Here at The Image Flow our clients often bring in photos to print that were made during amazing trips to every continent. Many of the images we see are world-class and require very little adjustment before an excellent print can be made. But an unfortunate percentage of camera work was not completely successful, and the finished product is limited by one or more technical mistakes made by the photographer in the field. No matter where your journeys may take you, a similar set of pitfalls can plague any photographer wherever she or he may go.
Photographer Daniel Coburn says photography is about ideas. “As image makers we have a valuable opportunity to engage with a variety of historical processes, to make images that are beautiful, unique, and rich in concept.”
Daniel first discovered 19th century alternative photographic processes as an undergraduate studying under the accomplished alternative process photographer Marydorsey Wanless. Although he has recently come to be known for his work with the cyanotype process, Daniel has worked in the full range of alternative processes. He says it’s not about the process; it’s about choosing the right process for the project.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is designed to make everything about digital photography easier. Many photographers, from amateur to professional, have put Lightroom at the center of their digital imaging workflow. Whether your photos are from that “trip of a lifetime,” or for a paying client, Lightroom offers a suite of tools and editing system for your most important work. And—the Develop module in Lightroom has even replaced the need to use Photoshop to process most images made with modern digital cameras. This is an essential program for photographers on the go.
In her Lightroom workshop, Taralynn Lawton shows you how to automatically embed your name and copyright information in each of your photos during import, and how to delete images in batches—a great way to get rid of out-of-focus or otherwise unusable images, without having to delete them one by one.
Taralynn also shows you how to take advantage of Smart Previews, so that you can store your images on an external drive, and still access them with the Develop module, even if the external drive isn’t attached. Once the external drive is plugged back in, Lightroom will automatically sync any changes you made while the file was offline. This feature wasn’t available until Lightroom 5, and is a valuable new feature for photographers who travel!
Constance Chu, the newest member of The Image Flow team, has a PhD in psychology with an emphasis in neuroscience and her most recent job was working with autistic kids doing applied behavioral analysis. So what is she doing at The Flow you ask? No, she’s not developing a new darkroom process—yet.
“Photography is my passion!” she says. “I want to be immersed in photography. I want to be around it all the time.”
Photographer and filmmaker Gary Yost will present a series of short films at the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts including the premier of his new project, Mountains Made of Chalk, Fall into the Sea, Eventually The film features the work of artist Genna Panzarella, who paints a 10-foot-wide mural of Mt. Tamalpais as it was when it was whole—literally inside what used to be the mountaintop. The film will premier with Gary’s new series about Mill Valley at a special event at the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts on Thursday, April 2 at 7PM.
Photographer Catherine Karnow has made a name for herself shooting surprising and thought-provoking images of Vietnam since 1990. Her new retrospective will open at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong March 9.
Catherine is well known in Vietnam: She began shooting in the country in 1990, and calls the late General Giap a personal friend. In 1994, she was the only foreign journalist invited to accompany him privately to Dien Bien Phu, the site of the battle that won Vietnam independence from the French.
There are very few opportunities to study the alternative photographic processes like gum bichromate, platinum/palladium, or wet plate collodion printing—especially in the west. The Image Flow brings together the world’s best photographers and instructors to teach these processes on a rotating schedule.
“For anybody interested in the alternative processes, it’s a rare opportunity to learn them,” said Ed Carey, owner of Gallery 291 and the alternative process workshop liaison at The Image Flow.
Jock McDonald went to Cuba for the first time in 1990 with Bernardo Gonzalez, the son of Mexican Minister of Culture Juan Francisco Gonzalez. The elder Gonzalez had had become somewhat of a mentor to Jock on Latin American culture after giving him his first retrospective show in Mexico. “Juan Francisco said to me, ‘You’ll never understand Latin America if you don’t understand Cuba,’” Jock recalls.
“But he said, ‘I’m not going, I’m married. I’m going to have my son take you.’ I will never forget the look in his son’s eyes, the look that said, ‘I’m not taking a gringo to Cuba!’” Jock laughs.
Since 1990, photographer he has made some 50 trips to Cuba. What keeps him coming back, are the friendships he has found.
This month, The Face of Water, a series of portraits by Rudi Dundas that tells the stories of people affected by the lack of clean drinking water, opens at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco. On February 26, Rudi will give a lecture about the images at The Image Flow.
How can we let our kids be kids, to see the way kids see, while still teaching them something about photography? Hillary Sloss is a veteran photojournalist based in Marin County and a digital and film photography instructor at the San Francisco Waldorf High School. Her new class, Digital Photography for Youth, is designed especially to encourage young people to explore their world through photography.
The idea is, she says, to help young photographers create beautiful images that are youthful, but not childish. “It’s important to give young photographers enough so that they can advance their photographic skills, without inundating them too many rules,” says Hillary.
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