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This book came out of a conversation. I was standing in an art gallery, happy enough that some of my pictures were on its walls, but telling a fellow that it was all very nice to be getting a show now and then, yet what one really wanted to do was bring out a book. I mentioned how daunting it was, when one had arrived at a certain age still without any reputation of note, to face the prospect of convincing a legitimate publisher to take on one's very first body of work.
"Pshaw!"; he said. "Publish it yourself!";
"But a book about what?"; I asked.
"How long have you lived here in Mission?"; he replied.
"Thirty-two years.";
"Well, then.";
It's an interesting community, Mission, where blue-collar values stand beside but do not always mix with a fierce dedication to the arts, where an economy still dependent on farming and forestry is increasingly hooked on the juggernaut of urban growth.
It's more interesting than Abbotsford, that's for sure, though it isn't always pretty. But then the last thing a photographer should want to do is make his subject pretty. Beautiful, yes. That's another matter. The thing about beauty, as the Romantic poets always said, is that the beautiful always contains elements of the dark and the unsavory. To respond to mere prettiness is to keep one's responses pretty much on the surface. To appreciate beauty is to respond to a wide and often discomfiting range of contrasts and possibilities.
Centennial Park in Mission is pretty. But do people actually go there? Mission as a whole, though, while it has attractive old hillside houses and stunning river views and sweeping mountain vistas and magnificent forest expanses right in its backyard, also has seedy back alleys and crapped-out shake mills and unkempt ravines where people dispose of their old tires, and a sometimes unpleasant (though hardly unique) history of dealing with non-Europeans.
The reason Stave Lake is such a beautiful place, though it is far from being always pretty, has a lot to do with the fact that for half the year it's a shimmering expanse of pellucid and inviting blue water, but for the other half, the dark half, the interesting half of the year, the water level behind the dam is drawn down thirty or forty or fifty feet from summer recreational levels, and then all the reminders of dubious logging practices--the snags and spars and junked machinery that nobody back then took the trouble to take away-this brown mess is all out there in plain view. Until, that is, it all gets covered up again under the next spring's runoff. But just barely. Just enough that it will still tear the bottom out of your speedboat if you aren't paying close attention.
I have even run up on a stump in my kayak up there, and the last thing you want to do when you're paddling along with an expensive camera around your neck is to suddenly find yourself under water and upside down, hastily reviewing the procedure for a wet exit. This actually happened to me one day-not by tipping off a stump, and not at Stave Lake, but on the Fraser, where I believed I was clever enough and strong enough one lazy fall afternoon to muscle my way upstream past the end of what had once been a tree wedged firmly into the downstream end of a small sandbar.
Fifteen hundred dollars and a new camera later, I had learned my lesson.
But to take the pictures that you need to take, you need to take your camera with you wherever you go, certainly in your car and your boat, possibly even to bed. Most of the time when you take your camera out the door with you, nothing happens. But that one afternoon when you leave it at home because all you're doing is a quick run down to the grocery store anyway, for heaven's sake-that's when a troupe of Hare Krishnas stages an impromptu parade down Main Street, or the sky suddenly darkens and you get hail and weird blue clouds and impossibly orange trees, or an eighteen-wheeler loaded with ten thousand bright yellow rubber duckies spills its load across the entire width of the Mission Bridge.
In short, you have to have your eye as open as you can, and your equipment always at the ready. In some ways, it hardly matters what the subject matter is. Landscapes, streetscapes, waterscapes, skyscapes, people, buildings, trees, mailboxes, cardboard boxes, cats, graffiti, dead fish, steaming horses, shop windows-, old tugboats-everything is grist for the mill, as long as the light is right. Reflected light, radiant light, natural light, artifical light, celestial light-the art of photography, as the etymology of the word makes clear, is really the art of drawing with light. People who take dull pictures in the flat, glaring light of the noonday sun are not necessarily dull people, nor even dull photographers; they just haven't yet learned to trust the evidence of their own eyes. One well-known photographer was asked why he took so many pictures all the time, and his reply was that he liked to see what things looked like when they were photographed. If you snap your shutter whilst aiming down at an otherwise unprepossessing pile of malodorous salmon early on a November morning when it actually feels as if this might look interesting when you see the finished product (for outdoor photography this usually means when the sun is at least semi-obscured or is not too far from the horizon), you stand a considerably better chance of getting a good picture than if you find yourself pointing your lens at a picturesque curve of the Great Wall of China on a cloudless day at one o'clock in the afternoon just because that's when the tour bus dropped you there.
In addition to subject matter and quality of light, there are also formal considerations, of course. Structure, composition, balance, all that. The best way to tell whether a photograph is formally pleasing, which means divesting it of as much content-related baggage as possible (does the bride really look as if she likes the groom; is aunt Vera actually smiling?) is to turn the picture upside down, or at least sideways. It's a bit like what the old eighteenth-century landscape painters did when they were sizing up a scene for its purely aesthetic possibilities: they turned around, bent over double, and looked at everything backwards and upside down through the framing device of their own two legs.
A word about the equipment used in the preparation of this book. Until recently, I shot everything with a 35 mm Canon EOS A2 single lens reflex camera on Fujichrome Velvia slide film (wonderfully fine grain, highly saturated colours). I used a 28 mm wide angle lens exclusively. To make digital files I scanned these slides (mostly on an Epson V750 scanner), then processed them in Adobe Photoshop (meaning, in this case, little more than getting the size right, removing dust spots and odd little smudges and worms, and tweaking brightness and contrast and sharpness a bit). Some of the most recent pictures were shot on a Canon 30D digital SLR with a 17-85 mm zoom. The book was laid out in Adobe InDesign.
Some of the book's images (and many more from other locales and on other topics) can also be viewed on my website, http://grahamdowden.ca. Anyone interested in purchasing additional copies of the book, or archival-quality inkjet prints in a variety of sizes and formats, should contact me, either via the website or at the Gyre & Gimble Publishers address listed on the copyright page.
An undertaking like this would have been utterly impossible without a huge amount of support. Over a hundred institutions and individuals had enough blind faith to contribute substantially to the project's costs. Friends (see the list at the back) are those who purchased at least one copy of the book well in advance of the publication date. Patrons (also listed at the back) contributed at a higher level, and Angels (see over) at a higher level yet. I must single out for its especially generous support my old employer and home away from home for 25 years, the University College of the Fraser Valley.
I am especially indebted to a few individuals without whom I would still be floundering around in the woulda shoulda coulda stages of all this: Jorge Rocha at Friesens; Kim Isaac and Rachele Oriente, who helped me with copyright; Bob McGregor and Geoff Fraser, who taught the software courses at UCFV and bailed me out on numerous occasions; Lynne Smith for her constant encouragement and marketing smarts; and above all my wife Judy Hill, whose technical wizardry and fearless criticism and inexhaustible fund of moral support still leave me at a loss for ... further ... words.
-Graham Dowden
"Pshaw!"; he said. "Publish it yourself!";
"But a book about what?"; I asked.
"How long have you lived here in Mission?"; he replied.
"Thirty-two years.";
"Well, then.";
It's an interesting community, Mission, where blue-collar values stand beside but do not always mix with a fierce dedication to the arts, where an economy still dependent on farming and forestry is increasingly hooked on the juggernaut of urban growth.
It's more interesting than Abbotsford, that's for sure, though it isn't always pretty. But then the last thing a photographer should want to do is make his subject pretty. Beautiful, yes. That's another matter. The thing about beauty, as the Romantic poets always said, is that the beautiful always contains elements of the dark and the unsavory. To respond to mere prettiness is to keep one's responses pretty much on the surface. To appreciate beauty is to respond to a wide and often discomfiting range of contrasts and possibilities.
Centennial Park in Mission is pretty. But do people actually go there? Mission as a whole, though, while it has attractive old hillside houses and stunning river views and sweeping mountain vistas and magnificent forest expanses right in its backyard, also has seedy back alleys and crapped-out shake mills and unkempt ravines where people dispose of their old tires, and a sometimes unpleasant (though hardly unique) history of dealing with non-Europeans.
The reason Stave Lake is such a beautiful place, though it is far from being always pretty, has a lot to do with the fact that for half the year it's a shimmering expanse of pellucid and inviting blue water, but for the other half, the dark half, the interesting half of the year, the water level behind the dam is drawn down thirty or forty or fifty feet from summer recreational levels, and then all the reminders of dubious logging practices--the snags and spars and junked machinery that nobody back then took the trouble to take away-this brown mess is all out there in plain view. Until, that is, it all gets covered up again under the next spring's runoff. But just barely. Just enough that it will still tear the bottom out of your speedboat if you aren't paying close attention.
I have even run up on a stump in my kayak up there, and the last thing you want to do when you're paddling along with an expensive camera around your neck is to suddenly find yourself under water and upside down, hastily reviewing the procedure for a wet exit. This actually happened to me one day-not by tipping off a stump, and not at Stave Lake, but on the Fraser, where I believed I was clever enough and strong enough one lazy fall afternoon to muscle my way upstream past the end of what had once been a tree wedged firmly into the downstream end of a small sandbar.
Fifteen hundred dollars and a new camera later, I had learned my lesson.
But to take the pictures that you need to take, you need to take your camera with you wherever you go, certainly in your car and your boat, possibly even to bed. Most of the time when you take your camera out the door with you, nothing happens. But that one afternoon when you leave it at home because all you're doing is a quick run down to the grocery store anyway, for heaven's sake-that's when a troupe of Hare Krishnas stages an impromptu parade down Main Street, or the sky suddenly darkens and you get hail and weird blue clouds and impossibly orange trees, or an eighteen-wheeler loaded with ten thousand bright yellow rubber duckies spills its load across the entire width of the Mission Bridge.
In short, you have to have your eye as open as you can, and your equipment always at the ready. In some ways, it hardly matters what the subject matter is. Landscapes, streetscapes, waterscapes, skyscapes, people, buildings, trees, mailboxes, cardboard boxes, cats, graffiti, dead fish, steaming horses, shop windows-, old tugboats-everything is grist for the mill, as long as the light is right. Reflected light, radiant light, natural light, artifical light, celestial light-the art of photography, as the etymology of the word makes clear, is really the art of drawing with light. People who take dull pictures in the flat, glaring light of the noonday sun are not necessarily dull people, nor even dull photographers; they just haven't yet learned to trust the evidence of their own eyes. One well-known photographer was asked why he took so many pictures all the time, and his reply was that he liked to see what things looked like when they were photographed. If you snap your shutter whilst aiming down at an otherwise unprepossessing pile of malodorous salmon early on a November morning when it actually feels as if this might look interesting when you see the finished product (for outdoor photography this usually means when the sun is at least semi-obscured or is not too far from the horizon), you stand a considerably better chance of getting a good picture than if you find yourself pointing your lens at a picturesque curve of the Great Wall of China on a cloudless day at one o'clock in the afternoon just because that's when the tour bus dropped you there.
In addition to subject matter and quality of light, there are also formal considerations, of course. Structure, composition, balance, all that. The best way to tell whether a photograph is formally pleasing, which means divesting it of as much content-related baggage as possible (does the bride really look as if she likes the groom; is aunt Vera actually smiling?) is to turn the picture upside down, or at least sideways. It's a bit like what the old eighteenth-century landscape painters did when they were sizing up a scene for its purely aesthetic possibilities: they turned around, bent over double, and looked at everything backwards and upside down through the framing device of their own two legs.
A word about the equipment used in the preparation of this book. Until recently, I shot everything with a 35 mm Canon EOS A2 single lens reflex camera on Fujichrome Velvia slide film (wonderfully fine grain, highly saturated colours). I used a 28 mm wide angle lens exclusively. To make digital files I scanned these slides (mostly on an Epson V750 scanner), then processed them in Adobe Photoshop (meaning, in this case, little more than getting the size right, removing dust spots and odd little smudges and worms, and tweaking brightness and contrast and sharpness a bit). Some of the most recent pictures were shot on a Canon 30D digital SLR with a 17-85 mm zoom. The book was laid out in Adobe InDesign.
Some of the book's images (and many more from other locales and on other topics) can also be viewed on my website, http://grahamdowden.ca. Anyone interested in purchasing additional copies of the book, or archival-quality inkjet prints in a variety of sizes and formats, should contact me, either via the website or at the Gyre & Gimble Publishers address listed on the copyright page.
An undertaking like this would have been utterly impossible without a huge amount of support. Over a hundred institutions and individuals had enough blind faith to contribute substantially to the project's costs. Friends (see the list at the back) are those who purchased at least one copy of the book well in advance of the publication date. Patrons (also listed at the back) contributed at a higher level, and Angels (see over) at a higher level yet. I must single out for its especially generous support my old employer and home away from home for 25 years, the University College of the Fraser Valley.
I am especially indebted to a few individuals without whom I would still be floundering around in the woulda shoulda coulda stages of all this: Jorge Rocha at Friesens; Kim Isaac and Rachele Oriente, who helped me with copyright; Bob McGregor and Geoff Fraser, who taught the software courses at UCFV and bailed me out on numerous occasions; Lynne Smith for her constant encouragement and marketing smarts; and above all my wife Judy Hill, whose technical wizardry and fearless criticism and inexhaustible fund of moral support still leave me at a loss for ... further ... words.
-Graham Dowden
Submitted on May 6, 2007 in By David.
