Words on Art on Words

Participating in a weekly evolving call and response art exhibition at The Lava Center in Greenfield, MA spurred me to new creative heights.  

From the exhibit's call for art and writing.

As artists, we are creatively stirred by the world around us. We create in response to what we experience, both our lived realities and the works of other artists. In the Words on Art on Words installation, we will observe this responsiveness in real time. Each week, at least 4 new visual or written pieces will be added to the installation wall. The only rule is that visual artists must create in response to an already-displayed piece of writing, and writers must create in response to an already-displayed piece of visual art.

Click to join the fun!

Delivering my piece Elements, created in response to Amie Hyson's poem Choose Not to be Moved

Elements

Choose Not to be Moved by Amie Hyson

Explaining to fellow exhibiting artist Collin Ricketts how the background image is a double exposure of clouds and sun overlaid with a masked image of plants and stone.

Showtime

John Nordell blogs about the creative process at johnnordell.com Instagram: @john.nordell

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Technology Research: Reviewing the Mirrorless Nikon Z6 II

Some end-of-year need-to-spend-budget money landed us at American International College with a Nikon Mirrorless Z6 II and I finally had a little spare time to create in the midst of my midsemester crush.  Grabbing the Z6, I had not even left my house when light forms on a window shade stopped me in my tracks.

“Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.” - George Eastman, Founder of Eastman Kodak Company

George Eastman revolutionized photography several times over and made it available to the masses. His quote maintains its juice in our digital age.

In 2007, I acquired an early Nikon DSLR, a D200.  This solid, trusty machine has served me well.  I discovered that I could program the camera to purposely create in-camera multiple exposures.  The process led to my Reality-Based Abstraction series.

The Creation of Triangles - 3 Individual Images Automatically Combined Into a Single Jpeg File Inside the Camera

Employing this multiple exposure technique I discovered with my D200, I used the mirrorless Z6 and shot three images of the light forms, angling my camera in different orientations.

When looking through the viewfinder of a mirrorless camera like the Z6, you view the scene you are photographing on a small digital screen. The scene comes through the lens and hits a sensor which sends information to the screen.  With pre-mirrorless cameras, the scene travels through the lens, bounces off a mirror and up into a corrective prism housed in the viewfinder before reaching your retina. 

When shooting multiple exposures, a digital screen embedded in the viewfinder like this allows to to see your prior shot images in the series and you can thus precisely align each successive image to complete your composition.  Looking through the viewfinder, as I aligned the right hand triangle to just touch the edge of the top shape, I felt like Michelangelo precisely spacing the hands in The Creation of Adam, one of his frescos gracing the Sistine Chapel's ceiling.

The Creation of Triangles - The Same Three Individual Images Combined by Hand After the Fact in Photoshop 

With the Z6, when set to create a multiple exposure, I discovered that the camera keeps each individual file and also combines the images into a single file. With the D200, you only ended up only with the single file of combined images. However, the combined file with the Z6 is the compressed, lower quality, Jpeg image file format, while with the D200, the combined file is a high quality, versatile, Raw format file.

I am baffled and disappointed that with this state-of-the-art camera the combined multiple exposure file is a lower quality Jpeg.  On the plus side, I do end up with each of the individual files. I experimented with bringing the individual images into Photoshop and manually combining the files to end up with a higher quality multiple exposure (see above).  I am vexed by this process, however, as I prefer spending my time creating images, rather than sitting in front of my computer. 

Equally baffling with the Z6, is that the combined Jpeg is in the middle of the sequence of images, rather than at the end, making it difficult to determine which files to combine in Photoshop. (1/5/23 Update: I use Lightroom to view and edit images.  If I sort the images by "File Name" rather than the default of "Capture Time," the combined Jpeg shows up at the end of the sequence of individual images.)

 Michelangelo and Me - Simulation of Aligning the Individual Images for The Creation of Triangles

Sketch for Seasons of Life - First of Three Images - Nahant, Mass.

Seasons of Life - 3 Images Combined in the Camera - Jpeg

I think I might prefer the overall solidity of the colors and details in the version below.  And I love the precision the Z6's viewfinder screen preview afforded me while photographing as I nestled the lampposts into the composition. However, I resent spending time in Photoshop combining the images to make the resulting higher quality file.

Seasons of Life -  The Same 3 Images Combined in Photoshop

Old School Construction Finery

Back to light and George Eastman. The late afternoon sun raking across the buildings in Northampton, Mass. was riveting.  Capturing the scene, aligning four successive exposures using the screen in the Z6's viewfinder, brought me into the joyous present moment.

Into the Infinite

While assessing the results of versions combined in-camera versus those combined by hand, I zoomed way in to ascertain the qualities, blowing the images up to 200 percent.  Even then, discerning sharp differences sometimes proved difficult. Perhaps my research was skewed by wanting to only find evidence that backed up preconceived ideas. 

Do you think the above image Into the Infinite was combined in camera, or later by hand in Photoshop?

Professor John Nordell teaches courses in the Visual and Digital Arts Program that he created at American International College in Springfield, Mass. He blogs about the creative process at CreateLookEnjoy.com and teaches online Zentangle drawing workshops.  

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X-Ray Mirrors: Visible Unseen Identities in Photographs

As a college professor, I have been scrambling to generate projects that my photography students can complete at home. The photomontage below is my test run of a Windows and Mirrors assignment, inspired by an excerpt from Sytze Steenstra’s book Song and Circumstance, about the work of artist and musician David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame.

According to an already classical distinction, proposed by John Szarkowsky, leader of the Department of Photography of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, photography can be approached “as a means of self-expression (as a mirror),” and “as a method of exploration (as a window).” Bryne freely combines both approaches, and casually erases the distinction:

Inside Looking Out and Outside Looking In

"Windows are mirrors through which we see ourselves reflected. Our view is colored by our prejudices, history and class.  We see reflected our perceptions of the landscape, the skyline, the people on the street, the weather, and what they mean to us.  Photographs are also mirrors.  In them we see reflected our own internal biases, our own assumptions, our own presuppositions. [...]  What we don’t see is a reflection of our face, we see instead a reflection of our interior.  An X-ray mirror."

I want to grow as an artist and take things less literally.  Obviously, this was not the case here.  However, Bryne's ideas conjured up an assignment that students could photograph at home and a device for me to teach Photoshop techniques.

Perhaps this incomplete draft allows for more viewing ambiguity:

Open Windows - Incomplete or Completely Better

The other day, I looked through a prized possession:  the exhibition catalog from a retrospective of painter Lyonel Feininger.  His works make me swoon.  One painting, Mill Windows, changed my life by sparking my Reality-Based Abstraction series.

Dotted among the paintings were photographs by, and of, Feininger.  The black and white images brought me back to a different aesthetic and time.  Looking up from the couch, I saw this cloud and wanted to capture it in black and white.

Portal to the Past and Present

Feininger sketched scenes before painting them.  He also sometimes took pictures.  I have previously described how I usually take a single frame as a sketch prior to layering a series of images into an in-camera multiple exposure.

The above window can thus become:

Digital Prism

Until now, I considered the image combing to be complete in the camera, rather than additional after the fact manipulation.  However, likely informed by a recent spate of teaching Photoshop techniques, I combined multiple versions of the above image by flipping and flopping it:

Reflections on the Inner Light

Bryne asserts that what photographers include and omit in their frames inform us equally about the creator's identity.  Along these lines, I love this quote from portrait photographer Richard Avedon, "My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph."

John Nordell teaches courses in the Visual and Digital Arts Program at American International College in Springfield, Mass. He blogs about the creative process at CreateLookEnjoy.com  Instagram: @john.nordell

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