A Picture

It took me most of a year, off and on, to make this picture:

To be fair, the "work" involved was sitting around in a coffee shop drinking fancy coffee drinks, keeping my eyes open, and occasionally pressing a button.

It should be obvious, but this is about that moment when a pretty girl walks into a coffee shop. Men glance at her. Just for a moment, but there's a particular way that glance looks. Ultimately, I made this on my birthday when my birthday present was several hours to do with what I pleased. I was pleased go drink coffee. I made one exposure, without looking at the camera, in that 90 minutes of coffee shop time, and this is it.

It's a Winogrand street shot, complete with tilt, shot with the exact opposite of Winogrand's technique. It was possible, for me, because this is a moment that occurs over and over, every 10 or 20 or 30 minutes. The problem is where to sit, and when to press the button. The moment will happen again if you miss it.

So what?

This is a good picture, but it's useless to me. It's a single instance photograph, which is basically a copy of someone else's pictures. I can't do this sort of thing often enough to pull together a coherent portfolio, and having made this I don't feel any particular need to shoot any more street photography. Can I print this and hang it? It doesn't really fit in to my decor, such as it is. It's not clear it fits into anyone's decor. Could I sell it? Is it journalism?

I don't think it's any of those things. This is a picture without a home.

That's a shame, because it's a good picture. One of the better ones I've ever made.

Personal Journeys

This post is largely about me, but the plan is that my personal tale will provide some sort of more widely applicable ideas. It is in some ways a followup to this post.

Here is a picture I took:

I put it out there for "critique" on some random photography forum, where it was quite well received. There's some things to quibble about with it, for sure, but basically it's a very likable picture and people like it. I made it that way. I went out with malice aforethought to take a likable picture, and Seattle graced me with a good dose of luck, and here we are.

I don't like it it. At all. I hate myself a little for shooting it. That picture looks like anyone with a modicum of color and design sense could have shot it. Pictures just like it show up on flickr's Explore, and in every other photo sharing site's Trending, Hot, Buzz, Whatever lists. It's likable, and extremely generic. Pictures like it are shot by the thousands every day, and many of them don't have the technical quibbles this one is saddled with. Normally when I see a picture like this, I raise the camera to my eye, and then lower it. It's just not interesting to me.

This doesn't mean that it's bad. It's not bad, it's pretty good. It's very likable. It just doesn't look like something I shot.

Here is another picture I shot:

This was also offered for critique. Same forum. Boy was it not liked! Nobody liked it. I made it with a lot of formal structure, and I happen to think it's interesting, and I like it. Everyone else sees a big confusing dead space of nothing right in the middle and can't get past that. They don't like it, at all.

Ok, so that makes it bad, by my own standards. If more or less regular people just can't stand to look at your picture, then you're not connecting, you're not communicating, you're not garnering a reaction. The work isn't good. So be it. I still like it.

This picture looks like something I shot. It's too much to hope in this world of a trillion pictures that an aficionado could look at a picture and say a priori that it is a Molitor. It is not unreasonable that the same aficionado could look at it after learning that it is a Molitor, and discern clearly that it is consistent with Molitor's other work. It is not unreasonable that my work could be a coherent and visually related body of work.

I want to shoot things that look like I shot them, and that people like. So far, not a lot of luck. It's hard to do, since people mostly like things they've seen before, and things they've seen before don't look very individualistic.

Lots of people have no such ambitions. Some guys just want to duplicate Ansel Adams photos, and that's OK. More power to 'em. Lots and lots of people just want to make pictures that hit flickr's Explore, or similar. That's OK too. They're both technically and artistically challenging things to do.

That's just not what I want to do.

FSA Photo of the Week

Here we go:

FSA Photo of the.. random time interval

Here's a portrait:

FSA Photo of the week

This might actually be a pretty well known photograph. It's certainly a kind of photograph that's very well known:

FSA Photo of the Week

Something a little more timeless?

FSA Photo of the Week

I may as well just define a week to be 8 days long.

FSA Photo of the week

Here ya go:

FSA photo of the week

Here it is, a day late:

FSA Photo of the Week

Here it is:

FSA Photo of the Week

Here we go:

Learning to See II

This could be considered a followup to this post.

A surprising number of new photographers seem to be unable to see things like contrast or saturation. They seem to be able to tell when their image isn't very good, and they certainly like it when someone increases the saturation or whatever, but they don't seem to see what's missing, in any particular detail.

I do, generally, and I dare say you do as well. Still, here's a handy little test chart of the sort (right down to the somewhat crummy photograph used as a basis!) that appears in every How To Take Pictures Book ever. Do you see what's going on in each row? You can, I assume, see that the three images in each row differ. If you can't see how they differ, look more. It'll be educational!

This image is now public domain. I made it, I say it is so. No rights reserved.

FSA Photo of the Week

FSA Photo of the week

FSA Photo of the Week

This is actually OWI, almost certainly:

FSA Photo of the Week

Commentary after the cut.

FSA Photo of the Week

I've decided to mix up the format a little and move all my commentary down after the photograph, so you can enjoy it for a little while as-is.

FSA Photo of the Week

Here is it. It's pretty snapshotty, but I've been reading Henri Cartier-Bresson lately, and I think there are some HCBish elements in play here. There's some instantaneous co-incidences of geometry (the child in front with the sack, the leaning telephone pole) and some nice repeated verticals. There's a hint of mystery (what's in the sack?) and the sense of a an event, however slight, unfolding.

The scan is nothing much, and this could without a doubt be rendered much more nicely and effectively than this scan shows. This is a nice example of how something that's basically good doesn't actually need sharpening and a full range of tones and and and. Well, it is if you accept my assertion that it's pretty good.

Mar 1939 (or Mar 1940?). Children of paper mill workers bringing home groceries in Berlin, New Hampshire, largely inhabited by French Canadians and Scandinavians. Shot by Marion Post Wolcott.

FSA Photo of the Week

Normally I spend a little time trolling the archives to find something interesting. This was literally the first thumbnail I clicked today, after my usual random clicking into the innards of the archive. Today, I was looking for something representative of the archive, in some sense, and this one certainly is. There's tons of this sort of sterile high-key/bright sunlight documentary stuff in the FSA/OWI archive, intended purely to illustrate "here are some of the things that are here."

On the one hand this is a pure and simple picture of a parking lot. The wires across the top of the frame make it, though, somehow. Echoing the line of the bus tires? Negative space above and below, well handled. There's a simple graphical feel to the whole thing. I like it more each time I look at it.

Oct, 1940. Line of school buses in back of Anderson consolidated school. Caswell County, North Carolina. Shot by Marion Post Wolcott.

FSA Photo of the Week

I skipped last week for lack of time. Maybe I'll start doing these on Wednesdays. Happy July 4th, US residents!

I like the dynamism in the man's pose, and expression. He's poised, for what, we're not sure (although obviously it's some mundane thing to do with corn). The backdrop of stacked corn is a nice texture, his clothes are great too. Possibly the legs and feet upper right screw the whole thing up, but possibly they anchor the scene in reality a bit making it clearly not staged.

William Singer, homesteader at Hightstown, New Jersey, helping to store corn for the dairy herd which is soon to be acquired by the colony. Russell Lee, Nov. 1936.