Zen, photography, and technology with Michael Rubin

Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society welcomes back photographer, podcaster, teacher, and entrepreneur Michael H. Rubin. Since we last spoke with Rubin, he closed his retail printing business, Neomodern, and is moving to Santa Fe, NM.  He will be teaching the online workshop, "Photographic Haiku: A New Approach to Creative Photography", March 15-26, 2021, through the Sante Fe Workshops. He is also the co-host of the "Everyday Photography, Every Day" podcast.

In this episode, Rubin talks about how the analog to digital conversion made the 1990s a unique time in technology, remastering Grateful Dead albums, and continuing to teach a new generation of photographers how to see in new ways.

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Transcript

Gary Pageau  0:03  
Hello again, and welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau. And today we're joined by a returning guest, Michael Rubin of Neomodern who has pivoted his business into some interesting areas. And I thought we do kind of a catch up podcast. Talk to Michael about what Neomodern is today, what it's going to be and where photography is going. Hey, Michael, how are you today?

Michael Rubin  0:30  
I'm good, Gary, good to see you.

Gary Pageau  0:32  
So the last time we talked, you were in the middle of closing down the physical, Neo modern retail store, which for those who don't remember, can you kind of describe what that business was?

Michael Rubin  0:46  
Sure, sure. And he's got to rub that in the dead. Okay. Yeah, I'll just joke I'm joking. Yeah, so it was a it was a beautiful gallery space on Union Street in San Francisco. And people would come in with their smartphones, just regular people usually walking down the street, our staff, we're all experts in Photoshop and Lightroom. And we would sit down with them, Go help them go through their pictures, Photoshop, fix pictures that needed fixing, and then print them archivally. So we had large printer. And then the kind of the special sauce was we would custom cut a mat for that print, sort of semi custom frame it right there with them. And in 30 minutes, they would walk out with the framed beautiful archival print. And it was great people loved it, I'd love doing it. And I'd been spending my time sort of also moving that online. But then COVID hit and, you know, things changed?

Gary Pageau  1:45  
Yeah, yeah. I mean, like a lot of businesses, it was a challenge, you had high rents, you had a very, you know, all that kind of thing. And I you know, we I recommend people go back and listen to that podcast to cover the details on that, because that's not really what we want to talk about, per se. If you come from the fine art world, which I think is an interesting step for someone, you know, to, to open a retail store and to talk to people about photography, because you know, you have a fine art background.

Michael Rubin  2:14  
Well, I wanted to, I mean, it, it's my background, but I really have always spent, like my career interested in what I would call democratization, things that were historically limited, whether it was media filmmaking, publishing, or ceramics, things that were limited by who could access them, you needed to be a professional or a very serious hobbyist. And and technology's made it possible to democratize these things to make it accessible to larger audiences at virtually the same kind of functionality and quality. So, you know, my background was in fine art, in collecting and creating my own artwork, but I was really interested in connecting people with smartphones to the rest of the process, I've always felt that it really wasn't photography, unless you printed it. And that that was a component that was just being lost on all of the people with these really increasingly good phones, such that they wouldn't even get to benefit from that quality. I mean, imagine you get these 50 100 megapixel images, but you're not gonna really get to maximize the value of that on a on a phone or on a even on a desktop. But you can print it nicely. So I was trying to connect them to that functionality. They may not have known they had. But yeah, the world intervened.

Gary Pageau  3:36  
Well, you know, let's talk a little bit about your democratization of technology concept. Because you have an interesting background, you were in filmmaking at loose Lucasfilm, in the editing world, which is there's a book out there on that called droid maker, which I recommend people check out. And then you moved on there to Netflix and was kind of in the democratization of DVD delivery and streaming and those kind of things. And I'm not sure where ceramics fit into that, but Well, you're there's a there somewhere. So it was really, I mean, that period was a very interesting time in terms of technology, when you had the late 80s and 90s. It's just fascinating when you think about just the opportunity potential that digital had, which I don't think people really either grasp or appreciate today.

Michael Rubin  4:27  
It's It was a, I gotta say, having lived through it. It was a strange and kind of frustrating time, you could see, you know, by the early 80s, it was pretty evident to people in industry, what was happening with Moore's Law, you know, in the early 80s, a hard disk, a 10 megabyte hard disk was like a washing machine, you know, it's a big thing and data was, you know, we were dealing with, you know, Word and Excel, you know, like tiny data files, and as the drives got larger as the CPUs got Faster, the opportunities to do more were increasing. And I was, you know, part of helping Apple understand, like, wow, I mean, they were thinking, geez, if everyone's got if we want people to buy a high powered CPU computer and a big old hard disk, they better be doing more than writing things and doing spreadsheets, they have to have images, they have to have video, or we're not going to sell these devices. Right. I mean, that was kind of the thinking at the time. And so I was early on interested in how you would, how would you get the general public interested in making shooting video, I mean, that was a really cryptic skill. And like what, and we were imagining someday, like, everyone's going to be shooting video, that seems like a crazy thought. Right. But it was, but and so from in the professional sense in the film for filmmakers and and news gatherers and stuff like that, it was frustrating, because you were still, you might be having some parts of the process that were able to be done digitally. And then other parts were being being done sort of in the analog domain, and you're having to move between them. I mean, you might use a an editing system to cut your your TV show or your feature film. But in many cases, it was still shot on celluloid, it was transferred to video, it was it was digitized into digital, you did the work. And then it came had to come back out. Ultimately on television would just come back out to video or if it was for a theatrical release of a film, it had to go back and cut film. Like that was a really arduous process. So we could see that digital is going to get better. And like in a few years, everything will be digital. But those transition years were you know, somewhere between 10 and depending how you define it, there was a very confusing 10, almost 20 years of transitioning. And you

Gary Pageau  6:51  
know, and for, to some extent, people, there are so many limitations because of the technology. At the time, it was that it presented all kinds of interesting problems. Like for example, the you know, the first batch of digital cameras. Couldn't even we didn't even have processing power to process the raw image into a JPEG, you all remember you had you'd actually connected to a computer to process the quote unquote, finished file, right?

Michael Rubin  7:20  
Yeah, I would actually go back. I mean, I'm, I'm your age, but like, there was actually before there was these, these compression schemes, they were just image files, and they were enormous. And you and the question was, is JPEG gonna? Like? Can you compress it without screwing it up? It's a lossy compression and compare that to lossless compression schemes. And there were a lot more focus on file formats, like did you want it to be a TIFF? Or did you want it to be this because right image was better? You know, and, and so, you know, this is sort of a digression. But one of the startups I did when I left Lucasfilm, I joined a startup that was in the digital audio space called Sonic solutions. Sure, and it was eventually sold off. But Sonic solutions pioneered the CD pre mastering at technologies. And, and the thing that was interesting about the business model, and it kind of highlights this era was that in 1987, which was the year we sort of founded that thing. There was every single recording, ever made by humanity was analog, right? There's a tape of it somewhere. And starting around 87, every new recording was being done digitally. Correct. So you've got a finite, very large body of stuff that has to kind of move from analog to digital. And, and by our calculations, when we started the company, if we worked at full tilt, you know, using our workstations, it might be five years, five years of lucrative work, but it would end right now. And that's what we did. Like we started a company we we basically pre mastered every single thing from Neil Armstrong landing on the moon to you know, Lionel Hampton and Louie Armstrong playing in the rst a bluebird stuff like all of those recordings had to be somehow converted over and then you ended up in the ditch. And so I think about that a lot we at the time, then while we were in the middle of that process, we're doing the pioneering work into it became DVDs sure which and then that add a new opportunity of pre mastering DVDs in the same way every old film needed to go through that process, but new ones eventually would be shot digitally.

Gary Pageau  9:39  
So that What does free mastering mean for those who don't know,

Michael Rubin  9:44  
pre mastering and audio in particular is basically getting the audio file ready for reproduction in in the new format. So for instance, you might come in with basically the only mask You had for we did all these Disney Disney recordings, they only have the optical track from the film, like they had no more master tapes. So we had to ingest the optical tracks into digitize them, but their band limited, and they had lots of noise. And so our Sonic solutions technology, invented de noising, and it D clicking D popping all that stuff. And you can decide how much you want to kind of clean it out. So I did a lot of albums. I did some Grateful Dead albums. I did you know Barbra Streisand albums, these were things that came in and analog and you had to sit down and listen to them, like a millisecond at a time and look at the waveforms and decide, is it? Is it clean enough? Is it too clean? And that was a manual task in the 88 1988? You know,

Gary Pageau  10:50  
did you get anything that you had to listen to that you're thinking? They're not paying me enough for this?

Michael Rubin  10:58  
Well, I will um, yeah. Well, I at the time, I wasn't a big Grateful Dead fan. And I was responsible for Europe 72 and working man's dad and I was pre mastering those. And I think they gave it to me because you you actually when you're you're on headphones listening to the music, you don't want to be listening to the music. You don't want to just be settling in like I love this song. Yeah. And so they were they purposely put me on there. But there was a song or a piece of track called feedback. And I just remember going through that a second at a time. And I didn't like it. I didn't get it. And that was I had met the Grateful Dead in that era. And that was the only thing that kind of got me through it was thinking about well, you know, they're cool, guys. They're right. They're historically important. And this is important. There was a story I know this is so off track. But when there was a guy named Bruce botnick, he had recorded the doors. They made a film from the Hollywood they'd filmed and recorded the doors at the Hollywood Bowl in the late 60s, right and Jim Morrison's microphone had a loose cable. So when he moved around, it cracked and popped horribly. And it was unfixable and and the engineer, the guy who had the recording, they felt like they couldn't release the movie, if they didn't have the tracks. And they were hamstrung. And every couple of years from 1970 to 1987. He would take it to engineers to scientists to see if there was anything they could do. And no one could fix this thing. And he showed up at Sonic solutions in 87, with the doors from the Hollywood Bowl and said, Is there anything we could do and we fixed it, we cleaned it and that movie, and the CD released that year. And this guy, like I think he visibly wept like it was an amazing moment to finally be able to release that thing. So that's the joys of technology. That's what those air that era was like for me. I really enjoyed that time.

Gary Pageau  12:55  
Yeah. Back in the photography world. in that era, we were dealing with the photo CD, the Kodak photo CD system and with the you know, the PMA at the time, that was a big, big focus for the industry, because you had all of these, this analog input, right that this film, and it was how to get it digitized. And it really kind of pioneered that sort of hybrid workflow idea where we're going to take this analog process and then get a digital and then make physical prints or some kind of weird Yeah. And it was in a lot of that work was the archival work, you had people setting up photos, CD workstations, which at the time were running on spark workstations, and they cost like a quarter million dollars, and I think what 19 $92 and the you know, proprietary format, and all this other fun stuff.

Michael Rubin  13:56  
And I I mean, I think about this in terms of photography, because when I talk to certainly older photographers today, you have that same situation, which is I mean, yes, some photographers are still shooting analog, and that will always persist. But by and large photography today is digital going forward. So all new pictures come in digitally, they are generally time stamped there, possibly GPS stamped, but you have this body of work, every old photograph either you've ever taken or the history of photography that are still analog. Yeah, and people want to see them in the digital domain and some things will never be transferred over. You'll never see them on a computer or maybe someday. I mean,

Gary Pageau  14:40  
and that's, you know, one of the segments that you know, read the newsletter is kind of that those digitization businesses right because you've got them send away people, like scan my photos and memories and yes video and those are great. Then there's your retail retail space, people who, you know, like your local retailer, you can drop that things off and they can stay, they scan it and preserve it and maybe spot it and all that. And then there's people who try and do it themselves. Right. And so I and you know, I've talked to people in that market, and they, they think there's a lot of left life left in that market. Because there may be, it's because it's, you know, every household has 10,000 images. They got many households or RV, right?

Michael Rubin  15:23  
You have more, because it's bigger, but it's, it's big, but it's finite,

Gary Pageau  15:27  
right? Oh, yeah. It's definitely got a time when it's, yeah,

Michael Rubin  15:31  
yeah. And you also might, in the first, it might be an 8020 rule, like in the first bunch of years, you get most of your stuff in that's important that you care about, and everybody does their important stuff. And then there's just a long tail of like things. If we have time, we should get that that shot. I'm not putting all my pictures in, but I'll get that one done.

Gary Pageau  15:51  
Well, and the other thing is, is you've got sort of, you know, family dynamic, right? I mean, you and I are, you know, what I call the tail end boomers, right? I mean, I am not a child of 60s, I'm more of a 70s 80s. Guy. And so are you. And, you know, we're sort of early acts,

Michael Rubin  16:06  
were sort of trapped between early Yeah, late, you

Gary Pageau  16:10  
know, when people get all excited about the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, I'm just like, not, you know, not so much more into the punk rock era. So anyway. And that's a digression right there. Yeah. So. And I lost my train of thought,

Michael Rubin  16:27  
I'm sorry, no, no, no. Oh, we were talking about the scanning of the old stuff and moving them into the new. Yeah, you know, all that process. I feel like and I've been working, I've been doing a little consulting for a couple companies that do this kind of thing that are interested in and helping people with their photos. And I just, you know, I wonder sometimes I you got to balance your energy, your attention between the people who are coming in with a pile that are going to be hard to manage and get them into a computer. And, and not making a product that's too designed for that, versus making something that handles like people walking in today, where they've got a smartphone, and everything's already digital, and getting it digitized is not even part of the workflow. You know, that's a weird thing to even ask about. Right?

Gary Pageau  17:14  
Well, you know, like, it would like I was, I was going back to was, you know, at some point that generational, there's gonna be a generational challenge where people won't care, grandpa's photos or whatever, you know. So I think like you said, there's a finite life to this,

Michael Rubin  17:31  
or they're taking a picture with their phone, like, they just don't care that it's in a scrapbook. They'll just take a picture with their phone, and it's fine. They don't need fancy standing

Gary Pageau  17:44  
let's talk a little bit about, we talked a little bit about that sort of 90s 2000 era, which was sort of a strange intersection of sort of the, you know, California hippie aesthetic that kind of drove apple and HP in those things. And it kind of was moving kind of almost into the corporate world as digital. took over a lot of industries. And as it took over photography, what were you doing photographically at that time, because you were kind of in the audio movie? space, but you were still photographing, right?

Michael Rubin  18:19  
I was but I was still photographing on film I found in the late 90s. Digital cameras are to me, I didn't like they were both overpriced and under quality for what they were you never

Gary Pageau  18:33  
had a Sony mavica right?

Michael Rubin  18:35  
Oh, no, actually, I take that back. I had a Sony Mavica recording on a floppy disk. Yes, but I was, but it but that further in sort of pushed me to this feeling like not yet that just sucked. Like we're I've got my Olympus OM 2 and a roll of TriX. And I know what I can I know what the picture will look like. It'll look great. And I know how to develop it. Now we're in that transition over those years, who was slowly getting harder and harder to get our film developed. Right, you know, the places were closing. Sure. And printed was, you know, you could go to a photo mat and get a bunch of, you know, three and a half by fives. But yeah, it affected us slowly. But I stayed on film, I really pushed back against digital, even into the, the, to the beginnings of the 2000s. I mean, the writing was on the wall. But I spent, I was more interested in that era with the filmmaking stuff with the democratization of video where we had mini DV, which was a tape format, a linear format, but it was still digital. And it was of a quality that was arguably approaching broadcasting qualities of of shooting videos, which meant you could go to a store, get a camera, if you knew what you were doing, you could make video and audio as good as professionals were doing.

Gary Pageau  19:48  
And of course, that was the year the Video Toaster was coming out. So you had a desktop editing happening

Michael Rubin  19:53  
yet all the desktop revolutions, desktop publishing and desktop editing and so that was my focus. photography and but Photoshop in that era, I mean, I had the version three, I mean, I had the early versions of all of these pieces of software. But I didn't think they were either ready for primetime or, or actually supplanted what I wanted from them for myself, right. You know, like, I would use Photoshop, if I was doing some pre press for a photo that was going in a book I was working on, like, that's when you'd use Photoshop, but I didn't just routinely use Photoshop, it was special to like a graphic design tool, you know, you just use it to prep.

Gary Pageau  20:32  
So moving forward, you've moved, like we've, like we mentioned before, you know, modern, doesn't exist as a retail store. So you've kind of taken the Neo modern aesthetic, and transported it. If you Yes, yes. So where are you physically now? And what are you doing?

Michael Rubin  20:50  
Well, I, I, yeah, had to close the gallery. And I, you know, my staff, and all in the process, I kind of implanted into another kind of frame photo place in San Francisco photograph and frame. So you can get that service still sort of in San Francisco, and not sort of you can totally get that service in San Francisco. I had enough sort of traction on the IP that I didn't want to just chuck the new modern.com. And I was transitioning more into teaching, like I have a kind of a philosophical feeling about photography, right, and

Gary Pageau  21:27  
we're gonna touch on.

Michael Rubin  21:29  
Yeah. So during, during COVID, during the sort of sheltering in place, and locked down, I started writing a book about sort of my philosophies of photography, I've been taking pictures as an amateur for almost 50 years. And I felt that professional photographers have a lot to teach us. But in a world of people who are walking around with their smartphones and taking pictures that way, and who have no ambitions to be professional, I kept feeling that my experience as a non professional photographer was possibly more instructive, Mike, I'm a person who grew up walking around with a cane with a camera and taking pictures for my own satisfaction, basically. So what is 50 years of that look like? So I wrote this book. So I, I wrote this text. And and I just kind of discovered this connection to the Zen arts, which was not something was a natural inclination for me. But I kept bumping into discussions of Haiku or discussions of a Kibana, which is the flower arranging, and I realized, I think there's something here, I think there's a connection, the more I would read about the the Zen arts and the more I studied it, you could almost substitute the word photography for whatever art I was looking at. And whether I'm talking about Wabi Sabi, or, or origami or something else. And if you put the word photography in that sentence, I felt like that was describing my own photographic work. So I wrote this book. And I was going to publish it. I've been working with a publisher, but it was a relatively short book. And most publishers don't really like very short books, they can't charge enough to make enough money to make it worth their while. And they wanted me to make it longer flesh it out. And I kind of liked the elegance of a short, elegant little book.

Gary Pageau  23:21  
Yeah, I mean, this is a haiku idea, right?

Michael Rubin  23:23  
Yeah. It all in three lines? right? Exactly. You could say it in three lines, why would you say it in 1500 pages, right? Because you're not in publishing. That's because I'm not in it, because I'm not trying to make money from it in that way, the way a publisher might. So I had this. And then by coincidence, I was connected to the Santa Fe photographic workshops, these distinguished group of I mean, phenomenal instructors, Great Courses. Sure. And they decided that I could teach this new curriculum, let's see how it goes. So before it gave me a new by making it into a workshop, it let me sort of stress test the curriculum in the book, like you never really know, if you got it in the right order. Or if you need to expand on some areas and condense other areas. It was sort of academic during COVID. And so starting this month, I've been teaching Santa Fe workshop, and it's called photographic Haiku. And it's letting me work out the sort of the details in the curriculum. And so far, we're going great and it's fun and, and, and I think that's gonna be an ongoing course with us, Fw.

Gary Pageau  24:37  
So, for the average snap shooter who's got their smartphone, and then they realize, Oh, my God, you know, they may not even know that they've got this, you know, raw format and their camera on, you know, they don't know. But if you're moving forward this idea of the democratization age Are you really talking about maybe the democratization of visual expression? Perhaps?

Michael Rubin  25:06  
Yeah. Well, it's a kind of visual literacy. But But the thing is that, you know, it's so easy to take a picture today that, um, I think the what constitutes a good picture changes, I think what people want from their photography, as consumers is sometimes different from what professionals are going for. And I feel like we have an obligation to make each of those pictures better, because there's so many pictures, we don't just you

Gary Pageau  25:36  
hate the rule of thirds.

Michael Rubin  25:37  
I do hate the rule. But you know what, I was just starting to write an essay about the rule of thirds. Yes, it's bullshit. But I think I've got, I think I can modulate that a little bit. If it isn't bullshit, it isn't what it is, here's what I'll say about the rule of thirds. And I know you're just joking with me, but I think it's a specific case, it's like, it's like Newtonian physics, it's not totally, totally wrong, it just applies in a very limited kind of universe. And I don't think it's the best way to teach it. And I don't think it helps people. Because I think the people teaching it don't understand it well enough. So they just recite this Newtonian physics principle. And it sort of works sometimes. And then the minute it doesn't work, they just they disregard it. But I believe there's an Einsteinian physics principle, which is actually under this, that is right. And the rule of thirds is just kind of a specific case of this broader understanding of photographic composition. And that's what I try to get to, in the course of how, how we're really composing pictures. So it's certainly the idea that, you know, on a basic physical level, you know, light behaves a certain way, it can be a particle, but then sometimes it's also a wave,

Gary Pageau  26:51  
right. But most people don't care, because they're just seeing they turn on a light in it, and it turns on, but if you want to get deeper, you can get deeper,

Michael Rubin  26:59  
I would say it's more like, one half mv squared kinetic energy is half the mass and the square of the velocity. You know, that's how you calculate that. But if velocity goes up to, you know, the speed of light, the one half of mass doesn't matter. And the more universal case is mass, you know, equals mc squared is a more generalized case of one half mv squared. I don't even know how we got done this, but I'm gonna have

Gary Pageau  27:26  
to put a physics disclaimer.

Michael Rubin  27:29  
I don't even I don't even I barely understand my college physics. But, but in that way, photographic composition, I believe that there is a center weight kind of composition, where the mass is in the center. And then I think there's an off center, mass composition. And to do that, well, you need to have sort of a balancing force on the other side, both physical, visual, emotional, that balances it out. It is not about it being in a third, it's not like on a third line. I know some people say it's on that line, some people say it's on that one third quadrant, and the truth is, in a rectangular float in any shaped frame, there's just it's not in the center, or it is in the center. Right. And, and I think it's good for beginners to remember that they can push a subject out of the center. And so so maybe it's okay to tell them to put it at a third. But you're not really teaching them why they're doing or what the point of doing that is. And I can show when you look at things like a cabana, which is about these balances and harmonies of objects that have different weights and relationships, it speaks a lot better to what you're doing in that frame, right then than shoving a subject to the side when the truth is, I mean, honestly, how often you have a single subject in a neutral frame that you can just shove it to the side, you've got a series of things in a frame that you're trying to arrange inside this rectangle, one of them might be the most important and others are less important, but I would not, you can't put your finger always on what the subject is the subjects everything in the frame.

Gary Pageau  29:07  
Right. You know, it is one of those things where if you just scroll through Instagram, and I know you're not a big Instagram guy, but you see people using technology, you know, portrait mode, or, you know, things like that, you know, they don't know really what they're doing in the sense, you know, I mean, I mean, technically they don't know what they're doing right? They know they want to port and they want to blur the background and they may have so is this do you think that technology is leading that or people always had the propensity for visual literacy if you will, and technologies is making it easier because I'm kind of wrestling with you know, is technology would be people be taking this many quarters if it was as easy with film or whatever. And it would they know enough to You know, open the aperture or close the aperture to get the effect they want or is it just technology is kind of replacing their brain at that point.

Michael Rubin  30:06  
I mean, I think technology is replacing their brain, I think that it's like my car, there was a time when you could, like you needed to know how your car works and fix you could and it was easy, you could open the hood and to pull on this thing or pull that thing in it. And you could, it was logical, you could see it, and

Gary Pageau  30:23  
very much shall do the same thing. Remember,

Michael Rubin  30:26  
it was hard to be considered yourself a car person if you didn't know how all that stuff worked. But nowadays, not only do you not need to know how it works, but you'd be hard pressed to figure out how it works or be able to, you're almost discouraged.

Gary Pageau  30:39  
Yeah, and you're on your own car, because you're probably void the warranty in your hood,

Michael Rubin  30:44  
which means more people can kind of feel like their car people because they can do and really enjoy their cars. It does all that stuff automatically. And and they don't have to shift or whatever. And you know, a lot of purists will argue that they're missing half the joy of driving, but they're finding other joys. Hmm. It is. I will say though, it's one of the reasons why my my photographic workshops are completely outside of technical discussion, like you don't need to, I mean, while we will, I want them to understand the ideas of F stop and shutter speed and things like that. Increasingly, the cameras will get better and better at making decisions and helping people do that, which is wonderful, what it won't do for them as a composer, their picture, or B choose their subject matter. And I think that's why I like having an underlying philosophy of the photography, because if you if you do those other things the camera can't do for you the non technical stuff, the human stuff, that's where you can grow as a photographer, where I think a lot of professionals hit a plateau, that I think they would be hard pressed to say how they would get better at what they do. But if you talk to a haiku poet, they spend their whole life in the practice of these haikus and whipping them out and trying to get see if they can nail it and get a perfect one before they die. And I think that's a better model for how professionals might want to think about their photography to avoid that sort of burnouts. You know, I've talked to Instagram guys who have millions of followers, and they don't know what, like, they don't even know why they don't really seem to make a lot of money on it. Yeah, their pictures are getting sort of boring and looking sort of alike. And I can and I feel for them, they they got into it, they got early success, but they don't have any, anything they're pushing up against as far as what, what the photography is, they might go to more and more advanced places, let's climb Everest and take pictures, let's go to Bali. But the truth and you know, this is that photography is less about the thing you're shooting and more about how you're seeing it. And you can take beautiful pictures and have a great photographic experience going nowhere just at home, or wandering through your town documenting your life.

Gary Pageau  32:53  
Yeah, I mean, you did that whole series of portraits in your own apartment with the same sort of space, it was the same sort of idea where you didn't go on location, location, people came to you and you shot the, you know, moving furniture around and looking at the light and that kind of thing. So

Michael Rubin  33:11  
that was cool. And that was an exercise. I mean, for those who aren't following it, it was a kind of a nude, it was a nude process. That's what I was trying to do is we were shooting nudes, you will never

Gary Pageau  33:23  
knew when you took the picture. That's

Michael Rubin  33:24  
correct. I was I was dressed. The people who showed up were just friends, there was not a single model among them. They're just people in an apartment. But nothing changed in this apartment. It was just an empty room, the light was the light of the day, the camera was always the same. And the only thing that really changed was the light and the person. And you would and my feeling was if you can't tell the pictures apart if they start getting boring or repetitive. You're done. And though and and the work as a photographer for me was Can I keep innovating in a space where there's increasingly more constraints because I've shot at a ton and I shot for seven years, I shot hundreds and hundreds of friends. And it never got old. Like I was by the last pictures I took they were very different from the first pictures I took. And it's kind of and that was that's photography for me.

Gary Pageau  34:20  
You know, let's let's talk a little bit about that word you just mentioned because I think it really goes to something I want to touch on is the word constraints. Because really heavy digital kind of gives you the a bit have to have limitless opportunities, limitless chances to experiment to play or whatever, and it produces a lot of crap. Yes, is that because you can just because you can take someone's portrait and make it look like a cartoon does not necessarily mean you're either a saying something be doing it well. So it sounds to me like, where you're going is sort of kind of embracing the idea of a constraint,

Michael Rubin  35:11  
oh, I would go beyond that. I would go beyond saying embrace constraint, I would say that it's required constraints are required. And part of the, the Zen art approach that I'm laying out, is establishing your constraints. But that's like, photographer, one as one establishes his or her own constraints, right? Because pushing up against those constraints is sort of the joy of creativity,

Gary Pageau  35:37  
I will only shoot at one 30th of a second.

Unknown Speaker  35:40  
Yeah, you know, no, no, I mean, you laugh. But you know, there are people who say, I will shoot one picture a day, one picture a day, like, that's a constraint, or I'm gonna for me, I would say, I don't I will not crop. I won't crop. If I have to crop the picture. I mean, to make it better, who am I pleasing, it's like the, the, for me, I'm trying to compose in frame, I'm trying to dynamically do this thing. And if I get it, that's great. If I fail, I don't really have an objective to cheat at it. I mean, sometimes I do, but I don't feel good about it. Right, I recognize the difference between something but I had to crop a little bit, and at least keep the same aspect ratio. So things sort of feel the same. I had to crop it. But those are arbitrary constraints. Like in Haiku people how many Haiku people use this 575 syllable thing. Like, if you tell me that I can. And honestly, many Haiku masters have thrown that out. And I can go into that some other time. But let's just say you're sticking with the 575. If someone said 575, is a haiku, but actually make it as long as you want. It's like, well, that's not fun. But the fun is trying to do a lot with very little. So for photography, I encourage the students in my class to come up with what constraints you want to be working. Now you can change them any time, but have constraints. And the process of photography is not just taking a picture, it's not pushing a button and pointing a camera, it is selecting one of the things that you've taken, and that selection process is non trivial. But weeding out all the other crap. And getting down to one picture is another constraint, like, that's an arbitrary constraint, I could just give you 100 pictures and say, hey, there's a good one in there. But that's abdicating my job as a photographer,

Gary Pageau  37:32  
right? So is, is printing a, would you consider that a constraint? Because I know you're a big fan of the print? And that's another reason why I wanted to have you on is because I do think there's a continued interest in a continued almost resurgence these days in print,

Michael Rubin  37:51  
as well

Gary Pageau  37:51  
as a valuable medium. Well,

Michael Rubin  37:55  
I mean, yes, I think that, as I said, it's not photography, if you don't print it, it is our I mean, it's a lot of things if you don't print it, and I and it's great to go through the process of weeding out your crap and sharing them and, and putting them on your Facebook page and all that. But photography is a is a graphic arts and like origami or even Wabi Sabi, it can't exist in the virtual world, it's part of printing, besides physically determining how this thing will be experienced, which is as important as taking it in the first place, I choose how dark this background will be, I choose that the frame is exactly like this, the minute I put it online, I don't control those things at all. And people are seeing it on different devices in different sizes for different amounts of time. And, and I just feel like, that's part of the process that I can't give up, I must pick how I want you to see this. And so I will print it. So there is one excellent version of this thing. And, and more importantly, you know, I've got a printer, I've got resources and inks and paper sitting here. And I go look at the pictures I took yesterday, and I'm about to print and I look at it and I think No, I'm not going to print that that's not good enough. It's not either it's not good enough, or I don't know why I would print it, I'm not going to sell that and I don't want to put it up and that means it is a higher bar for our work. Because certain works. make that cut, I want to see that big. I want to put that on my wall. I'm gonna stare at it a lot. And you print all of your own work or do you or do you have a preferred lab? I print my own work. And that's what Neo modern was it was also a photographic printing place. Sure. Yeah. I think that it's great. I mean, I've experienced what it's like to have a terrific printer. Like because not everybody knows what a great print looks like or knows how to make the technology deliver that Great print. And there are people who do print masters of various colors all over the world who are just great at printing. And there's

Gary Pageau  40:06  
no I mean, even the best photographers, you know, the classic photographers, a lot of them didn't print their own work, because they had master printers who would do, who would execute what they wanted for them.

Michael Rubin  40:17  
Absolutely. And Angela Adams, who was like one of the preeminent printers of his day, and Matt, you know, design, you know, invented the zone system, and he had assistants who he would train to print his work. And they became this body of unbelievably good printers, john Sexton, Ted Orland, these were Angela Adams assistance, and they, purple Jones, all great photographers in their own right. But they also were master printers. And I always thought that like if you've got to, either you need to learn how to become a great printer or have a relationship with someone who's a great printer. And that relationship is a is an important one. You know, George Tice, who is a phenomenal photographer, is well respected as one of the great printers. So that's a, that's a thing. So I think that people who are interested in photography, who love photography, really need to both own prints. And you know, either buy other people's prints or see their own work printed it for all these reasons for the vetting for, you know, it's just a higher bar. And I think Finally, because the only way I ever really know if a picture is any good is that you stare at it a lot. And I don't just mean you put it on your screen for 10 seconds. And you're like, yeah, it's good. I mean, it's on a wall and you see it every day. And after two years, when you go by it, does it still make you stop and look at it and think that was awesome. I love that picture, or do you start getting bored? Like, that's not it's like, I liked it. I don't know why I liked it before. But it's, and you can't get to that point until you've got to print in front of

Gary Pageau  41:51  
you know, you know, funny this, this is making me think, you know, the trendy thing now amongst the youngsters is, you know, the, there's this film photography, right, and it kind of goes back to what we're talking earlier about hybrid. A lot of them are shooting film, having someone else process it, and then having the images scanned onto a disk, which they may or may not even print, which is kind of, to me kind of you they're kind of missing that last step. You know, it's sort of like, oops, we're not quite there yet.

Michael Rubin  42:23  
I get it, I get it. I mean, you know, there's something about the look the look of a Polaroid the look of try Polaroid, something else completely. Right. But But the idea that, I mean, when Instagram came out, they had lots of sort of fO fO filters that would make it look like a physical print was scanned at some level. Right, right. Yeah. And I think that people respond to that Wabi Sabi nature to the the subtle imperfections that the effects of time for that stuff. So I think when people shooting with with film, or a pinhole camera, or a four by five, or whatever it is, they want to, they like the constraints, it limits what they can shoot, it creates a certain kind of real look, right? And then they want to get it digital, because that's where it's easiest to manage and manipulate. And you can still make a print from that. It's, it's funny, I've looked at Digital things I've shot that I'm looking at putting back on negative so that I can print them in as a silver print, like how ass backwards is that? And then there's other people shooting on film who are scanning it into digital and printing on an inkjet printer like, so who I wouldn't I don't think anyone would have calculated that. I don't know how big those markets are. I mean, there's always going to be sort of a niche of people who either still shoot film. I used to say this back when celluloid was going away for feature films, which was, you know, everyone's gonna be shooting and delivering on digital. But the law was be like that class, the high class of people like Spielberg and Scorsese, I thought, who would still demand their stuff be shot on celluloid and projected on a wall, you know, in a theater, and they would have the clout to do it. But I thought that it would become like opera, or we're going to the symphony, like you could still see projected film, but it would be very rarefied, it would be a very special different kind of event. And places that handled that would be set. Not the same as that regular theater where you just go to watch your movies.

Gary Pageau  44:29  
And then there was the Irishman was sure where the Where'd that come from? That's another discussion. Anyway, but I just find it kind of interesting because it sort of talks about kind of the flexibility and fluidity of photography that you kind of have these options, right? You can start analog, go through a chemical process, even if you want, you can even provide instructions on Hey, you know, I want you to pull the process or push it or whatever to retrieve a circuit. effect and negative and then have the image scanned, do something with it additionally, and then go somewhere else. But I think, again, I'm not hearing from a lot of my friends in the industry, where they're seeing a lot of that those images being printed. You know, I hear a lot of, you know, the excitement of analog is sort of in the capture side of it, where you're kind of I'm being so old school it's like I'm, I'm we're getting out the turntable and listening to my Grateful Dead.

Michael Rubin  45:30  
People, like people like different parts of photography, right? I mean, I, I see people who have a tripod and a big wooden box camera, and they like the experience of having like five plates, and they're going to, like be very measured and what they should like, that's a discipline. And that's a, you know, constraints, of course, and they like the experience, like that's fun for them. Maybe they're not interested in going to a darkroom and smelling like Dec tall. And who knows?

Gary Pageau  46:01  
Well, yeah,

Michael Rubin  46:02  
I like Dektol. I like that smell that brings me back. It's like that olfactory memory is very exciting for me the talk to

Gary Pageau  46:09  
come up with a cologne.

Michael Rubin  46:11  
Yeah, looking back, that's what happened to our hair. Like I'm certain bathing and toxic waste for most of our early puberty is ruined us, you know, but I think that people are drawn to, okay, there are photographers who love going into the studio and the setting up the lights and working with the model and shooting 8000 pictures and going into Photoshop and finding the right one, like, that's something that they love about photography and delivering that perfect picture going into Photoshop and making it perfect. None of that interests me. But it doesn't mean I don't like photography, or I don't even good photography, that's a different kind of photography, you know, different aspect of it. So I think that there's, that's one of the cool things about picture taking is that there's so many capture ways, distribution ways and ways of experiencing it. But the biggest market, the biggest body of people are people shooting with their phones, they don't generally print, they're not connected to that they generally don't know anything or self identify as a photographer even. Right, and I think it's an opportunity to not get all of them, but get some number of them to understand what the what people for 100 years have been doing when you only get one picture? Or how do you make a good picture that really matters that you'll actually care about in 20 years, and not just buried in your 18 terabyte drive or something? You know,

Gary Pageau  47:29  
right? Yeah, that was I don't know, if you've seen we had a item in the newsletter recently about somebody I think was Fuji did a study in the UK, about British people during the Age of COVID, how they were kind of going back to their printed pictures, and really felt they were getting because they were you know, stuck at home and they kind of reconnected with their analog pictures. I do think you know, kind of bring it into the, into the current world that there has been a greater appreciation of maybe family, friends, etc. Because you've had them removed from you in some ways. And photography is a one way of reconnecting with those, your family and friends.

Michael Rubin  48:13  
I agree. It's super fun. I just had a reunion with my college freshmen dorm. And, you know, people were snapping pictures of things in their scrapbooks and sharing them. And we were a lot of for physical, virtual virtual zoom, zoom thing. But it was, it was cool. Like, we were actually noting that there was a relatively small number of photos that even all of us together might have I probably had the most because I actually walked around with a camera back then. But relatively few pictures, trying to imagine today kids where they've got hours of footage 1000s and 1000s of pictures I I'm curious what they're looking back experiences will be like, you know, they're

Gary Pageau  48:57  
gonna have a I'm gonna come back and fix all that stuff. That's seriously that's gonna go back and it's gonna choose the images and the baster, whatever. That'll be driven a lot of that. But like you said, there's gonna be a big gap in the early digital where that stuff wasn't timestamp correctly or had geolocation or the facial recognition doesn't work, right. But it's, I don't know, if they're, I don't know if it's that that's a technological solution or not,

Michael Rubin  49:22  
you know, one of the company that I'm most working with, I'm not gonna mention them yet, but like, we're designing a new way for people to experience their pictures, like fully a new a fully different way than Google Photos or Facebook or Flickr or anything like that. And I'm really excited about this sort of opportunity to change the way people think about visual imagery, experience. They're passed through through this body of data, basically.

Gary Pageau  49:52  
So what as you kind of bring this to a close I want to talk a little bit about the feedback you're getting from your students to Your ideas? How is what are you kind of gleaning from them?

Michael Rubin  50:05  
Well, I think I mean, it's hard to say the course isn't totally over. So they're not going to be critical yet. But I think that they're getting it, I think they understand. It seems to me that they're resonating with these ideas. And in some ways, I'm just putting words and structure on something that all photographers do anyway,

Gary Pageau  50:25  
right? That's kind of where I was going with that.

Michael Rubin  50:27  
But it's but it has enough of a difference that where people are floundering in their photography, and just taking pictures of leaves as they walk around their neighborhood and not, you know, sure how to where to go with this, they just want to take pictures of nicer leaves, I don't know, um, to talk about the difference in composition of objects that aren't moving and objects that are in motion, how you compose a picture, when everything in the frame is in motion? How do you do? How do you decide what you take pictures of like, what is the litmus test for that? What is there a better? Is it? Are all pictures equally good? Or are there actually quantifiable ways to describe good pictures and bad pictures? And just to give you a taste of that the things that people resonate the most with is, I have a couple continua continuum that, that people use as we discuss pictures, and one of them is from its obviousness, from obvious to cryptic, those are the two ends of the line. And somewhere between, like, obvious might be here is a picture of a stapler. You know, there's the stapler. What is it? That's a stapler, you know, too cryptic where it says games where she's like, what is this and you're staring at it and you can't figure it out? Or why it was what's going on. Here. somewhere in the middle, there is a moment that Haiku describes where something goes from not quite understanding it till you get it. Right. It's a tiny switch. And there's a moment of delight when that happens. Now, if it's too far out, they won't get it. Or it'll take too long and they won't last. And if it's too close in. It's too obvious. It's like a beautiful sunset. Okay, yes, it's beautiful. That's easy. That's, it's colorful, it's happy. I look at it. And it's, it's like a sugary, satisfying drink. There's nothing wrong with it is just super far on the obvious side. Right? But then you, but if you push it in a little bit farther, like, Where's that point for you? And I think the students like that's one thing we talked about in class. And it's, it's something we learned from Haiku in practice. But now if you know that one thing and think about things in that term, you go and you see a dog sitting on the street, and you think it's an adorable dog, and you take the picture. And now you ask yourself, well, that's obvious, can I? How can I ratchet it back a little bit. So it's still fun. It's still delightful. It's still the dog. But it's not quite so this far in the on the continuum, right. And there's lots of ways we talked about doing that. And then there's other issues of composition, other things that go on. But that's just one of the things that I think the students really resonate with. And it's a new idea, in terms of the metrics we use, as we've talked about photography. And there's a handful of those. And then from zen, they come from the Zen arts,

Gary Pageau  53:19  
and soon people will be able to experience this in a physical book. I hope so. Yes.

Michael Rubin  53:26  
Get that out. In 2021.

Gary Pageau  53:29  
There you go. Well, we're in 2021. Now, so hopefully, by the end of the year, the clock will be in a better place and people can appreciate your book.

Michael Rubin  53:37  
I think I'm hoping all of 2021 it puts us all in a better place. And the book is just one part of everyone getting out Finally, and

Gary Pageau  53:46  
so people can go to I think what Neil modern.com to shirk working on and the next season of photography every day podcast is going to start again soon correct.

Michael Rubin  53:58  
When I get to Santa Fe, yes, it will really kick in. And there's links to the Santa Fe workshops on the Neo modern site if you don't want to just go straight to the Santa Fe workshop site. And yeah, it's um, we'll get back into this photographic evangelism in 2021. no serious way.

Gary Pageau  54:17  
Well, thank you, Michael, for your time. We've had a great discussion and I encourage everyone to check out neo monitor.com and everyday photography every day, and we'll see you another time.