Classroom Geometry, originally uploaded by marc silber.

I took this shot 44 years ago, it was published a few years ago in a photo-essay I did for Gentry Magazine, so I guess you could say it is now my first professional photo.

Henri Cartier-Bresson talked about how photography relies on geometry. I agree. I see in images that I admire a sense of geometry—the placement of lines and objects. Contrasting proper placement can be things out of place or unexpected as in this shot.

So many times we’re limited to holding the camera in the landscape or portrait position, but what happens when you change the horizon as I did above.

Your thoughts?

Marc showing the concept of "framing", originally uploaded by marc silber.

This is a shot of me teaching photography workshop at Kepler’s in Menlo Park using Ansel Adams’ framing card. It was cool that in one of our recent video shoots with Micheal Adams, he talked about how his dad used this card in his classes.

BTW, I’ve just completed some Photography workshops for Filoli and Hillsborough and Atherton clubs, these were well received by the students and I’m getting requests for some over the summer.

These would cover the basics of photography & digital cameras, composition, etc. They are suitable for teens on up.

We’ll use the surrounding area, Sunset Magazine, Palo Alto-Stanford, etc, to photograph.

The workshop would be a total of 4 sessions 1 ½ hours each, probably one in June, two in July, one in August.

Lots of personal attention and feedback.

Please let me know if you might be interested and we’ll work out specifics for dates and cost. Marc@silberstudios.com

You can look at www.silberstudios.com/learn for more data.

News about PhotoCycle. Our show is in the works and our first pilot should be up in about a month. Rocky and I were working on editing it yesterday, I have to tell you it’s really cool: We’re going to show you Ansel’s darkroom with footage we just shot, but the really cool part is we have unreleased footage of Ansel working in this same darkroom (thanks to Michael and Matt Adams who generously made this available to us.)

This embodies our vision of PhotoCycle: To take you close to the masters of photography, for inspiration and to get their know-how, connecting this directly with the digital world, which of course is built on the analog world of photography.

For example, Ansel made a point of mentioning the key to the photographic process is visualization, he brought this up over and over in his books the Basic Photo Series. But imagine hearing from him directly what he meant by the process of visualization? That’s where we’re taking you on PhotoCycle.

Another example is with Edward Weston (he and Ansel helped pave the way for photography to be considered a true art form—something we can now take for granted and enjoy the freedom of. Edward made the definitive statement about composition: “Composition is the strongest way of seeing.” Though we have no recording of him talking about this, I will ask his grandson Kim to elaborate on it.

We’ll also be taking you on classic PhotoWalks to accessible but photo rich locations, Thomas Hawk will be joining us as he and Robert Scoble did some of the original PhotoWalks which are still available. You can join us on these too, in person or on our show: watch, follow along and learn—or show us, as the case may be.

We’ll be bringing you weekly tips and tricks, how to get inside your equipment do those neat things.

We’ll also be covering the business side of photography, how successful photographers have made a go of it.

We’ll be tailoring this show to you and your interests, so leave your comments, send me your emails and come along when we go on a PhotoWalk.

I’m really passionate about this show and very happy to be working on this with Robert and Rocky and hope to hear from you and see your work along the way.

Ansel’s license plate? “Zone V” (Matthew Adams, his grandson now has them on his car, how they ended up there is another interesting story…)

Zone V is of course middle (18% ) gray that all of us middle-gray (excuse pun) photographers know so well. It’s the middle zone that your light meter goes after.

But could it be that Ansel also had a slightly more philosophical message behind the obvious?

Photography is a balance: You have to be well versed technically, but you need the eye to find the image. Too far on either side and you’ll see it in the image. A perfect technical rendition but no emotion or story in the image. Or a great image but weak technically. Both will fall flat. But how about a balance between the two? Zone V.

When I teach, I try to balance the student’s attention between how to look for the shot and how to get it.

Ansel remarked that photography is a language. We’re speaking to others with our images, your use of the language must be clear, but so must what you are “talking” about.

How is your balance? Are you in Zone V?

Here is a cool interactive post in the New York Times with backstories to some of Ansel’s  iconic images told by Andrea Stillman, one of his assistants. Click on each image to hear her story.

Here are five easy ways to improve your photography:

1. Learn to visualize your image: Get a clear image of what you want as the final picture and control the shot and image processing to get it.
2. Take more photos, take photos daily. The more photos you take (but not shotgun, please) the more you put yourself out there. Just as with tennis — or better surfing, the more waves you paddle for the more you will catch (with some wipe-outs along the way
3. Critique your work:Use these points s a guide and see how you feel you did in each: a. Technical quality?
   i. Focus?
   ii. Exposure: Light or dark?
   iii. Lighting?
   iv. Colors?
   b. Composition? Framing what should and shouldn’t be in the frame?
   c. Emotional appeal?
4. Look over other photographer’s work and do the same. Also try to visualize what they were seeing at the moment they took the shot.
5. Take photographs outside of the “box.” We all tend to stay within our set photos, make yourself get shots outside of that. Go out and shoot old cars, bicycles, people sleeping or nude–whatever you would normally not take shots of.

These are just a few ideas, there are many more points to improving your shots but try the above and let me know how this goes for you.

PS: I’m thinking of setting up a a critiquing venue on a photo-sharing site, would you find that useful?

Michael Adams showing us Ansel’s enlarger

For our next segment of PhotoCycle, we stopped by Ansel Adams’ home to get a tour from his son Michael. As Scoble put it “it’s like being in a cathedral” — we were surrounded by Ansel’s work on the one hand and on the other his actual workspace—his darkroom and workroom where he printed and finished his work.

For me this was a very personal experience, Ansel has been an inspiration and teacher for me most of my life. My mom read me his biography The Eloquent Light, later she introduced him to me when he came to my grade school for a show. I avidly read his Basic Photo Series in my teens and charged into my own darkroom to put my new found knowledge to use. So to be in his home that emanated his passion for making photographs was quite moving.

We toured through Ansel’s living room-gallery and Michel told us stories behind Moon over Hernandez and his shot of Half Dome in 1927, which he sites as his first visualized photograph—a signal moment in photography.

We went onto his darkroom and had a look at his 8×10 horizontal enlarger that runs on railroad tracks! This machine was engineered by him so that he could make enormous prints. It has a feature I’ve never seen before: He could control the lights on the enlarger to create more or less light projected from individual parts of the negative itself.

After Michael gave us an overview, I asked Frederick Johnson from Adobe to join us and discuss how the analog world of photography had made it into the digital realm, such as PhotoShop. This was pretty surreal: Representatives of both of these worlds discussing the meeting of the medium in our present day digital age.

My passion with this show is to put our viewers in touch with the masters of photography, to learn from them so that they can better their own craft. Proof of concept: My friend Helen, who is a neighbor of the Adams’ and I had invited to join us for the shoot told me later that she had a major realization while hearing the description of the enlarger: She saw for the first time the art of how the photograph was created by Ansel, taking his vision and projecting it into the print that he wanted. In this moment she saw clearly how photography is an art form not just a reproduction of the scene.

Her realization is exactly what occurred to Ansel when he first discovered that he didn’t have to follow the rules of pictorial or snapshot photography, but could visualize and show others his vision in the final print. Ansel with Edward Weston (whose home we’ll be visiting next) and others were responsible for getting photography recognized as an art form, something we tend to take for granted today.

What I found fascinating about her spark of realization was—this is precisely what I hoped my viewers come to realize…this is my passion with the show: to tell the story and to broaden awareness of the field. Results? Deeper understating and better resulting photographs.

Be sure to subscribe to my blog so you can hear about the launch of for our show PhotoCycle.

Frederick Johnson’s blog

Frederick’s Flickr

Scobleizer

A new Camera that you can ride?

Nope. It’s our show that will be launched soon on FastCompany.TV, so named because it covers the whole cycle of photography beginning with inspiration and visualization, tricks and tips, through to the final print and even how to sell your work.

We’ll be introducing you to the masters of photography and take you along on our PhotoWalks.

Our next stop? Ansel Adams’ house for a tour and we’ll end up in his amazing darkroom, where we’ll discuss how the analog world of photography made it to the digital.

Have a look at Scobel’s Qik video of our visit last week with Michael Adams to the Ansel Adams gallery.

Stay tuned folks, you’ll love this!

Half Dome is an amazing monolith to just look at and not even think, just look or talk quietly with friends, in this case with Robert Scoble, Michael Adams, Rocky Barbanica and Thomas Hawk.