A busy week

Oakville Camera Club Presentation

A Presentation

Well,  it was certainly a busy week for me.  I gave a two-hour presentation on my Antarctica trip to the Oakville Camera club.  I spent a huge amount of time preparing for this presentation, most of it because I was once more digging through the huge amount of photographs from the expedition to distill the ones I would use to tell the story of the trip. I’ve been told two interesting things. First, Wynnell Schrenck, looked over my work while in Antarctica and commented that she thought I was not showing my best work. Second, I’ve always been told to look over a trip’s photographs six months or more after returning to have a better view of the work.

As photographers, we are our own worst and harshest critic, Since we were present at the creation and  already visualized the photograph that we wanted, we tend to be disappointed in anything that does not match our preconceived view. This really isn’t fair, as our audience is not judging the work the same way. They are seeing it with fresh eyes and no particular expectations. To develop the best presentation I could and to make sure I was wasn’t overlooking work that I shouldn’t I invested some time in going over my Antarctica body of work again. I was surprised at some of the photographs that I had discounted previously and changed the ranking of of quite a few of them. I use the star system in lightroom extensively which both allows me to review a LOT of photographs easily and change the ranking without much effort.  I had gone through this work previously for other projects and as part of a series of blog posts, but this was the fist time I went through them from beginning to end as part of telling a larger story. It was well worth the effort and has convinced me to go back and look at some of my other bodies of work. I tend to keep most of the work I create (except for disasters like leaving the lens cap on or shooting at 1600 ISO on a sunny summer day – you know you’ve done this too), so I expect there may be some more surprises.

This presentation was to photographers, so I could talk about the creation of the work more than I might with a regular audience and it was my first opportunity to present the whole trip in one presentation and discussion. The audience was larger than I expected with somewhere in the range of 120 people. I had been told to simply bring a thumb drive, but I brought the whole kit, just in case, which included the laptop, a thumb drive with the presentation, and my X-rite i1Display colour calibration device (in case their projector was off). It turns out their projector was great and could take the HDMI input straight from my laptop. The difference between VGA and HDMI is outstanding when you can compare VGA and HDMI directly.

The presentation went well and they were even tolerant of me running a little late. Several of my ex-students in the audience were not surprised .  They also invited me back after some of my upcoming adventures in Iceland and the Arctic. I really enjoyed this event and looking forward to more in the future.

(P.S. Sorry for the poor quality of the photographs, as these were shot by an iPhone in a rather dark theater)

Oakville Camera Club

An Interview

I was also interviewed this week by the website “Exhibitions without Walls”. They contacted me a little while ago about an interview. Shortly after my presentation above, they emailed me to let me know it had been published. Here is the link, should you want to read it for yourself.

http://www.theblogexhibitionswithoutwalls.com/2012/10/25/scott/

As an aside, they asked me about photographers who had influenced me and I missed an important one, David duChemin. He has written a series of books, both print and electronic, which resonated with me as few photography books do. He presents the view, which I share, what the equipment and cameras we use are ONLY important to allow us to share our photography with others. The creation of photography is done entirely by the photography. The rest are just tools to assist in the execution of that vision.

I have known of, and exchanged email with, David for many years, but I had the opportunity to meet him in person during my Antarctica trip. I think there were only 4 Canadians on this trip, and he and I were the only professional Canadian photographers.  He is releasing his latest book within the next few months, called “The Print and the Process: Taking Compelling Photographs from Vision to Expression” that is one of the few books I have purchased in both electronic and print form. I am including the link and the cover photo so you can check out this book for yourself.

In keeping with the theme of this post, I was next to him in the zodiac when he shot this photograph.

The Print and the Process

You can find the book here.

He is an outstanding photographer and an all around great guy to travel with on any adventure. However, do not peek at his screen while you’re editing work side by side. His work is so good, it’s a heck of an ego shot to try and return to working on your own.

Oh, My interview is here:

http://www.theblogexhibitionswithoutwalls.com/2012/10/25/scott/