Duende Arts

Journal with Photographs by Orlando Gustilo 



September 8, 2009

More than creativity to being an artist

In his 1995 book, Becoming a Chef, coauthored with his wife, Karen Page, sous chef Andrew Dornenburg wrote: "This profession requires a tremendous amount of hard work. There is more to being a chef than creativity, just as there is more than creativity to being an artist. As in any other craft, chefs must practice, practice, practice. Perfection is the only acceptable benchmark."
 
Reading this was reassuring. We have our innate, gut sense of what looks, sounds, tastes, smells or feels good but as human beings that mostly do things with their hands, art is also craft, the manipulation of objects to align with what we see in our minds and hearts.

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September 7, 2009

A serious photographer is a businessman first, an artist a distant second

Scott Bourne, interviewed by Jason Anderson on the latest Learning Digital Photography podcast, had some attention-grabbing comments. He quoted someone else saying some 99% of camera lenses are better than 98% of the photographers who use them. Humbling! He told Jason that when he did portrait and fashion photography he shot with long lenses, 400 and 500 mm babies! He said photographs in fashion magazines like Vogue are taken with long lenses for richer detail. Use side lights for maximum texture in landscapes but direct frontal light (light behind your shoulder) for shooting nature and birds. He started his photography career in the 1970s when his father who worked for an Indianapolis/Bloomington paper got him a pass to shoot pictures at the Indy 500. After doing motor racing photography, he did the usual wedding and portrait, fashion and product photography before he was lured into nature and finally avian photography. Shooting with a Canon for 17 years, he switched to Nikon D7s that focus more quickly and have less noise at high ISOs.
 
His one comment that floored: he is a businessman, not an artist. He spends 80% of his time selling his photographs (and now videos), only 20% on actually doing photography. I'm not there at all.
 
The podcast host, Jason, writes in his photography website that he has been shooting pictures for three years. His portraits are ordinary but his landscapes are very good. Like me he wants to shift from doing IT to making his photography his bread-and-butter. He is married, apparently with children.
 
I shot the photo above on my walk up the Monon Trail to 116th Street this evening. The sun came out after a rainy morning and a cloudy afternoon and the light was great. I had not walked on the Monon since I walked there with the Banthias in early August. I fall into other routines and forget how pleasant it is walking on the trail in the late afternoon when the air is cooler and the light perfect for taking pictures.

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September 4, 2009

QuickTime X versus QuickTime 7 for video compression

To finish the new website I am working on the video page before tackling the text (currently called blog) page but I didn't anticipate diving headlong into video compression. Compression, like motion and color, are the most intimidating phases of preparing a video for delivery. The videos I have completed are all large files. I worked under no file size constraints. They are too large for the iWeb software I am using. I can post them but streaming would be stringently slow.
 
So, I'm stuck here whereas I had envisioned flying through these last two sections of the website.
 
The image above shows the video display on QuickTime Player 7 and the new QuickTime X that is included in the recent Snow Leopard Mac OS upgrade. I exported the Final Cut Pro movie file as a 1280x720 video on QuickTime with an appreciably sharper and more vivid picture but the size fourfold!
 
More than ever I feel mastery of compression is the final Holy Grail of video production. This should not be! Shooting and editing should be at the heart of the beast!

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September 3, 2009

A Second Look at Old Photo Shoots Brings Pleasant Surprises

I am excited to revisit my old photo shoots and look at the images again, processing them as I see images today. Instead of using previously processed images I am starting from scratch, and the images are surprising me. This shoot with Lenny lasted just four hours but he was such a natural that he executed pose after poses easily. Compare this with the shoots I did with Brandon. Over nine hours and I got so few usable images. Brandon has done more modeling than Lenny but he generally models for commercials and ads. There shoots are often more straight-forward and probably heavily directed. Model photography for me is a more creative process. My most successful shoots were done with little planning. The results came from the intense collaboration between the model and me.
 
The new website is live and the model portfolios are growing steadily. Pretty soon I want to weed them down although I am rethinking the concept of "portfolio." I may redesign the site and have a separate page for my best images on a separate page that I'll call 'Portfolio."
 
I want to post more videos on the video page then decide what I want to do with the blog page. What I really want is a page containing the equivalent of my writing "portfolio" - the more disciplined work I want to get into.
 
Once I am done with these, I'll continue to revise the web site but will shift my focus to doing new shoots. Before I do new shoots (unless a new shoot hits me on the head), I want to work on my shoot technique and learn additional skills in Photoshop.

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September 2, 2009

Nostalgia for summer not quite gone

I took this photo yesterday afternoon during my end-of-the-day walk. I love shadows. I think they give images not only depth but mystery. This is a shot of an alley beside a Chinese restaurant. The front of the restaurant is painted gold and red with plaster dragons and faux pillars.
 
Days are crystal-clear and cool, suggestive of fall that technically is not here yet. Already I feel nostalgia for summer even as it dwindles into fall. Nostalgia is okay. Any feeling is better than no feeling at all. Feelings help me identify images to composite and shoot. Isn't creativity largely feeling?

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September 2, 2009

Peter Cheung's China

Peter runs a small Chinese restaurant on a side street near busy Keystone Avenue. I stopped having lunch there ten or more years ago when I became embarrassed by his mother’s attention. Walking by the restaurant yesterday afternoon, I decided to check it out again. I had fully expected the restaurant to be gone by now. The larger, more successful Chinese Ruby closed this spring, before the economic downturn began to affect other businesses.

Peter is ebulliently friendly as always. He treats me like a long-lost brother without mentioning that I have patronized his restaurant in years. No recriminations, everything as though I had been going there all these years. I am older and Peter, too, is older. He has gray in his sideburns. His father who used to be the main cook passed away a year or so before I stopped going. His mother now stays at home.

“She walks slowly, moves slowly, but still talks fast,” he says. He spends as much time at the restaurant to get away. She is 81 years old.

Peter talked about the new China. There are 300 cities with over a million people. The people have idolized American capitalism but since the recession their adulation turned them from being disciples to leaders in their own right.

“They come to Chicago,” Peter says, “and are disappointed.” The buildings are old. In China, because they “started from scratch,” the buildings are spanking new and glitter in the newfound prosperity of abundant, cheap labor.

They have evolved a kind of communism different from that of Soviet Russia. The politburo collects information then makes decisions that affect the whole country. One size fits all. It works for the country if its economic triumph is any indication. Peter admits there is no room for protest. There is no room for the individual.

Peter himself is a product of the old China. He has been running his restaurant for decades through sheer perseverance and hard work. He told me he planned to keep working for another ten years then will retire to Hongkong. “There,” he told me, “he could hire a Filipino to do his household work at $500 a month. Your money there goes a long way.”

Unlike the new Chinese immigrant businessmen, Peter is not looking to rapidly expand his business or build a franchise. He does most of the cooking himself. He greets each customer personally, chats with each one before he seats them, and takes their payment after they finish. As I was leaving today, I told him his food is as good as it was when last I ate there. He told me he cooked Cantonese and now Sichuan. A young woman helps with cooking in the kitchen.

When I think of business, my model is similar to Peter’s. Personal touch is high on my values. Customers are treated like old friends. Like Peter I would like to be generous with freebies. Lagniappes is how I think of the most successful small-time business owners in the Philippines. After you conclude your business, they add a few more prawns to your heap while making small talk, never making a big deal of the tiny addition. Those little gifts are what the customers remember, what keep them coming back again and again. They become suki, regular patrons.

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September 2, 2009

Posting to YouTube and Vimeo

I'm finishing the new website (www.duendearts.com), creating links to my Internet sites on the home page. I've had an account with YouTube for years but never posted a video there. I think the Dubrovnik video I made in July is the best I've done. Watching it again yesterday I revisited the memories of that trip. I had not planned this video but somehow the footage I took worked really well in editing the 22-minute video.
 
YouTube has limitations for free account holders: no more than 2 GB, no longer than 10 minutes. I couldn't upload the video. As I get back to editing videos I have to consider the YouTube limitations. Vimeo has a .5 GB weekly limit and only standard, not high defintion, Vimeo Plus 5 GB with a limit of 1 GB per file. I knew short videos are more effective (I've seen enough director commentaries on DVD to see how feature movies are edited down and down, often eliminating the director's favorite clips all in the interest of creating a more powerful movie) but ignored caution. If I want to post my videos they'll need to conform to these requirements.

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September 1, 2009

Moving from documentary to emotional and artistic impact

A year and a half into my learning sabbatical and I see the progress I've made not only in the craft of taking and processing photographs. I also see the weaknesses in my work more clearly.

While driving to the Final Cut Pro Users Group meeting a week ago, I had a comforting insight. The time and money I am using to learn the new craft in graphic and video production is what a young person would be spending going to college. The main difference: I don't have as much time as that young person. What I do have is perhaps a clearer vision of where I want to go, and maybe a dose or two of maturity or common sense.

I have my doubts about the clear vision. I had another insight, this time at the meeting itself while the group leader described his experience making an HD video with the Canon D5 Mark II. I've ruled out narrative video features and thought documentaries were what I wanted to shoot for. Documentaries are easier to do with no experience and no money to hire writers and actors and I enjoy watching documentaries, especially travel and history documentaries. But most documentaries are ho-hum. I want my work not just to document experience but to move the viewer either emotionally or artistically. 

I've had no prior experience in artistic movement, only some experience in creating emotional movement but this in a totally different field and for different objectives. I want to move people emotionally so they can have insights into themselves or their lives with impact considerably more powerful and effective than the clinical insight patients get in psychotherapy. I want impact that strikes below the belt, under the skin, beneath the surface of consciousness. This would mean impact more appropriately classed under art. Intellectual insight is too frail. When it comes, it swims on the surface of thought and hardly dives deep enough to change the ocean bottom where the reside the structures that shape most of our lives.

I don't make as much progress as I wish I could make in part because I am torn between learning the technical craft of software and the craft of artistic creation. I need to focus on learning more creative ways of compositing and processing images, while spending some part of my daily schedule continuing to learn the software and shooting technology.

Last Tuesday I thought I should go back to the idea of learning to create effective commercial images and videos. I am not interested in doing weddings or events photography. If I want to make money by early next year, I need to revive my aspirations for commercials and corporate videos. To reach that goal I shall need to shoot and process more videos. It’s this simple when you’re at the very bottom rung of the ladder that you want to climb.

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September 1, 2009

My first homemade pizza margherita

Visha did the honors of rolling out the pizza dough that I had prepared Sunday morning for a successful launch of my home pizza-making enterprise. The crust was heavenly—thin and nutty, the filling of Mozarella, tomatoes, and fresh basil leaves just right. We ate it hot out of the oven, with a salad of fresh greens from the deck garden with a simple balsamic vinegar-olive oil dressing.
 
Yesterday I rolled out my own pizza, this time adding strips of Prosciutto and more fresh chili. I overloaded it with seeded tomato, even adding a few Kalamata olives. It was not as good. Sunday's pizza was thinner like Neapolitan pizzas. I ignored everyone I consulted who urged a thin crust for the best Margherita and rued my disobedience. The center of my pizza was thick, like bread, or, I guess, like Sicilian pizza and I missed the crunch and flavor of Sunday's pizza.

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August 29, 2009

The Amish and a more genuine simplicity

Thirty years ago when I still drove around getting to know the country I stopped by Lancaster County in Pennsylvania to see how the Old Order Amish lived. Solid-color buggies with the color-glow orange caution symbol in the back, men, women, girls and boys all dressed alike in solid blue, gray and purple clothes, small, tidy farms and the lack of modern-day rush and clutter: there was a simplicity that bespoke bygone times of unadulterated joy.

Last night, reading Bob Brooke's The Amish Country for American Traveler ($1 at Half Price Books) reminded me why I was interested in the Amish. I probably would not have survived in an Anabaptist community where one size fit all. That's not what drew me to the Amish. Maybe it's what I've salvaged from growing up in the Philippines. By American standards we were poor in material goods but when I take away the subjective feelings of not fitting in (I didn't fit in back then either) the childhood memories shine with what today I perceive as lost down-to-earth simplicity.

In the 80s I drove around studying the alternative spiritualities that the American tenet of freedom allowed to sprout in tiny, unobtrusive pockets around the country. I discovered yoga and Buddhist meditation. On a trip to Yellow Springs in Ohio to attend a weekend vipassana retreat I met several people who influenced the lifestyle I was shaping. Paul, a psychologist at the Dayton VA, introduced me to the Buddhist center in Barre, Massachusetts where Buddhist practice became established. Buddhism drew me for being an Asian tradition of spirituality but like my attraction to the Amish and the early Christian desert hermits a more powerful draw was the aesthetics of simplicity and of "fewness of desires."

When I undertook a protracted sabbatical last year I was motivated by several factors. Among others I wanted to simplify my life in both its material and process aspects. Instead of chasing after material aggrandizement I wanted to deepen my inner life. How well have I succeeded? Not as well as I wanted. But I am recognizing that life is not so much about reaching the other shore as living each day as it comes. Goals provide us with set patterns when fate does not provide the surprises that energize and renew our spirits. Goals are default behaviors. More vital to a life of inner richness is the openness to what lies beyond goals and desires. To walk through life minimally encumbered with expectations: this is a more genuine simplicity.

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