I keep selling copies of this book, Intermediate Photography. Slowly, slowly.
Y'all buying it out there, write me a review, huh? Even if it's bad, that's OK. I'm vain enough to want to know what people are thinking. Heck, I might even try to improve it if I got some constructively negative reviews. Maybe.
Friday, May 22, 2015
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Awesome
This is a prize-winning photo. Alison Postma, of the University of Guelph, won a year's tuition from the Art Gallery of Ontario.
And she should have. This is not a technical tour de force. This does not illustrate Mastery Of The Light, or any of that shit. What this is, is a razor sharp concept simply and clearly executed. This is the embodiment of an idea. What it is, exactly, is up to you. But by golly it's something.
And she should have. This is not a technical tour de force. This does not illustrate Mastery Of The Light, or any of that shit. What this is, is a razor sharp concept simply and clearly executed. This is the embodiment of an idea. What it is, exactly, is up to you. But by golly it's something.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
The Death of the Iconic Photo
I dunno about you, but I think of contemporary photographers and photographers from, say, more than 40 years ago quite differently. Robinson, Stieglitz, Weston, Lange, Adams, Evans, Evans, I can think instantly of one of two iconic photographs. Bam. These people exist in my mind, first and foremost, as iconic pictures.
Sebastião Salgado, Peter Turnley, Sally Mann? These guys do not.
These guys exist as bodies of work, sets of ideas. I can, with effort, think up single pictures from them, but there's no instant recall of these things. I instantly think of ideas and books and collections.
I think, although I am not sure, that this is a reflection of the modern trends in photography.
There's no such thing as a singular iconic image any more. There's an idea, a concept, and then a cloud of pictures around it. Pick any Salgado picture. It's probably crunchy black and white, of some subject or another. A desolate landscape, a desperate human, perhaps. I can find 100,000 similar photos online in a few minutes. Some of them will be excellent. Some of them might be better than Salgado's picture.
Does this mean that Salgado sucks? Certainly not.
His strength is in the ideas and in the bodies of work. Any fool can make a crunchy black and white photo of a poor South American child, and 10s of 1000s of fools have. 1000s of them have probably made excellent crunchy black and white photographs of a poor South American child. But only one has made important books, embodying important ideas, that contain such pictures. Ok, maybe two or three people have. But not very many.
Edward Weston's place in the history of photography rests, at least in part, on a handful of truly excellent photographs. Sally Mann's place rests on a handful of books. The pictures themselves are, of course, excellent. But the point is that they fit into carefully built collections, portfolios of work that embody something bigger.
It's not that excellent pictures are no longer being made, it's that they're being made in such quantity that the quality "iconic" is no longer applicable to a single photograph. Instead, we have an archetype and a collection of instances of it. These things, in and of themselves, have become less and less interesting.
In a way, I think we've grown up. Individual words were cool when they'd just been invented, but now everyone can read and write. What's interesting now is the sentences and poems and books and plays that a few of the most talented are writing.
Sebastião Salgado, Peter Turnley, Sally Mann? These guys do not.
These guys exist as bodies of work, sets of ideas. I can, with effort, think up single pictures from them, but there's no instant recall of these things. I instantly think of ideas and books and collections.
I think, although I am not sure, that this is a reflection of the modern trends in photography.
There's no such thing as a singular iconic image any more. There's an idea, a concept, and then a cloud of pictures around it. Pick any Salgado picture. It's probably crunchy black and white, of some subject or another. A desolate landscape, a desperate human, perhaps. I can find 100,000 similar photos online in a few minutes. Some of them will be excellent. Some of them might be better than Salgado's picture.
Does this mean that Salgado sucks? Certainly not.
His strength is in the ideas and in the bodies of work. Any fool can make a crunchy black and white photo of a poor South American child, and 10s of 1000s of fools have. 1000s of them have probably made excellent crunchy black and white photographs of a poor South American child. But only one has made important books, embodying important ideas, that contain such pictures. Ok, maybe two or three people have. But not very many.
Edward Weston's place in the history of photography rests, at least in part, on a handful of truly excellent photographs. Sally Mann's place rests on a handful of books. The pictures themselves are, of course, excellent. But the point is that they fit into carefully built collections, portfolios of work that embody something bigger.
It's not that excellent pictures are no longer being made, it's that they're being made in such quantity that the quality "iconic" is no longer applicable to a single photograph. Instead, we have an archetype and a collection of instances of it. These things, in and of themselves, have become less and less interesting.
In a way, I think we've grown up. Individual words were cool when they'd just been invented, but now everyone can read and write. What's interesting now is the sentences and poems and books and plays that a few of the most talented are writing.
The Future of Imaging
I got into it a little with Michael Reichmann the other day, arguing about what Camera Companies Ought To Do (like all pundits, Michael thinks they should build a special camera just for him). It got me to thinking about what the future will be like.
Not next year, but a few years from now. How would you get out in front of the market?
Here's my theory. Free business idea, if you want to take it on.
The problem is one of curation. We have no problem with tons of photos. Making lots and lots of sharp detailed pictures is a solved problem. This has created new problems, of curation and of preservation.
We are swamped in pictures. We are swamped in our own pictures, often. The current solution is to simply let the older ones go. They slide down some timeline, and get looked at less and less. Even I do this, and I am incredibly old school, and curate like the devil himself. I easily can get to photos from 5 years ago, 8 years ago. I don't, though, not very often.
So let's pose some problems that a typical person, someone who as I like to say just wants pictures might run in to.
These can all be solved by something which can search for relevant files, sort them, organize them, and present them quickly and easily. Something that lets us easily:
Selection is obvious. It should use, at least: face, scene, and object recognition, accompanying text, embedded date/time information, context (if any -- at least the other pictures nearby both in the sense of location of the file, and in the sense of time).
Organization should be similarly obvious, it's simply how we arrange the pictures (not necessarily in a linear sequence, by the by), and we need good tools for quickly and easily doing that. But this is a more or less solved problem, we know how to build tools for rapidly flicking through pictures, dragging, dropping. Still, automated solutions that give an excellent first draft are pretty much a requirement here.
Rendering is less obvious. We might want a movie with Ken Burns effects, we might want to populate a digital picture frame, or our computer's desktop background. We might want to print a book. We might want to show a friend, or share a slideshow or a movie. We might want to create a composite portrait. Queries like "what color was" might be simply a set of color swatches representing best estimates, with clickable context. We might want a 3D printed bust of grandma? I dunno. The possibilities, if not endless, are large.
It's an indexing problem, an image recognition problem, a big data problem. Ideally we'd have some automated simple composition tools -- some basic crops, color correction. Are we looking for portraits of grandma? Then make portraits of grandma out of whatever raw material is present.
Many of us have piles of photographs lumped into flickr, facebook, picasa, local hard drives, and so on. Many of us will have bigger piles as time goes on. It's obvious, I think, that any tools need to be able to go dredge out photos from all these sources and more, and should support plugins for arbitrary archives.
If we could solve the problem of managing immense heaps of pictures, then we could go really crazy. We could all wear wide-angle lapel cameras taking a picture every second, dumping it all into the cloud, and the result would no longer be a incomprehensible mess.
Now we can say "make me a shutterfly book of Susanne's birthday party from last week" and then we quickly flip through the mockup, make a few light changes, and press PRINT. Done. The software should find all the photos from the right timeframe that look "birthday party". It should identify all the unique people. It should construct a set of pleasing portraits with suitable croppings of suitably selected photos, and it should pick out a decent sequence of:
based on some expert system's understanding of what local customs for birthdays are, and what they tend to look like.
Perhaps wrap up with a couple of collages.
I don't think the future of "imaging" is in imaging at all, although it may lead toward specific devices eventually. Lytro cameras, anyone? It would be trivial to integrate the ability to retask a given file as a shallow DoF portrait, or as a record shot of Sue At The Party. This, again, could be automated. Are we looking for portraits of Sue, or are we making book of The Party?
I think the future is in managing how we "use" pictures.
Not next year, but a few years from now. How would you get out in front of the market?
Here's my theory. Free business idea, if you want to take it on.
The problem is one of curation. We have no problem with tons of photos. Making lots and lots of sharp detailed pictures is a solved problem. This has created new problems, of curation and of preservation.
We are swamped in pictures. We are swamped in our own pictures, often. The current solution is to simply let the older ones go. They slide down some timeline, and get looked at less and less. Even I do this, and I am incredibly old school, and curate like the devil himself. I easily can get to photos from 5 years ago, 8 years ago. I don't, though, not very often.
So let's pose some problems that a typical person, someone who as I like to say just wants pictures might run in to.
- I miss grandma.
- Wow, the kids grow up so fast.
- Do I have any pictures of my car before the accident?
- What color was dad's house?
These can all be solved by something which can search for relevant files, sort them, organize them, and present them quickly and easily. Something that lets us easily:
- select
- organize
- render
Selection is obvious. It should use, at least: face, scene, and object recognition, accompanying text, embedded date/time information, context (if any -- at least the other pictures nearby both in the sense of location of the file, and in the sense of time).
Organization should be similarly obvious, it's simply how we arrange the pictures (not necessarily in a linear sequence, by the by), and we need good tools for quickly and easily doing that. But this is a more or less solved problem, we know how to build tools for rapidly flicking through pictures, dragging, dropping. Still, automated solutions that give an excellent first draft are pretty much a requirement here.
Rendering is less obvious. We might want a movie with Ken Burns effects, we might want to populate a digital picture frame, or our computer's desktop background. We might want to print a book. We might want to show a friend, or share a slideshow or a movie. We might want to create a composite portrait. Queries like "what color was" might be simply a set of color swatches representing best estimates, with clickable context. We might want a 3D printed bust of grandma? I dunno. The possibilities, if not endless, are large.
It's an indexing problem, an image recognition problem, a big data problem. Ideally we'd have some automated simple composition tools -- some basic crops, color correction. Are we looking for portraits of grandma? Then make portraits of grandma out of whatever raw material is present.
Many of us have piles of photographs lumped into flickr, facebook, picasa, local hard drives, and so on. Many of us will have bigger piles as time goes on. It's obvious, I think, that any tools need to be able to go dredge out photos from all these sources and more, and should support plugins for arbitrary archives.
If we could solve the problem of managing immense heaps of pictures, then we could go really crazy. We could all wear wide-angle lapel cameras taking a picture every second, dumping it all into the cloud, and the result would no longer be a incomprehensible mess.
Now we can say "make me a shutterfly book of Susanne's birthday party from last week" and then we quickly flip through the mockup, make a few light changes, and press PRINT. Done. The software should find all the photos from the right timeframe that look "birthday party". It should identify all the unique people. It should construct a set of pleasing portraits with suitable croppings of suitably selected photos, and it should pick out a decent sequence of:
- the piñata
- the present opening
- the cake cutting and candle blowing
based on some expert system's understanding of what local customs for birthdays are, and what they tend to look like.
Perhaps wrap up with a couple of collages.
I don't think the future of "imaging" is in imaging at all, although it may lead toward specific devices eventually. Lytro cameras, anyone? It would be trivial to integrate the ability to retask a given file as a shallow DoF portrait, or as a record shot of Sue At The Party. This, again, could be automated. Are we looking for portraits of Sue, or are we making book of The Party?
I think the future is in managing how we "use" pictures.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Internet Considered Harmful
I'm going to bust some guy's chops in this piece, but I want it understood that it's not about the guy, it's about the archetype. He's a kid who rolled in to an internet forum a couple years back, got taught a bunch of nonsense by the local illiterati, and has grown up into an arrogant little prat who's taking wretched photos. Dan's just an example.
There's lots of examples. This poor guy is just a Really Good one that I happen to have been paying attention to, because he started out with so much potential.
So, as usual, let me start out with this, some positives: Dan has grown up into a perfectly useful technician. He can grind out a certain kind of thing all day long, and while that thing is uninteresting to me it's probably somewhat commercial. So, good on him for that. He's mastered his equipment, and is doing just what he wants to do.
Here's a photo from two years ago:
He's got at least one terrible idea going on here (deliberately weak blacks) which some people seem to think is a fashion trope -- it's not, the only place I have ever seen this is in crummy bottom-feeder wedding photography, and online people who copy them.
But look at the rest of it. There's this dynamite diagonal thrust, these great textures, and this is the most important thing: The model is giving Dan something. The model is present, and rocking it. There's some chemistry here. Clip a little off the top, punch up the blacks:
Boom. That's fully legit.
So let me be clear, I think this is genuinely excellent work, with some very minor issues. Dan was churning this stuff out at a pretty good clip when he got started. Interesting people doing interesting things in front of the camera, with chemistry and dynamism. He got a raft of crap from forum idiots, because it looks nothing like low-rent retail photography. It doesn't look like School Pictures, or Senior Sessions, or Sears Portrait Studio. At All. And so it is wrong.
And here's some of his contemporary work:
This is an attempt at fashion. Dan can't style and hasn't got any sense of color, but he's clearly looked at some pictures in magazines and is aping some of the tropes. The model looks like she wants to die, or at least wants this terrible session to please end soon.
This was done to him by the forum members. They pushed and pushed, and then there was some socializing and Dan made some friends with other young idiots who can't see who churn out terrible Senior Sessions, and he learned that the only thing that matters is The Light and whether you can photoshop out all the crap in the background you didn't notice during the shoot.
So now he's got dead-eyed models glumly prancing through the frame, producing low-rent catalog shots.
Now Dan's an expert. So he's published a column of sorts, entitled Mastering Natural Light Photography:
There's lots of examples. This poor guy is just a Really Good one that I happen to have been paying attention to, because he started out with so much potential.
So, as usual, let me start out with this, some positives: Dan has grown up into a perfectly useful technician. He can grind out a certain kind of thing all day long, and while that thing is uninteresting to me it's probably somewhat commercial. So, good on him for that. He's mastered his equipment, and is doing just what he wants to do.
Here's a photo from two years ago:
He's got at least one terrible idea going on here (deliberately weak blacks) which some people seem to think is a fashion trope -- it's not, the only place I have ever seen this is in crummy bottom-feeder wedding photography, and online people who copy them.
But look at the rest of it. There's this dynamite diagonal thrust, these great textures, and this is the most important thing: The model is giving Dan something. The model is present, and rocking it. There's some chemistry here. Clip a little off the top, punch up the blacks:
Boom. That's fully legit.
So let me be clear, I think this is genuinely excellent work, with some very minor issues. Dan was churning this stuff out at a pretty good clip when he got started. Interesting people doing interesting things in front of the camera, with chemistry and dynamism. He got a raft of crap from forum idiots, because it looks nothing like low-rent retail photography. It doesn't look like School Pictures, or Senior Sessions, or Sears Portrait Studio. At All. And so it is wrong.
And here's some of his contemporary work:
This is an attempt at fashion. Dan can't style and hasn't got any sense of color, but he's clearly looked at some pictures in magazines and is aping some of the tropes. The model looks like she wants to die, or at least wants this terrible session to please end soon.
This was done to him by the forum members. They pushed and pushed, and then there was some socializing and Dan made some friends with other young idiots who can't see who churn out terrible Senior Sessions, and he learned that the only thing that matters is The Light and whether you can photoshop out all the crap in the background you didn't notice during the shoot.
So now he's got dead-eyed models glumly prancing through the frame, producing low-rent catalog shots.
Now Dan's an expert. So he's published a column of sorts, entitled Mastering Natural Light Photography:
This thing is just sad. First of all it could use some editing, ok actually a lot of editing, but that tells you more about the "magazine" than about Dan. Secondly, it seems a little light on content to be entitled "Mastering" anything. In fact, it seems a little light on content for anything.
His actual actionable advice seems to boil down to "watch videos on youtube that tell you how to light", followed up with "use soft light. or, harsh light, if you want a different look. also, shadows are fun!"
Really? Seriously? This isn't even One Weird Trick to Improve Your Photography, this is just blather.
Stick around on the internet long enough and you too can be offering workshops and writing educational pieces. Are you blind? Do you want to lead blind people around? The internet has a job waiting for you!
I don't have a good answer for how to actually learn things, really, but the state of photography edumacation on the internets is terrible. Stay off the internets, kids.
You'll ketch the dumb.
Monday, May 18, 2015
Ennui
Kirk Tuck, in a piece I cited recently, makes the claim that photographers are increasingly hanging it up. They're quitting. Or at any rate they're not using their fancy expensive cameras any more.
I don't know how true that is, but it feels likely.
We do know these things:
There's no question that some people are just getting exhausted and quitting, once they see just how many pictures there are out there. What we don't know is whether these people are a trivial minority, or enough to constitute an interesting trend.
There's also no question that tons and tons of people -- far more than in the days of film -- are taking pictures with cameras they're paying some serious coin for.
I've talked about people who just want pictures in the past. I'm pretty sure they're an interesting category, and I'm pretty sure they are all, 100%, using their phones now.
I also know that I am far more focused than I used to be. I basically never, ever take the camera out without a very specific purpose in mind. I might not have the exact shot(s) in mind, although often I do, but I have a very specific theme in mind.
The casual walking-around looking-for-pictures thing is gone from my life, there's simply no point. The casual day-to-day this-is-my-life photography is mostly the phone, although I do take the camera on trips or "occasions" of one sort or the other. These changes are to an extent wrought by my awareness of the River Of Pictures out there. I know I am not going to Ansel Adams my way to fame, just walking around with a camera looking for iconic pictures. Not gonna happen.
Kirk made a really interesting analogy, this idea of a sort of Art Capacitor. I think you can make a case that there really isn't any such thing as an iconic picture any more. There's an idea, and a sort of cloud of pictures that execute that idea to greater or lesser degrees. The single picture embodying the idea is now more or less irrelevant, since everything good (or simply brightly colored) is now instantly copied endlessly.
It's not even possible, usually, to identify a sort of Picture Zero to assign credit for, since every iconic idea is derived and intermingled with other ideas. It's not even a single ideal idea-point surrounded by a cloud of pictures, it's more of a branching tangled vine of ideas, with knots every now and then where the picture-cloud of executions get particularly thick.
It would not be at all surprising to me to find that Serious Photographers are hanging it up. It's depressing to realize that you're not a distinctive voice in the wilderness, you're more of a single cell in a vast picture-taking organism.
The attentive reader knows my solution: don't try to make iconic pictures. Make portfolios instead.
I don't know how true that is, but it feels likely.
We do know these things:
- Sales of interchangeable lens cameras are dropping steadily.
- Sales of interchangeable lens cameras are still several multiples larger than the equivalent film cameras ever were.
- Sales are still greater than zero -- people are still buying these things.
- Production of pictures has gone up over the last ten years by many factors that dwarf camera sales.
There's no question that some people are just getting exhausted and quitting, once they see just how many pictures there are out there. What we don't know is whether these people are a trivial minority, or enough to constitute an interesting trend.
There's also no question that tons and tons of people -- far more than in the days of film -- are taking pictures with cameras they're paying some serious coin for.
I've talked about people who just want pictures in the past. I'm pretty sure they're an interesting category, and I'm pretty sure they are all, 100%, using their phones now.
I also know that I am far more focused than I used to be. I basically never, ever take the camera out without a very specific purpose in mind. I might not have the exact shot(s) in mind, although often I do, but I have a very specific theme in mind.
The casual walking-around looking-for-pictures thing is gone from my life, there's simply no point. The casual day-to-day this-is-my-life photography is mostly the phone, although I do take the camera on trips or "occasions" of one sort or the other. These changes are to an extent wrought by my awareness of the River Of Pictures out there. I know I am not going to Ansel Adams my way to fame, just walking around with a camera looking for iconic pictures. Not gonna happen.
Kirk made a really interesting analogy, this idea of a sort of Art Capacitor. I think you can make a case that there really isn't any such thing as an iconic picture any more. There's an idea, and a sort of cloud of pictures that execute that idea to greater or lesser degrees. The single picture embodying the idea is now more or less irrelevant, since everything good (or simply brightly colored) is now instantly copied endlessly.
It's not even possible, usually, to identify a sort of Picture Zero to assign credit for, since every iconic idea is derived and intermingled with other ideas. It's not even a single ideal idea-point surrounded by a cloud of pictures, it's more of a branching tangled vine of ideas, with knots every now and then where the picture-cloud of executions get particularly thick.
It would not be at all surprising to me to find that Serious Photographers are hanging it up. It's depressing to realize that you're not a distinctive voice in the wilderness, you're more of a single cell in a vast picture-taking organism.
The attentive reader knows my solution: don't try to make iconic pictures. Make portfolios instead.
Friday, May 15, 2015
"Art" Photography
Many people seem to think "Art" Photography is inaccessible, pretentious, crap. Only critics can make sense of it, in their own weird little world-bubble.
This is false. What are inaccessible are artist's statements. They're not for you, anyways. They're mostly incomprehensible, mostly meaningless, and entirely social signaling.
The pictures themselves, just look.
Consider, say, Gursky's Rhein II. If you happen to know that it's something about Germany and her relationship to the Rhein River, well, it might help a bit. But you need none of that to make sense of it as some sort of abstraction of river-ness.
Cindy Sherman, well, she's witty at least. There's a bunch of subtext about.. feminist theory or something? Maybe? Knowing that probably wouldn't hinder your understanding (and frankly for some of her work it's not subtext much at all, it's pretty in-your-face).
And so on. You might not get all of it without being a critic and an artist and knowing how to decode International Art English, but you can get the important stuff just by being familiar with mainstream human cultures.
It might be bad art, but it's not inaccessible.
This is false. What are inaccessible are artist's statements. They're not for you, anyways. They're mostly incomprehensible, mostly meaningless, and entirely social signaling.
The pictures themselves, just look.
Consider, say, Gursky's Rhein II. If you happen to know that it's something about Germany and her relationship to the Rhein River, well, it might help a bit. But you need none of that to make sense of it as some sort of abstraction of river-ness.
Cindy Sherman, well, she's witty at least. There's a bunch of subtext about.. feminist theory or something? Maybe? Knowing that probably wouldn't hinder your understanding (and frankly for some of her work it's not subtext much at all, it's pretty in-your-face).
And so on. You might not get all of it without being a critic and an artist and knowing how to decode International Art English, but you can get the important stuff just by being familiar with mainstream human cultures.
It might be bad art, but it's not inaccessible.
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