Basically Good

“That’s Me On The Other Side” (Greece, 2014)

The picture above is one of the few I brought back from the island of Santorini and actually developed and printed. Although I had far more, I really wanted something like this as it was totally mine and not what people usually bring back from the island: HDR shots of Oia and Thera with the blue in the domes of the churches and in the sky and water oversaturated. (Another image from Santorini is “I Hated You”, which you can read about here – there even is a description of how to get to the place, Santorini was shot to death from. If you really, really need that.)

I know it is hard to do something different, but it is totally worth it. I’m not talking vacation snapshots here. If that’s what you do, lining up the family in front of the Eiffel Tower is perfectly alright, but that same Machu Picchu shot again? It doesn’t matter at which time of year you set up your tripod at either Inspiration Point or Tunnel View – you’re trying to do “Clearing Winter Storm”. But why?

Practice? Maybe, but that’s one hell of an effort for a practice shot. No, that won’t do as an explanation I’m afraid. But it’s not even me that you have to satisfy with an answer. It’s you.

Ask yourself why you want to do something that has been done before and more than once. And with those iconic shots there’s not really much you can do to make it look different I guess. People will always see the original image and not yours.

Just like we don’t want to copy the style of a photographer, we don’t want to copy their images either. When I play jazz guitar, you can tell who I listen to. you can hear Kenny Burrell, Jim Hall, and Barney Kessel. And I do hope you can. As I am not ashamed to have been influenced by them. But when I play the same songs they play or used to play, I don’t play their solo. So, of course, you might go where Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Walker Evans or whoever it is who influenced you went. Just don’t take the same pictures. Take what is yours and yours only. There is no satisfaction in trying to be someone else.

But realizing why you are doing something and where you are going with this will give you a sense of direction of your work and of yourself as a human being. You don’t want this to be just happening to you. Even if you let outside influences partly determine which path you might take, it is always your decision which influences you like to play a role in your life and which to neglect. This is a dynamic in your artistic and personal life which you are in control over.

So go and look at all these images you like, see why you like them, go to all these places you like, see why you like them and when you have found the place, the moment and the mood that feels like you just have to hit that shutter right then and there, please feel free to do so. Just like in love you’ll know when it’s right. And even if not – recompose and repeat.

The other day I was going through some material about a digital Fine Art workflow by R. Mac Holbert (who is by the way currently adding a series of excellent videos called the “Mac Holbert Advanced Series” to the YouTube channel of the Epson Print Academy) and I found the second item in the list one of the most important. It said, “Frame A Destination – Analyze the image”. In part 8 of the video series (https://youtu.be/9F4vpv8uHkU?t=43) he describes how he looks at the image in Lightroom (hit L to hide all tools and menus and view the image against a neutral background) and just previsualizes what he wants to see once he’s done.

It seems so obvious and simple you might not have thought about that one at all. To have an idea about where the whole editing process will go is important as you need to plan how to achieve the look and feel you want for your image. It would be even better to have that idea at capture. To already have a plan of what is going to happen in Lightroom and Photoshop (or whatever it is you are using) will enable you to make the right decisions when taking the photograph. Like do I need bracketed shots for an HDR or focus stacking? And once you are working on it you need to figure out exactly what you need to do (and maybe use a device like an image map to keep track of it as described by Vincent Versace here.)

But it is definitely – at least for me – about more than just identifying whether the image needs luminosity adjustments or local sharpening. I want to find what the image is telling me, what the story behind it was and is and whether this has changed between when I captured the image and the moment I sit back and look at the image on the screen, which should be quality time. I like to listen to music when I am working on my images, have a cup of coffee and then I need to go to full screen, sit back and take it all in. And sometimes I see things I didn’t see before or something happened which now with this particular picture on the screen, makes sense and gives the image another meaning for me. Which needs to be addressed in a way that brings out hopefully exactly what I see in it.

Later on in the optimization process, as Mac Holbert call it, he recommends to re-analyze the image. After cropping, clean up, foundational issues, major retouching, and global color adjustments, he reconsiders the destination. Why not? If at some point on the way you find that something else might work even better, of course, you should follow your instincts. This, of course, would mean that it is highly advisable that you apply a non-destructive workflow meaning you always have an exit strategy so you don’t need to start from scratch once you change destination. In Lightroom, everything is non-destructive anyway and in Photoshop you can use Smart Filters, Smart Objects, and Layers to be able to go back and make changes if you need to.

Having said all this, do not neglect the need to experiment. If you can only draw from the things you have done so far, your idea of destination will always be the same and your images might all look the same, which isn’t necessarily called style. If you keep working non-destructively, your imagination is the limit.

In the signature of my emails, there is my name, the place where I live, my phone number, the URLs of my website and this blog. And it says “Photographer, musician, and writer”. That’s who I am. That’s what I am.

I have been writing forever and at some point playing jazz guitar became my second passion. Those things have been sharing center stage for decades of my life. Sometimes the focus went to other things, but there’s a thing about passions – they just stay with you. Whatever I did, wherever I was. at some point I would write something and if it was only for me. And I always had a guitar.

The other day I was at the opening of an exhibition of my images and a reporter for a local newspaper asked me how long I’d been doing photography and I said I was sorry I couldn’t tell her something like I picked up a camera when I was nine and got instantly hooked and that’s that then. It wasn’t like that at all. I discovered photography for me about five years ago and it had become my major creative outlet. Although I kept writing as I publish a short text with each photograph. I try to get across what I was feeling and/or thinking at the moment of capture, while editing it or when I saw the final print. The text would serve as an invitation to whoever would be looking at the image. Now you tell your story.

But also music would have an influence on what I do and would be connected to what I write and how I feel about my photos. When I work on the images in Photoshop, I mostly listen to classical piano, but also Jazz. When I think about the moment I want to capture in an image and how I can tell the story about that very moment, I think about the moment in improvised jazz. The moment I hear something and react. When I hear the bass player talk to me or the saxophone quoting me, there is a story told together, communication taking place.

“Everything dovetails into everything else” Vincent Versace

Everything is indeed connected. From the environment I am trying to capture and me, the person viewing the image and the image, that person and me, that person and the environment. And photographing, writing and playing in me. Whatever creative skill you have, if you have others as well (which is very likely), don’t go and make one the only one you will cultivate. Those skills can and will benefit from each other as long as you are mindful about them, reflecting about what it is you are actually doing. There will be times when I am more of a photographer. There will be weeks when I need to write more than doing anything else. Or I will be happy enough playing a gig with my band so I am wiped out for days. But it will all be there all the time and make me a better photographer. A better musician. A better writer. And eventually a better person.

For a while now I wanted to create a folio, a collection of about 10 to 12 smaller images not to be framed, but to be held and enjoyed sitting in your favorite chair listening to Bach. Or Pat Metheny.

As I was putting together a selection to submit to Brooks Jensen, the publisher of LensWork, I felt that those images would be perfect for my first folio, so I selected ten and re-edited them all over again. The outcome was quite different from what I did with them originally as I switched RAW processors from Lightroom to Capture NX and used some Photoshop techniques I hadn’t known before.

The theme “Under The Same Sky” is about realizing that that is where we all live. That a religion or a nationality are just labels and that at the end of the day we breathe the same air, our skins are warmed by the same sun and that eventually, we all go home just as we lived under the same sky. I think this is even more important to consider in these times as leaders are actually dividing nations and trying to separate countries from a community that was so hard to build to begin with. There really is no “America First!” or “Deutschland uber alles!”. There is just one mankind after all.

What I show you here are the first three prints. All of them are done on Canson Baryta Photographique 310, a paper that looks and feels fantastic. These ten prints including a certificate of authenticity and some information about the prints will come in beautiful hand-cut covers and should be available in late December 2018. The exact date will be announced on this blog and there will be a video showcasing the folio on the website holgermischke.com. You can also order the folio there.

One of the most enervating questions I found I had to answer for myself was the question of how I was going to price my artwork. You can find a lot of answers on the internet because of course this question has been asked many times and will continue to be asked as long as artists create and publish. But of course, no resource on the net can actually name the price. The problem is that you’ll have to find out for how much you will be offering your art.

So I studied a book about Fine Art Marketing by Alain Briot, which was quite interesting and after reading that I came up with a price for my prints. Which was still a bit under what I should have taken according to the calculation methods of the book, but here is the main problem. The Ego.

At that point, I wasn’t sure people would want what I do. I wasn’t even sure it was any good. The only reference I had were the opinions of family and friends and that, of course, is not enough. Today I am more confident about my work and I could ask more. But I won’t. I think actually I’ll ask less. Why?

I found some interesting lectures by Brooks Jensen, the publisher of LensWork magazine and in them, the question was asked, which market you were going for? Would you be trying to sell for a higher price to a few who could afford that or would you ask a lower price to reach more people? I must say that the second market agreed with me a whole lot more than I think the first one ever could. Don’t get me wrong — I wouldn’t mind selling a print for a million bucks, but then again I always hated it when I heard that a vintage guitar was auctioned for a ridiculous amount of money because that meant that guitar would never be actually played again anymore. The same is true for prints sold at very high prices. We are talking investment here, not art to be framed and hung in walls.

But even if your art is not selling at investment prices (mine sure isn’t), it is worth thinking about selling for a lower price or at least selling something for a lower price. If you are selling your prints for say 500 Euros, you would have to ask yourself what that means for other people. For some, it is a month’s rent or food for two months or a quarter of their monthly income. For somebody else, these are the proverbial peanuts. The group of people for who 500 Euros are mere peanuts is probably a lot smaller than the other group, who would have a harder time shelling out that kind of money or more for our art.

So either you are trying to find those few that don’t have a problem paying higher prices for art AND who do like your photography. Or you try to find the larger group of people who pay lower prices for art AND who do like your photography. Which is probably easier.

But it doesn’t stop here. You don’t have to just lower your prices. You can offer a range of products with lower to moderate to higher priced items and reach all of these people. I find this idea of reaching more people with my art by making it affordable for everyone very appealing.

To do this, I am looking into possibilities of publishing other than just the framed inkjet prints I am doing right now. Postcards, folios, zines, canvas prints books or digital publishing are all valid means to get your work out there and the customer can choose how much they are willing to pay for enjoying your art. It is not just “This is what I have — take it or leave it.”. I like giving everybody a choice how much they can afford and/or are willing to pay. This way my artwork will be seen and hopefully enjoyed by more people, what at the end of the day might even just mean more profit.

And even though we are calling ourselves artists and insist that we’d do this anyway — profitable business or not (and I do claim this is true for all artists who consider themselves passionate and serious about their art) — profit is not a bad thing. Although the sales will never pay for all those years of studies, all the equipment, the travels, the creativity, and whatnot. And they shouldn’t have to, this is not part of the actual costs. But even if your price is not a four- or even five-digit number for a 13 x 19 print, you will be making money, because the actual cost for paper and ink isn’t even that high. Even if you factor in the time spent in post-processing, those high numbers are — again — an Ego problem. Are you only a serious artist, if your prices are very serious? As mentioned above, there might be a few people who can afford that AND who like your photography, but those are hard to find and you might even have quit printing and publishing before you have found them. So I think it is best to cater to people from all walks of life and with all kinds of income. You can increase your price at all times if you find your printing can’t keep up with the demand, But until then why not sell for a lower gross margin and just see more of your images go out in the world where they can actually be enjoyed by real people?