I’m giving a one-day seminar in Seattle on how I travel the world photographing for books and exhibits while filming the Travels to the Edge public television series. Members of the Travels to Edge crew will discuss equipment usage and transport while I will show how I employ the insights of modern painting when composing photographs.
Space is limited to 180 participants. There will a drawing at the end of the day for a Lowepro bag!
Topics will include:
• Composition: changing how you see
• Finding the image
• What’s in Art’s Bag
• Lunch Break – On your own
• Tips: Light, Depth, Movement
• Working with people
• Transport and workflow
• It’s the photograph, not the subject
For more info please contact us directly at info@artwolfe.com or check on Learning on www.artwolfe.com. Class fee in $195.
I’ve eaten street food in India and Africa, sampled meat of unknown provenance in Mongolia, and dined on unpronounceable meals in the jungles of South America without getting really sick, but a quick dinner of Chinese food at Philadelphia International Airport cut me down. My crew and I were enroute to the Travels to the Edge Field Seminar in Bay Harbor, Maine. I started feeling poorly in our Bangor Hotel. After a brutal night spent trying to decide whether to sit on the toilet or hold on with both hands, I was transported to an ER where the doctors filled me with fluids and antibiotics. I had to skip an evening presentation, a first, but felt well enough to proceed by the time the Seminar began. Glad that’s over. Such is the glamour of life on the road.
A few days ago I attended a dinner for the Law of Climate Change and Human Rights Conference in Seattle. Later, I presented “Between Heaven and Earth,” my homage to the Himalaya, to the attendees. The conference brought legal scholars from around the world together to learn about issues related to the rights of those affected by climate change and strategies for assigning responsibility for such impacts.
The event was organized by University of Washington law students, principally Jeni Barcelos and Jen Marlow. I was impressed to learn that students, not faculty, were the engine behind the conference. While I only had a chance to meet a few of the participants, I was cheered to find bright, engaged young people determined to make a difference in the face of immense problems and was honored to be invited to show my work to the group.
Yosemite Valley is one of the wonders of the world, but it’s a tough place to capture color images. By the time light reaches the Valley floor, it has become harsh and lost the golden glow of dawn. For that reason the classic Ansel Adams compositions don’t work as well in color, and there is no point in replicating the compositions of the master. The trick is to find a new way to see a familiar landscape. It’s not the subject, it’s the photograph. The union of composition, light and texture create the effects we desire.
During class, I discussed composition and linked photography to the painting of modern masters. All their techniques, from the use of negative space, to line, pattern, and color, apply in photography.
I saw the limitations of the light as a teaching opportunity at the recent Travels to the Edge Field Seminar in Yosemite. Our group set out early to shoot in shade before the sun blew out highlights. When the sun was higher, we hugged the cliffs, explored narrow canyons, or confined our shots to muted forest scenes or details in shadow. We selected blooming dogwoods, moving water, and forests as our principal subjects.
I asked everybody to concentrate on removing distraction so the eye moves as we intend across the photograph. We don’t want a twig to derail us or a white blob of blurred water to divert attention.
Shooting was fun, but people learned the most during our critiques in a grand room in the classic Ahwahnee Hotel. When looking though a viewfinder, it can be tough to see all the small elements that can sabotage an image, to see how an alternate crop strengthens a composition. We projected the images from Lightroom so I could improve the crop and alter tonality. Most often, the images included too much and simplifying added impact. Day by day I saw improvement in everyone’s images as they incorporated the suggestions.
I teach all kinds of workshops, but none are more satisfying than working with these small groups. I look forward to the next one in Maine’s Acadia National Park next month.
Yesterday was the first day of the Monterey/Big Sur Travels to the Edge Field Seminar, the first of three (Yosemite and Acadia follow soon). I had planned to give a lecture before we went out to shoot, but the foggy morning was too good to resist. We hurried to a coastline rich in twisted cypresses and surf-carved rock. After shooting we returned for the presentation. This was backwards, but you can’t turn your back on opportunity, which is a lesson in itself.
Spend a day with me to learn how I create my images as I
travel the world. Members of the Travels to Edge crew will discuss
equipment usage and transport while I will show how I
employ the insights of modern painting when composing photographs. This is a synopsis of what I teach in my three day Creative Session.
Space is limited to 180 participants. There will a drawing at the
end of the day for a Lowepro bag!
For more info please contact us directly- info@artwolfe.com
Composition: changing how you see
Finding the image
What’s in Art’s Bag
Lunch Break – On your own
Tips: Light, Depth, Movement
Working with people
Transport and workflow
It’s the photograph, not the subject
July 18, 2009
9:00-5:00
Silver Cloud Hotel Stadium
1046 First Ave South
Seattle, WA 98134
I was pleased with the results of the Creative Session last weekend. It seemed that everyone grasped the idea of applying a painter’s vision to photography and that shooting every subject to expand your view of composition was the key to rapid improvement. Darell Gulin laid out all the issues involved in macro photography, and Scott Stulberg delivered a rapid fire survey of Photoshop plug ins and the critical role of layer masks for enhancing photographs. John Greengo discussed the equipment issues faced on the road.
Tomorrow I leave for a Travels to the Edge Field Seminar in Monterey and Big Sur where I will teach the same precepts where we can put the lessons into practice along the shore and in the forests.
We receive mail criticizing me for my opinons on climate change. This one from James contains some good information and some conclusions I find faulty. I thought I would share our interchange, with a guest appearance from a friend of mine.
Art, I enjoy you shows and this may not be the place to post this but frankly my time is limited and I couldn’t find a better one.
I’m watching your Glacier Bay Alaska show and its great except for your unscientific human induced global warming dig.
I’m a lifelong environmentalist and licensed professional engineer practicing in the field of environmental engineering for 39 years and while agree we need to be concerned about environmental change. There is no doubt Alaska and Greenland are warming.
However, you are totally and absolutely wrong to claim that the natural process is being accelerated by human activity.
The simple fact is Greenland is now almost as warm as it was when Eric the Red Discovered it in 1000 AD. Thats right Art, Greenland was green back then and Vikings farmed the green coastal land for 300 years until the mini ice age. As a fact you can verify if you want to Greenland is still 1 degree C COLDER than it was when Eric the Red Discovered it.
There is no evidence that CO2 is the cause of any acceleration of the natural warming cycle.
BTW Greenland ice cores more than 400,000 years old produce historic factual evidence that a rapid climate change is about 12,000 years and if you want to wait and see the effect of the current cycle of Global Warming you need to live a long time guy. But cheer up the ice cores prove incontrovertibly that the quickest and best way to cool the earth is to put small amounts of particulate matter in the upper atmosphere. Thats right a little air pollution will take care of even the chicken little human induced global warming fanatics claims. Before you open your mouth about global warming you really need to get the facts and the best way to do that is look at both sides of a question.
The best way to understand how fanatical human induced global warmists are is to go back and look at the religious fanatics who predicted the end of the earth and when it didn’t happen they rationalized. For an example of religious rationalization of global warmist theory go to unScinetific American’s recent Hot Times in Alaska and check out the professor from the University of Alaska who shows Alan Alda a paper with three charts on in. One is the inaccurate computer projection which he admits isn’t very good under that is a chart of what actually happened in the same time period and below that is one where he combines the inaccurate prediction with the historical fact and claims that by combining the two makes the predictions of dire immediate global warming in the next 100 years is proved. Aside from the unscientific process of combining fact and fantasy to prove fantasy its no different that what end of the world fanatics have done or said.
Please take the time to know what you are talking about before making a fool of yourself. But cheer up it will be thousands of years before anyone really knows how much of a fool.
As for the computer models they don’t prove anything except that the data and design were faulty. Models don’t prove anything, never have never will.
Personally as an environmentalist I am upset that people like you give credence to t a bunch of fanatics that are trying to create a State of Fear that will cause us to make rash decisions that will damage our country.
A perfect example is the poster boy of green alternative fuels, corn ethanol. Not only does corn ethanol drive up the price of food, its a net user of fossil fuels. Thats right guy it uses more fossil fuel BTU’s to produce a gallon of corn ethanol than the BTU’s in the ethanol. But the real clincher is the additional fertilizer (produced with fossil fuel) adds to the already grossly polluted ground water and run off to the Missisippie River which has a 200 mile dead zone at its mouth were nothing grows. Thats a fact just like like the one about Greenland being Green in 1000 AD.
Hi, James,
Thanks for your note.
We disagree on this subject. I wanted to respond clearly and fairly to your points so I asked my friend James Martin, the author and photographer of the upcoming book Planet Ice to respond for me. He is as well informed as anyone I know, has no axe to grind, but tends to speak bluntly. I give you James’ response:
James,
I think the test of a scientific theory is how well it predicts future discoveries or events. When the climate change model was postulated back in the Seventies, it predicted that global temperatures would rise with the increase in CO2 and related gasses. Further, we would see wider swings in weather.
The predictions were conservative as it turns out. While it is certainly possible that this is a coincidence, I doubt it. When the early proponents of evolution and continental drift made their claims, they made predictions, and the accumulation of evidence supported their predictions.
Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica prove that this is the high point in atmospheric CO2. The conclusion that CO2 is a major contributor to climate change is accepted by almost all climate scientists and endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which earned one more Nobel Prize than either you or I. Your denial of the relationship between CO2 and climate change is very much in the minority of the scientific community.
Although you seem well informed on much of the data, check out Two Mile Time Machine by Dr. Richard Alley, by all accounts one of the premier paleo-climatologists and a leader of US ice core programs. There is no hint of hysteria or handwaving, yet he makes the connection you deny.
You write as if you presume we are ignorant regarding climate variation in Greenland. You refer to the temperature increase of Younger Dryas event, which was incredibly fast, as much as 11 degrees in decades, but the preconditions for that, a temperature minimum, do not apply under these conditions.
You have a point regarding global warming alarmists. People on both sides of the issue tend to cherry pick the data they prefer; it’s human nature. Conflating alarmists with scientists is an ad hominum argument, though. The fact that Al Gore made an unsupportable connection between climate change and Katrina doesn’t mean his other points are without merit.
I’ve read about the idea of using certain particulates to cool the earth. Maybe. I agree completely regarding ethanol.
In the end, either of us could be wrong. The question is whether our positions are falsifiable. What set of facts would change your mind, or mine? If there is no set of facts, then we are being irrational. Certainty has no place in issues such as these and your arrogant and dismissive comments on those who disagree do harm to your argument.
I’m back from NANPA. I was gratified by the response to my keynote presentation Between Heaven and Earth and got to meet a lot of interesting people.
Before NANPA I ventured out to Bosque del Apache to photograph swans, cranes, and snow geese with some friends. We had some luck at one sunrise, with large groups of birds exploding into the air in soft light. It seems that the birds are less wary than in the past so it’s easier to get full frame shots of individuals. The visit put me in a great frame of mind for NANPA.
