This is about a workshop I took quite a while ago – actually it was October 2007, looking at the date of the image files. Why write now about it? Well, the output of this workshop hung for a year in my lab above my monitor, and I am watching these prints (made with my old Canon i950 and the KMP inks) fade away for some time now. And now that I have my new printer, I need space on these walls anyway. So I decided to hang those images here instead (well, virtually of course), and make room for some new pigment prints!
This workshop, again organized by the Volkshochschule im Norden Münchens, aimed at explaining the difference between a single image and a series of images belonging and fitting together to become and provide more than a single image could.
It was held by Dr. Erwin Geiss, an avid amateur who had impressed me before with his workshop on image composition. The seminar consisted of a theoretical first part, an excursion into nature (yes!), and an evening where everybody presented the results to the others. Now, given my (by now) extensive workshop experience this is as good as it gets, and especially the “after” review / meeting is invaluable for the learning experience, so I cannot understand why some of the workshop participants skipped that part.
Dr. Geiss said one thing that workshop which really had and still has a lasting impact on me:
Do expose yourself to your art!
Think about this. And this is the real reason why I did hang the resulting images on my walls. I came to like some of them over the last year – much more than I would have I they had just rested on my hard disk like so many (>50000) others.
The excursion led us to the well known and – also by me – frequently visited park of the Nymphenburg palace in Munich’s western part. If you haven’t been there – it definitely is well worth a visit: It is a beautiful English landscape park which is absolutely huge, and provides plenty of photo opportunities. Even migrating birds, but this story is left for another day.
Now for the images! I list them here in no particular order, just as they are hanging (faded, with a strong red hue) in front of me:
- Image number one is – admittedly- a standard. At least if you walk through the park as we did on a cold cold October morning, with dull grey sky (hey, huge lightbox!) and some dripping rain (which started out as melting snow, actually). What I did like is the fact that I got four different leaf colors – one nearly red, one gold, one green, and one brown. Other than that, nothing particularly exciting. You do get the idea, however, of how the tableau of multiple images is better than any of the images on it’s own. One could argue that only the composition of 4 images makes the image worthwhile.
- For the next one, I was able to borrow a lens baby from the workshop guide, and did my very first tilt / shift / manual focus / manual exposure experiment with some of the statues in the park. I missed the exact focus in several of the images, though, but found two which can qualify in the context of this mission as a tiny “series”.
- The third one was inspired by my early work on Computer Graphics and 3D modelling, a topic I have left alone for the last 10 years. But given the task at hand to create image series in this park, I couldn’t resist to go 3D in photography. Sorry for the weird format, but art takes it’s toll there.
- All of the previous image tableaus were mounted by myself on dark black photo paper with some glue. In the very morning when this early snow was still covering some of the ground (read: mud), I had one more radical idea: To not create an image series of rectangular images hanging next to each other, but rather use the modern technology and try to blend some images into each other, trying to create a single image out of several. Those images were taken with the end result in mind, and it was not meant to have any particular meaning, merely the pure color / texture blend of several pieces of ground coverage I found close to each other in front of the palace.
- Last but not least again a more conventional series and tableau. I took, in realization that the weather would be really unforgiving on this Sunday morning, a piece of frosted glass with me in order to “force” a series of images in case nothing else works. I did take pictures of this glass candle holder (which in reality is about the size of a fist) throughout the park, and only afterwards at home when scanning the catch of the day did get the idea for the image series below, which I do like best of my attempts
Lesson learned: It is harder to create series of images, and you have to preplan those series while being on site. Even then, expect to throw away some images (and ideas) so better be safe and take some more pictures. It is rewarding though to see how images can complement each other, and I’ll certainly be following up this line of thought.
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