Category: Blog

“Could you speak at our club about Abstract photography on <insert date here>?” is the question that I am hearing more and more frequently.  Clearly Joe Miller’s impact on our local area camera clubs is becoming more tangible.

McLean Photography Club

has invited me to speak at their club on Abstract photography and provide critiques of club members’ images on January 8, 2014.  Two other clubs invited me to do something similar the same week, with the same subject.  I believe that the cause of all this excitement over Abstract photography has a direct correlation with the annual Joseph Miller Abstract Photography Exhibit, which will be celebrating its 4th year in 2014.

As the popularity of that event has grown, so has interest in the programs that I had developed discussing abstract imagery and visual design.  As a reformed “hater” of abstract art I feel that I have a special relationship with abstracts.  And I try to help people understand the elements that make an abstract art, particularly as it relates to how lines, shapes colors, texture and perspective affect our perception of art.

Ed Knepley has written several blog posts about abstract photography recently, he tells me that they do not attract nearly as many visitors as his posts on technique.  Ed and I have differing opinions about the use of post processing in photography, but the articles are all well written and persuasive.  In particular, Ed refers to a book written by Kandinsky in this post, of which I had never heard before,  Point and Line to Plane.

Kandinsky’s quote, “Objects damage pictures,” is a constant reminder to me that subjective imagery can be as effective as objective imagery.

So am I being pigeon holed into an Abstract Photographer, perhaps.  But I could think of a lot worse reputations to have.

I’ve been away from the site for a while, but hope to be back to posting on a semi-regular basis.  The last few weeks my vocation has been taking up an inordinate amount of my time, and I accepted a volunteer role as the primary webmaster for the Nature Visions Mid Atlantic Photo Expo, a local nature photography exhibit that attracts hundreds of entries each year.

Updating the website was quite a bit of work, there are 13 presenters and 21 presentations that required updated pages/posts, tons of linkages to other websites and a tremendous number of functional fixes.  The theme that is being used is quite dated and created menus based on the page hierarchy, which meant the only posts were related to the blog.

I found code that allowed me to add the PHP code necessary to integrate the WordPress 3.x menus, which caused a Z-index issue that had the menu displaying below galleries and sliders on certain pages.  After I got that fixed for every browser to which I had easy access, someone else experienced the issue running a 64-bit version of Chrome (or at least Chrome running on a 64-bit version of Windows 7).

Also on the agenda was creating pages with lists of things like presenters and presentations.  Fortunately I found WP List Posts Shortcode that creates lists of posts by Category, and Posts by Tag that creates lists of posts by Tag(s).  These two plugins allowed me to simply categorize and tag presentations and presenter information, updating the relevant pages automatically.  I also stumbled upon an RSS feed plugin called RSS Multi Importer that allows us to import posts from the presenters’ RSS feeds and add them to the presenter’s page automatically.  Together I believe that these plugins make the site appear more professional, which is not bad for a non-profit organization.

Ultimately this is all part of my goal of paying to back to a community that has provided so much to me without reservation.

I’ve been invited back to Gaithersburg Camera Club to judge their End-of-Year competition this year.  This will be my first EOY competition and I am really looking forward to it.  I will get more time to spend with the images, and I will not be required to critique each of the images in real time, the most stressful part of a monthly competition in my opinion.

This time I get to make comments on only the top three images in each category, which will be written down and read at the EOY banquet.  I believe this will be far less stressful for me and more beneficial to the members at the banquet.  Mainly because I will have time to think and formulate a more cohesive train of thought.  I will also be able to concentrate on why the image was chosen over the others, rather than justifying removing the image from competition as so often happens when judging monthly competitions.

My camera club, NVPS, has asked me to do an “anonymous critique” of some member images at our upcoming meeting on Tuesday, 9 April.  I prefer critiques to judging for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I am not relied upon to make a qualitative judgement about whether this image is better than that image, something that I feel is largely in the eyes of the beholder and quite subjective.  Not that I don’t have an opinion, just that I know that my opinion is just that, an opinion.

Nonetheless, I find that judging and critiquing others’ work has helped me to be a far more critical self-editor.  I am better able to ignore my delight in the work that I put into creating an image and concentrate more on whether others may get the same feeling (or not).  Not that I do not still take banal and unimaginative photographs, I am just less likely to be showing them off than in the past.

Understanding the difference between a good image and a hard-earned image is one of the skills necessary for developing your photography beyond the ordinary in my opinion.