Reinier van Houten – Photography

In yesterday’s blog entry I wrote about my visit to the Arnold Newman Masterclass exhibition in The Hague. The previous – and first – location where the collection was shown was in Berlin. There happens to be a very interesting 50 min. video where William A. Ewing – curator of the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography – literally walks you through the exhibition and explains Newman’s work. It is an excellent film about Arnold Newman as a person and his work. Definitely, a highly recommended must see!

By no means does this replace an actual visit (if you’re in a position to go). On the contrary, it just inspires you to go and see Newman’s work yourself, I think. You can find the video here.

“We do not take pictures with our cameras, but with our hearts and minds.”

Visited the Arnold Newman Masterclass exhibition at the Fotomuseum in The Hague yesterday. I already knew some of his work, of course, because he simply is one of the big names of the 20th century photographers. This is the first time his work is on tour after his death in 2006. Before The Hague, the collection was exhibited in Berlin. And then everything goes back to the US for 2 more exhibitions over there. So it is a unique opportunity to see the originals myself. The exhibition in The Hague lasts until January 2013.

Arnold Newman is mostly known for his portraits, although – as can be seen – he als made many photographs of architectural details. But the majority of his work – and his fame – is about portraits. What sets him apart from many of his fellow photographers is the fact that he used the subject’s environment to take his photo’s. Not in a studio. One of this statements about this was also quoted on one of the walls of the exhibition.

“The thing is, with Penn or Avedon, they control totally the situation in the studio, and I’m always taking a chance, wherever I go.”

Arnold Newman is widely regarded as the master of what is called environmental portraiture.  A term he didn’t like that much himself. He’d rather called it symbolic photography, referring to the various symbols he used in his pictures. There’s plenty of information about him and his work on the internet, so there’s no need to repeat it all here. The website in memory of him and his work can be found here. So, what did the visit do to me? Most of the portraits I do, are shot in the studio. Very unlike Newman. One of the things I will do, is to take some pictures out of the studio. There are one or two shoots planned anyway, so I decided to use the Newman approach for these. Don’t think though that in his environmental portraits everything was simply registered as it was. Even though he used an artist’s studio or a business man’s office as the natural environment, it was still carefully setup and controlled. I’ll publish some of my own Newman-style portraits later on this blog.

October has nearly started, so a good time to share with you my planned photography activities for this month. Actually a number of things are scheduled:

Mentoring program
On Monday, October 8, I will start with participating in a mentoring program. The mentor is Diana Bokje, whom I have met earlier this year in her class Criticizing Photographs. Together with a  number of fellow members of my camera club we will work on the expressiveness of our work in 8 different sessions over the next 4 months. I’m really looking forward to this masterclass. I’m sure I’ll have something to report on this in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Arnold Newman exhibition
Later this month an exhibition on the work of Arnold Newman will start in The Hague. Actually, it will be the first exhibition of his work after his death in 2006. I’ll be visiting it on the 18th. This fits very nicely into the mentoring program as Newman is well-known for his in context portraits. He has photographed many celebrities in their natural environment. Just a portrait wasn’t good enough for him; by adding the personal habitat, he tried to reveal something about their life and character. Another activity I’m very much looking forward to.

National Photo Association Masterclass
Taking place in November, but I subscribed this morning (which makes it more or less an October activity). The National Photo Associated (Fotobond) is organizing a whole day in November where several topics will be discussed in parallel sessions. Also the work of several masters will be discussed.

So plenty of things to see and learn, but let’s not forget to take some pictures as well! You can expect some personal work to be presented and discussed on this blog the coming weeks.

The holiday season and a tight work schedule have prevented me from updating this blog over the last few weeks. Doesn’t mean though that I haven’t done anything about photography. Time to do some catching up and tell you what I have been doing.

Google acquires NIK Software

Probably the biggest surprise in the world of photo editing yesterday! No rumours, nobody expected or predicted this. Is it good or is it bad? As long as we don’t know what Google’s plans are, it is hard to say really. Given that they already serve the pro/consumer market with Picasa, Snapseed seems a logical choice for the take-over. But the widely recognized and awarded plugins (Color Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro, Viveza, etc), NIK Software also has a very strong offering for (semi) professionals. Personally, I use Color Efex Pro for all the post-processing I do.  So what are Google’s plans with this suite of products? Are they going to continue with the development? If so, isn’t it a bit out of their league? Picasa and Snapseed I can understand, but you would expect the other products to belong to a company like Adobe, right? I can’t wait to hear what Google has to say about this. Another interesting question, of course, is what this all means to Capture NX2? Originally developed by NIK Software, but some years ago handed over to Nikon for further development and maintenance. As we all know, it has been quiet since. Some people believe that the future of Capture NX2 is much brighter than before. I really doubt if this is the case. The product is aimed at photo professionals and high-end amateurs. Although Google takes photography seriously, this is a totally new area for them. I don’t expect Google to be involved in anything like Capture NX2 or any other further development of NX2 for that matter. So it’s still up to Nikon themselves of which we know they make very fine camera’s….

World Press Photo

Every year the World Press photo collection is exhibited close to where I live. Obviously, every year I visit it. And every year it makes me feel awful. It’s more than one person can handle in 2 hours. So much violance, so much aggression, so much pollution. So much negative things. Even when you go and see the sports section, it’s full of aggression. I deepley respect all photo journalists who risk their lives day in and day out in order to record they ways we behave. But it does paint a one-sided picture. I still recall very vividly, several weeks after visiting the exhibition, of the violence in Mexico with its images of chopped off heads and limbs scattered across the streets. It makes you feel sick. And every year I say to myself this was the last visit. And every year I go again. Probably hoping, against all odds, that next year our world has turned into a much nicer place to live in.

Kids photography

Finally, I did take some pictures myself. That’s, after all, what it’s all about. You can talk about editing software as much as you like or visit as much exhibitions as you can, but at the end of the day it all comes down to taking pictures yourself. In general, I like taking studio portraits. Taking portraits of kids can be a challenge. I had this experience once before when taking kids portraits for the first time. This time the kids – a boy and a girl – were older, 5 and 7 years old to be exact. The girl is taking ballet lessons, which you can tell by the way she poses.

The boy was very extrovert and busy. Couldn’t sit still for one single second. So there was no way to direct the kid. I decided the best way was probably to let it go. Let it happen and take as many shots as I could. To illustrate this: the boy found a basketball laying in the studio somewhere and immediately started playing with it. Instead of telling him not to do so (I admit I was worried he would ruin my strobes a number of times…) I just let him go. I didn’t plan to take any shots of him with the basketball, it was just something that happened. It resulted in some decent shots, I think. So in the end, parents happy, kids happy, and me happy. Was fun to do. Anyway, as always, judge for yourself.

We all take things for granted. Okay, some more than others, but we all do. When someone asks you a question about something that is so obvious to you, you’re left speechless. You simply cannot find the proper explanation for something that is, just because it is.

This happened to me this weekend. I was explaining depth of field to someone and how it is affected by different apertures. So far, so good. Until the person asked: “but why does a different aperture give a different depth of field”? It’s always these “why” questions that get you into trouble. I managed to get away with it at the time by saying not to bother why, but simply accept it does. But afterwards I gave it more thought. I was sure I learned the principle behind it once, but could not recall it exactly anymore. Why does a different aperture give a different depth of field? Fortunately we’re blessed with Internet and Google these days, so it didn’t take me long to find out why it is as it is. Although normally outside the scope of this site, I’d like share my regained wisdom with you for a change.

Let’s say I want to take one picture of three objects which are standing more or less in line of each other. I focus on the middle one to make sure it is sharp in the resulting image. Let’s say we use full open aperture, f/2 or something similar, which, as we all know, will give us minimal depth of field. But why? Let’s look at the drawing below to understand.

Because we focused on Object 1 the internal focal point will be on the sensor (or film for analog cameras). The distance between the camera and Object 2 is longer than with Object 1 and in case of Object 3 it is shorter. Therefore, the internal focal point will actually be before and after the sensor respectively (as the drawing illustrates). This causes the so-called circles of confusion. They refer to the areas on the sensor after the focal point (Object 2) or before the focal point (Object 3). As a result we see these elements blurred on the final image. Only Object 1 will be spot on.

Now let’s see what happens if we’re going to use a much smaller aperture (to give better depth of field). If we used f/2 in the previous example, let’s use f/16 now then. Let’s bring in the same drawing, that is, almost the same drawing.

What we see here is that, as a result of the smaller aperture, the internal focal points of Objects 2 and 3 are much closer to the sensor which gives much smaller circles of confusion. On the final image Objects 2 and 3 will appear to be in focus. Please note the delicate wording here: they appear to be in focus. In fact they are not. Object 1 is the only that’s in focus, but because the blurring is imperceptible, we see them as in focus. Strictly speaking they are not. And that is how aperture and depth of field are related. Larger apertures cause larger circles of confusion, resulting in blurred objects in the final image. Smaller apertures cause smaller circles of confusion. Mind you, this still results in out of focus objects, but the blurring is not noticable to the human eye.

In the small research I did for writing this entry, I noticed the thousands of articles on depth of field that live on the Web and almost all of them simply state that wider apertures give you lesser depth of field. Which is true of course, but only few articles tell you why. Here’s a contribution to the latter category.

What is it that makes you immediately like a certain photograph and absolutely dislike another one? You look at a picture you haven’t seen before and within a split second you say “I like it” or a similar expression showing your admiration. Another picture will have an opposite effect. I had an interesting discussion about this subject the other day. The person in question was a member of a local camera club for a while, but eventually gave up because she couldn’t stand the almost endless discussions on whether a photograph was good or not. In her opinion, it was very simple: you like it or not. Just as with wine. You take a sip and you like it or not.

Of course, I asked all the obvious questions: why do you like the photograph (try to analyse it a bit). Is it the colours? The composition? The light? The subject? Does it bring back memories? These are all very basic and obvious types of question when you try to figure out what makes you like the picture. It were exectly these questions that made her eventually give up her membership. It’s simply a matter of gut feeling. You look at a picture and your gut feeling or instinct or whatever tells you it’s good (or not). Without all the analyzing questions.

Against all odds, I tried going one step further. What do you think the photographer is trying to say with this picture? What is the message? Indeed, this proved to be way out of proportion. A simple analysis of your own thought might be do-able one day, but disentangling the photographers mind at the time the picture was taken, was next to psycho-analysis. Nothing to do with photography.

I think that with the huge amount of camera’s that has penetrated our day-to-day life and  the number of pictures that is being taken every day (which is even much bigger), our citicism actually has gone down. If you don’t care about composition or light when you take a picture, why should you be interested in it afterwards? You simply take the shot (without giving it much thought) and you also simply say whether you like it or not (without giving it much thought).

It probably has something to do with the superficiality we see spreading all around us these days. I guess we have to live with the fact that a growing number of people loves clicking the I Like button. Don’t give it much thought, follow your instict. Thumbs up!

There was an interesting blog post on Thom Hogan’s site this week, celebrating Nikon’s Capture NX2 4 year anniversary. He compares NX2’s developments over these 4 years with those of the competition. You can all more or less guess the outcome: NX2 has hardly seen any development and enhancements where the competition, especially Adobe with Photoshop and Lightroom, has made significant progress.

I admit that all of this may be very fine and true, but I continue to say that NX2 has some unique features and capabilities – which you can all find on the various websites and forums – that still makes it for me the preferred editing tool. Especially in combination with Nik’s Color Efex Pro plugin – actually the only one it properly supports – it gives me all I need. Sure, better workflow integration and better user-interface are more than welcome. But would it allow me to do better editing? The answer, at least for me, is no, it wouldn’t. So, as long as Capture NX2 continues to provide me the tools I need, it remains my product of preference.

The question is, of course, will Nikon be able to keep up with all the PC developments that are happening? Given how long it took the to support Windows 7 64-bit environments and also given that Windows 8 is to come out soon, you can only pray some bright people at Nikon do something about this and release Capture NX3.  Until then, I’m still very happy with Capture NX2.

I was just so lucky to spend a couple of days in New York the other day. I have visited the city quite a bit over the years so there’s no longer the “obligation” to do all the tourist attractions and other must sees. It was a very relaxed visit this time with plenty of just walking around. With no particular place to go. Still I could easily fill a number of blog pages here with what I have been doing in this very exciting and beautiful city, but since this is not the place to do such a thing, I’ll focus more on photography.

As it happened, there was a Cindy Sherman exhibition taking place at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) which was very conveniently located only a couple of blocks away from the hotel. In preparing the trip to NY I came across the exhibition so I was aware of it, but decided to make an actual visit depend on the weather. During the weekend this was perfect: sunny with temperatures in the high 70’s. On Monday, however, it was raining a bit. Not much, but enough to justify the visit to MoMA. Believe it or not, but at 10am there was already a queue of people who wanted to get in – as you can tell from the picture on the left. Some of them were wearing hoodies to protect them from the drizzling rain.

To be honest, I wasn’t familiar with the work of Cindy Sherman. So I Googled around a bit. More than enough to be found on the Internet. I’m not going to repeat here what is already publicly available and pretend I’m some sort of expert. Because I’m not.

In general I didn’t find the work of Cindy Sherman easily accessible. That is, I found it difficult to interprete the pictures individually (one by one). Why did she take the picture the way it was taken? What is she trying to communicate with it? What does the picture tell me? These kind of questions – as I was recently taught in the class Criticizing Photographs – I found hard to answer. Now Cindy Sherman works in series and that’s the way you should read them, and not one by one seperately. And then they started to make more sense to me. That was also the way the exhibition was setup. It showed the various styles and phases throughout Cindy Sherman’s lifecycle. So gradually the appreciation grew during the exhibition.

Just a day or so before I left for NY, I came across Cindy Sherman’s name on one of the photo blogs I read now and then. It had a link to a Wikipedia page called List of most expensive photographs. From the list of 19 photographs 2 came from Cindy Sherman. They were sold for $3,890,500 (number 2 of the list) and $2,700,000 (number 6) respectively. Truely amazing amounts of money.

More on Cindy Sherman and her work can be found here and here. The following text  clearly describes her motives and what she’s trying to say with her work:
“By turning the camera on herself, Cindy Sherman has built a name as one of the most respected photographers of the late twentieth century. Although, the majority of her photographs are pictures of her, however, these photographs are most definitely not self-portraits. Rather, Sherman uses herself as a vehicle for commentary on a variety of issues of the modern world: the role of the woman, the role of the artist and many more. It is through these ambiguous and eclectic photographs that Sherman has developed a distinct signature style. Through a number of different series of works, Sherman has raised challenging and important questions about the role and representation of women in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art.”

Not being familiar with her work, I found it not always very accessible at the beginning, but developed a better understanding along the way. In retrospect, I was glad to have seen it. It was most certainly well worth the money.

Earlier this week I had to go to Dublin, Ireland for business with some colleagues. Because they were seated way behind me in the plane on our way over, I was out much sooner than them. You might ask yourself what this opening line has to do with photography. Well, just continue reading. Eventually I will get there. So, because I was out of the plane much more quickly than my colleagues I waited for them in the airport (this shows what a really nice guy I am). Anyway, while I was waiting at Terminal 2 of Dublin airport, my eye was caught by an exhibition of photo portraits. It goes without saying that I was immediately attracted and watched a number of them. I soon found out the series was simply called Faces of Ireland and they were taken by Irish photographer Kevin Abosh.

It’s a mix of well known – Pierce Brosnan and Sinéad O’Connor – and unknown Irish people who are photographed in exactly the same way. They’re all square frontal head-and shoulders shots against a black background and all lit in the same way. So, famous or not, everybody is shown exactly the same throughout the entire Terminal 2 builing of the airport. More information about the exhibition can be found here. To visit the website of Kevin Abosch, click here.

If you happen to be at Terminal 2 of Dublin Airport this year, I recommend you allow yourself some extra minutes to watch the work of Kevin Abosch before you go through customs and collect your luggage. It’s a very nice welcome to Ireland!

In February 2011 I posted an entry on this blog about Google’s Art Project that was just released around that time (click here to read it). I was very excited about this initiative. And even more so today, because Google recently enhanced the Project by adding a considerable number of museums, paintings and artists. If the Google Art Project was already one of the best things to be found on the Internet, it now has become even better.

Yes, this blog is dedicated to photography. I know. But I believe photography is an art form, in fact a continuation of an art form, that started with painting. Photography and painting are closely related. Visiting museums, and I don’t mean photography museums here, and studying art is important. The Google Art Project is a tremendous help in doing just that. It allows you to very conveniently study all kinds of techniques and different styles. Learn from it and be inspired.

I recommend you read this article in the NY Times to get a better understanding of what the new version of the Google Art Project is all about. But even better, of course, go to the project itself and find out what a fantastic contribution to the Internet this really is. Go and see www.googleartproject.com. Have fun!