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Process

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein

As you might rightly conclude from the quote, I am not quite done yet with the topic of simplicity. This time, though, I want to talk about it in the context of process.

Process in photography comprises of many things. In landscape photography it includes choice of location and time, the equipment that is used and how it is used but also how the captured results are further processed. In some ways the process defines the photographer.

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Simplicity

April 21, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

“Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that’s a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That’s not simple.
The quest for simplicity has to pervade every part of the process. It really is fundamental.”
Jonathan Ive

Imagine a rustic writing desk with a sleek silver laptop from Silicon Valley on top and a steaming cup of coffee on the side. Does an appealing picture form in your mind? It does for me. Since long I have noticed that I am most vulnerable to this kind of imagery in advertising. I wonder why this is so.

Firstly, when I try to analyze my reaction, I can’t ignore a certain disconnect between my thoughts and my emotions. I know that the implied promise of unleashed productivity in a simple rustic environment is false. Lacking inspiration is no less painful in front of a rustic desk than it is in a cubicle. Neither the desk nor the shiny gadget are creating any inspiration either. Still, my gut feeling tells me that in front of such a desk my life will be more productive and inspired.

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Notes on Composition II

April 12, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography

In the first post in this series on composition I mentioned to use nature’s design as an alternative approach to composition. Such a design would build on the relationships, energy and forces in nature.

Now it’s time to have a closer look.

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Storytelling

March 19, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

Now I got myself hooked on these shells. So I played some more with them and found out they can be quite useful for an investigation into storytelling.

There are quite a few photographers who think that every picture should tell a story. For a long time I myself was quite puzzled on what that really means, outside of documentary photography and journalism. That is until I understood that the real topic is how we process visual information.

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Forms

March 10, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

In case you wondered where the follow-up to the Notes on Composition post is. It will come, eventually. I am still thinking about it – and maybe too much so. It is a strange thing with creativity. Every time you think you are in the driver seat, creativity or your creative muse will kick you in the ankle and remind you that you follow her, not vice versa.

Coming back from a wonderful trip to the Indian Ocean I am still filled to the rim with new impressions and wonder about the manifold forms in nature. So I started to make a few pictures about the shells my wife and I collected at the beach (ah, ok I confess mainly my wife collected – I was more in a kind of dumb stasis trying to believe what I saw).

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Finnish Winter

February 11, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography

Among the seasons, winter could be arguably called the most Finnish one. Not because it would be the most beautiful. I’d be hard pressed to select one as the most beautiful one even though I have already admitted that I favor autumn most. No, I think winter is maybe the most varied of all the seasons.

Somehow, it feels this country was made for winter. Except, of course, for mid-summer, when again the midnight sun washes its crimson watercolors over the sky and a blue scent is woven into the air; the landscape is definitely also made for that.

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Notes on Composition I

February 5, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography

A beginning photographer can hardly evade advice on the question of composition. As reward, he/she is told, wait more pleasing photos. Usually then follows a list of rules (with immediate advice that rules sometimes need to broken), like the Rule of Thirds, the Rule of Odds, use of leading lines and so on. But is only goal for a photographer to always make pleasing photos? I don’t think so. Therefore, I believe it is a fair question to ask what we really want to achieve with composition.

If we try to understand what we mean by composition we find that at the most basic level, it can be described as arranging visual elements in a limited frame. I think the term “limited” is quite important here. Paintings and photographs always use some limited two-dimensional plane (a canvas, a film, a sensor) to place the picture. Even sculpture can be thought of as using a limited, but three-dimensional space.

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To be, or to make.

January 3, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography

Before starting on the series on composition that I announced in the previous post, let’s take a moment and look at another topic, the photographic process. Before any thoughts regarding composition or design come into play, the landscape photographer has already made a decision; he/she has selected a subject or scene.
How is that selection made? And why? These seem pretty fundamental questions in making a photograph, but often, artists stay very quiet about them. Why is that and what is going on?

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What is Art?

December 25, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

“You know it’s art, when it’s bigger than two metres and priced higher than five figures“. This quote attributed to British photographer Martin Parr nicely highlights not only Parr’s sense of humor, but also some of the friction between photography and the art market. The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones in turn has become quite (in)famous among photographers as he regularly declares that photography is not art. This begs to revisit the old question: “What is art?”. Here is my attempt of an answer.

In the year 1917 Marcel Duchamp, with his work “Fountain”, declared a urinal as art. The sculpture was a Dadaists declaration of war on aesthetics and other forms of classification of art. Ironically, the work (or rather its later replicas) became an object of desire achieving prices in the millions at auctions. This has many concluding that art is what sells on the art market.

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Nature Deficit Disorder

December 7, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

A few days ago I found on the BBC website an article about “nature deficit disorder” (NDD for short). The term comes from a 2005 book by Richard Louv titled “Last Child in the Woods”. The condition is not strictly a medical one but a cultural one. Still, Louv sees it as a reason for increasing obesity, stress and decreased emotional wellbeing among children. Louv’s book triggered a number of nature education programs for children, aimed to have children practising outdoor sports, learn to name things they encounter in nature and take a scientific interest. That sounds all pretty good, doesn’t it? Yes it does, and still, there might be a fundamental misunderstanding at work.

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