arrive. i too long thought of my black brush pen as simply lacking the detail of my 005 fine liner and little more than a blunt colouring tool. instead, i have started to see it as important as the page itself: white paper, detailed lines, black shadows, all of it in balance and harmony when drawn right.

    Don’t get me wrong. Many, many artists aspire to draw photo-realistically and a hundred fold people who are their audience applaud the efforts. I admire such skill. 

    Yet, Realism in art is just one branch of a towering tree-worth of styles.  Not every image needs to be a replica of a photograph.

    I’ll give an example that is one step removed from my sketching: I am making a video game. It is artistically best classified as a modern-retro 8-bit game. It is not 8-bit and it is not as simple as that implies. But the art style evokes an 80s arcade aesthetic. It is not trying to be photo realistic. It is not using the best of the best graphics engines to make it look unimpeachably perfect. It is leaning into a style. And while making games that are visions of realism is a fine achievement both technically and artistically, there is more to art, style and creating than replicating the capabilities of another art form.

    So here I found myself with a pen, a sketchbook, and a set of manageable rules that forced me to push through tedium, weather, uninspiring architecture and tight deadlines, all while drawing one image a day then letting it go. There was no working towards perfection day after day after day on one work. It was about sketching in the moment and ignoring the inclinations of a wandering photographic mindset.  

    It has mostly worked. I’m 28 for 28 with three sketches to go as of this writing. My sketches have become freer with style, and my pen become more willing to see a subject where my camera would have seen background fluff.  It has been good. And no, not all the sketches are good, but they are exercises that each and every one have obeyed a rule to create an minor obstacle to build a tiny bit of skill in the overcoming of it. And that’s been worth it.

  • panoramic, three: oculus graffiti

    There is this strange place literally walking distance from my house. 

    The graffiti tunnel, more formally known as The Oculus.

    I say “walking distance” though it did take me over an hour to walk there and an hour to walk home—plus I spent time there taking photos, sketching, making a video and then stopping for lunch on my way home. Three and a half hours later I got home from a little suburban adventuring.

    About twenty years ago now they built a stretch of the city-circling ring road that swung round the southwest corner of the city. At about seven o’clock on the circle the road passes over a little feeder creek. Readers of this blog will be slightly familiar with that creek because we run through many of the trails that weave over and around and past that creek—but north of where the Oculus sits.

    Rather than just build another bridge, some industrious city planner seems to have decided that this would be the future site of some connecting trail linking the neighbourhoods on either side of the freeway, so they build a hulking concrete culvert with a beautiful paved footbridge traversing through the middle and atop the creek… and never connected it to anything. Never. Even twenty years later it’s this seemingly abandoned piece of pedestrian pathway that requires a map and some hiking boots to locate. 

    To be fair, they are doing some roadwork about 500m south of this point now and it is a strong possibility that the lack of connection will be formally remedied in the next couple years—or never—but if it’s going to happen it’s going to happen soon. Or, yeah, maybe never.

    Still. In those twenty years much has transpired under the freeway and much paint has been spent on decorating every reachable surface with graffiti. It is a sight. I mean, if they ever connect it, I’m sure they will repaint it as a stark and boring Industrial City White—but for now, it is a destination for adventure and a sight worthy of some stellar photographic efforts.

  • urban sketch, three

    In the meanwhile, my personal month-of-sketches art experiment continues unabated and, as of nine days in, triumphant.

    To be clear, not even most of the pics are gems. I have been partaking in the act of suburban sketching, which doubly adds to my challenge of (a) seeking out something to sketch and a place to sketch it and (b) making said scene of suburban mediocrity seem interesting enough to sketch in the first place. 

    To make matters more challenging, I’ve been mildly sick for the last couple days, which means going to sit in the park on a chilly October afternoon is not high on my list of priorities, even if doing a sketch kinda is. There was one particular sketch I did from the comfort of my living room window, looking out into the back garden with a mug of hot tea at the ready.

    All that aside, what my goal for the last nine days has been is embracing the clutter and chaos of a scene. Urban sketching (and thus I will postulate, suburban sketching) is very much about a Venn-like diagram of purpose and positioning (artistically speaking) in a way that overlaps with snapshot vacation photography. That is to say, if I were to walk out into a busy city street, stroll into a lovely urban park, or sit on a bench beside a cute little corner shop, I may be so inclined to snap a photo, right? But with a sketchbook in hand, and a pen at the ready, I should be able to stay a little longer and draw the view instead.

    thinking like a photographer

    i used to snap hundreds or thousands of photos each week, and owning, learning, and perfecting my use of camera equipment was a defining hobby of my life. small-p politics of being the camera guy aside, thinking like a photographer is a sixth sense for me and as such has been both a benefit and a curse. it is a curse because sketching is not photography: there is something about consuming a scene with one’s eyes, mashing it around inside one’s brain, and then turning the thoughts about the scene into monochromatic lines on a piece of paper with one’s hands, all of it taking place over minutes or hours of time. this is nothing like the instantaneous click of a shutter that turns photons into matrix of data that represents a near-perfect replication of the light that passed through the lens of the camera in that moment. thinking this way, though, has been a benefit because for years I have already been thinking about composition, light & shadows, shape, form, and style—all of which translate into a meaningful way that my aforementioned brain mashes around what it sees before it turns it into a sketch.

    In that case, the context of the scene is just as important as the focal point. And mostly here in reality the context of any scene is a little bit cluttered and little bit chaotic. 

    Drawing a building will include the vegetation growing around it, the shadows, the posters hanging in the windows, the parking meter out front, the cars parked in the stall astride the building itself, people, birds, trash cans, street grates, and all the lovely details that make the scene feel real. The camera wouldn’t ignore any of that to make the object one is photographing stand out, would it? Neither should the urban sketcher, I assume.

    With this in mind, I have been practicing absorbing the life that comes from that chaos and clutter: it all makes the scene seem more real, I think, and even just playing with the notion of adding as much of that clutter as I can while still retaining the fidelity of the art I am trying to put onto the page…well, it’s a balancing act. But it is resulting in interesting sketches that have made this little challenge satisfying enough to continue.

  • panoramic, one: autumn-ish

    If you’ve been reading along, you may already know that about a year ago I went backpacking in the mountains and returned with a whole bunch of great photos. A few of those photos were panoramic pictures.

    This is not a post about those particular photos, but rather the inspiration and adventures into code brought about by those photos. It was an adventure in thinking about image formats, and trying to figure out a way to display them nicely on a website, so when I go out on lovely autumn weekend and take photos like these… I can post them like this…

    Now, don’t even get me started on the image and video orientation debate. Horizontal versus vertical video! The shift from snapshot to square to tall images on instacrap. It’s all bewildering and when they start making wide screen folding phones we’re all going to follow the little red ball to whatever the latest trend is anyhow. 

    I like my 4×6 photo format for the most part. It’s a generational bias, I know, but still—it’s what I like. 

    All that said, the progress of technology over the last twenty-five years to simplifying panoramic, ultra-wide, auto-stiched photography has arugualby turned it into my second-favourite format. (Which probably means Apple will turn it off soon, dammit, I shouldn’t have said anything!) Back when I got my first camera I literally used software like photoshop or single-purpose software to individually stitch carefully captured photos together to make home-brew panos, and they were at best mediocre.

    Now, there is just a mode on my phone. On your phone too, probably.

    Except, back to that format war thing. People like pics that fit on their screens in the orientation that is most comfortable to hold. In other words, pano pics don’t fit nicely at all on our screens. 

    All this is leading up to the fact that when I added a pano feature into my 8r4d-stagram app, it changed my incentive by one hundred percent to take more pano photos. Which of course means…

    I’ve been taking a lot of pano photos lately. And like you’ve seen scattered into this post, I am interested in sharing some of those here on this blog. 

    Where this all led me was to sit down and write a plugin in WordPress to do something that should have been very simple, but look as did, was not something I could figure that anyone else had made: I built the start of a simple plugin to add panoramic photos to my WordPress blog, and display them in a way that lets you think of them like regular photos, but with a little secret hidden off to the side if you are inclined to scroll and nudge with your mouse or finger.

    I released it this morning on Github.

  • Photobia

    retro post: I wrote a blog for over 16 years at this very domain …and some of it is even worth reposting here again. This might be one of those posts.

    It was the invention of the digital photograph that may be credited with the reprieve from destruction granted to humanity… or at least for saving us temporarily. 

    I know, dear reader, that this may be a bold and potentially far too dramatic statement to place on the mantle of our budding new relationship, here, now, just like that, but there it is. Fact. A fact I know to be a virtual certainty, a clear and unobstructed truth, viable from a million perspectives, crystalline and as clear and in-focus as any photo I’ve clicked, snapped, plucked from the photons of light scattering through the air. Any. Ever. 

    But then I don’t take pictures any more, do I? Too risky. Too selfish. I ceased that hobby when I learned more of it. After all, it was all there, as plain as the language and words scribbled on these pages, the twists of very phase that we were there using to excuse our actions. I saw it. I saw the truth of it unfold, and it was confirmed for me in a proof so perfect that I could not doubt it, question it, ignore it. And perhaps you too will stop your own frenzy of photographic apocalyptic chaos after what I am able to…

    Ah, but wait; Surely I am getting ahead of myself. 

    It is my failing. This tenacity in me to grasp onto a moment and present it a single, perfectly focused image is still so strong, it remains so firmly entrenched in my heart, soul, my being, or whatever you prefer to call it, that to extend that moment temporally, to weave a path through the here, now and before, to pull it out like a spool of film stretched backwards in time as to explain a sequence, and then to play out the implications after the moment has passed and well into the future thereafter, ah, but it is not a skill that I have honed by my years of clicking shutters and catching instants of light in my lenses. I was a photographer and the haste derived from that skill is core, essence to my being. I regret that now, of course, but that this tale, this rant, this warning should suffer any, unfold poorly, or fall to convince because of that lapse, ah, but that burden is not yours, it is mine.

    See, you already know me I think. We’ve met. We’ve bumped shoulders on the street. 

    Ah. Recall? there was that time in Paris when I was steadying myself against a lamppost, my back turned to the Champs-Élysées while my lens was aimed at some richly flowing frieze upon the Arc de Triomphe. You walked through my frame and I snapped at the exact, precise, inconvenient moment when you stepped between the epic stone monument and my camera, your head turning and your eyes catching in a softly focused blur of confusion that forced me to retake the picture. 

    We were also together, briefly but together, that day in New York City, my fish-eye lens a bubble of elegantly tuned glass exploding the blur of lights, neon, and yellow taxi drag-lines into the perfect snapshot of West forty-second street in the last second of sinking daylight in a photograph that I would have been proud to hang on my wall, but no, no, no, thank you, no, because there was your head smudging, blurring, blocking the lights of the McDonald’s sign against the New Amsterdam marquee from my frame. 

    You don’t remember? 

    Then perhaps I can jog your memory of that day when we knocked elbows, paid our excuse-mes, as we both leaned over a rustic wooden rail bending into a kind of pale misty haze falling out of a mountain scene, zooming in to photograph that waterfall near Jasper. Or the day of the parade when your kid’s balloon persistently strayed into my shot. Or maybe it was you that handed me an awkward glare when I was merely taking photos of my own family in the park and lingering, yes, lingering a little too long on the swings striving for the idealized action shot I had blinking through my mind’s eye. 

    It was somewhere, may have been everywhere, or it certainly was anywhere, but believe me, we’ve met. 

    Ah, but please don’t misunderstand. This is not to imply or inflict some abstract, unfocused blame upon you, dear reader. Blame? Ha! No. Not blame. Blame for what? Blame for something, nothing, everything. Blame for the anguish of ruined photos, ah, no. No. Not blame. 

    No. Oh no. No. No. 

    No. 

    That would never do, indeed no. Blame, not at all. Not for you or me or any one of us alone. No. Rather. Well, rather it’s merely, simply, wholly that we are acquainted, you and I, somehow, if you know it, believe it, share that knowledge or not, and within the frame of this notion I share my picture of the impending apocalyptic ruin, end and doom of humanity. Just that.

    Just that.

    Just that. And who ever would have thought our eventual demise would be filtered through a lens so seemingly benign, so innocent, so… so… ah, but there I go again.

    It starts like this: it starts with the simple understanding that when I was a boy I was also a scout. That was me; Picture it. A neat-and-tidy uniformed, nature-strolling, camp-fire-building scout standing with his trusty red-plastic army knife tucked into a faux-leather utility belt and an orange scarf neatly woggled around his young neck. We camped. We crafted. We sang songs. We pledged allegiance to mysterious English lords long since dead this past century, and saluted proudly to the flags of our country and our club. I tell you this now, dear reader, because it is important that you understand one of those oft-recited mottoes, a rhyme, a creed, an elegant maxim of old-fashioned wisdom that peppered my actions then and thereafter, for a long piece of my adult life, and even now haunts this very treatise. We had a motto that would be repeated, sage wisdom flung to anxious children as they clambered out of a crowded sport utility van dislodging themselves from civilization and stepping into the wilderness. Our voices would sing it out to fellow scouts if we caught them dropping a wrapper from a snack, or snapping a still-green branch from a tree. “Leave only footprints,” we’d chime with the sing-song air of a memorized credo, “take only photos.”

    Take only photos. Take only…

    Photos? PHOTOS? Just photos. Just that.

    August 1998

    I was packing. “How many rolls of film do you think I should take? Five? Six?”

    “You can always buy more.” She says.

    “Twenty-four photos per roll at six rolls, that’s, uh… about a hundred and fifty pictures. Is that a lot of pictures? It doesn’t seem like a lot a pictures to me.”

    “Depends.”

    “It is my first time over to Europe. How many would you take. I don’t know, but it seems like there could be quite a bit I’d like to photograph. I don’t think I’d use a whole roll every day, but it’s three weeks. Three weeks. Twenty one days. Or is it twenty-two? No, right, twenty one. And only one hundred and fifty photos. It… it seems like I might take more than five or six photos per day, you know?”

    “You can buy more film. They sell film in Europe.”

    “But do I want to always be looking for places to buy film?” 

    My nerves are not my friends when I travel. They get the better of me. Always have, always will, I suspect. I am not a fearful traveler, but I stumble through the unknown with both hands outstretched and my feet plodding, scuffing, stumbling along with methodical care and attention. Travelling didn’t come naturally, either. Some people see the world and grab onto it with both hands. I wanted to reach out. I wanted to grab it. I wanted to soak it in, flit from place to place, country to country, new world to new world, absorbing the people and the culture, dropping into another culture, another city, blending with perfect fusion of ease and certainty. I wanted to be the guy who stepped off an airplane with perfect confidence and waved for a taxicab to scoot him off to an important place or vital meeting, I wanted to be seamless and noticed all at the same time, blurred into a geography not my own. But I was not that guy. Instead, I fumbled with maps, and studied unfamiliar street signs, I was the guy who looked up into the sky as if it would help me orient my latitude with the grace of a mythological ranger, as if seeing the glare of the sun would shine an all-knowing beacon upon my destination. I was not that guy. Oh, no. Not he. No. No. No.

    “They sell film everywhere. I’m pretty sure.” She insists. “You can very likely buy it from shops on every street corner or even from little old ladies selling their baking from baskets. Anywhere. Everywhere.” A pause. “You are going to a place that thrives off of tourism, so you think they are going to miss the chance to sell you something as fundamentally important as film?”

    “They have that?”

    “What? Film?”

    “No. I mean do they have little old ladies selling muffins out of baskets?”

    “I have no idea.” She sighs. “I’ve never been.” She says, she begrudging me jealous, but she is going back to school and I’ve graduated. “I’m just talking, you know? But they will have film. Everyone has film.”

    “So, how many rolls of film do you think I should take?”

    “Take five.” 

    “Five? And buy more?”

    “Yeah.” She says. “Just buy more. It’s just film.”

    Originally published: November 7, 2013