8 October 2024

Welcome to the first edition of No End To Seeing News.

This newsletter as well as my YouTube channel (see link above) were created to share with you the creative process behind my photographic work. 

By process, I’m referring to the thoughts and artistic considerations that are behind my work in general as well as specific photographs I’ve made. 

Many of the photos I will be discussing here can be found on my web site (www.noendtoseeing.com), while others will be images I’ve made that I find interesting but maybe not candidates for the web site. 

For these other photos, I’m thinking of possibly showing and discussing similar images to those on my web site but ones I felt were missing something.  The point would be to gain insights into some of the nuance I look to include in my own work.

These discussions might touch on the gear I use and how I edit the images in Photoshop and/or Lightroom, but they won’t be how-to discussions.  There are dozens of good How-to channels and guides out there.  My focus here will be deeper insights into my creative process and how equipment and software choices support my artistic process and vision.

To start, I’ll provide a bit of background about myself. 

I’ve been making photographs for over 50 years.  I’m basically self-taught, but my sister has an art degree and was instrumental in my basic understanding of form, texture and composition.  In high school, I had a friend who taught me how to develop my own film and prints, and I quickly pulled together a darkroom in my parents’ basement.

For my first semester in college I signed up for Intro to Photography.  It was to meet every Friday afternoon.  On the first day, only three students showed up, so the Professor cancelled the class.  Knowing how hard it would be to add a class to my schedule after the first week of classes (this was before online class selection), I asked the Professor if he would consider guiding me in an independent study.  He asked that I bring in a portfolio the following week and based on what he saw, he agreed.

Back then, I only worked in black & white as color film was nearly impossible to process in a home darkroom.  And over the years I drifted in and out of photography as a hobby.  I maintained a darkroom most of those years, but when I had small children, it was very difficult to find big blocks of time to do darkroom work.

Eventually, I got into digital workflow.  I made photos on film and had the “keepers” scanned and put on a CD.  Then I used a program like Photoshop to process the images.  Finally, I’d print the images at home on a high-resolution, pro-sumer level printer.

My photography was limited mainly to family vacations.  I started getting more interested in photography when I brought my camera on business trips.  I’d usually have large blocks of free time on these trips where I could walk around a city without annoying my family by making photos of odd things.

I think I started getting serious about my work after being inspired by a workshop I took through the Santa Fe Workshops.  It was called Zen and the Art of Photography and was run by Doug Beasley.  Doug is a Minneapolis photographer who now runs his own series of workshops called Vision Quest.  I’ve taken two other workshops through Vision Quest and they were both inspiring.

The Zen workshop got me to slow down, make fewer photos with more intention behind them.  We would go to a location and just walk around getting to know the place before we started making photos.  The point being to experience first and then use that experience to inform your photography.

This resonated with me as I had recently taken a family vacation to the Grand Canyon.  I knew I had seen the canyon, because I had like 500 photos of it.  But I didn’t really experience the natural wonder of it as I had spent my time looking at it through the lens of my camera.

After taking a couple of workshops in portraiture, I tried starting a portrait studio.  I had moderate success, but kind of lost my motivation to make photos.  I learned a lot of the mechanics of photography, but the work was missing a spark from me.  I was making photos for others.  It wasn’t feeding my creative side.

I put my cameras away and focused on my day job as a marketing research consultant.  I did make some photos, but mostly with my first iPhone (iPhone 4).

It wasn’t until I retired that I started making photos for me on a consistent basis.  I have a newish cell phone with a very good camera app.  I was able to get creative with it, but I found it difficult to keep track of where various settings were, so it became frustrating at times.

I dusted off my digital-SLR, but it is very big and heavy—and I was interested in getting back to making street photographs, where a stealthier camera comes in handy.  I had heard about digital mirrorless cameras, which were smaller and allowed one to use smaller lenses versus a DSLR.

I ended up buying a mirrorless camera and a few lenses.  While I don’t think equipment is the be-all and end-all when it comes to making photographs, the smaller set-up rekindled my interest in the art.

Coincidently, I got an email from Vision Quest and one of the available workshops was called Touching the Devine.  It was billed as a continuation of Doug’s Zen workshop, and it was being offered online.  Through that workshop I really became inspired again to make photos for me.

My web site, www.noendtoseeing.com, is the result of that inspiration.  The idea behind the site is to share insights into my creative process and approach to photography.  I’d love to hear from you if you have questions or comments about my work or photography in general.

Thanks,

Steven

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