In Pursuit of Excellence (In Photography)

"You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books that you have read, the music you have heard and the people you have loved.
-Ansel Adams

Photography can be art, but strangely it is also sometimes nothing more than personal record keeping, what we might term a snapshot. Often we just want to record a moment or occasion in our lives without any attempt at creating anything more and that's okay of course, being a perfectly legitimate use of photographic technology. 

The vast majority of photographs taken on any given day are exactly that and no more, a photographic record destined for Facebook or Instagram, possibly to be "shared" or "liked" by members of the recorder's inner circle, their "friends".

But the potential, ahhh, the potential of the medium is so very vast these days, it's a bit mind blowing, that is to say, EXTREMELY INTIMIDATING!

Every time I start to think I'm making some progress towards transitioning some of my work from digital record keeping to creating art, I come across someone else's photographs that very quickly illustrate just how far I have to go. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the perspective) photographic technology is advancing incredibly rapidly and as one technique or technology is mastered or at least partially understood, something new becomes possible. It's quite the challenge to keep up!    

I think the best thing I ever did to help my photography skills move forward was to join a photography club. If I am honest with myself I have to admit that I am guilty of being a bit of a lazy photographer (in the past). These days I am trying very hard to learn better habits and skills and to push, pull or drag my photography to a higher level.

When I first joined the St. Albert Photography Club http://www.stalbertphotoclub.com/
I was a little bit intimidated (and still am) by the skills of some of the members. Most of the members are not professional photographers, but rather they are for the most part, talented, passionate amateurs who love to learn and share their work with others.

Part of the process of a photography club is the submissions night that takes place every month during the club season. On that special night, members bring printed images, (as large as they can afford to print) up to the maximum size of 11" x 14" unframed but in a simple mat, to pit against the work of other club members.

The other way of entering is the digital submissions category and that is how I first entered the fray in an effort to determine if my images made the cut, if they would stand up to the critiquing of the other members of the club. At first I was regularly disappointed by the response to my submissions and in hind sight I see now that I often submitted badly chosen images, it was quite a revelation. 

A Non-winner from the "Country Roads" submissions theme.

It took quite a while to break into the winners circle and that only happened by accident.

When friends used some of my images in their home, they decided to re-print one of them in a larger size (because they liked it so much, wahoo!) and I asked for the old one printed at 11"x14" which was exactly the right size for submissions night.

My first winning image

I submitted it in the open category in October of 2013 and won first place, a very heady feeling let me tell you! That win ignited my renewed interest (my photo-mojo) and spurred me on to print more images, take more photos and much more carefully shoot, select and enter the various categories.

It's a lot of work planning and executing creative entries for themes such as: weathered wood, opposites, alone in a crowd, broken, fog/smoke or country roads. I've noticed though that it's good to be challenged, it's good to have stiff competition that consistently forces you to submit your best work for even a hope of having your images placing well. 

All of last season I was mentally chasing one particular individual who is consistently entering absolutely great images, technically perfect, exciting, creative and well crafted art. There are lot's of great photographers in the club, but this guy consistently submits excellent work and he makes every month even more of a challenge.

I love this one and expected it to do well......what can I say, it didn't even place but I still love it!

I called this post "In Pursuit of Excellence" because I wanted to make a point about how this kind of a challenge can be such a motivator to up your game, to push you and motivate you to spend more time thinking and creating something beautiful or meaningful that is well beyond what we might create on our own, without outside influence and a challenging environment.

You might believe that art is subjective and of course you are right, but until you have had a selection of your work critiqued by your peers (and betters) and you have truly compared your best to the best that is out there, it is very easy to convince yourself that your work is good or even great and leave it at that. 

After all, it's mine and I'm awesome, at least that's what my mom used to tell me and she should know!

Reno's With Rosie - Creating the Curator Wall (With 2024 Updates)

If it isn't decorating magazines or pinterest, it's television or just talking to someone about what they're doing that inspires my wife Rose. She's always thinking. First comes the inspiration, then the planning, then dropping little hints around the house, "running it by me" just a little bit at a time so I won't get alarmed and the "fight or flee" instinct won't become active. 
Apparently it's a delicate balance.

As for me, usually I have no idea what's going on, I'm just minding my own business and then...wham o! And I have apparently agreed to some kind of expensive renovation, decorating project, major purchase, or vacation, somehow without even being aware of the fact that a decision was in the process of being made!

Oh well, mostly it works itself out and every once in a while I do exercise my veto vote, but not without careful deliberation, at least 5 seconds anyway. Rose gets her own veto vote as well so don't worry, we are an equal partnership (mostly, with a lot of zig-zagging back and forth).

But this particular project was really an excellent idea and it took no convincing at all. I took one look at the picture of the "curator wall" in Rose's magazine and I was on board.

The finished art wall.

After our trip to Italy in 2013, I have been itching to get some of my photographs printed, mounted and displayed around the house. I had already printed a bunch of calendars that turned out pretty well and I had enjoyed some success entering some images in the St. Albert Photo Club monthly competitions in November. One image of the snail or Momo staircase from the Vatican Museum won first place in digital images and another of a woman walking through the early morning mist in Piazza San Marco won second in printed images. Pretty heady stuff, let me tell you!

So when Rose mentioned her idea for showcasing my work, I jumped at the chance. Our first task was to find a suitable piece of galvanized pipe and the mounting flanges to get it up on the wall and properly supported. I looked around and finally found a nice, 6' piece of 1/2" galvanized pipe as well as the elbows and mounting flanges.

Galvanized pipe mounted on the wall from which the artwork hangs.

Meanwhile, Rose had been working on selecting and cleaning up some frames we had recently taken down when we repainted the house. She marked out an area on the floor approximating the size of the wall area we had to work with and we laid out the frames into the most pleasing arrangement we could come up with. 

We didn't want to spend a lot of money on new frames or new mats so she re-painted some of the old mats and painted select parts of the old frames, getting rid of any gold accents and replacing it with silver or black.

Frames with old artwork laid out on the floor.

Next was the hard part for me, choosing what to print, finding good images that told a bit of a story about our trip to Italy. We had this great long narrow frame that had a space for a 12"x36" image and I decided to crop a vertical shot of a man walking up a steep lane in the rain with a bright blue umbrella. It was shot in one of our favorite places in Italy, the town of Belagio on Lake Como in Northern Italy. We both loved the pop of blue and the wet cobblestone steps leading up to the bright opening at the top of the image where there was perhaps a little sun filtering through and illuminating the yellow walls.

Hanging the Images.

Most of the other images weren't hard to decide on. We both love the image of the grand canal in Venice from the foot of the Pont del Accademia with the blue gondolas in the foreground and the sun rising over Piazza San Marco and the Santa Maria della Salute Church.

We printed it in 24"x18"  at London Drugs (along with all of our other printing) and they did a great job. We went with 2 11"x 14" images along the top, the one on the left was taken in Rome, we had just arrived after a bit of a kerfuffle at the train station and then a mix-up picking up our keys and a rude person at the gelateria. While Rose kindly waited in line for some delicious gelato, I listened to the cello playing, tuxedo wearing busker in the most picturesque little alley staircase, it was quite magical and I took a couple of quick pictures (after depositing a few euros in appreciation).

Also in the top center is another shot of Venice taken on a misty morning on one of the smaller canals that criss-cross the city. Our first morning in Venice we woke up to some gorgeous fog blanketing the city and I loved it! On the top right side is a smaller shot of the ceiling in the Pantheon with a nice little beam of light shining through the 27 foot wide oculus. What an amazing building, we visited several times at different times of the day and it was always beautiful. 

Below that is another image from Rome, this one was taken in the Capitoline Museums but I don't remember who it is. The one below it on the right is a fairly modern statue built into the hillside in the town of Monterosso al Mare, Cinque Terre, Italy. This statue called Il Gigante, was built from concrete in 1910 but rough seas and allied bombs during WW2 have left this image of Neptune holding the waves at bay looking pretty forlorn and shabby. We both loved finding the statue there at the end of the beach and we visited it several times (gelato in hand) during our 4 days in Monterosso.

The living room with the couch half finished, but the art wall complete! - 2013

A few years have passed since we put up our Italy photographs and since then we have changed them out twice. The first time we changed it in 2018 to photographs from our Eastern Canada trip that we did with our trailer.

Eastern Canada scenes except for one of the Grand Canal and one of California - 2018

Then in 2024 Rose tired of those images and in an effort to bring the forest into our living room we replaced them again with a mix of B.C. and Alberta forest scenes.

Western Canada forest scenes 2024

In the photo of the 2013 Italy photographs up above a ways, you may notice the partly reupholstered couch. Here it is in late 2024 now and Rose has just ordered fabric to once again re-cover (for the 3rd time) a very comfortable, durable and well loved sofa.

Time just keeps marching on and while some things do change, some things (like that sofa frame) still stay the same.

Picture Perfect

My brother, sisters & I

I was thinking today about what makes a photograph art? And is there such a thing as the perfect photograph? Of course there's the subjective side of things and we may all have a different opinion on any given image. But for me, the answer might be connected to our concept of what life is. Is life just a random confluence of matter and time and events that just sort of falls out of the sky, or the brain, to splatter on the pavement in front of us to be interpreted sort of like a street Rorschach test? Or is there a lot more meaning to life, and a lot less random particle collisions with weird outcomes and more ………………….life, love, beauty, and God?

A photograph can be a lot of things, just like a human life. It can be dull, boring and flat, but useful. It can be a record of a place or time, but with no-one to care about it or be interested in it, it might seem to have no point. But if it has a connection to something or somewhere that people care about and are interested in, it has a life and a magic of its own. If it has a provenance that is somehow intertwined with our lives or something we care about it comes alive to us.

 Today I was looking at a box of old pictures that really tells a story of who my family is. After my mom’s death, it seems I was appointed as the “keeper of the past” without even realizing it, (and I didn’t even get a tee-shirt). There are hundreds of photographs and negatives and papers and keepsakes that are a living record of my family throughout the generations. As I looked at these old pictures of people, many of whom I didn’t even recognize, I was sad. Who were these people who were so obviously important to people who were important to people who were important to people I care about?

Normally, I don’t spend a lot of time taking family pictures or people pictures at all, but looking back through these old photos, I realize that they do have importance, even for those of us who are not sentimental about them. Most people are kind of funny looking and they definitely are not models so they don’t know how to pose very well and they make funny faces and have bad hair and weird clothes, wait a minute, that’s just me I’m talking about, you on the other hand, look great!

Don’t get me wrong, there is beauty in just being family to one another. All of those traditions and little rituals and trade-offs that are part of growing up Canadian in the times that we live in, have a meaning and a beauty of their own, I know that. And I know that an incredibly beautiful photograph can be absolutely empty of any other meaning if it doesn’t connect the viewer with life in some way. The best pictures connect us to something in our own lives, a memory, a moment, a fear, a shared experience, a dream, an emotion, even a nightmare. That’s the challenge of artists of all kinds, but especially the photographer. That’s what separates the record keepers, from those that can draw the viewer into the scene and capture their heart.

There are at the very least, two kinds of beauty when it comes to photographs: The kind that comes from the existing emotional attachment that we have with the subject and the kind that the photographer manages to evoke through the subject, or in spite of the subject, even without a pre-existing connection.

Life also seems to diverge into two parallel paths, do we choose door A with the easy path, the wide path that so many are taking, do we just follow along because it happens to be the easy way and everyone is doing it, or do we choose the narrow door, the one that looks hard to enter? If my record in the supermarket checkout line is any indication, I’m in trouble! But I've learned to stick with it and ride it out, even if my mind says, “go that way, fool.” 

Sorry, I don’t have a lot of answers, but when it comes to beauty, I’m convinced I have it right. To me, much of the beauty around us comes from the family who loves you and makes you happy. Beauty and perfection, in a photograph are very similar, if you love it, and it makes you happy, that's great, and if it happens to serve God in some way, even just by sharing the wonder of creation, or by recording the family that He gave you and the moments that you've shared with them, you just might be on the right track.

Mom, Terry, Chris, Doug, & Duke in 1962.

A Visit To Harvard

What does it mean to a guy balanced on the slippery slope of being over fifty and looking down at what might be the shortest half of his life, to visit Harvard, the Ivy League school? I asked myself that question a few times over the course of our visit to Boston and over the weeks before we left on our trip. My wife Rose and I decided to go to Boston, “for the fall foliage” but really there were quite a few underlying reasons. One of the biggest ones was this, “it is well at any price to have peace in the home”. I believe it was Agatha Christie who said it through Hercule Poirot in one of her novels. Whoever it was who first said it, I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment!

I went because my wife wished to go. Also, the new Sony A77 DSLT camera was supposed to be available at that time and I was hoping to persuade her that I needed the new camera to photograph the lovely fall foliage. She would have fallen for it to, but as fate would have it, because of production problems and a flood in Thailand, I had to use my old camera, can you believe it!

Rose spent her early years in Eastern Canada, Newfoundland and Ontario, kicking around various army bases with her parents, her sister and her dog Sporty. She always goes on and on about the red leaves of the trees down east and I finally decided that if I could get a new camera out of the deal and it would end the “red leaves are soooooo beautiful” talk, then it would be well worth whatever it cost.

By the way, Alberta may not have red leaves (except along 97 Street North of 137 Ave.) but when it comes to dog stories, it has way smarter dogs. All of her stories about Sporty involve washing him with tomato juice because a skunk sprayed him, or pulling porcupine quills out of his nose or some other goofy thing like that. But in Alberta we breed amazingly smart dogs like “Duke” who was our family dog when I was a kid. Duke was a cross between Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, and that lovable little dog named Lou from the film, Cats and Dogs. He was an action figure of a dog, if he was a people, he would have been GI-Joe or Rambo, (but with a heart of gold). He was a German Shepherd and a very big, smart and opinionated dog from all of the stories my dad told. First off, he didn’t like policemen. I don’t know where he got that, I really don’t, well OK maybe I do, but I’m getting off track here so I’ll only tell you one story today about Duke.

Duke was so smart that while a certain eastern dog was still wondering why the sight of anything black and white, even a cat, made him cringe involuntarily and run for the hills, Duke would patiently wait on the little rug by the back door for his wet feet to dry so he wouldn’t get water on the hardwood floor. I kid you not, even though it must have bugged poor Duke that we kids ran all over like monkeys and he, the dog, was the one with manners.

But we didn’t go to Boston to talk about dogs and the rivalry between eastern Canada and the west doesn’t have a lot to do with dogs, or leaf colour for that matter. We went to Boston because it is steeped in history and it is one of the oldest cities in North America and it is beautiful and we thought it would be fun, and it was!

There was a lot to love about Boston and if I had to pick one thing, red leaves would not be it! As it turns out, it wasn’t a great year for “colour” as the tour bus driver called it. Oh Francis, what a character you are! This guy referred to himself in the third person, “Francis” he would say, “you have a heart of gold” or “Francis tries very hard for you folks, to find some color, yes he does.” He sounded a bit like Gollum from “Lord of the Rings” actually, if you can imagine Gollum saying, “Move that car, ya bum!”

Like most places that I’ve visited, it was the people that were the icing on the cake. All of the wonderful museums and restaurants and attractions and old churches and parks would mean very little if they weren’t peopled by “folk”. I may love to take pictures of the buildings and natural beauty of this world around us, but it really is the people who make it come alive, and the dogs and cats of course.

There are real live people who we interact with as we go about our business and move from place to place who make life special, but there are also those people from the past who made history and who are the soul of those places. Boston is a place like that, populated today and throughout the years with bigger than life people involved in bigger than life events.

You can’t go ten steps in Boston without hearing about Paul Revere and his midnight ride and, “The shot heard around the world.” If I hear one more reference to “the minute men”, or “the Boston Tea party” or “Bunker Hill”, euuuahhhh!!!!

I love history and all of this is fascinating, it really is, and I get tourism, I do, but as with all else in life we need a balanced approach. Boston has a great history and a great story with a place in American lore as a city fuelled by movers and shakers, but that’s the past. Today matters too!

Harvard, in nearby Cambridge, is an amazing place and for me it had a kind of magical aura that lingered and permeated every building, statue, museum, church and cobblestone that we stepped on, visited or passed by. It's steeped in history but still vibrant and alive today.

Sure MIT is newer and cooler in some circles, but HARVARD, what more is there to say? Harvard to me, is a special place and I’m not even sure why, but I loved it. I loved the atmosphere of clever, rushing students, clutching their Starbucks cups and talking with their heads together. I loved the fleet of bicycles that were everywhere and the tweed jackets and scarves and messenger bags of the Professors and students. I loved the Harvard Yard and the maples turning colour as the people sat under them reading or working on their laptops in one of the hundreds of brightly coloured chairs that looked like they could stand up to just about anything.

Harvard Yard

Harvard University, which celebrates its 375th anniversary in 2011, is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Maybe I’m just a bit of a romantic when it comes to Harvard, and the reality would fall far short of the fantasy and the anticipation of being a part of something with so much history, that’s probably it I suppose. But one thing is sure, it makes you think! What if?