This seems obvious. Your frame of mind when you first see a photo, or any piece of Art, affects what you will see and what you will take away from it.
While this is obvious, I think we forget it. Try posting a photo for critique in several different online venues, with different cultures. The wild variability of responses reflects (of course) the differing tastes of the venues but also the differing cultures.
In many venues critique is approached essentially as a 'find what is wrong with the picture' task. Others fall more directly into 'how much does this picture resemble the ambient taste' and a few, occasionally, reach for 'what is good about this picture'.
The point is, though, that your frame of mind has a large effect on how of look at a picture. If you know it's a Great Photo you look at it one way, if someone's just showing you their snaps you look at it another, and if someone's asking you to help them take better pictures, you'll look at it yet another way.
Witness the occasional games that are played by people posting well known photos "for critique". This first of all illustrates the deep ignorance of many would-be critics, but also illustrates the different mindsets we use when we approach a picture. If you approach "Migrant Mother" with a mindset of 'what is wrong with this picture' you'll find a lot, and profit very little from the experience.
Ideally, you should approach a picture with a clear and open mind. Look neither for greatness nor for flaws, look for what is.
You'll get more value from it, be it a throwaway snap of drunk girls, or a Victorian masterpiece of portraiture.
Monday, March 9, 2015
Friday, March 6, 2015
A Photo Of Grandma
It might be natural, upon reading some of my remarks, to wonder "who cares about all that Art crap?" This note might address that, a little.
Let us suppose that it is grandma's 82nd birthday, and we're taking a picture of Grandma.
The cell phone snapper yells "smile grandma!" and pressed the button when she does.
The 'See The Light' hero positions grandma next to a north facing window and photographs her in the gorgeous indirect light.
The wanna-bee pro waits for short lighting, or broad lighting, or whatever, and presses the button 50 times, and digs through the 50 RAW files to find the one where the lighting pattern looks as much as possible like it does in the book, or on strobist, or whatever.
The photoshop god is much like the wanna-bee pro, but spends hours in photoshop "fixing" stray hairs, and "cleaning up" grandma's skin.
And so on. You can probably make up some more.
None of these are necessarily any good. Please note: I have been all these people. There's a pretty good chance you have too.
If you want a good picture of grandma, consider not the light, but grandma. You needn't agonize and pull out your best Tortured Arteest routine, but consider who grandma is and what she means to you and try to make a picture of that. If you succeed, the light won't matter beyond there being enough of it. The stray hairs and wrinkled skin won't detract.
The cell phone snapper, alone among our heros, is thinking of grandma, and is thus surprisingly likely to come up with a decent picture. Surprising to the camera aficionados, at any rate,
The point is that even the most casual snapshot is better for being made with with good motivations, with a clear idea of what the snapshot could best be. You might not nail it every time, or even occasionally. But at least you've got a chance.
If you're a pro shooting some new blender, take a moment to think about the blender. What are we trying to say here? It doesn't have to be deep.
Art, it's not just for artists. You should do it too.
Let us suppose that it is grandma's 82nd birthday, and we're taking a picture of Grandma.
The cell phone snapper yells "smile grandma!" and pressed the button when she does.
The 'See The Light' hero positions grandma next to a north facing window and photographs her in the gorgeous indirect light.
The wanna-bee pro waits for short lighting, or broad lighting, or whatever, and presses the button 50 times, and digs through the 50 RAW files to find the one where the lighting pattern looks as much as possible like it does in the book, or on strobist, or whatever.
The photoshop god is much like the wanna-bee pro, but spends hours in photoshop "fixing" stray hairs, and "cleaning up" grandma's skin.
And so on. You can probably make up some more.
None of these are necessarily any good. Please note: I have been all these people. There's a pretty good chance you have too.
If you want a good picture of grandma, consider not the light, but grandma. You needn't agonize and pull out your best Tortured Arteest routine, but consider who grandma is and what she means to you and try to make a picture of that. If you succeed, the light won't matter beyond there being enough of it. The stray hairs and wrinkled skin won't detract.
The cell phone snapper, alone among our heros, is thinking of grandma, and is thus surprisingly likely to come up with a decent picture. Surprising to the camera aficionados, at any rate,
The point is that even the most casual snapshot is better for being made with with good motivations, with a clear idea of what the snapshot could best be. You might not nail it every time, or even occasionally. But at least you've got a chance.
If you're a pro shooting some new blender, take a moment to think about the blender. What are we trying to say here? It doesn't have to be deep.
Art, it's not just for artists. You should do it too.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Knowledge in the Age of the Internet
I learned photography from books, and from people who knew what they were doing. I learned book-binding from the Internet. The differences are, well, they're illuminating.
Although this is less and less the case, when you're writing a book about how to do a task, you tend to organize the ideas together. You test procedures you're recommending, you research ideas you're proposing. You try to pull together a coherent set of more-or-less true statements that present a more-or-less complete picture of how to do the task.
When you're writing a web page on how to do a task, you pull together random bits and pieces of bullshit from a quick google search, stitch it together with a few things you've actually tried out superficially, and you fling the whole mess up there. The result is incomplete, riddled with nonsense, and disorganized.
In order to learn to sew a perfectly ordinary Smyth-sewn book binding, I had to pull together information from at least three different web pages. Were the authors of the web pages simply leaving bits and pieces out through carelessness? Do these authors actually just sew bindings incorrectly? Or do the authors in fact not actually know anything, but are filled with an inexplicable desire to teach others how to do this thing they do not know how to do?
I don't know and it doesn't matter. The bottom line is all the web sites on book binding that I have found have errors and/or serious omissions.
Web sites which purport to teach photography are just as bad. Incomplete, incorrect, and assembled by people who have no idea what they're talking about.
In a very real sense, the vast Internet which allows uniform access to knowledge to all has returned us to a tribal state in which "knowledge" is a mixture of truth, superstition, and cargo cult logic. This witch-doctor's brew is copied and passed on not by word of mouth but through the mechanic of web searches. It is inherent in copying that further errors are introduced. Without mechanisms of testing, editing, correcting, the errors remain to be themselves copied, so the each generation is always, unambiguously, worse than the previous.
Thus we get endless bullshit about "the medium format look" and "rule of thirds" and "exposure triangle". We also get endless overly technical descriptions, because these things feel weighty and "true" but often fail to actually describe anything. We're given depth-of-field calculators to play with, which may or may not be correctly implemented, but which most assuredly tell us not one damn thing about what our pictures will look like. We're given detailed descriptions of Airy discs and the optical details of diffraction, which may or may not be riddled with errors, which tell us not one damn thing about what our pictures will look like.
In this modern era, we increasingly see this same approach taken for books, formerly (albeit only to a degree) a kind of bastion. Book authors copy rubbish from one another, and from wikipedia, and the Internet, with increasing abandon, to churn out the how-to title du jour.
This is not exactly progress.
If you want to learn how to do something, get a book. An old book.
Although this is less and less the case, when you're writing a book about how to do a task, you tend to organize the ideas together. You test procedures you're recommending, you research ideas you're proposing. You try to pull together a coherent set of more-or-less true statements that present a more-or-less complete picture of how to do the task.
When you're writing a web page on how to do a task, you pull together random bits and pieces of bullshit from a quick google search, stitch it together with a few things you've actually tried out superficially, and you fling the whole mess up there. The result is incomplete, riddled with nonsense, and disorganized.
In order to learn to sew a perfectly ordinary Smyth-sewn book binding, I had to pull together information from at least three different web pages. Were the authors of the web pages simply leaving bits and pieces out through carelessness? Do these authors actually just sew bindings incorrectly? Or do the authors in fact not actually know anything, but are filled with an inexplicable desire to teach others how to do this thing they do not know how to do?
I don't know and it doesn't matter. The bottom line is all the web sites on book binding that I have found have errors and/or serious omissions.
Web sites which purport to teach photography are just as bad. Incomplete, incorrect, and assembled by people who have no idea what they're talking about.
In a very real sense, the vast Internet which allows uniform access to knowledge to all has returned us to a tribal state in which "knowledge" is a mixture of truth, superstition, and cargo cult logic. This witch-doctor's brew is copied and passed on not by word of mouth but through the mechanic of web searches. It is inherent in copying that further errors are introduced. Without mechanisms of testing, editing, correcting, the errors remain to be themselves copied, so the each generation is always, unambiguously, worse than the previous.
Thus we get endless bullshit about "the medium format look" and "rule of thirds" and "exposure triangle". We also get endless overly technical descriptions, because these things feel weighty and "true" but often fail to actually describe anything. We're given depth-of-field calculators to play with, which may or may not be correctly implemented, but which most assuredly tell us not one damn thing about what our pictures will look like. We're given detailed descriptions of Airy discs and the optical details of diffraction, which may or may not be riddled with errors, which tell us not one damn thing about what our pictures will look like.
In this modern era, we increasingly see this same approach taken for books, formerly (albeit only to a degree) a kind of bastion. Book authors copy rubbish from one another, and from wikipedia, and the Internet, with increasing abandon, to churn out the how-to title du jour.
This is not exactly progress.
If you want to learn how to do something, get a book. An old book.
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Fake Art
There's Art out there. Some of it is photographs.
There's decor out there, too. Some of it is photographs.
Decor is generally attractive, or at the very least suitable to the environment it's hung in. It might be soothing, warm, in a home. It might be high energy, dynamic, in a business environment. It might be situationally appropriate, pictures of products or clients or equipment or staff. Decor fits in with where it is hung, and enhances that environment in some way.
Then there's a Fake Art. This stuff isn't decor, or at least if it is it's pretty tough to imagine what kind of anti-living environment it would be hung in to enhance. This stuff is often black and white, usually ugly. It might be high contrast urban shadow play. It might be pictures of homeless people, or starving native peoples from far away. It has many of the trappings of Art: the subjects are very much in your face, the ugliness is often studied, clearly intended to separate the piece from "mere decor".
It's Fake Art because there's no idea there. There's nothing there except a sweaty, desperate, desire to be Art. Is the artist being true to himself? Who can really be sure? Still, usually one gets the sense that the artist is not. The artist is instead aping the forms of Art, and wants to be taken seriously. The piece feels outwardly focused, it feels as if it was made not to express the inexpressible, but instead to be Taken Seriously By People.
There's probably a wide grey area. After all, aping the forms of Art is how Art is made as well. Aping them with, I dunno, integrity.
Regardless, I think there's a well-defined thing here, and if you cast your mind about you can probably call some pieces to mind. Earnest, Serious, Photographs that can't get any farther than being Earnest.
There's decor out there, too. Some of it is photographs.
Decor is generally attractive, or at the very least suitable to the environment it's hung in. It might be soothing, warm, in a home. It might be high energy, dynamic, in a business environment. It might be situationally appropriate, pictures of products or clients or equipment or staff. Decor fits in with where it is hung, and enhances that environment in some way.
Then there's a Fake Art. This stuff isn't decor, or at least if it is it's pretty tough to imagine what kind of anti-living environment it would be hung in to enhance. This stuff is often black and white, usually ugly. It might be high contrast urban shadow play. It might be pictures of homeless people, or starving native peoples from far away. It has many of the trappings of Art: the subjects are very much in your face, the ugliness is often studied, clearly intended to separate the piece from "mere decor".
It's Fake Art because there's no idea there. There's nothing there except a sweaty, desperate, desire to be Art. Is the artist being true to himself? Who can really be sure? Still, usually one gets the sense that the artist is not. The artist is instead aping the forms of Art, and wants to be taken seriously. The piece feels outwardly focused, it feels as if it was made not to express the inexpressible, but instead to be Taken Seriously By People.
There's probably a wide grey area. After all, aping the forms of Art is how Art is made as well. Aping them with, I dunno, integrity.
Regardless, I think there's a well-defined thing here, and if you cast your mind about you can probably call some pieces to mind. Earnest, Serious, Photographs that can't get any farther than being Earnest.
ToP
Once again, Mike shares a wonderful bunch of insights with us. If you find my blog even slightly interesting, you owe it to yourself to read this post over at ToP:
The Old Question, Revisited
The Old Question, Revisited
Monday, March 2, 2015
One Weird Trick!
Dozens of photographers are using this one weird trick to improve their DSLR images.
Open your god damn eyes
Open your god damn eyes
What Moment?
I have noted in the past that a photograph is, perhaps above all else, a moment, a "now"
snatched out of the stream of time and preserved. This is not new, this is not original with me.
Perhaps its weight is under recognized, I suppose.
There's a curious thing we do with these. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes we pry the moments loose from their anchor and set them adrift.
In portraits and "lifestyle sessions" and other retail photography, lights, makeup, and digital editing are used to make the young look older and the old look younger. The moment the client gets is, of course, "now" but the moment they want is the one when they were 22 years old and beautiful.
Photography apps of all stripes now come with filters, as we all know, and among the mandatory set of such canned post processing effects are vintage looks of various stripes. Aged prints, Polaroid, damaged prints, black and white, sepia, and so on.
We are thus confronted, this, with teens photographed 10 years in the future using "film formats" that have not existed for 10 years. The teenager indubitably graduated last spring and paid far too much for some trashy photos, but the referents on the pictures are all wrong.
Of course, this is mostly just social norms. She likes the pictures because they look the way they should, the way her big sister's pictures do, the way her best friend's do, the way the alpha girl's do.
But why do we want a picture that looks like that?
There is implicit in this some sort of sympathetic magic, perhaps best encapsulated in the reaction of others when they see a really flattering photograph of us:
You look great!
We don't look great. The person in the photograph looks great. But somehow, by some sort of alchemy, it feels as if we also look great, or at least did. We are flattered and pleased.
In the same way, perhaps, the vintage look in a photograph transports us to a previous time when (as with all previous times) things were carefree and wonderful. We can, perhaps, visualize ourselves then, when things were better, or at any rate different.
There's a curious thing we do with these. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes we pry the moments loose from their anchor and set them adrift.
In portraits and "lifestyle sessions" and other retail photography, lights, makeup, and digital editing are used to make the young look older and the old look younger. The moment the client gets is, of course, "now" but the moment they want is the one when they were 22 years old and beautiful.
Photography apps of all stripes now come with filters, as we all know, and among the mandatory set of such canned post processing effects are vintage looks of various stripes. Aged prints, Polaroid, damaged prints, black and white, sepia, and so on.
We are thus confronted, this, with teens photographed 10 years in the future using "film formats" that have not existed for 10 years. The teenager indubitably graduated last spring and paid far too much for some trashy photos, but the referents on the pictures are all wrong.
Of course, this is mostly just social norms. She likes the pictures because they look the way they should, the way her big sister's pictures do, the way her best friend's do, the way the alpha girl's do.
But why do we want a picture that looks like that?
There is implicit in this some sort of sympathetic magic, perhaps best encapsulated in the reaction of others when they see a really flattering photograph of us:
We don't look great. The person in the photograph looks great. But somehow, by some sort of alchemy, it feels as if we also look great, or at least did. We are flattered and pleased.
In the same way, perhaps, the vintage look in a photograph transports us to a previous time when (as with all previous times) things were carefree and wonderful. We can, perhaps, visualize ourselves then, when things were better, or at any rate different.
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