December 2022

This journal records my actual 10,000 hours of art photography study. This page record the deliberate practice carried out in December 2022.

Hours 7,127 to 7,200

(January 2023)

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31^st December

Hours 7,199 to 7,200

(2h) creating alternative versions of the “First Dinner Le Sorcier” image below. Most of the time being spent on extracting the subject from the background for re-compositing.

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30^th December

Hours 7,196 to 7,198

(2h) processing the “First Dinner Le Sorcier” image below.

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29^th December

Hours 7,193 to 7,195

(2h) shooting an attempt at recreating René Magritte’s, 1951, “Le Sorcier”

(½h) shooting water photos: Spray steam and ice in the hot tub

(½h) processing the above images – nothing inspiring!

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28^th December

Hours 7,191 to 7,192

(1½h) working on my A panel including rewording the Statement of Intent to be more personal.

(½h) YouTube from Sean Tucker:

• “Photographers should be more competitive” – actually, ‘collaborative’.
• “Choosing your Focal Length (85mm, 50mm, 35mm, 28mm)“

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27^th December

Hour 7,190

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26^th December

Hours 7,188 to 7,189

(1h) finishing and publishing the “Autumn 2022” post

(½h) updating this journal

(½h) removing the shadowy figure, and reframing my God’s Light image below

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25^th December

Hour 7,187

Christmas Day.

(1h) working on the new artists section of the “Autumn 2022” review post

“Logos: Truth that transcends factual evidence”

Sean Tucker – The Meaning in the Making

The above may be more useful than a debate between beauty and sublimity.

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24^th December

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23^rd December

Hour 7,185

(1h) researching the concept of Sublimity and attempting to resolve the contradiction of the 19^th, particularly with reference to some more recent philosophers. Work still continues …

Including the ArtHistoryBabes YouTube “the sublime in art history“

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22^nd December

Hours 7,183 to 7,184

(1h) updating this journal and associated Flickr site.

(1h) youtube from FromLight2Art:

• “Conceptual Art Explained: Why Conceptual Art Works, and How it Fails?” – again and pondering the concept of Sublimity and updating my notes from the 19^th
• “Wabi-Sabi in Photography: The Art of Imperfection“

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21^st December

Hours 7,179 to 7,182

(2½h) creating a “Deconstructed Landscape” images for the Amersham Beyond Group meeting in January.

(1½h) YouTube:

• 70081376: “Philip Guston” documentary interview
• Sinix Design: “Improve Your Art with Better Shadows” – 3 tips:
  1. less light = less detail (less detail on its own implies shadow) – exception is where you have a very bright light in an otherwise dark scene, one would expect to see less detail in the bright area
  2. Shadow shapes:
     • Rembrant triangle
     • minimal shadows for innocent faces -> simplicity -> minimal forms -> framing
     • keep shadows as large blocks, avoid too many separate areas
     • shadows are for shape design -> graphic element – merge the subject with its shadow for simplicity
  3. Colour:
     • Shadow colour is the ambient colour
     • this is subtle, but makes the image more interesting.

“Art is the enhancement of reality”

Sinix Design

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20^th December

Hours 7,176 to 7,178

(1h) updating this journal including notes from yesterday YouTube and competition

(1h) creating the following Diptych:

(1h) reprocessing the recent snow shots to have a colour balance of:

• Highlight:
  • cyan/ red: -10
  • magenta/ green: 0
  • yellow/ blue: +10
• Shadow:
  • cyan/ red: 5
  • magenta/ green: 0
  • yellow/ blue: -5
• Midtones – left unchanged

The above give surprising more punch to the image.

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19^th December

Hours 7,171 to 7,175

(1h) updating this journal with images from the last week

(1½h) reprocessing some of the images being included in this journal

(½h) YouTube from Conceptual Art:

• FromLight2Art: “Why Conceptual Art Works, and how it fails” including:
  • “All art searches for truth and we as viewers take in that art as a sublime experience”
  • With classical forms of art, the viewer can access the sublime through a sense of harmony and balance, or the virtuosity of the artist
  • With conceptual art, truth is reached and the sublime achieved through the introduction of new insight into a subject or idea
  • changing our association with a subject, changes us
  • 3 reasons why some work fails:
    • Derivative – i.e., has been done before, nothing new to say
    • Incongruent – the message is at odds with the expression of the work
    • Illustrative or “preachy” – telling us something we either already know or don’t want to hear

“The sublime is critical to Art. Without the sublime, there is no Art, just visual communication.”

FromLight2Art YouTube above.

According to Wikipedia: the Sublime is the quality of greatness, especially that beyond all possibility of calculation or imitation. The above definition is from Edmund Burke’s 1756, “A philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful” where he goes on to state that sublimity and beauty are mutually exclusive. This would suggest that FromLight2Art’s claim above, means that art cannot be beautiful. Which is ridiculous, so I suggest that FromLight2Art’s definition of sublimity is different to that of Burke’s

(2h) Amersham Photographic Society – differed print competition

Image	…..	Comments
		“Four Paramedic Shifts” 16 Needed the title to understand the image. [She did need to wear the NHS lanyard]. Important message, but doesn’t hold the attention for long.

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18^th December

Hours 7,169 to 7,170

(1h) YouTube: Blind Dweller “Kim Nobel – The multiple personalities of one artist” – Kim Nobel has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), a psychiatric condition where she has multiple personalities, largely unaware of each other.

(1h) enhancing the images from a couple of shots with potential from Black Park last Sunday

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17^th December

Hours 7,167 to 7,168

(2h) processing images from the last few days

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16^th December

Hours 7,165 to 7,166

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15^th December

Hours 7,162 to 7,164

(1h) rewriting the Statement of Intent for my A Panel and preparing the prints

(2h) Amersham PIC Group meeting where my A Panel was presented. Comments as follows:

• images 1 & 5 need more punch or “lifting” to match the others
• the tree in image 5 should ideally have more space around it
• images 2, 4, 12 & 14 are too similar
• image 10 doesn’t fit – remove
• images 11 & 15 are too heavy, need “lifting” slightly so that they match the rest of the panel
  
• Statement of Intent, whilst much better, still needs a bit of tweaking to make it more about my input/ emotions rather than being purely factual
• Presentation good
• Tonal balance across the panel and more natural colouring, now OK.

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14^th December

Hour 7,161

(½h) updating this journal, mainly comments on last nights competition.

(½h) working on the “Last Paintings of Modern Artists” post, adding images.

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13^th December

Hours 7,158 to 7,160

(1h) processing the JPegs for my potential A Panel to be reviewed by the PIC group this Thursday.

(2h) Stoke Poges Photographic Club – PDI competition by skin in the game below:

Image	…..	Comments
		“Nirvana Nevermind” 15 Judge did not recognise the Nirvana Album cover this is emulating.
		“Dungeness Sunrise” 15 Judge didn’t think the dripping paint texture overlay was appropriate for what was a classic landscape shot.
		“Hard Climb” 16 Would have been better had the subject been alighned with the pillar rather than starting the climb.
		“God’s Light St Paul’s” Held back – 18 On balance better without the shadowy figure to the right; may have needed another element but not that.

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12^th December

Hours 7,155 to 7,157

(1h) updating this journal

(2h) processing images from the last 3 days.

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11^th December

Hours 7,153 to 7,154

(1h) total shooting Black Park first thing in the morning and Gray’s Field in the evening.

(1h) YouTube: Blind Dweller: “The Bewitching Art of Laurie Lipton (Re-Upload)” revised version of documentary watched on 29th November 2022 – definitely worth the rewatch. Tip from the artist:

“The secret to good art is doing a lot of it. I have drawn every day for 65 years.”

Laurie Lipton speaking to the Blind Dweller in the above video

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10^th December

Hours 7,151 to 7,152

(1h) shooting Stoke Common; early morning, very cold, c -4^∘

(½h) processing

(½h) updating this journal.

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9^th December

Hours 7,148 to 7,150

(2h) processing:

• preparing a new version of Image 1 of my potential A Panel
• preparing the panel for printing – for PIC meeting next week
• preparing the “Four Paramedic Shifts” image for printing for the Amersham Print Competition on Monday.

(½h) writing a revised Statement of Intent for my prospective A Panel.

“After Deforestation – Stoke Common”

Statement of Intent

Stoke Common is an 80 hectare site of special scientific interest, heathland and forest, 2 miles north of Slough.

A recent programme to return the centre of the common to natural heathland involved the seemingly brutal removal of vast swathes of natural forest.

The Common has changed and trees now occupy merely the periphery, but in doing so are more visible.  This panel reflects my renewed appreciation for their strength and resilience.

79 Words

(½h) YouTube:

• Blind Dweller: “The Beautiful Nightmares of Aleksandra Waliszewska” b. 1976, Polish surrealist painter
• Moder Color Podcast: “Ernst Haas: New York in Color“

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8^th December

Hours 7,142 to 7,147

(1h) updating this journal, mainly with notes from yesterday’s displacement YouTube.

(2h) Tate Modern

(½h) London Street Photography

(½h) Drafting the blog post on “The Last Paintings of My Favourite Artists“

(2h) Amersham Mono Group – no work of mine discussed.

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7^th December

Hours 7,140 to 7,141

(1h) working on the following – trying to achieve a sense of mystery:

(1h) YouTube:

• photoshopCAFE: “Better way to make displacement maps in photoshop” top tips
  • look at the channels of the underlying layer and select the channel with greatest contrast
  • copy the selected channel – to a new document – this will be the displacement map layer (ensure that it is a psd file)
  • adjust the new document (which will be monochrome):
    • tighten the blacks and whites, i.e., make the whites fully whites and the blacks fully black (using curves or levels)
    • smooth out any noise that would just degrade the image to be distorted by using Gaussian Blur – just 1 or 2 pixels usually
  • change the layer to be distorted to a smart object, and distort using the newly created distortion map, the default settings of 10, 10 is usually OK
  • change the blend mode of the distorted layer to something like Multiply or Linear Burn
• ArtHistory School: “Amedeo Modigliani – The Life of an Artist“

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6^th December

Hour 7,139

(1h) updating this journal and Flickr site

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5^th December

Hours 7,136 to 7,138

(1h) YouTube: Sean Tucker: “Can I Recreate this Famous Portrait? (Michelle Pfeiffer by Terry O’Neill)“

• Clamshell lighting to make her look thiner:
  • Large silver beauty-dish just above the camera – gives defined hard light
  • Silver reflector under her neck/ chest area
  • Black flags either sider of the model’s face
• Post processing:
  • Heal to remove imperfections that won’t be there in 3 weeks, e.g., stray hairs and minor spots
  • Use a black&white adjustment layer
    • blending mode: Overlay
    • slightly darker reds and lighter yellows makes the face look more narrow
    • perhaps dial back the opacity to 75%
  • dodge and burn to amplify the lighting effect and highlights in the hair
  • Brightening the irises just a tad
  • Slight colour adjustment using the colour balance tool to subtly emulate the effect of the film photograph
    • Mid-tones: yellow/ blue -3, Magenta/ Green +1
    • Highlights: yellow/ blue -3, Magenta/ Green +2

More detail in Sean’s portrait retouching series: https://bit.ly/3RMv5Gz and covered by me on 15th January 2022

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4^th December

Hours 7,134 to 7,135

(2h) First draft of the “Autumn 2022” post, including determining the top 10 images.

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3^rd December

Hours 7,132 to 7,133

(1½h) YouTube:

• Sotheby’s:
  • “David M. Solinger: A Vision Across Continents” – seen before but worth rewatching
  • “Echoes of America: Andy Warhol’s White Disaster“
  • “Pablo Picasso and the Collision of Muses” – Femme dans un Fauteuil (1927), shows both his wife, Olga Khokhlova, and his new mistress, Marie Therese Walter
• The Blind Dweller:
• The Photographic Eye: “My System For Unlocking Inspiration In Photography”
  • 1. Shoot without intent – be open to whatever comes up, more so in street photography than a studio portrait session
  • 2. Step back – sit and watch or revisit a scene before shooting
  • 3. Catch and hold – look for images that both capture attention by being striking, and holds it by being cleverly composed, telling a story, etc.

(½h) updating this journal.

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2^nd December

Hours 7,130 to 7,131

(1h) processing assorted images from the last week

(½h) YouTube: Blind Dweller: “Felix Nussbaum – The Holocaust Artist“

(½h) processing the images shot at the Silent Pool distillery earlier in the day.

[Time spent shooting, realistically, less than ¼h. So lost due to rounding error.]

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1^st December

Hours 7,127 to 7,129

(1h) updating this journal, including all the new month admin.

(2h) External competition: London NWFed at Croxley.

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(November 2022)