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Galen Rowell - Master Class He is probably the best outdoor photographer
in the world. Galen RowellÕs climbing
credits are almost as impressive as his photographic ones. Here he shares some of the secrets of
his style and technique with Simon Willis. The best poetry delivers a message directly to the
soul, the chosen words being the most perfect way to capture the
concept. The images created by
Galen Rowell make the same direct connection with those of us who love high,
wild places. In last months TGO,
Galen described his photographic philosophy, making no excuse for the fact it
sounded Ōnew agey and
spiritualĶ, because when hiking, climbing or backpacking he sees himself as
part of the natural world and then tries to capture this in his work. So how
come our pictures donÕt turn out like his? This second part of our interview concentrates on technique. If you want to read about f-stops,
lens choice and motor drives pick up a camera magazine, that is not what this
master class is about. But
likewise, if you just want to shoot snaps of your dog cocking a leg on a trig
point, then keep the sun over your shoulder and turn the page. Learning the techniques to produce
quality photographs must, by definition, involve some technical
knowledge. And take heart, as
Galen Rowell explained last month, his early photographs were pretty awful
too...... GR. About
98% of them "didn't come out." In other words, they didn't look
anywhere near as good as what I saw.
I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human
eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful
than what you actually observed.
IÕve been studying those differences and using them creatively and
thatÕs what initially got me going on photography as a career and keeps me
going almost 40 years later. SW.
Most landscape photographers know the light is better during the
"magic hours" of early morning and evening, and in your
photographic books you make a big thing of this. GR. Why is the light of early and late
hours so special? The light of
magic hour is much warmer and cleaner than the light of other hours of the
day for a number of reasons.
With the sun angle low in the sky you have far more light coming from
the warm rays of the sun that have scattered away the blue light as they go
through the atmosphere. Counter-intuitively, there is
actually less blue light scattered when the sun angle is low, so the sky
appears a richer darker blue giving much more contrast to the scene than when
you have the blueness of a brighter sky affecting everything at high
noon. But more important than
what is actually going on is the visual effect that we have because of the
difference in the way that our eyes see colour and our film sees colour. SW. This is what you mean about learning
to ŌseeĶ a scene as it will be seen on film.... GR. Newton was wrong that colour is a
property of light. That only
holds true if white light is a constant. During magic hour the wavelengths of light are radically
towards the warm side that would be called red as a property of white light,
yet we can clearly see greens in trees and the true colour of peopleÕs
complexions. Our eyes construct
colour to have an enduring constancy no matter what the illumination, but
people educated about how Newton "proved" colour was matched to
wavelength designed our films.
In other words, magic hours are guaranteed to produce warmer tones
than we see because they are locked in by rendering the chemical colour
response of film to the wavelength of light. SW. Surely this doesnÕt mean
photographing only at sunrise and sunset? Our film
sees a white paper 20 minutes before sunset as quite reddish, whereas our
eyes would still see a white piece of paper as white in light 20 minutes
before sunset. Only when the
light begins to exceed the ability of our eyes and brain to compensate do we
begin to actually see the vivid warm colours around sunrise or sunset, and
then itÕs too late to start photographing. The great quality of light was beginning to happen at
least half an hour earlier. SW.
I know you prepare well in advance to take a photograph, often
visiting the location several times.
Could you explain the technique you've called
"pre-visualizationĶ? GR. Pre-visualisation does not
necessarily mean that you have visited a location before, but that you pre-visualise
the way the image will look on film before you take the photograph, instead
of merely taking a snapshot with the naive expectation that the outcome will
be like you see. The problem
with pre-visualisation is that unless you think about it and take action,
itÕs a passive enterprise. In other
words you found the picture by looking through your normal visual system
without thinking about how things look on film. You got your feet in those Kodak footprints that are
sometimes put where the landscape photograph is supposed to be right, and
only then do you say to yourself, "oh this is going to look good on film
so maybe I want to compose this a little differently than I ordinarily
would." ThatÕs very low-level passive pre-visualisation. At a higher,
more active level, pre-visualisation means that you are always viewing things by
mentally translating what you see into the foreign language of film and
imagining the visual power in this way of seeing that is not before your
eyes. Taking it a step further,
if you can go to a location before hand on a different day or in different
lighting, you can further imagine the way the lighting might be at the ideal
time of day, what time of day that is, and return with a more powerful
pre-visualisation in mind and a little more spare time. SW.
You have also developed technique using a type of filter, called a
Ōgraduated neutral density filterĶ, which allows the camera "see"
more like human eye. Could you
explain, simply how this works? GR. Graduated neutral density
filters existed long before I worked with the Singh -Ray Corporation to
produce very special ones in my signature line. The ones that were available in the 1970s were screw-ins
without a movable line that could be moved up and down in the frame and they
weren't colour-neutral. In other
words, they would render a magenta cast to skies and clouds and people, which
was quite objectionable. I went
to Bob Singh, an optical engineer who had done things for the CIA and Defence
Department as well as Kodak and other photographic companies on
contract. I asked him if he
could customise some filters for my special use. We ended up designing four different ones with different
degrees of hardness of the edge and different degrees of density. We have a hard-edged two stop, a
hard-edged three stop as well as a soft-edged two stop and a soft-edged three
stop. The hard filters took
10-20 different test prototypes to get the edge working just right. SW. Yes, but how do they work? GR. The reason that you need to use
graduated filters in many situations is that the human eye sees a brightness
range at a glance without adjusting of about 2000: 1, while colour slide film
holds a range of just 8:1 within limits that look decent in a projected
slide. In other words, 8:1 is
about three stops of shutter speed or aperture, meaning one-and-one-half
stops in each direction. If you
are a stop-and-a-half over-exposed, things are pretty burned out, and if you
are a stop-and-a-half under things are getting pretty murky, but if you can
use a three-stop graduated filter when you have that kind of variation, then
you can hold a sunset with the same value as the green trees or green grass
in a meadow and have things look more the way your eye sees them. EDITORIAL
NOTE - I ASKED GALEN TO INCLUDE TWO SHOTS WHICH APPEAR ON HIS WEBSITE SHOWING
THE SAME SCENE, ONE WITH A ND FILTER ONE WITHOUT. THEY MAKE ALL THE ABOVE INSTANTLY UNDERSTANDABLE. IN THE SHOT WITHOUT THE ND, THE
FOREGROUND IS TOO DARK, AND ONLY THE ROCK BEHIND IS EXPOSED CORRECTLY. BUT WITH THE ND FILTER, FOREGROUND
AND BACKGROUND COME CLOSER TO THE SAME EXPOSURE, AND BOTH CAN BE SEEN. SW.
At the end of the day, with computer enhancement do people still trust
photographic images? I wonder if
we respond to them in quite same way or, when we see one we find particularly
impressive, do we now assume it has been manipulated, and conclude we are
being manipulated too? GR. We have definitely entered an
age when photographs are no longer "the unimpeachable witness" as
they were in the 19th century when Leland Stanford collected $25,000 based on
MuybridgeÕs photograph of horses running with all their feet off the ground
at the same time. Today, no jury
would convict on the basis of still photographs alone if digital imagery was
involved, however if you had a strip of film that had a series of images that
experts could attest were made without any digital processing, then a jury
might well use them as evidence.
On the other hand, when we see pictures in popular venues such as
travel magazines and advertisements, our first impression of an unusual image
may be "how did they do it?"
In other words, how was the image manipulated? ThatÕs
why I have tried to create my own venues, such as exhibits and books, where I
guarantee the viewer that I have not manipulated the images away from the
original content. Where I do use
digital means to create fine art prints or scans for books, as does every
pre-press house in the world these days, IÕm attempting to make the image
more like what I really saw or what the film contains, rather than to take it
away from that content and add something that wasn't there, or delete
something that might be disturbing.
I want my audience to know that all my images were made on a
single exposure on a single piece of film with no content added or
subtracted. SW. Galen Rowell, thank you very much. Galen
RowellÕs Top Five Tips for better outdoor photography 1. Learn to see like film and pre-visualise
the different way a photograph will look compared to whatÕs before your eyes. 2. Play the hand that nature deals
you. If you've got rain and fog
and were hoping to photograph a distant landscape just like a photograph you
saw published somewhere, itÕs not going to work. The soft lighting might be perfect for detail in a meadow
or a portrait of your partner, so find something close to the camera with a
strong composition and include your background to the image context. Your
viewer will see the sharp image in the foreground and have the impression
that the whole photograph is clean and sharp. 3. Take light equipment and know exactly
how to use it. Most photographic
problems in the field can be cured by RTFM (read the F... manual). 4. Use a
tripod wherever possible. If you
are doing serious photography always carry a decent tripod into the
mountains. But if you are doing
casual photography, take some kind of tripod even if itÕs one of those
plastic ones that costs a pound or two and weighs less than an energy
bar. Even though they don't seem
stable, you can get very
sharp pictures with them if you position them on a rock or log and use the
self-timer to release the shutter after a delay so that the camera doesn't
shake. 5. Avoid the rut of taking record
shots. Imagine that each
photograph you're going to take is the cover of TGO, or the lead photograph
in some grand exhibit. Once you
think about how it should look when its presented to people who weren't
there, you avoid taking those boring staring-in-the camera shots of you and
your partner dead in the middle of the picture, or those landscapes that just
show a tree or a mountain without any emotional interpretation. |
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