John Camp made a very simple but ultimately wise remark, elsewhere. He said, this may not be an exact quote, "Photography is easy".
It is. You don't have to muck about learning to weld, or how clay works, or how to use a chisel. You don't need to learn how to mix colors, or what the difference between painting wet on wet and wet on dry are, and all this technique so many of the other arts demand. You walk around a bit, you point the damn thing, and you press a button. It's just not that hard.
The trouble here, though, is that you cannot baffle people with your technique. You're gonna have to scrape up an idea, someplace, or at least something pretty to look at. An idea is probably better, in the long run.
It's just you and your muse, and you're buck naked. Go.
Of course, you can try to baffle people with your technique. You can rattle on about resolution and color this and Zeiss Otus that and ergonomics the other thing. But it's all just bullshit, and if you're doing it, you probably have a little nagging voice somewhere in the back of your head saying "you suck, better distract your audience with some bullshit about microcontrast or the ineffable look of medium format."
Ultimately, if you're paying attention, that microconstrast and the ineffable look of medium format don't mean a goddamned thing. Yeah, they're real effects, to some extent. You have to be a bit careful, and people do tend to fall headfirst into a sort of audiophile world of 1% science and 99% crap that's not real but still is very very expensive indeed. But what do they accomplish, in terms of the idea? Not one thing. Most people can't even see this stuff, not even the parts of it that are actually real, visible, effects. Most people will see your idea, if you deliver it with a blunt enough stick.
Our internets are awash in people who want to buy expensive shit, and fool around trying to wring the last erg of technical cocksucking out of their expensive shit. Then, because they know in their heart of hearts that they're barking up the wrong tree, they attempt to justify it in terms of the Art They Want To Make. "My vision", they will say, "my vision cannot be realized without the incredibly wide color gamut of the Phase One DICKSUCKER 1200" and then they show us pictures of Antarctica which is, let us review, pretty much white. With occasional penguins (black).
These people are trying to complexify a simple task, and they are doing it because they are laboring under a 100-year-dead idea that Art has something to do with Hard To Do. Suffering under this idea from the Victorian Stone Age, they feel the need to show that photography too has tons of hard technique in it, just like carving in marble, or ballet, and that therefore their work is Art.
Wake up and smell the Duchamp, sheeple!
Art doesn't have to be technically hard. Photography is easy. Ideas are hard.
Go scrape up an idea, point your camera (whatever it is) and press the button. You may whisper "click" as you do so. It's ok.
Showing posts with label opinion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opinion. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Friday, August 7, 2015
Ergonomics
Time for another one of my more or less standard rants.
It's a common refrain on Photography Blogs and so on, that the camera you choose must be transparent. It has to be capable of being used without thought. You have to find the camera that fits you, that you can learn to work with in this way.
The obvious problem is that this is false. There's tons of photographs that can and are made while swearing loudly at the camera.
The less obvious problem is this: the conventional wisdom is that most cameras are too poorly set up, and the problems are too complex; you have to find that right magical camera that will somehow, magically, just feel right, and then you'll be able to just use it without thinking. The conventional wisdom is just wrong.
Here's a fucking tip: If you're still struggling to get your camera to behave, you're not practicing with it enough. Damn near any task can become unconscious if you're willing to work at it. If you have a dozen cameras and keep dragging all of them out, don't be too surprised when they're all kind of mysterious and cantankerous. The problem ain't the cameras, though, it's you. Pick one. Any one.
People can and do learn to heel-and-toe a manual transmission automobile. Don't worry about what it is, or look it up.
In this move, you simultaneously manage all three pedals on the floor (with two feet), while steering with one hand and shifting with the other. Five controls, all inter-related, all simultaneously. You're integrating all the usual sensory inputs related to driving to keep the car on the road, between the lines, without hitting anyone. You're also listening to engine pitch, considering your speed, and the impending gear shift, and putting that together with the previous stuff. Simultaneously, and usually at a pretty brisk pace. If you fuck any of it up too too badly, you might die.
People learn to do this well enough that they literally don't think about any of it, and instead enjoy the pleasure of coming out of a curve under full power, VROOOOOM. Whee!
This is way more complicated than anything to do with cameras, and with practice it becomes completely automatic. And, amazingly, it does not require the purchase of dozens of cars in order to find the one that has the right spacing between brake and accelerator to make it all fall together. Learn how to do it, and you can pretty much just do it on most cars with a little practice.
You can probably manage to focus AND adjust aperture at the same time, even if one of the control wheels is a little too nubbly or whatever the hell your problem is. Just work at it a bit.
It's a common refrain on Photography Blogs and so on, that the camera you choose must be transparent. It has to be capable of being used without thought. You have to find the camera that fits you, that you can learn to work with in this way.
The obvious problem is that this is false. There's tons of photographs that can and are made while swearing loudly at the camera.
The less obvious problem is this: the conventional wisdom is that most cameras are too poorly set up, and the problems are too complex; you have to find that right magical camera that will somehow, magically, just feel right, and then you'll be able to just use it without thinking. The conventional wisdom is just wrong.
Here's a fucking tip: If you're still struggling to get your camera to behave, you're not practicing with it enough. Damn near any task can become unconscious if you're willing to work at it. If you have a dozen cameras and keep dragging all of them out, don't be too surprised when they're all kind of mysterious and cantankerous. The problem ain't the cameras, though, it's you. Pick one. Any one.
People can and do learn to heel-and-toe a manual transmission automobile. Don't worry about what it is, or look it up.
In this move, you simultaneously manage all three pedals on the floor (with two feet), while steering with one hand and shifting with the other. Five controls, all inter-related, all simultaneously. You're integrating all the usual sensory inputs related to driving to keep the car on the road, between the lines, without hitting anyone. You're also listening to engine pitch, considering your speed, and the impending gear shift, and putting that together with the previous stuff. Simultaneously, and usually at a pretty brisk pace. If you fuck any of it up too too badly, you might die.
People learn to do this well enough that they literally don't think about any of it, and instead enjoy the pleasure of coming out of a curve under full power, VROOOOOM. Whee!
This is way more complicated than anything to do with cameras, and with practice it becomes completely automatic. And, amazingly, it does not require the purchase of dozens of cars in order to find the one that has the right spacing between brake and accelerator to make it all fall together. Learn how to do it, and you can pretty much just do it on most cars with a little practice.
You can probably manage to focus AND adjust aperture at the same time, even if one of the control wheels is a little too nubbly or whatever the hell your problem is. Just work at it a bit.
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
At That Rate...
An inherent problem with being an internet-famous photographer is the rate at which you have to churn out new work.
This is always one of the more daunting obstacles to my occasional plans to go scam the plebes on Flickr or wherever.
If you're internet-famous, or want to be, you've gotta have a feed. Whether you're posting on Flickr or Instagram, or on some forums, or on your own blog, new content is king. If you're just putting out a new portfolio of six pictures every few months, it doesn't matter how many people you follow. You have to generate, at a minimum, a couple new pictures a week. Better if you can do a little group of three or four about every two days.
The is absolutely opposed to being serious. Nobody has new ideas at that rate. Therefore you are pumping out more or less the same ideas, or no ideas at all.
The best you could do, in terms of being serious, is to continuously share out work in progress. Ideas as they evolve, half finished, half baked work, tossed out there at the most vulnerable moment. This is the time when you're groping for the final form, trying to find the ultimate expression, or at any rate your best try at it. This is probably not the best time to let the masses start helping out, unless you're after some crazy internet/collaboration thing.
Commercial and retail people do a lot better here, by there way. They're grinding out the same ideas over and over, but that's kind of the job. And then they can talk about the gear they're using, and the new gear they're gonna buy, and so on. It totally works, there.
If you're internet-famous, or want to be, you've gotta have a feed. Whether you're posting on Flickr or Instagram, or on some forums, or on your own blog, new content is king. If you're just putting out a new portfolio of six pictures every few months, it doesn't matter how many people you follow. You have to generate, at a minimum, a couple new pictures a week. Better if you can do a little group of three or four about every two days.
The is absolutely opposed to being serious. Nobody has new ideas at that rate. Therefore you are pumping out more or less the same ideas, or no ideas at all.
The best you could do, in terms of being serious, is to continuously share out work in progress. Ideas as they evolve, half finished, half baked work, tossed out there at the most vulnerable moment. This is the time when you're groping for the final form, trying to find the ultimate expression, or at any rate your best try at it. This is probably not the best time to let the masses start helping out, unless you're after some crazy internet/collaboration thing.
Commercial and retail people do a lot better here, by there way. They're grinding out the same ideas over and over, but that's kind of the job. And then they can talk about the gear they're using, and the new gear they're gonna buy, and so on. It totally works, there.
Monday, August 3, 2015
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Why Isn't It Hot?
There's a whole genre of photos I think of as 'affluent white guy goes to Thailand.' You probably know the ones.
Etc. The theme is generally serenity with a bit of the mystery of the east. Look how foreign and strange. Look how serene. How strangely beautiful. You can shoot these things outside of Thailand, obviously, and you needn't actually be white to do it. But here's a question for you: why isn't it hot in these pictures?
I've never been and don't have a lot of interest. But every single written or spoken description of the area says: chaotic, loud, often squalid, and mind-destroyingly hot. I literally cannot bring to mind a single written description of anywhere in southeast asia that suggests anything of serenity.
The pictures and the descriptions seem to be from completely different places. What on earth is going on?
I'm pretty sure that when amateurs go to Laos or wherever, they're not really there to take photos of Laos. They're there to crank out the pictures they've seen online or in magazines of the Mysterious Orient. And so we get nothing of their impression of Laos at all, nothing of their experience, nothing new, nothing true. Just copies of copies of copies of false pictures.
See also Havana, Cuba. It is apparently also not at all hot in Havana, but all walls have a patina of peeling paint and yet none are freshly painted and none are bare. The Communists, one is left to assume, have perfected a way to preserve paint eternally in a picturesquely peeling state. One wonders if all the beautifully preserved Chevys are part of this strange alchemy.
And so it goes with the various photo-tourism spots. It's devolved to trophy hunting, and that's a shame. You spend ten grand or whatever getting out somewhere really interesting, someplace about which surely, if you have more sensitivity than a melon, you have some strong reaction, impression, idea. And you squander that by shooting the Trophy Photos instead of something personal, something meaningful. Something, one imagines, perhaps even important.
People are different, and I know I am slower than most. Still, a major reason I never consider going on some photo safari is that I know I cant'd do anything in three days. Chuck me into Vietnam or Nigeria on a whirlwind tour, and I'd be lucky to crank out a couple trophies. There's just no point in shooting, unless I've got a month to sort through the impressions and develop an approach. I might go, but I wouldn't shoot. Well. Snapshots. My wife in front of the Eiffel Tower, my children in front of a charging lion, that kind of thing.
On the one hand, I can see that there is pleasure in producing even lame Steve McCurries, but on the other hand, what a waste.
Are you serious, or are you just noodling at a piano you cannot really play?
Small ancient woman in funny hat selling colorful things.
Guy in funny hat in rice paddy. Maybe with ox.
Solitary monk looking serene.
Line of young monks. Saffron robes.
Distant mist-enshrouded hills/ridge beyond green fields.
Guy in funny hat in rice paddy. Maybe with ox.
Solitary monk looking serene.
Line of young monks. Saffron robes.
Distant mist-enshrouded hills/ridge beyond green fields.
I've never been and don't have a lot of interest. But every single written or spoken description of the area says: chaotic, loud, often squalid, and mind-destroyingly hot. I literally cannot bring to mind a single written description of anywhere in southeast asia that suggests anything of serenity.
The pictures and the descriptions seem to be from completely different places. What on earth is going on?
I'm pretty sure that when amateurs go to Laos or wherever, they're not really there to take photos of Laos. They're there to crank out the pictures they've seen online or in magazines of the Mysterious Orient. And so we get nothing of their impression of Laos at all, nothing of their experience, nothing new, nothing true. Just copies of copies of copies of false pictures.
See also Havana, Cuba. It is apparently also not at all hot in Havana, but all walls have a patina of peeling paint and yet none are freshly painted and none are bare. The Communists, one is left to assume, have perfected a way to preserve paint eternally in a picturesquely peeling state. One wonders if all the beautifully preserved Chevys are part of this strange alchemy.
And so it goes with the various photo-tourism spots. It's devolved to trophy hunting, and that's a shame. You spend ten grand or whatever getting out somewhere really interesting, someplace about which surely, if you have more sensitivity than a melon, you have some strong reaction, impression, idea. And you squander that by shooting the Trophy Photos instead of something personal, something meaningful. Something, one imagines, perhaps even important.
People are different, and I know I am slower than most. Still, a major reason I never consider going on some photo safari is that I know I cant'd do anything in three days. Chuck me into Vietnam or Nigeria on a whirlwind tour, and I'd be lucky to crank out a couple trophies. There's just no point in shooting, unless I've got a month to sort through the impressions and develop an approach. I might go, but I wouldn't shoot. Well. Snapshots. My wife in front of the Eiffel Tower, my children in front of a charging lion, that kind of thing.
On the one hand, I can see that there is pleasure in producing even lame Steve McCurries, but on the other hand, what a waste.
Are you serious, or are you just noodling at a piano you cannot really play?
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
HOLY FUCKING SHIT
I occasionally wonder just how profitable photography workshops are. Michael Reichmann has helpfully provided some useful information for us!
Check this out Reichmann and Biggs Galapagos Workshop.
The price for the workshop is $9995, for a maximum take of $119,940 gross.
If you google a little, you will find that the charter company runs two web sites. The one Michael doesn't link to has prices. You can buy this exact cruise rack rate for between 5 and 6 grand, depending on cabin. You don't get to wander around with Andy and Mike, though. You do get to wander around with the naturalist in all the same places. Andy and Mike are paying $72,450 for the charter, which includes pretty much exactly what they're calling out in their glowing description. There's a little ambiguity surrounding alcoholic beverages (not included in the charter, but Andy and Mike say "all meals and drinks"). Basically all that crap they talk about in the description of the awesome cruise is just included by the charter company as part of the basic package. I can find no extras, apart from possibly booze, that Mike and Andy are arranging. They're buying a charter for $72,450, and attempting to resell it for $119,940, which is pretty nervy, I'd say.
So anyways this looks a lot like a net of $47,490 to Andy and Mike, if they can fill the workshop. Note that there will be 14 (12 paying, plus Andy and Mike) participants, and there are 9 cabins. I wonder who'll be getting cabins to themselves.
"There will be no classroom sessions, no lectures, no slide shows, and most importantly — no unnecessary egos. We will all work closely together, sharing our knowledge and experience." Or to put it another way, "We won't be doing much of anything except wandering around with you. You'll be paying about a $4500 premium over rack rate for the pleasure of our company, and possibly a T-shirt."
Now, according to the web site with prices, they had to front 20% to nail down the dates, so they're out of pocket $14,490 right now and they could lose it. If they need to cancel, the charter company is gonna take $7245 and pocket it, and they'll take the rest if they can't resell the charter week to someone else. So, there's a legit risk.
Notice, though, the incredibly stringent terms. The charter company wants payment in full 60 days in advance, Mike and Andy want it 90 days in advance, and so on. So they're hedging and leaving wiggle room, throughout. These guys need to sell 8 spots to make their nut and get a free vacation to the Galapagos. If they can sell all 12 spots, they're gonna clear 30-40 grand for handholding some rich wannabees for a week and making a few phone calls.
Nice work if you can get it.
Check this out Reichmann and Biggs Galapagos Workshop.
The price for the workshop is $9995, for a maximum take of $119,940 gross.
If you google a little, you will find that the charter company runs two web sites. The one Michael doesn't link to has prices. You can buy this exact cruise rack rate for between 5 and 6 grand, depending on cabin. You don't get to wander around with Andy and Mike, though. You do get to wander around with the naturalist in all the same places. Andy and Mike are paying $72,450 for the charter, which includes pretty much exactly what they're calling out in their glowing description. There's a little ambiguity surrounding alcoholic beverages (not included in the charter, but Andy and Mike say "all meals and drinks"). Basically all that crap they talk about in the description of the awesome cruise is just included by the charter company as part of the basic package. I can find no extras, apart from possibly booze, that Mike and Andy are arranging. They're buying a charter for $72,450, and attempting to resell it for $119,940, which is pretty nervy, I'd say.
So anyways this looks a lot like a net of $47,490 to Andy and Mike, if they can fill the workshop. Note that there will be 14 (12 paying, plus Andy and Mike) participants, and there are 9 cabins. I wonder who'll be getting cabins to themselves.
"There will be no classroom sessions, no lectures, no slide shows, and most importantly — no unnecessary egos. We will all work closely together, sharing our knowledge and experience." Or to put it another way, "We won't be doing much of anything except wandering around with you. You'll be paying about a $4500 premium over rack rate for the pleasure of our company, and possibly a T-shirt."
Now, according to the web site with prices, they had to front 20% to nail down the dates, so they're out of pocket $14,490 right now and they could lose it. If they need to cancel, the charter company is gonna take $7245 and pocket it, and they'll take the rest if they can't resell the charter week to someone else. So, there's a legit risk.
Notice, though, the incredibly stringent terms. The charter company wants payment in full 60 days in advance, Mike and Andy want it 90 days in advance, and so on. So they're hedging and leaving wiggle room, throughout. These guys need to sell 8 spots to make their nut and get a free vacation to the Galapagos. If they can sell all 12 spots, they're gonna clear 30-40 grand for handholding some rich wannabees for a week and making a few phone calls.
Nice work if you can get it.
Maybe..
Next time you see some dude photographing kids in public, consider some of these alternatives to 'AAAAA! PEDOPHILE!' Next time someone you know freaks out on facebook about some creep photographing children at the playground, consider these possibilities.
Maybe he's doing research on how kids play, to design a better and safer play structure.
Maybe he's doing a book on the innocence of youth.
Maybe he's preparing a report for the city on playground usage, to justify increased funding.
Maybe he's actually photographing the moms in yoga pants, and shooting the play structure from time to time as cover.
Maybe he's just messing around with his camera.
Maybe that little girl reminds him of his own daughter who died of brain cancer.
These are pretty much all more likely scenarios than PEDO! Feel free to use them on your freaking-out friends.
If you're feeling brave you could also try out 'So what? Are we now thought police?' but you may want to buckle in for backlash if you try that one out.
Maybe he's doing research on how kids play, to design a better and safer play structure.
Maybe he's doing a book on the innocence of youth.
Maybe he's preparing a report for the city on playground usage, to justify increased funding.
Maybe he's actually photographing the moms in yoga pants, and shooting the play structure from time to time as cover.
Maybe he's just messing around with his camera.
Maybe that little girl reminds him of his own daughter who died of brain cancer.
These are pretty much all more likely scenarios than PEDO! Feel free to use them on your freaking-out friends.
If you're feeling brave you could also try out 'So what? Are we now thought police?' but you may want to buckle in for backlash if you try that one out.
Monday, July 27, 2015
App Land
I'm going to prognosticate. In fact, I'm predicting the imminent death of the internets. Well, not quite.
One needs neither wisdom nor courage to speculate that the web will be different in five years, in ways we can't imagine now. Change is a constant, in this game. The tricky bit is in guessing what the change will be.
Here's what I am smelling in the breeze. The increasing dominance of Mobile as a thing (fucking around on your phone, instead of on a computer) is leading increasing toward Apps and away from general web browsing. Don't let the bastards lie to you. An app is generally pretty much just a web browser that only goes to one web site. It's the holy fucking grail for web-based businesses. If they can just get you to download and use the App, now it's a gigantic goddamned problem to go to any other web sites. So, if my web site isn't utterly crappy and broken, and if I can get you to fire up my App, you're a whole bunch more likely to just stay put while I sell you to advertisers.
What's this mean?
Well, in theory it means less cross-fertilization in photographic style and method, perhaps?
Are we actually going to see anything other than the current complete homogeneity across the entire interwebs (inter-apps, whatever)? I dunno, it doesn't take very damn much cross-fertilization to create homogeneity. If you want grizzly bears that don't look pretty much like all the other grizzlies, you need to completely isolate them for quite a while. And then, zowie, white bears. WTF?!!!
There should be some more differentiation, at least. And perhaps even a little renewed enthusiasm, as people stop having it forced upon them quite so obviously that there are a billion Joes Just Like You out there.
I dunno. Cautiously optimistic. I don't see how this could be bad for photography.
Terrible for everything else? Oh, hell yeah. Definitely.
One needs neither wisdom nor courage to speculate that the web will be different in five years, in ways we can't imagine now. Change is a constant, in this game. The tricky bit is in guessing what the change will be.
Here's what I am smelling in the breeze. The increasing dominance of Mobile as a thing (fucking around on your phone, instead of on a computer) is leading increasing toward Apps and away from general web browsing. Don't let the bastards lie to you. An app is generally pretty much just a web browser that only goes to one web site. It's the holy fucking grail for web-based businesses. If they can just get you to download and use the App, now it's a gigantic goddamned problem to go to any other web sites. So, if my web site isn't utterly crappy and broken, and if I can get you to fire up my App, you're a whole bunch more likely to just stay put while I sell you to advertisers.
What's this mean?
Well, in theory it means less cross-fertilization in photographic style and method, perhaps?
Are we actually going to see anything other than the current complete homogeneity across the entire interwebs (inter-apps, whatever)? I dunno, it doesn't take very damn much cross-fertilization to create homogeneity. If you want grizzly bears that don't look pretty much like all the other grizzlies, you need to completely isolate them for quite a while. And then, zowie, white bears. WTF?!!!
There should be some more differentiation, at least. And perhaps even a little renewed enthusiasm, as people stop having it forced upon them quite so obviously that there are a billion Joes Just Like You out there.
I dunno. Cautiously optimistic. I don't see how this could be bad for photography.
Terrible for everything else? Oh, hell yeah. Definitely.
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Ming Thein is an Idiot
Jesus H. Christ.
Check this out: Repost: Defining cinematic.
Note some distance into it these words: I’m not aware of any other photographer who’s actually spent time shooting in this style which he qualifies in a footnote, blabbering about some guy whose name he forgets.
While not everyone on earth should necessarily be familiar with this sort of thing, I am pretty sure that some jerkoff who offers Masterclasses and Workshops all over the world, and styles himself an artist, and all that other stuff Mr. Thein does, ought to have heard of Cindy Sherman. One of the, I dunno, top 5 or 10 most important photographic artists over the last, say, 40 years. You know. That woman who rose to fame on the basis of a series of 69 photographs, a portfolio entitled:
Untitled Film Stills
which incidentally are a lot more cinematic than Mr. Thein's. Mr. Thein, despite his posturing, is simply taking horizontal shots of the same stuff he always shoots, and fiddling with the color balance until it looks like something he saw in a movie.
Maybe what he means is that he doesn't know of any photographers who shoot horizontal shots of nothing, in which case I think he really needs to get out more.
I may have to introduce a tag "theinwatch" or possibly "nottheinwatch" so people who don't want to don't have to read my ranting.
---
Oh look, you can see in the comments that he's looked Sherman up, and hurriedly invented a bunch of reasons why he didn't mention her. Anything to avoid looking dumb.
Check this out: Repost: Defining cinematic.
Note some distance into it these words: I’m not aware of any other photographer who’s actually spent time shooting in this style which he qualifies in a footnote, blabbering about some guy whose name he forgets.
While not everyone on earth should necessarily be familiar with this sort of thing, I am pretty sure that some jerkoff who offers Masterclasses and Workshops all over the world, and styles himself an artist, and all that other stuff Mr. Thein does, ought to have heard of Cindy Sherman. One of the, I dunno, top 5 or 10 most important photographic artists over the last, say, 40 years. You know. That woman who rose to fame on the basis of a series of 69 photographs, a portfolio entitled:
which incidentally are a lot more cinematic than Mr. Thein's. Mr. Thein, despite his posturing, is simply taking horizontal shots of the same stuff he always shoots, and fiddling with the color balance until it looks like something he saw in a movie.
Maybe what he means is that he doesn't know of any photographers who shoot horizontal shots of nothing, in which case I think he really needs to get out more.
I may have to introduce a tag "theinwatch" or possibly "nottheinwatch" so people who don't want to don't have to read my ranting.
---
Oh look, you can see in the comments that he's looked Sherman up, and hurriedly invented a bunch of reasons why he didn't mention her. Anything to avoid looking dumb.
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Writing About Gear
Another winning essay from Kirk Tuck right here.
He's making the well known point that writing about camera gear is way more widely read than writing about pictures or about Art. This is a depressing reality, especially for those of us who find gear talk boring, and who decline to write about gear.
Many self-styled photographers are in fact camera enthusiasts, as I have noted ad nauseum and, in the way that audiophiles listen to their gear with your music, the pictures they make are mainly about showing off the capabilities of their gear, and their mastery of it. Macro photographs of bugs, endless pictures of ospreys, and so on. As a dabbler in the piano, I am loathe to condemn these folks too loudly.
But there is more. Gear can be quantified. Experiences with gear can be discussed without getting abstract. "My big hands have trouble with the tiny buttons" and so on. These are easily relatable statements. You can argue about specifications. You can discuss future features, and so on. There's simply a lot to be said here, most of which is accessible, most of which doesn't require firmly held ideas about abstractions to absorb and enjoy, or to disagree with.
Art, and pictures in general apart from the quantifiable, the measurable, that's a lot harder to talk about. It's all abstract and kind of vague. It's pretty hard to talk about without first clearing away some intellectual underbrush. One cannot, for example, talk meaningfully about the artistic merit of a photo without having some idea about what Art is, and what Artistic Merit might be. You needn't necessarily settle on some universally agreed upon definitions, but you've got to sort them out to a useful degree for the purposes of a single discussion.
Your choices are to either spend time and words clearing away this sort of underbrush, which is pretty dry stuff, or you can assume that everyone's already on the same page regarding the underbrush and launch into the discussion you want to have. In the latter case, you're essentially launching the layperson onto an sea of words without a chart. It's meaningless blather. Worse, it appears to have meaning, but since the layperson probably means something different than you do when they say "Art" the apparent meaning seems all wrong, incoherent, disconnected.
At book length, you can do the underbrush work, and then have some space to talk. On a blog, all is pretty much lost. Short form, low-context blather, the stuff the web thrives on, flatly cannot support any meaningful discussion of Art and related ideas.
Finally, most intellectual discussion of any depth whatsoever requires that you state some definitions up front, to set the context of the discussion. "For our purposes, let's consider Art to mean blah blah blah". The vast majority of people seem unable to permit this basic first step. You will bog down inevitably in arguments about definitions, which will mostly be idiots posturing to try to look clever. Of course, people will tend to do the same thing for lens resolution and so on, but in those areas there are well-defined, universally agreed-upon definitions and ideas. The posturing is a lot easier to put a stop to in technical domains.
Pretty quickly, people learn that discussions about things other than gear, picture sharpness, white balance, rule of thirds, where the lights are put, and a few other easily measurable things are off-limits and snowball into flamewars and furious ranting. So, efforts to start such things up die away pretty fast, and we're back to gear.
With the notable exception, obviously, of this blog. Where I moderate the comments, and have essentially no readers!
(That's tongue in cheek, I know a couple blogs that get a bit more traffic than this one that talk about Art and stuff, see my Other Blogs and Things page)
He's making the well known point that writing about camera gear is way more widely read than writing about pictures or about Art. This is a depressing reality, especially for those of us who find gear talk boring, and who decline to write about gear.
Many self-styled photographers are in fact camera enthusiasts, as I have noted ad nauseum and, in the way that audiophiles listen to their gear with your music, the pictures they make are mainly about showing off the capabilities of their gear, and their mastery of it. Macro photographs of bugs, endless pictures of ospreys, and so on. As a dabbler in the piano, I am loathe to condemn these folks too loudly.
But there is more. Gear can be quantified. Experiences with gear can be discussed without getting abstract. "My big hands have trouble with the tiny buttons" and so on. These are easily relatable statements. You can argue about specifications. You can discuss future features, and so on. There's simply a lot to be said here, most of which is accessible, most of which doesn't require firmly held ideas about abstractions to absorb and enjoy, or to disagree with.
Art, and pictures in general apart from the quantifiable, the measurable, that's a lot harder to talk about. It's all abstract and kind of vague. It's pretty hard to talk about without first clearing away some intellectual underbrush. One cannot, for example, talk meaningfully about the artistic merit of a photo without having some idea about what Art is, and what Artistic Merit might be. You needn't necessarily settle on some universally agreed upon definitions, but you've got to sort them out to a useful degree for the purposes of a single discussion.
Your choices are to either spend time and words clearing away this sort of underbrush, which is pretty dry stuff, or you can assume that everyone's already on the same page regarding the underbrush and launch into the discussion you want to have. In the latter case, you're essentially launching the layperson onto an sea of words without a chart. It's meaningless blather. Worse, it appears to have meaning, but since the layperson probably means something different than you do when they say "Art" the apparent meaning seems all wrong, incoherent, disconnected.
At book length, you can do the underbrush work, and then have some space to talk. On a blog, all is pretty much lost. Short form, low-context blather, the stuff the web thrives on, flatly cannot support any meaningful discussion of Art and related ideas.
Finally, most intellectual discussion of any depth whatsoever requires that you state some definitions up front, to set the context of the discussion. "For our purposes, let's consider Art to mean blah blah blah". The vast majority of people seem unable to permit this basic first step. You will bog down inevitably in arguments about definitions, which will mostly be idiots posturing to try to look clever. Of course, people will tend to do the same thing for lens resolution and so on, but in those areas there are well-defined, universally agreed-upon definitions and ideas. The posturing is a lot easier to put a stop to in technical domains.
Pretty quickly, people learn that discussions about things other than gear, picture sharpness, white balance, rule of thirds, where the lights are put, and a few other easily measurable things are off-limits and snowball into flamewars and furious ranting. So, efforts to start such things up die away pretty fast, and we're back to gear.
With the notable exception, obviously, of this blog. Where I moderate the comments, and have essentially no readers!
(That's tongue in cheek, I know a couple blogs that get a bit more traffic than this one that talk about Art and stuff, see my Other Blogs and Things page)
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Ming Thein on Street
This is probably worth your time to read: The evolution of street photography.
He gets an incredible amount of stuff wrong, and the piece is clearly a self serving 'no, street photography is whatever I want it to be' piece. He's got this whole thesis about how "People want street to be, X, Y, and Z" which is true as far as it goes. What he gets wrong there is that the list X, Y, and Z is extremely fluid. And there's tons of other stuff that's pretty out of left field. So what. "Street Photography" either means something specific that basically nobody does these days, or it means nothing. Your choice.
The thing worth noticing is this: he's actually got his thinking cap screwed on quite tightly. He's got some ideas. Just because they're self-serving ideas doesn't mean they're bad. In fact they're pretty good ones.
Also, he knows what a decisive moment is. Kind of slips that in there.
His pictures are still pretty awful but I can see his idea in them, and I saw it before he told me what the idea was. Note my post on Three Cases in which I remark that Thein's Prague photos are... well, universal is certainly a polite way to say it, and no less true for being polite. What I think he's missing is anything particularly interesting to say. The pictures are universal, but do they meaningfully encapsulate The Idea of Man? I'm not feeling that, yet. Maybe he'll get there.
Am I impressed that Mr. Thein is, like pretty much every single other internet-famous photographer out there, attempting to stretch the meaning of the phrase "street photography" wide enough to wrap himself in it? Nope.
I am impressed that he's actually thinking, though.
Go read it. You'll probably find something you can take away from it.
He gets an incredible amount of stuff wrong, and the piece is clearly a self serving 'no, street photography is whatever I want it to be' piece. He's got this whole thesis about how "People want street to be, X, Y, and Z" which is true as far as it goes. What he gets wrong there is that the list X, Y, and Z is extremely fluid. And there's tons of other stuff that's pretty out of left field. So what. "Street Photography" either means something specific that basically nobody does these days, or it means nothing. Your choice.
The thing worth noticing is this: he's actually got his thinking cap screwed on quite tightly. He's got some ideas. Just because they're self-serving ideas doesn't mean they're bad. In fact they're pretty good ones.
Also, he knows what a decisive moment is. Kind of slips that in there.
His pictures are still pretty awful but I can see his idea in them, and I saw it before he told me what the idea was. Note my post on Three Cases in which I remark that Thein's Prague photos are... well, universal is certainly a polite way to say it, and no less true for being polite. What I think he's missing is anything particularly interesting to say. The pictures are universal, but do they meaningfully encapsulate The Idea of Man? I'm not feeling that, yet. Maybe he'll get there.
Am I impressed that Mr. Thein is, like pretty much every single other internet-famous photographer out there, attempting to stretch the meaning of the phrase "street photography" wide enough to wrap himself in it? Nope.
I am impressed that he's actually thinking, though.
Go read it. You'll probably find something you can take away from it.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
On "Workflow"
Digital photographers seem to obsess, sometimes, over this idea of "workflow". This is the work that occurs after the shutter press and before the final result, whatever that is. There's a lot of "here is my workflow" or "what is your workflow?" floating around out there. People write up their workflow, "Step 3: Level the Horizon" and 17 other absurd tiny steps.
It's not that this is a terrible thing. The great leap forward digital has given us is the ability to do a bunch of stuff after the shutter press and before the final result. That's a good thing.
I see two things that are bad about it, however.
The first thing is the obsession over it. It's just some stuff you do, it's not the heart of your creative process. Your art isn't in your "workflow" unless you're a digital painter. If you're a photographer, the workflow should be secondary, it should enhance your photography. A common workflow will tend to create similarity between photographs, which is great for a portfolio or other body of work which is supposed to be coherent.
Which leads to the other problem. If you standardize your workflow, then you apply it to everything you do, whether the process is appropriate or not. All your landscapes look the same, whether they're supposed to or not. Your portraits looks kind of like your landscapes which look kind of like your still lifes.
Standardize workflow as appropriate. It's just a tool, use it as such. When a tool suits the job at hand, use it. When it does not, set it aside and take another tool, a tool that does suit the job.
Do you make bespoke wooden furniture, or are you a chisel-user?
It's not that this is a terrible thing. The great leap forward digital has given us is the ability to do a bunch of stuff after the shutter press and before the final result. That's a good thing.
I see two things that are bad about it, however.
The first thing is the obsession over it. It's just some stuff you do, it's not the heart of your creative process. Your art isn't in your "workflow" unless you're a digital painter. If you're a photographer, the workflow should be secondary, it should enhance your photography. A common workflow will tend to create similarity between photographs, which is great for a portfolio or other body of work which is supposed to be coherent.
Which leads to the other problem. If you standardize your workflow, then you apply it to everything you do, whether the process is appropriate or not. All your landscapes look the same, whether they're supposed to or not. Your portraits looks kind of like your landscapes which look kind of like your still lifes.
Standardize workflow as appropriate. It's just a tool, use it as such. When a tool suits the job at hand, use it. When it does not, set it aside and take another tool, a tool that does suit the job.
Do you make bespoke wooden furniture, or are you a chisel-user?
Thursday, April 17, 2014
What Looks Real?
It seems that every time someone mentions the idea of photographs looking real, or not looking real, or whatever, a chorus starts up about how every photograph is inherently false. I've beaten this drum myself, mostly in discussions of photojournalism. The name of the game, from the chorus' point of view, is to shout down the idea that a photograph "looking real" is a meaningful, and to make themselves look terribly clever in the process.
As usual, the chorus is is quite wrong. Any fool can see that some photographs look real, and others look fake, and there's some sort of grey area as well. The fact that the chorus isn't capable of sorting out what's going on doesn't mean that nothing is going on. Here's what's going on.
No photograph is a "true" representation of reality, to be sure. Neither is what we see a "true" representation of reality, our eyes and visual cortex are mighty liars. This matters for discussion of photojournalism, where there is a planted axiom to the effect that a good photojournalistic picture is "true", but it doesn't matter for most other contexts.
A photograph "looks real" for you if, when I give you the photograph and allow you to compare it with that which was photographed, you respond intuitively "that picture looks like the thing it is a picture of". It's entirely subjective, and partly some sort of social construct, but much of the time many people will tend to agree. It changes over time, as well. 50 years ago, most people were willing to accept black and white photographs as looking "real", but now very few people will. Younger people will likely accept saturated colors and HDR-style processing as "looking real" whereas old bastards like me won't.
Photographs are not even remotely "real" but we train ourselves, and are trained, to accept certain things and to not accept certain other things.
So, next time someone wants to wave off the idea of a photograph looking real, you can tell them to go pound sand.
As usual, the chorus is is quite wrong. Any fool can see that some photographs look real, and others look fake, and there's some sort of grey area as well. The fact that the chorus isn't capable of sorting out what's going on doesn't mean that nothing is going on. Here's what's going on.
No photograph is a "true" representation of reality, to be sure. Neither is what we see a "true" representation of reality, our eyes and visual cortex are mighty liars. This matters for discussion of photojournalism, where there is a planted axiom to the effect that a good photojournalistic picture is "true", but it doesn't matter for most other contexts.
A photograph "looks real" for you if, when I give you the photograph and allow you to compare it with that which was photographed, you respond intuitively "that picture looks like the thing it is a picture of". It's entirely subjective, and partly some sort of social construct, but much of the time many people will tend to agree. It changes over time, as well. 50 years ago, most people were willing to accept black and white photographs as looking "real", but now very few people will. Younger people will likely accept saturated colors and HDR-style processing as "looking real" whereas old bastards like me won't.
Photographs are not even remotely "real" but we train ourselves, and are trained, to accept certain things and to not accept certain other things.
- There are photographs that "look real"
- There are photographs that "look fake"
- There are photographs that are in some grey area between these two
So, next time someone wants to wave off the idea of a photograph looking real, you can tell them to go pound sand.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
"Master The Light"
How often has some fatuous idiot told you that in order to be a photographer, you must "Master Light" or something similar? Heck, I've probably done it on this blog.
There's two problems here.
Suppose you have two pictures. One has a random assemblage of junk crammed badly into the frame, but with marvelous dramatic or interesting light. The other has a small grouping of meaningful objects, well-placed in the frame, but the light is, eh, the light serves only to let us see the objects. One of these is a good picture, and the other one isn't. Great content can make a great photograph, regardless of light. Great light cannot save a crummy picture.
Somehow, though, fatuous idiots never say "You must Master The Framing" or "You must Master The Perspective". Nope, it's always the bloody light.
The other problem is that the fatuous idiot always makes it seem like you have to go meditate silently in Tibet for a year before you can begin to Master Light. This is false. It turns out that we have two organs in our face which don't do anything except sense light and keep our eyelids from chafing our brain. Mastering the Light is called "seeing" and many of us do it quite a lot. To be sure, you have to see with some intent and intensity, but for crying out loud, you just do that. Look at some pictures, good ones, and then look at the world.
What you really need to Master is Master Not Looking at 500px for shitty landscapes you can copy. You need to Master Not Trying To Make Amateurish Copies of Second Rate Crap. You need to Master Not Taking Advice From Idiots on the Internet.
Now go away and stop taking advice from me. Git. Go look at some things.
There's two problems here.
Suppose you have two pictures. One has a random assemblage of junk crammed badly into the frame, but with marvelous dramatic or interesting light. The other has a small grouping of meaningful objects, well-placed in the frame, but the light is, eh, the light serves only to let us see the objects. One of these is a good picture, and the other one isn't. Great content can make a great photograph, regardless of light. Great light cannot save a crummy picture.
Somehow, though, fatuous idiots never say "You must Master The Framing" or "You must Master The Perspective". Nope, it's always the bloody light.
The other problem is that the fatuous idiot always makes it seem like you have to go meditate silently in Tibet for a year before you can begin to Master Light. This is false. It turns out that we have two organs in our face which don't do anything except sense light and keep our eyelids from chafing our brain. Mastering the Light is called "seeing" and many of us do it quite a lot. To be sure, you have to see with some intent and intensity, but for crying out loud, you just do that. Look at some pictures, good ones, and then look at the world.
What you really need to Master is Master Not Looking at 500px for shitty landscapes you can copy. You need to Master Not Trying To Make Amateurish Copies of Second Rate Crap. You need to Master Not Taking Advice From Idiots on the Internet.
Now go away and stop taking advice from me. Git. Go look at some things.
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
On Critique
I am on the record, several times I think, as being in favor of critique. Over the last year or so, my thinking has, shall we say, evolved. Mainly because I've been watching the process as it plays out on the internet in some detail.
I still believe in it. How can I not? If Art in general, and photography in particular, is about communication, how can we not devote some effort to testing and refining our ability to communicate?
Now, though, I think one must take at least a two pronged approach. Really useful critique of an individual piece has to be a conversation, you have to probe a little. This means that you need to find someone who will put up with a conversation, who is willing to be probed a little. Good luck with that, they're out there, but they're wildly outnumbered by pompous asses who want to force you to comply with local norms.
This does not mean that you should ignore the pompous asses and their local norms. The little bits of local dogma that circulate in one context or another (and they are local, they'll always cite Rembrandt but that's a bunch of rubbish) are based on something and it's not a waste of time to work out what the something is. You can add that to your little store of ideas, of things people like. Occasionally you can add it to your list of things not to do.
In any case, when you're dealing with the tribal behaviors of a camera club or internet group of some sort, keep in mind that you're not there to "learn" what they tell you. As a general, albeit not universal, rule they have nothing of interest to tell you. You are there to unpack their belief system, and to get at the underlying ideas of it. That's actually interesting.
So, just smile, nod, and think "idiot" very very quietly to yourself. And keep your eyes open for someone who's open to a conversation.
At some point I'm going to investigate paying for portfolio review. With the right person, I suspect this might be useful. Mostly, of course, the people offering to do it are charlatans, but I'm pretty sure they're not all.
I still believe in it. How can I not? If Art in general, and photography in particular, is about communication, how can we not devote some effort to testing and refining our ability to communicate?
Now, though, I think one must take at least a two pronged approach. Really useful critique of an individual piece has to be a conversation, you have to probe a little. This means that you need to find someone who will put up with a conversation, who is willing to be probed a little. Good luck with that, they're out there, but they're wildly outnumbered by pompous asses who want to force you to comply with local norms.
This does not mean that you should ignore the pompous asses and their local norms. The little bits of local dogma that circulate in one context or another (and they are local, they'll always cite Rembrandt but that's a bunch of rubbish) are based on something and it's not a waste of time to work out what the something is. You can add that to your little store of ideas, of things people like. Occasionally you can add it to your list of things not to do.
In any case, when you're dealing with the tribal behaviors of a camera club or internet group of some sort, keep in mind that you're not there to "learn" what they tell you. As a general, albeit not universal, rule they have nothing of interest to tell you. You are there to unpack their belief system, and to get at the underlying ideas of it. That's actually interesting.
So, just smile, nod, and think "idiot" very very quietly to yourself. And keep your eyes open for someone who's open to a conversation.
At some point I'm going to investigate paying for portfolio review. With the right person, I suspect this might be useful. Mostly, of course, the people offering to do it are charlatans, but I'm pretty sure they're not all.
Sunday, April 6, 2014
Dogmatism
There are many things in life one can study, practice, and with diligent effort get a little bit good at, or even very good at. Two of them, just to pull some handy examples, are baking bread and taking photographs.
The progression runs, roughly, as follows. You learn a little, and you get some positive results. Your bread rises, your photographs are in focus. You think you're pretty good, and your friends agree. Everyone is a little surprised and astonished that your bread rises, and that your photographs are in focus. Still, everyone also recognizes, on some level, that there are degrees of goodness. You are not suddenly the best in the world, you're just "good" on some very broad spectrum of "good".
As you learn more, as you experiment more and find things out, develop skills, and so on, your idea of what's good will probably narrow. As you begin to actually understand what separates your first efforts from the greatness that you always recognized, you will perhaps, probably, begin to view your early efforts as "bad" rather than "good". You might also grade your current efforts as "bad" but you work to get past that.
At about this point there seems to be a very very natural event that can occur, almost regardless of discipline: You may find a social group with a set of ideas, methods, procedures, doctrines. You discover that by hewing to these, your results get to be pretty good. Leagues better than your early efforts. Furthermore, by espousing these ideas, methods, procedures and doctrines both in what you say, and in how you work at your chosen craft, you gain acceptance into this social group. Some people who you consider to be expert begin to compliment and accept you. This is powerful, this is tribal.
Now there is an excellent chance that what you know at this moment will harden into dogma. You may give lip service to the notion that you're always learning and growing but inside, somewhere, you secretly think that in fact you have found The Answer. You know the true method for ultimate excellence, and now it's just a question of more perfectly executing the approved methods and procedures. Your growth stops. Your results are pretty good, more or less, but as you perfect your adherence to the dogma you have selected, something is lost. The creative spark is gone.
Bakers stuck here just wind up producing a couple kinds of decent bread, and being happy with that. Photographers who get stuck here produce emotionally dead garbage. Any soul they once had, any fresh ideas they once had, will be inexorably squeezed out in the relentless refinement of the approved methods and procedures. These photographers eventually reduce their "mistake" rate to vanishingly small, and wind up crapping out an endless stream of more or less identical lifeless examples of a very very specific form, while their social group cheers them on with cries of "wow, another great one! you are so great! can you teach me your workflow?" (arrg, "workflow" I must write an essay on that particular horror as well)
There is another way.
It happens that I am an excellent bread baker. I hew to no dogma. Well, at any rate I am not aware of any particular dogma to which I hew. Instead, I have a pretty firm and yet ever changing idea of what constitutes excellence. My approach evolves constantly. I understand, clearly, distinctly, and differently week-to-week, the ways flour, water, salt, and leavening work together. At any moment I have methods and approaches, and I have firm ideas about what sorts of things will affect the resulting loaves in what ways; and these ideas changes and evolve constantly. Sometimes I develop genuinely new ideas, and other times I simply think about old ideas in new ways, I develop a new mental image of what's going on to describe the same things.
What's important here is that my thinking is (usually) right, or at least not very wrong. It changes and evolves constantly, but rarely diverges far out of the zone of being pretty much correct. I'm usually in the zone of right, because I do know a lot of stuff, and I have spent a lot of time reading, talking, hanging out with dogmatists who do indeed own a piece of the puzzle. Still, there's infinitely many ways to think about these things, not just one.
This means that my bread constantly changes. Sometimes it is frankly not very good. Usually it's somewhere between good and astonishingly excellent. It's rarely boring. And, let me repeat this: sometimes it is astonishingly excellent. This is an important point.
You can, I think, approach photography the same way. Learn from the dogmatists, take their ideas of excellence and add them to your own. You have always known that there are good pictures, and better pictures, and superb pictures. Your job is to develop an ever-evolving, constantly changing, theory of what makes the astonishing ones astonishing. Keep your mind open, and your thoughts flexible.
Try to hold on to that early naive idea that everything is good, only some things are better.
Sometimes, you'll make pretty bad pictures, or pretty bad bread. If you're not a commercial photographer or baker, that's OK. If you are, of course, you have to find some formulas that work and stick to grinding them out -- at least in the day job. Even so, at night, when nobody's looking, remember that everything is good. Devise a new theory of what makes it good, and shoot a bunch of that for a while.
If your stuff isn't crap some of the time, then, eventually, it's crap all of the time.
The progression runs, roughly, as follows. You learn a little, and you get some positive results. Your bread rises, your photographs are in focus. You think you're pretty good, and your friends agree. Everyone is a little surprised and astonished that your bread rises, and that your photographs are in focus. Still, everyone also recognizes, on some level, that there are degrees of goodness. You are not suddenly the best in the world, you're just "good" on some very broad spectrum of "good".
As you learn more, as you experiment more and find things out, develop skills, and so on, your idea of what's good will probably narrow. As you begin to actually understand what separates your first efforts from the greatness that you always recognized, you will perhaps, probably, begin to view your early efforts as "bad" rather than "good". You might also grade your current efforts as "bad" but you work to get past that.
At about this point there seems to be a very very natural event that can occur, almost regardless of discipline: You may find a social group with a set of ideas, methods, procedures, doctrines. You discover that by hewing to these, your results get to be pretty good. Leagues better than your early efforts. Furthermore, by espousing these ideas, methods, procedures and doctrines both in what you say, and in how you work at your chosen craft, you gain acceptance into this social group. Some people who you consider to be expert begin to compliment and accept you. This is powerful, this is tribal.
Now there is an excellent chance that what you know at this moment will harden into dogma. You may give lip service to the notion that you're always learning and growing but inside, somewhere, you secretly think that in fact you have found The Answer. You know the true method for ultimate excellence, and now it's just a question of more perfectly executing the approved methods and procedures. Your growth stops. Your results are pretty good, more or less, but as you perfect your adherence to the dogma you have selected, something is lost. The creative spark is gone.
Bakers stuck here just wind up producing a couple kinds of decent bread, and being happy with that. Photographers who get stuck here produce emotionally dead garbage. Any soul they once had, any fresh ideas they once had, will be inexorably squeezed out in the relentless refinement of the approved methods and procedures. These photographers eventually reduce their "mistake" rate to vanishingly small, and wind up crapping out an endless stream of more or less identical lifeless examples of a very very specific form, while their social group cheers them on with cries of "wow, another great one! you are so great! can you teach me your workflow?" (arrg, "workflow" I must write an essay on that particular horror as well)
There is another way.
It happens that I am an excellent bread baker. I hew to no dogma. Well, at any rate I am not aware of any particular dogma to which I hew. Instead, I have a pretty firm and yet ever changing idea of what constitutes excellence. My approach evolves constantly. I understand, clearly, distinctly, and differently week-to-week, the ways flour, water, salt, and leavening work together. At any moment I have methods and approaches, and I have firm ideas about what sorts of things will affect the resulting loaves in what ways; and these ideas changes and evolve constantly. Sometimes I develop genuinely new ideas, and other times I simply think about old ideas in new ways, I develop a new mental image of what's going on to describe the same things.
What's important here is that my thinking is (usually) right, or at least not very wrong. It changes and evolves constantly, but rarely diverges far out of the zone of being pretty much correct. I'm usually in the zone of right, because I do know a lot of stuff, and I have spent a lot of time reading, talking, hanging out with dogmatists who do indeed own a piece of the puzzle. Still, there's infinitely many ways to think about these things, not just one.
This means that my bread constantly changes. Sometimes it is frankly not very good. Usually it's somewhere between good and astonishingly excellent. It's rarely boring. And, let me repeat this: sometimes it is astonishingly excellent. This is an important point.
You can, I think, approach photography the same way. Learn from the dogmatists, take their ideas of excellence and add them to your own. You have always known that there are good pictures, and better pictures, and superb pictures. Your job is to develop an ever-evolving, constantly changing, theory of what makes the astonishing ones astonishing. Keep your mind open, and your thoughts flexible.
Try to hold on to that early naive idea that everything is good, only some things are better.
Sometimes, you'll make pretty bad pictures, or pretty bad bread. If you're not a commercial photographer or baker, that's OK. If you are, of course, you have to find some formulas that work and stick to grinding them out -- at least in the day job. Even so, at night, when nobody's looking, remember that everything is good. Devise a new theory of what makes it good, and shoot a bunch of that for a while.
If your stuff isn't crap some of the time, then, eventually, it's crap all of the time.
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Another Common Refrain
One sees from time to time on the internet someone complaining that much critique comes from people who lack knowledge. Many of the people who comment on other people's pictures don't have the knowledge, the training, the skill to know a good picture from a bad one. Sometimes, when it gets personal, there is an attack on the commenter's portfolio, or lack thereof.
This all contains a planted axiom: that we take pictures for other photographers. It's not just a planted axiom, it's false. I could not care less what some bunch of half-baked gearheads think of my pictures. Fuck those guys. And here's why:
For the most part the person making these complaints also has no particular ability to recognize good pictures. In fact, what ability they may once have had, they have carefully trained out of existence. What they have is the ability to recognize pictures that meet the norms of their little social group of photographers. They recognize certain "mistakes" and call them out with stock phrases, and they declare a picture good when it lacks any of these supposed mistakes.
The poor ignorant sods who dare to comment do not know, or do not care about, these social norms, and so they cannot or will not shout out the stock phrases. They are recognizably not part of the social group, and therefore must be either forced to comply, or hounded out.
This is not to say that every random joe has anything valuable to add. People who lack this sort of "training" (ahem) are generally very generous, and like pretty much anything that's in-focus. But consider, what does that say? Think about that a little. On the other hand, it's not helpful for improvement. Random people, who are not part of some ugly little club, are a better source of critique, but I think you have to work with them a bit, and have a conversation.
This is also not to say that every picture is good, it's not. But there are more things in heaven and earth, random internet blow-hard know-it-all, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Also, random blow-hard, because your taste has been trained to like a sort of lowest-common-denominator social norm, your taste is garbage and should be utterly ignored by anyone with any actual ambition.
Some contexts have a bigger problem with this than others, of course. Use caution, and keep your wits about you.
This all contains a planted axiom: that we take pictures for other photographers. It's not just a planted axiom, it's false. I could not care less what some bunch of half-baked gearheads think of my pictures. Fuck those guys. And here's why:
For the most part the person making these complaints also has no particular ability to recognize good pictures. In fact, what ability they may once have had, they have carefully trained out of existence. What they have is the ability to recognize pictures that meet the norms of their little social group of photographers. They recognize certain "mistakes" and call them out with stock phrases, and they declare a picture good when it lacks any of these supposed mistakes.
The poor ignorant sods who dare to comment do not know, or do not care about, these social norms, and so they cannot or will not shout out the stock phrases. They are recognizably not part of the social group, and therefore must be either forced to comply, or hounded out.
This is not to say that every random joe has anything valuable to add. People who lack this sort of "training" (ahem) are generally very generous, and like pretty much anything that's in-focus. But consider, what does that say? Think about that a little. On the other hand, it's not helpful for improvement. Random people, who are not part of some ugly little club, are a better source of critique, but I think you have to work with them a bit, and have a conversation.
This is also not to say that every picture is good, it's not. But there are more things in heaven and earth, random internet blow-hard know-it-all, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Also, random blow-hard, because your taste has been trained to like a sort of lowest-common-denominator social norm, your taste is garbage and should be utterly ignored by anyone with any actual ambition.
Some contexts have a bigger problem with this than others, of course. Use caution, and keep your wits about you.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Am I Good Enough To Charge?
Yet another common theme among photographic amateurs. It's a natural question, I guess. All hobbyists wonder if they can turn their hobby into a profession. I periodically wonder if I should start a business baking bread. And then I remind myself that this is stupid and that there's absolutely no way I want to start a bread company.
Should I start a business?
Should I charge?
Should I put up a web site?
Long time readers will no doubt not be surprised to learn that I think you should charge, or not, or start a business, or not, as it suits you. But don't be half-assed about it.
There is no such thing as "good enough to charge money," either you charge money or you do not. Your customers will judge whether or not to pay the rates you ask. It doesn't matter if you're good or bad, there are plenty of terrible photographers charging money, and plenty of excellent ones who do not charge. Making money is a marketing and business problem, not a skill problem.
Don't launch a web site just to have a web site. That's stupid. What purpose does your web site serve? Is it intended to drive business? Is it a convenient place to place your best work for review purposes? Is it purely for vanity? These are all fine reasons to have a web site.
"All these other people have web sites" is not a good reason to have a web site.
As always, the theme here is:
Figure out what you want to do, and then do that.
Should I start a business?
Should I charge?
Should I put up a web site?
Long time readers will no doubt not be surprised to learn that I think you should charge, or not, or start a business, or not, as it suits you. But don't be half-assed about it.
There is no such thing as "good enough to charge money," either you charge money or you do not. Your customers will judge whether or not to pay the rates you ask. It doesn't matter if you're good or bad, there are plenty of terrible photographers charging money, and plenty of excellent ones who do not charge. Making money is a marketing and business problem, not a skill problem.
Don't launch a web site just to have a web site. That's stupid. What purpose does your web site serve? Is it intended to drive business? Is it a convenient place to place your best work for review purposes? Is it purely for vanity? These are all fine reasons to have a web site.
"All these other people have web sites" is not a good reason to have a web site.
As always, the theme here is:
Figure out what you want to do, and then do that.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
More Color Fidelity
Here's more things to think about.
I've been thinking about how much stuff we look at doesn't really have real colors any more; so much of what we see is a perceptual color created by mixing a small set of dyes or lights. We spend hours looking at a computer screen, and more hours looking at printed materials. We spend almost no time looking at apples, and no time at all really looking at an apple.
Color-managed workflow, that paragon, that ideal state of perfection, is all about managing those perceptual colors. It tries to ensure, and largely succeeds in ensuring, that the perceptual color I see on one monitor is the same perceptual color I see on another is the same perceptual color I see on the printed page.
A good process can actually do this, for a pretty broad range of colors. The color my visual cortex comes up with based on the Red, Green, and Blue light sources on one monitor is more or less the same as the color my visual cortex comes up with based on the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black inks used to print the page. With certain fairly stringent restrictions.
What's missing from this? Did you notice the elephant that we're not talking about?
There's nothing in there that makes sure that the color on the monitor, or the page, looks like the color of the thing I photographed.
A side note. We occasionally see some eggheaded idiot explaining that the Red Channel is Clipped, and how that's Unacceptable. This same person would not complain that the highlights are blown where the sun appears in the frame, because anyone -- even an idiot -- may know that the sun is simply out of range. If you're going to get a picture of anything else, you have to let the sun go. Yet, when photographing an object with an out-of-gamut color, precisely the same problem exists. One or more color channels will clip. Fixing it will destroy the rest of the picture.
Some experiments to try: Use your favorite method for getting a "correct" white balance, and photograph a handful of small objects, all in one frame. Use a grey card or whatever you like to "get the white balance correct". Produce an image file with correct white balance. Now hold your objects up to the monitor, or set them near the monitor in good light. Do the colors on the screen match the objects? What happens when you tweak the color to get one of the objects spot-on?
In my tests the answer is "ha, ha, ha, not even close" but your mileage may vary. The hell of it is that on-screen they look pretty darn good. They're convincing when compared with my memory of the object, but place the object close to the screen, and the illusion falls away. The object I was mostly interested in was not even out-of-gamut, I was able to persuade my monitor to produce the color quite closely without much trouble. Correcting the picture for that color simply ruined the others, though. With an out-of-gamut color, I cannot imagine the situation would be any better.
Cameras, for excellent technical reasons, tend not to actually see things the way eyes do. Some cameras do better than others.
The result of this experiment might be liberating. If the prospect of getting the color accurate is taken away from you, then you don't have to worry about it any more. Make your picture look nice.
I've been thinking about how much stuff we look at doesn't really have real colors any more; so much of what we see is a perceptual color created by mixing a small set of dyes or lights. We spend hours looking at a computer screen, and more hours looking at printed materials. We spend almost no time looking at apples, and no time at all really looking at an apple.
Color-managed workflow, that paragon, that ideal state of perfection, is all about managing those perceptual colors. It tries to ensure, and largely succeeds in ensuring, that the perceptual color I see on one monitor is the same perceptual color I see on another is the same perceptual color I see on the printed page.
A good process can actually do this, for a pretty broad range of colors. The color my visual cortex comes up with based on the Red, Green, and Blue light sources on one monitor is more or less the same as the color my visual cortex comes up with based on the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black inks used to print the page. With certain fairly stringent restrictions.
What's missing from this? Did you notice the elephant that we're not talking about?
There's nothing in there that makes sure that the color on the monitor, or the page, looks like the color of the thing I photographed.
A side note. We occasionally see some eggheaded idiot explaining that the Red Channel is Clipped, and how that's Unacceptable. This same person would not complain that the highlights are blown where the sun appears in the frame, because anyone -- even an idiot -- may know that the sun is simply out of range. If you're going to get a picture of anything else, you have to let the sun go. Yet, when photographing an object with an out-of-gamut color, precisely the same problem exists. One or more color channels will clip. Fixing it will destroy the rest of the picture.
Some experiments to try: Use your favorite method for getting a "correct" white balance, and photograph a handful of small objects, all in one frame. Use a grey card or whatever you like to "get the white balance correct". Produce an image file with correct white balance. Now hold your objects up to the monitor, or set them near the monitor in good light. Do the colors on the screen match the objects? What happens when you tweak the color to get one of the objects spot-on?
In my tests the answer is "ha, ha, ha, not even close" but your mileage may vary. The hell of it is that on-screen they look pretty darn good. They're convincing when compared with my memory of the object, but place the object close to the screen, and the illusion falls away. The object I was mostly interested in was not even out-of-gamut, I was able to persuade my monitor to produce the color quite closely without much trouble. Correcting the picture for that color simply ruined the others, though. With an out-of-gamut color, I cannot imagine the situation would be any better.
Cameras, for excellent technical reasons, tend not to actually see things the way eyes do. Some cameras do better than others.
The result of this experiment might be liberating. If the prospect of getting the color accurate is taken away from you, then you don't have to worry about it any more. Make your picture look nice.
Friday, March 28, 2014
The Pictures You Take Before The Pictures You Want To Take
I have railed against this before, but I'm going to take another stab.
Lots of people who imagine themselves as serious about photography seem to be stuck practicing. They're taking the pictures they feel they need to take before they can get to taking the pictures they actually want to take. They're testing, they're shopping. They're getting together the gear and the skills they're going to need to take the pictures they actually want to take.
Some people do this forever.
Stop it.
Do you want to take aerial photographs? Stop mucking about shopping for the right lens, and discussing what the best camera is. Go get your pilot's license, buy a drone or a kite, or learn to skydive. Do it now.
Do you want to shoot erotica? Stop shopping for lights and modifiers, stop arguing about scrims versus beauty lights on internet forums, stop reading strobist and making tests with a basketball. Hire a model who will get naked, and take some pictures. Do it now. Get on modelmayhem or onemodelplace or whatever, find a model you like, and make contact. Contact 3 or more, in fact. GO.
Do you want to take large format photographs from the top of the Burj Khalifa? You will need to buy a large format camera, a plane ticket to Dubai, and you'll need to figure out how to get a permit. Go get started. Stop reading up on what the lightest field camera is, just go buy something that's in your budget, and GO.
I see people, even quite good photographers, posting pictures with some commentary along the lines of I was out and about and I saw this and I thought I'd shoot a little series and it makes me sad. You're pretty good, and you're wasting your time and talent taking pretty good pictures of .. stuff .. for no apparent reason except to post them on the internets so people can look at them and, maybe, tell you that you're pretty good.
Figure out what you want to do, and do that. If you don't know what you want to do, then stop farting around and figure out what it is you want to do. And then go do that.
Take the pictures you want to take, not the pictures that come before those.
Lots of people who imagine themselves as serious about photography seem to be stuck practicing. They're taking the pictures they feel they need to take before they can get to taking the pictures they actually want to take. They're testing, they're shopping. They're getting together the gear and the skills they're going to need to take the pictures they actually want to take.
Some people do this forever.
Stop it.
Do you want to take aerial photographs? Stop mucking about shopping for the right lens, and discussing what the best camera is. Go get your pilot's license, buy a drone or a kite, or learn to skydive. Do it now.
Do you want to shoot erotica? Stop shopping for lights and modifiers, stop arguing about scrims versus beauty lights on internet forums, stop reading strobist and making tests with a basketball. Hire a model who will get naked, and take some pictures. Do it now. Get on modelmayhem or onemodelplace or whatever, find a model you like, and make contact. Contact 3 or more, in fact. GO.
Do you want to take large format photographs from the top of the Burj Khalifa? You will need to buy a large format camera, a plane ticket to Dubai, and you'll need to figure out how to get a permit. Go get started. Stop reading up on what the lightest field camera is, just go buy something that's in your budget, and GO.
I see people, even quite good photographers, posting pictures with some commentary along the lines of I was out and about and I saw this and I thought I'd shoot a little series and it makes me sad. You're pretty good, and you're wasting your time and talent taking pretty good pictures of .. stuff .. for no apparent reason except to post them on the internets so people can look at them and, maybe, tell you that you're pretty good.
Figure out what you want to do, and do that. If you don't know what you want to do, then stop farting around and figure out what it is you want to do. And then go do that.
Take the pictures you want to take, not the pictures that come before those.
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