Since this isn't a vehicle by which I can carry on a two way conversation with any of you I am writing something here that is centered on my work, once again. We have started the count down. This is a short post about the lecture I am giving this coming Wednesday evening for the PRC (Photographic Resource Center) at 6:30 pm at 705 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston in Room 522. Call the PRC for more information: 617-975-0600.

What am I lecturing on? Let me think. Ah yes, it will be on my work; with an emphasis on recent work and showing a preview of the two shows I have coming up. I will also show earlier black and white work as a way to ramp up to how I photograph now.

I am very excited to be able to do this and thank the PRC for asking. My friend and fellow photographer Peter Vanderwarker will be doing the intro.

I promise a good time.

As a way to tempt you here are the two first slides:

What? You say you feel cheated? Come to the lecture and see what follows as I will be showing actual photographs.

We also will have a selection of books for sale that evening, including the newest one, just out this week, called  Above, Aerial Photographs of Martha's Vineyard by Neal Rantoul.

For those of you from out of town you clearly live in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Be there or be square.

In past posts I have written about the upcoming architectural photography class several of us are teaching at Penland in North Carolina in April. Last week we had a meeting with all of us at my studio except for one, Nick Wheeler, who lives out west.

This was our second teachers meeting and Mercedes Jelinek drove up from NYC to attend. Mercedes is one of the two Studio Asssistants that will be at Penland with us. Earlier I wrote a profile on her and her work: Profile. The other studio assistant will be Elizabeth Ellenwood. I also wrote a profile on her and her work here.

Mercedes and I went out to have lunch together after the meeting. She has just landed a teaching job back in New York and is finding out what it is like to teach photography weekly. We had a laugh talking about how you now have to look like a teacher, sound like a teacher, behave like a teacher, etc.

This, of course, got me into remembering what that was like, when I started teaching at New England School of Photography in Boston in September, 1975. This was two years after getting out of graduate study and my first real teaching job.

I learned this right away:

How do you know if you really know the material? 

Find that you have to teach it. 

I told Mercedes that back then I thought I knew the Zone System (Ansel Adam's system for controlling exposure and contrast in black and white) until I realized that I was going to have to present it logically over several weeks to students who didn't have a clue what I was talking about.  I also felt in those days that I was required to know the answers to every student question. It is the insecure teacher who feels this way. The secure teacher, the one I became later, felt free to say " I don't know" and then tried to help the student find the answer themselves. As she teaches adults in her classes, she often finds she has students who are trying to impress her with how superior they are, how much they know, as though their age or position in life sets them apart in the class. I find this as well in the workshops I teach. I sympathize with this as it would be hard for me at my age to be in a class with a teacher 26 years old, a few years out of graduate school, and not try to impress her/him with just how much I knew. But a class really only has one place for a leader and it needs to be the teacher.

Good teachers learn as much from their students as they teach to them. If I miss anything about university level teaching several days a week it is this: Teaching isn't about the teacher it is about the students. Leave your ego and need to be worshipped at the door. Students are paying top dollar to be in your class. You have a responsibility to be on point, up to date, relevant, exacting, compassionate, decisive, and to know your topic.

I am still teaching, of course. A workshop here, a class there. And I am enjoying that. Workshops are great because most of your students are there because they want to be there. University teaching: not always so much. As I am older, I am impatient with students just biding their time or wasting mine. A day long workshop has a kind of honesty about it, a kind of single mindedness of purpose that seems right.

Last weekend I taught a one day workshop for Digital Silver Imaging in Belmont, MA that was on the topic of making a portfolio that gets noticed. I shared everything I could think of that related to making and presenting a portfolio. The students were wonderful; motivated, interested and interesting. 

Do I have a teaching method? Listen really hard, try to figure out what the student is saying , really saying and then address that. And don't put any kind of "superiority spin" on it. More experience is just that, not better. Also, a teacher needs to be decisive, able to say which is better, where a student needs to go with their work, how their work is either succeeding or is not and then why.

Ah, teaching. It has been the other half of my career, the counter to the self serving nature of making pictures. I am extremely pleased and relieved to be free from academia these days. My friends used to tell me there were two Neals: summer Neal and winter Neal. Winter Neal was more serious, a little intense and focused, troubled and hassled and perhaps a little less happy. Summer Neal was more carefree, would smile a little easier and more often, was less troubled and life didn't seem to get in the way of what he wanted to do. Summer Neal might just as easily be found out in a kayak in Boston Harbor or paddling along the coast in Maine as he might be seen with a camera or schlepping prints to or from his studio. Safe to say it is summer Neal pretty much all year around since I retired.

These days most photography is hugely quantitative. We tend to make a lot to get a few. There used to be some things that would restrict photographers' output: the cost of film, the difficulty of processing, the bulk of carrying film around, the physical storage of the materials, to name a few. Back in the 70's I was cranking out so many photographs I felt I needed a "restricter" and one of the reasons I started photographing in 8 x 10 was to slow me down. During the 80's Ilford granted me free film and I remember I would shoot maybe 600 sheets while teaching in Italy each summer. It would take me about 6 months just to develop all those sheets. So maybe my tactic wasn't wholly successful.

Nowadays there really isn't anything to restrain us if we photograph digitially. When in doubt, we make another picture. This kind of indiscriminate way of photo- graphing gets us in trouble later when it is time to edit the work and so I would urge economy of scale when shooting. It  becomes difficult to know which picture is the picture when confronted with too many choices.

But we all make more bad pictures than good ones. I can't think of too many other fields that work this way, except that movies are famous for more footage ending up on the cutting room floor than in the can. But we need to become comfortable with our failures and try to learn from them. Now that I shoot all digitally one of the things that has helped me is to look at the pictures I've shot during the day, back in the motel room at night. Then I try to apply what I've learned the next day while out shooting. When I do this, spend nights in motels, I always think of Lee Friedlander, when he was making cross country trips in the 50's and 60's as his motel experience was very different. You can see it in his self portrait as he sits there, probably exhausted from driving and shooting all day:

To me this looks like someone who's alone and probably lonely, separated from his family by the work he does, someone immersed in making pictures and stuck in a motel room at night with nothing to photograph.

Of course, a view camera photographer on the road has got to figure out some way to get the shot sheets out of his film holders into some storage boxes and load fresh unexposed film into them so as to be ready to shoot again the next day. This means total darkness and no dust.  I can distinctly remember when checking into motels asking if the bathroom in the room I was being given had windows or not. If it didn't it made loading film much easier.  I would always travel with black tape and black fabric just in case. I did get some strange looks, though, at the front desk.

As the technical side of photography continues to move forward and progress our skills as an editor are called into use more than ever before. One of my colleagues at Northeastern, Andrea Raynor, a professor I am proud to say I hired, was the best editor I have ever worked with. Her ability to find the one image that was the right one out of scores of files was legendary and much admired not only by students but by people like me as well.

You might want to think about strategies that might result in less shooting by being discriminating, particular and specific. 

About a year ago I took a big chance. I ordered the new Nikon D800e as it made a file that was 36 mp. This meant I would give up a tool that had made so many incredible pictures parting would be hard. This was the Nikon D3x. Too big, too expensive and too heavy by far this pro level Nikon had never let me down. I took it to Europe a few times, shooting extended bodies of work with it. I made landscapes with it and shot the Reggio Emilia series with it. I took it to shoot wheat fields from the ground and from the air, I took it to Utah and I shot much of the Islands of MA project, all aerials, with it. Sincere apologies, but I become attached when a camera makes so many wonderful photographs.

At any rate, those of you that have known me for awhile know I am always trying to get bigger pictures to be better. This is a holdover from my 8 x 10 days when I would reverse mount my enlarger and project on the floor to make big prints. One of the reasons the move to inkjet printing was so liberating for me in the early 2000's was that scanned 8 x 10 negatives made great prints 4 x 5 feet across.

At any rate, many of us waited for a long time for the 800e and I didn't get mine until late May last year. New cameras have never been easy for me to adjust to and this one was no exception. I started photographing with it right away and made several series using it through the late spring, summer and fall including: Penland 2012, Pulaski Motel, Virginia 2012, Wheat 2012 and Rivalta, Italy 2012 (one of my favorites), among others. The files are very good, the camera is a little clunky and not made to the same standards as the D3x, and it is a little slow, but overall it is a reasonably good camera. It is cheaper too.

All this time with the 800e files I was making prints on 22 x 17 inch paper, a standard size for me when printing out portfolios. This is large enough to see the work, small enough to carry around. But over the past two weeks since returning from San Diego, I have been working on the new Imperial Sand Dunes pictures I shot while there. These are aerials and are up on the site now: Dunes 2013. I have been printing them 37 x 25 inches and have framed three at 45 x 34 inches. 

OMG! I only wish you could see the actual prints as they are exceptional. Sliding along at about 100 mph, about 800 feet over the Dunes, clicking away at 1/1600 of a second and these photographs show the very small wave like patterns the wind forms on the sand with such detail it simply blows me away. So far I've printed and framed these:

Here's a detail of the one above:

With more to follow. I can't stop thinking about them. This is a sea change for me as all those years in 8 x 10 was basically a pursuit for this. Both the large scale view of the subject at high quality that when viewed closely didn't fall apart. I'd love to show them but my up and coming shows are locked in and Jason Landry at Panopticon (the gallery that represents my work) looks ill every time I bring it up about wanting to show big work. BTW: Almost no one wants big work: not the gallery, not most buyers, certainly not the museums, unless you're an Andreas Gursky, which, evidently, I am not.

I would do a pop up show of these if someone would give me a space. The pictures are simply unbelievable.

This is a post where I should take as many hits as many others for I am as guilty of using a big camera to make bad photographs as anyone else I know.

This is the phenomenon of making the faulty assumption that even the most banal and boring of subjects is somehow elevated to a higher plane by being made with a large format camera. 

When I was a student one of the most fascinating and eccentric of my teachers at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) was Paul Krot.

Paul is now gone but for awhile Paul was a very good friend to me. He was hired by Harry Callahan in early days to be the guy that kept the lab going, ordering and mixing chemistry and as an overall technical person. Paul later founded Sprint Systems, the 5 gallon cubes of photo chemistry that schools use across the country in their labs. Harry decided Paul should be a teacher too so he started teaching. Paul taught a killer sophomore level tech class that dealt with chemistry, physics, optics and mechanics. I remember these words he said to me one day when I was still an undergraduate student, "Working in 8 x 10, everything is a photograph". By this he meant that the way the camera rendered the photographs made with it was so superior that you could shoot anything with it and it would be a great photograph. To some extent, it's true. He also said it was the most difficult of formats to master. I am sure lights went off in this brain of mine. Of course, I was a sucker for this. So many have fallen into this trap. I know I did.

This isn't to say that many magnificent photographs haven't been made with large format view cameras over the years, from Adams, to Weston, to Gowin, to Sommer to Walker Evans, to Jim Dow, the list goes on and on. I think I've made some good ones too. It is simply not true, however, that the picture is good because of the tool used. On the other hand, imagine Ansel Adams making his half dome picture in Yosemite with a 35mm camera up to his eye. Not so good. Many students (a lot of them male) over the years fell into the trap of the large format's supposed superiority. It is just different tools for different jobs. The thinking went like this: if it is really hard to make the picture and there is a lot of skill involved in using the camera, and it is big, heavy and intricate, along with expensive, and processing the film and making the print demands skill and care, then that validates the ensuing photograph and we all must be totally impressed with it.  Well, actually, it does not. Boring, banal and undistinguished are characteristics that span all formats. 

Me? Oh yes, I thought I was hot stuff, with my 8 x 10 camera, my dark cloth. To be kind, for many years this was simply what I used as a photographer. One lens, one film, black and white, that was it. So, if I was making pictures (mostly bad, some good), it was with that tool. I used the 8 x 10 while I was in my strongest years; , hiking down to the bottom of marble quarries in Italy in late afternoon July heat, trekking up to the top of a cliff in Southern France, shooting at midnight with the Mistral blowing under a full moon in Les Baux, hovering out and over Grand Coulee Dam in Washington.

Now big cameras don't have so much clout anymore, I don't think. The best DSLR's are doing an amazing job of mimicking the quality from large format cameras. I have friends that use 4 x 5 and 8 x 10 and some are making really good work. Different tools for different jobs.

In many ways I am a view camera person at heart. And, although I now use a DSLR, for much of the work I do the camera is used much like a view camera would be used. This means I am mounting it on a tripod and being very careful with exposure and aperture settings, focusing carefully, often for hyperfocal distance, and of course, I make mostly really terrible pictures with it, just as I did with the  8 x 10. And a few good ones from time to time.

I also use the same camera to make pictures hand held, something I couldn't do with the 8 x 10. About 60% of the work done over the past year or so was shot hand held. Love that! Imagine trying to do aerials when 8 x 10 was the only camera I used?