People as Symbols

What I mean by symbol here is anything in a photograph that represents, in a viewer's mind, some larger thing. A cross might stand in, or evoke, a collection of ideas about religion, for instance.

People, especially people with specific collections of accessories, are powerful symbols. A man wearing a pinstriped suit, talking on a cell phone, could be very evocative. For some viewers he might represent banking, or industry. For another viewer the man might represent Dad. Most viewers have known many people in their lives, and have seen many photographs of people. All of this experience is in play when the viewer sees a person in a photograph.

Since people are things we're intimately familiar with, we're more likely to compare the image of a person with other people's images we have stored away in our minds. A viewer with expertise in bulldozers would do the same with an image of a bulldozer. While few of us are experts on bulldozers, most of us are experts on people.

Pictures with people in them are potentially pretty powerful stuff, but potentially lead to a wider range of interpretations of your image.

The Trees and the Forest

This post is inspired by a transaction I saw on a forum somewhere. No names, since I don't mean to point fingers and the anyways it's the sort of thing we all do.

Someone posted a picture of a cute little girl in front of a wooden fence, and requested help in black-and-white conversion. Someone replied with a quickly pulled together sample, in which the fence was beautifully rendered by the child looks blotchy and dark-skinned when in fact she was neither.

The helpful individual had gotten distracted by getting the fence "right" in the b&w conversion, and had been fooling around with sliders and curves and who knows what else. The result was the that the fence looked like a fence.

Here's the point: When you're processing something up like this, focus on the right thing. The picture wasn't a photograph of a fence, it was a photograph of a little girl in a white dress. The fence Does Not Matter. If you're anywhere in the ballpark, the viewer will see it's a fence and move on. This applies broadly. If you're doing an HDR, what's the point? If you're trying to render the pews deeply shadowed inside the church visible and visually appealing, go ahead and do that. Don't get your "workflow" right, get the damn pews right. Don't correct the white balance to some mechanical notion of correct, get the skin tones looking nice and then leave it alone. When you're applying effects or burning or whatever it is you're doing, have a reason and a goal, a reason and a goal within the current print, and focus on achieving THAT.

FSA Photo of the week

This is actually another Office of War Information image.

This is a great environmental portrait, I think. The guy looks like he's at work, a little rumpled and barely posed. There's enough context to suggest his office, but mostly pushed out of focus to grant the subject the limelight. He hasn't quite been surprised at work, but he's giving a definite impression of sparing only a few moments, with his mind on other things.

His posture, his not-quite neutral expression, and the context of the office around him let us impose on him a narrative. We imagine, as we do with portraits, that we have a little window into the man's life and personality.

It's slightly reminiscent of Karsh's famous Churchill portrait, which is probably a big influence on how I personally view this image. It's toned down in mood, both tonally and in the man's demeanor, and therefore less dramatic. But, since we don't know this guy, a little less drama is probably good.

Albert Mayer, Washington, D.C., Principal Architect of Bound Brook project, NJ. shot by Carl Mydans, 1936.

Sharpness

Everywhere you look in the great mass of content on the subject of photography, you find references to sharpness. Which lens is sharpest? How can I test the sharpness of my lens? Does one sensor produce sharper images than another? How can I make the sharpest possible prints? How sharp do my prints need to be? How can I align my camera to optimize its sharpness?

Even I get into the game, peeking dumbly at the pixels in my digital files, and moaning about the lack of sharpness, and getting out this lens or that to see if it's sharper.

I am sick to death of it.

We see arguments which boil down to: you can remove sharpness later in the process, but you can't put it back in. This is true, but for some reason we rarely see people arguing that you can add chromatic aberration later, or you can remove color fidelity later, or you can remove your ideas later.

Sharpness is but one facet of the technical minutiae of photography. I speculate that the reason we've latched on to it, collectively, is that it's easy to understand, and it's something we can always improve. We can get a tripod. We can get a better lens, or a bigger sensor, or or or. We can spend money to get more of it, pretty easily.

If only it was remotely related to making good photographs, wouldn't that be a wonderful thing?

Democratization and Value

With the advent of digital photography, and its ubiquity in recent years, we have seen an almost complete democratization of photography. Virtually everyone with enough wealth to feed themselves has access to a camera, even if it's only in a phone. The DSLR is everywhere. There are now many millions of people with equipment capable of the finest work, equipment which will, when set on Automatic, consistently produce technically fine images.

Pretty pictures, the sharp photographs of a flower or a girl or a classic car, with vibrant and appealing colors, are now accessible to all. I can knock them out all day, so can you, and so can your Aunt Martha who cannot reliably hold the camera the right way around.

The isn't a bad thing, nor is it a good thing. It's just a fact. It has changed the way photography works, however. We now have micro stock web sites, selling outstanding images for pennies. Make no mistake, the work on these sites is often outstanding. These images were made, often, with expensive gear. Models were hired, hours of time spent digitally retouching. The economics are not clear to me, but it seems obvious that in many cases the photographer is operating at a substantial loss. Again, this is not a bad thing, it's just a thing. The market is flooded with people who will work for nothing, because they enjoy the process. You can't make any money playing frisbee either, and nobody complains about that.

What it does mean is that photographs have lost value. Pretty pictures are free. In fact, most pictures are free. Any publicly accessible view of something interesting has been shot, go look on flickr. If you are standing in a place with a reasonable amount of foot traffic, and spot a really neat photograph, don't even bother taking it. Go home, search flickr, you will find 20 copies of the really neat image you saw.

So what still has value? Unique images retain value by their rarity. Photographs of a unique event have value: wedding photography is still a business, because the wedding is a unique event. Sports photography, likewise, as each match is a unique event. News and editorial photographs have value, documenting as they do by definition, unique events. Wet-plate processes, and similar, which produce a unique object produce an object with value thereby. You can also add value to "free" images by packaging them: a book of pretty pictures of flowers has some value because of the labor and curatorial effort you put in to it, the cost of production and materials. A print has some value, although this is decreasing.

This is not to suggest, really, that you shouldn't take whatever pictures you fancy. You should simply be aware that those images will typically have value only to you.

Famous Photo of the week

The Steerage, Stieglitz.

As a composition, this is divided in two top to bottom. The upper mass of people is neatly framed by various objects and lines, centering your attention on the white hat. The man's face and hand, if not the actual hat, is placed at about 1/3 of the way down the frame (rule of thirds!) while the various linear objects in-frame give more or less strong diagonals, especially the gangplank. The implied line of sight from the man in the white hat could be considered to be interrupted by the gangplank, but I think one can argue convincingly that it passes behind the gangplank , down into the second mass of people (the ones in Steerage).
The relative tidiness of the framing above contrasts with the relative untidiness below, arguably echoing in the composition the contrast between the two classes of people involved, although this might be a bit of a stretch.
As a composition, I think this one is fair rule-following, as far as the simple rules of composition we run in to over and over. It is a particularly fortuitous arrangement of shapes and lines, a little random to be formal as such, but while it's loose I think it's pretty obedient to convention.
Of course the point of this image is, as is so often with the really good ones, essentially political.

Copy Things

Painting has a long tradition of copying other painters, photography should as well. You see a bit of some kinds of copying, but generally stylistic things. Lighting setups, processing ideas. This is in the right direction, but it's better to try to copy a "look" to get closer to the essence of the thing. Who cares if your lights are in totally different places, if you're getting the same feeling? Do you care about where the lights or, or what the final image looks and feels like?

What photographers do you admire?

Copy their work, or their style, try to understand how it is that they do the thing they do. Make slavish copies of the originals, make similar images that copy the look, make images that are responses to the original. Make witty references to the original. Apply that "look" to something completely different, and so something very very similar.