| From Photoworkshop.com Waiting for the Light
Exposure equals Intensity x Time or (E= I x T) sums up simply how proper exposure is achieved. In practical terms for a given intensity of light which is controlled by the aperture of the camera, proper exposure is achieved by the length of time your camera’s shutter stays open, usually in fractions of a second. The result, in basic terms, is a usable image captured on film or by the sensor of your digital camera. We also deal with time in other ways. The time of day that we make a picture is important. Some photographers who attend our workshops at the New Mexico Photography Field School comment how they just can’t make a picture after about 10:30 in the morning or before 3 in the afternoon because the sun is too high and hence, the light is “boring.” They prefer the early morning and late afternoon hours of the day, sometimes referred to as the “sweet time”—the time of day when the sun is low enough in the heavens to cause those dramatic shadows that sometimes rake across the land. However, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz once said, “wherever there is light, one can photograph,” and I think he was right. I am sometimes disappointed when I look through a student’s portfolio of photographs and notice that all of the photographs were made at the same time of day. For a body of work by a photographer to have life, depth and vitality, there must be some variety—not only in the images—but also in the time of day that the images were made. I invite you to take a look at Alfred Stieglitz’s ground-breaking photographs made of New York at night, Edward Weston’s photographs at Point Lobos, Ansel Adams’s photographs of Yosemite or Paul Caponigro’s photographs of just about anywhere, to see that each of these incredible photographers made their photographs at a variety of times throughout the day. They knew the right time and in fact the right moment to photograph their intended subjects when it was revealed to them. John Szarkowski, the influential photographer, curator, historian, and critic at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, created an exhibition of images titled The Photographer’s Eye. A book/catalogue of the exhibition was originally published in 1966 and was re-released earlier this year. Szarkowski eloquently summed up the notion of time in photography by saying: “Photographs stand in special relation to time, for they describe only the present. Exposures were long in early photography. If the subject moved, its multiple image described also a space-time dimension. Perhaps it was such accidents that suggested the photographic study of the process of movement, and later, of the virtual forms produced by the continuity of movement in time. Photographers found an inexhaustible subject in the isolation of a single segment of time. They photographed the horse in midstride, the fugitive expressions of the human face, the gestures of hand and body, the bat meeting the ball, the milk drop splashing in the saucer of milk. More subtle was the discovery of that segment of time that Cartier-Bresson [Henri Cartier Bresson, French photographer, 1908-2004] called the decisive moment: decisive not because of the exterior event (the bat meeting the ball) but because in that moment the flux of changing forms and patterns was sensed to have achieved balance and clarity and order—because the image became, for an instant, a picture.” Time of year or season is an important thing to consider when making photographs too. In the spring of 2004, I made a photograph of an Apricot Tree in full bloom along the side of the road on some property belonging to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, not far from where I live. I have no idea how it got there. It lives just below the Lab’s linear accelerator, an unlikely place, I think, for an apricot tree to have volunteered to grow. I like knowing it’s there, though. On my birthday a few weeks back I found myself late one afternoon driving by “my” tree and noticed that a change was quite literally in the air. The afternoon was definitely cooler, the light had a crispness to it, and the leaves on the apricot tree were beginning to change from the greens of summer to the yellows and oranges of autumn. When I am out “cruisn’ fer snaps,” I will sometimes come upon subject matter I want to photograph but the time of day may not be quite right to reveal the subtleties that I sense may be there. I might need to come back at another time of day or season to make the image. I have found keeping a small notebook in the cubby of my pickup truck to make a note of the subject and sometimes even a quick drawing and a proposed future time that I need to be back to make the image to be an invaluable tool. The next time I am out making photographs, I will consult my little black book. In the case of my apricot tree, I had written down, Mid October, Apricot Tree, Los Alamos National Laboratory, soft light, mid-afternoon. Last Sunday, light clouds appeared in the western sky and remembering the note in my black book, I decided to head out with my camera and tripod and check out the little apricot tree. I drove to the site and noticed that the tree had begun its marvelous transition from Summer to Autumn. While there was a hint of green leaves still on its branches, there were an abundance of yellow leaves and even some that were tinged with red. I knew that a beautiful yet subtle picture of the tree and its environment might be possible. Clouds had been coming in from the west all afternoon and finally they veiled the sun creating a beautiful soft light. I pulled my camera out of the bag and chose my 24-70mm lens and fastened the camera to the tripod. I set the camera to a small aperture so as to achieve a large amount of depth of field and made a “test” exposure to check the histogram to be sure that my highlights or shadows were not being clipped (lost). I adjusted the exposure time (shutter) and then began to wait for just a little thinning of the clouds to hopefully create a glow in those beautiful leaves. I made several exposures. I pondered the RAW file images in Adobe Bridge for some time. I finally chose the one that you see below as the best expression of that afternoon. The image was processed in Adobe Camera RAW and was minimally refined in Adobe Photoshop.
As the philosopher Jagger* once said, “time is on my side, yes it is,” and at present, I believe him to be correct. I am enjoying these first few weeks of being fifty and look forward with true excitement to all the photographs I will make in the second half of my life. I encourage you to go out into the world with your camera and photograph it too. Go out in the early morning and late afternoon and every hour in between and explore the world with your camera. Make a day of it. Heck, make a week of it if you can! Autumn is one of the most wonderful and dramatic times to be outside making images of your world. I wish you many brilliant yellows, oranges and reds in your photographs. I wish you beautiful skies and warm days. I wish you, as Kodak reminded us long ago, “the times of your life.” Tech Stuff: The black-and-white photograph of the Apricot Tree in Bloom was made with a 5x7” Ebony SV57UE Field View Camera with a Carl Zeiss Protar lens on Kodak Tri-X Film on a Gitzo GT5540LS tripod. I carry my gear around in a Lowepro SuperTrekker backpack or a Lowepro Stealth Reporter shoulder bag, depending. The colour Apricot Tree photograph was made with a Canon EOS 1DS Mark II camera with a Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L series lens on a Gitzo GT3540LS tripod with a Really Right Stuff BH-55 ball head. The John Szarkowski book mentioned is “The Photographer’s Eye” by John Szarkowski, published by the Museum of Modern Art (ISBN#978-0870705274) * The philosopher Mick Jagger is a wise sage and a member of the English band, The Rolling Stones. Fine-art photographer Craig Varjabedian is widely acclaimed for his images that embrace the people and places of the American West. He received his MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1989. While Varjabedian's photographic career has spanned over thirty-five years and encompasses a deep grasp of the technical aspects of the photographic process, his gift is his intuitive ability to make authentic and compelling photographs full of not only light, but life. An author and photographer of six books, Craig is also the director of the prestigious New Mexico Photography Field School in Santa Fe. His most recent book, Four & Twenty Photographs: Stories from Behind the Lens, is a collection of his best-known photographs and the stories behind them. See Craig’s photographs at www.craigvarjabedian.com Explore exceptional workshops at www.photofieldschool.com View selections from his new book at www.fourandtwentybook.com © Copyright 2002 by Photoworkshop.com |
