<|-- removed generator --> The Online Photographer: Photographic aesthetics

Photographic aesthetics

Monday, 12 May 2014

Assignment: Blow It!

So...have you ever taken a picture that had a significant area of blown highlights, or, better yet, flared highlights? I'd like to see some.

I love the effect in Kim's picture below, but (strangely—maybe something is wrong with my brain tonight) other examples aren't popping into my head. Apart from some of the landscapes in Deep South and some of Atget's*.

Mike
(Thanks to Severian)

*It's so annoying having most of my books in boxes. To paraphrase Richard III, "My library, my library, my kingdom for my library!"

[Note: To post an image in the comments use the following code and make sure the linked image isn't wider than 470 pixels or it will be truncated. —Ed.]

Screen Shot 2014-05-14 at 1.47.54 AM

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

PeriniBy Michael J. Perini

Blake: "Julián Barón's C.E.N.S.U.R.A. makes excellent use of this technique."

ChristiandavisBy Christian Davis

LettonBy Terry Letton

Here's a historical picture that I remembered: Lee Friedlander's 1959 portrait of Helen Levitt in New York City. I imitated this effect several times over the years.

Not a very good JPEG, but it was the best I could find:

Friedlanderlevitt

I once asked Miss Levitt if she liked this, and she replied that she didn't like any photographs of herself. But then, she wouldn't sign some of her own books. —MJ

TrentparkeTrent Parke, White Man, 2001. (Suggested by Kevin Purcell)

BullardBy Jim Bullard

By Hugh LovellBy Hugh Lovell (Sony 828, 2005)

Posted on Monday, 12 May 2014 at 09:53 PM in Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (66)

Thursday, 08 May 2014

A Fair and Levelheaded Article

My favorite photography critic* has surfaced again. To read, put "what does art look like site:wsj.com" (without the quotation marks) into Google. Richard B. Woodward discusses the difficulty of printing artists' work after their deaths, and puts the Vivian Maier situation into perspective.

I read everything I can find that this guy writes. Always good, often great, never bad.

Mike
(Thanks to MM)

*Well, certainly one of them.

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Richard Newman: "An interesting column, but:

"In the end, it is the 'art object' itself, whether photo, oil painting, sculpture, room size installation or 'whatever' plus current taste, that determines what is art, and how good it is. Few viewers of Mona Lisa, or a Picasso, or an Ansel Adams know or care about the technique of production. They are not themselves artists. It is the visual impression which counts. Few etchers get credit for the creation of the etching. The artist gets it all (with some exceptions). So Adams has a point that the negative—or the raw digital image—is a score, and the printer who makes the printis analogous to the orchestral musician who is usually anonymous. Who makes critical decisions in printing depends on the relationship between photographer and printer-even if they are the same person. A great original can result in great prints—or lousy ones. What counts is the result being presented to the world at large. When the photographer is deceased, such as Maier, where no obvious original intent is available, much responsibility rests on the person(s) who select what is to be printed, and does the printing. But still, it is the art object which is the final arbiter of artistic value.

"There is also the photographer's reason for making the image. Not all are intended to be presented in galleries or museums as art objects. For example, most of the photos taken in the 1930s by FSA photographers were intended to be a record of an economic disaster. Some few have achieved art object status, but most served their purpose as records, and were published for that purpose. Similarly, many family photos will never achieve 'art' status, but in family albums make relatives and friends remember important times and events."

"Given these factors, I think that we need to remember that the 'art object' itself is what counts, and its history and production processes are of little interest to the general public. They are for specialists only, unless, like war photography, the context matters."

adamct: "The art market will certainly decide what prints of Ms. Maier's work are worth. That is the nature of the art market—something is only worth whatever it is that someone is willing to pay for it. It doesn't really matter why they are willing (or unwilling) to pay for something, all that matters is that they are (or are not). Logical arguments are highly unlikely to sway the market one way or the other.

"But as a philosophical matter, I fail to see what all the fuss is about. If a photographic negative is the score, and the print is the performance, then why are we treating photography any differently than we treat music or theater? We can value the score and the performance separately, in and of themselves. If we discovered the works of an obscure composer, whose works were never performed, would we dismiss his compositions out of hand? If we discovered the works of an obscure playwright, would we question the artistic value of posthumous performances of those plays?

"What should actually happen (again, from a logical perspective, I am in no way suggesting that the art market would or should actually correspond to my argument) is that we should celebrate Ms. Maier as a photographer, and prints of her work should be judged on the quality (both from the perspective of printing as a craft, and as a matter of artistic interpretation) of the prints. Perhaps the art market simply doesn't think Mr. Maloof's prints are any good (I'm not actually saying that is the case—this is a thought experiment). Perhaps he should permit accomplished printers to print a very limited number of prints of Ms. Maier's negatives. This would ensure the scarcity that is vital to the art market. But it would result in a variety of interpretations of Ms. Maier's score, and we could leave it to the market to judge the relative value of those prints. Perhaps some of them would be worth more than Mr. Maloof's prints.

"But even apart from differences in value, as judged by the market, it would permit fans of Ms. Maier's work to see it in a new light, and to appreciate the interpretations of the various printers in an of themselves. The more I think about it, the more this seems like the best way to handle previously unprinted negatives of deceased photographers...."

David Dyer-Bennet: "Are the vintage Maier prints her own work, or custom prints? If not, if they're just run-of-the-mill lab prints, they don't say anything about her ideas of printing the images."

Mike replies: A very good point. In fact, it might have been the reason she didn't routinely print her work—because she couldn't get it done to her satisfaction. (My dissatisfaction with drugstore prints was the reason I set up my first darkroom, so I sympathize.)

We have to bear in mind that lots of photographers work in less than ideal ways because it's expensive to do it right and they can't afford it.

I once attended a lecture at an Edward Weston show. The prints were obviously made on many different kinds of photo paper, and the lecturer discussed how Weston's interpretation was carefully matched to his materials on a case-by-case basis. Which I think was complete bullshit. Much more likely, he couldn't afford paper and picked up whatever remnant or odd lot of printing paper came his way, and then printed on what he had. Again, I'd been there and done that. That's the way it was for many of my friends at the time, too.

I suspect lack of funds is also why Vivian left behind so many unprocessed rolls of color film as well. She just couldn't afford to get them all processed and printed or proofed.

William: "I recently saw I saw John Maloof's Finding Vivian Maier as well. It is an excellent movie. Maier created the work and Maloof edited it. When you view Maier's home movies, you realize Maloof edited her stills appropriately. Vivian Maier was truly incapable of editing her own work. She was mentally ill-suited for the task. But it is her work. She made the work. Maier is the one who carried the cameras everywhere. She is the one who interacted with her subjects. She filled the frame and she operated the shutter. Maloof invested a great deal of time, effort and money trying to understand Maier. Maloff just didn't start cranking out images hoping to make money and obtain fame. He worked to attempt to understand her. It is better to see her work through his editing than to see none of it."

Gary Nylander: "I though this might be of interest in regards to this article. When photographer Brett Weston turned 80 he destroyed all of his negatives by burning them. He is quoted as saying (from an Associated Press article, December 18, 1991), 'Nobody can print it the way I do. It wouldn't be my work." He went on to say, 'The prints are posterity, not the negatives,' and 'Make that clear. It's my personal work. Nobody can print it.' For some photographers, like Mr.Weston, it's a very clear-cut issue—no one but themselves can print their negatives."

Mike replies: Very true, and a good point. But then, Ansel Adams donated his negatives to the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in part so that students might try to print them and interpret them in their own ways. The CCP archivists don't allow that to happen, because the negatives are too valuable, but that was his idea. Everybody's got a different idea.

Posted on Thursday, 08 May 2014 at 12:42 AM in Photographers, historical, Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (16)

Monday, 24 March 2014

What a Great Comment!

An outstanding brief comment from yesterday, continuing the topic of B&W tonality, from "sneye":

I once tried to illustrate the "emotional gamut" of monochrome. Having allocated one axis to brightness and the other to contrast and then describing the "feel" of different areas of the field obtained, I was impressed with the richness of expression allowed by this seemingly primitive medium. It goes from murky and industrial (low tone, low contrast) to airy and dreamy (high tone, low contrast), to mention only two "moods" (I got to about a dozen). Adding tint and graininess as variables would widen the creative space even further. The possibilities are almost endless. My point is, some colour photographers tend to regard black and white as a monolithic modus operandi. However, being surrealistic to start with monochrome is a vast field of expression. Unlike colour, it can't really go "wrong."

Great comment. Not much I can add to that, but as an aside, doesn't everyone take it for granted that black and white is far richer, more communicative, and more nuanced as a medium for expressive photography than color is? I don't know—not fair to make that assumption any more? Others don't think so? We do almost exclusively use cameras that shoot color c. 2014, and it quite naturally follows that color is the lingua franca of photography today. (This, I think, is a huge change from the 1980s when I got started in photography seriously.)

Another vein of commentary I've been hearing over the past two days during our discussion of B&W is from several people, both in the comments and privately, who point out that only a small percentage of photographers really know how to be creative with B&W and "print" it well (in the broad sense of "print" that Ctein used, meaning presenting it in any fashion, whether post-processed digital for display on the web or a paper print for the wall.)

In other words, not many photographers are very good with digital B&W, but then, not many people could print B&W well in the film era, either. Generally speaking I agree. Whenever any experienced photo-dawg says they like B&W, it has to be tempered with the assumption that what they mean is that they like the 10% of B&W out there that's purposeful, skilled, and deliberate. We're not talking about just any old digisnap that's been desaturated because the colors happened to clash.

Gordon Lewis pitched in on a similar note:

Many if not most of us have an appreciation only for what we have learned or been taught to appreciate. So some people simply have no appreciation for any type of B&W image. Others like only one type of B&W rendering. For those of use who do like to use B&W as a way to show the world, you really hit the nail on the head when you said that the trick is to "develop...a look that you really like and that not only suits but enhances your own work." That can be very difficult. It can also be very rewarding, and in more ways than one.

And finally, James Eaton asked:

I was interested in your comment about the learning curve on conversion to B&W. I have the same issue. So I wondered about this possibility: could you post a straight from-the-camera color photo and invite readers to do a conversion, documenting their process? It might be interesting to crowd-source this issue.

BWmike-4-smallIn February 2012 we asked readers to interpret the same file in B&W.

Interesting it indeed would be, but we've already done it. (I guess that's one of the problems with a "mature" blog like this one—we don't cover what we've covered before, but maybe lots of people haven't been following along religiously and quite naturally missed the topic the first time around. Anyway, here is the link:

Interpreting Black and White Part I

If you don't care to take the time to read that earlier post, you can get the gist of it just by looking at the pictures.

I see to my consternation that I never finished writing "Interpreting Black and White Part II"! Uh-oh. That was a mistake. I have a half-finished Part II in the stack but never followed through.

Sorry. Bad...

...Mike!-
(Thanks to sneye, Gordon, and James)

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Camp: "Painters since the Renaissance have had a reasonably complete color palette to work with, but some significant painters, from Rembrandt to Picasso, have spent time working in near-monochrome. (And drawing and printing is often simply black and white.) So B&W has always had a dramatic appeal. I think, though, that B&W only works (in an artistic sense) with really good photos. Color adds punch to photos that otherwise might be unremarkable."

Don: "'Doesn't everyone take it for granted that black and white is far richer, more communicative, and more nuanced as a medium for expressive photography than color is?' That's an out of character, unusually sweeping statement. The problems with colour are what makes it more expressive but harder to do well. If you take that 2D graph example, that B&W has a range on two axes for brightness and contrast, for colour you can add a third dimension—a rainbow of possibilities. Colours can be associated with emotion (psychology) and an era, and like it or not with computers we have phenomenal control over how we express those colours. If B&W were really so special, how come the art galleries are hung with colorful oil paintings and not charcoal sketches? Ditto man's earliest art—cave paintings filled with colour? I think you may have allowed your passion for B&W to colour your vision!"

Mike replies: Nicely argued and nicely written, yet you misunderstand me pretty thoroughly. 1. It's not a contest, and one doesn't win nor the other lose. 2. It has nothing to do with me; I wasn't expressing my opinion. I'm a color photographer now, like most, and I'm not anybody's arbiter of anything.

The view I expressed and that you quoted was simply the prevailing view throughout the history of photography up until at least the 1990s. It was taken for granted. Color was considered vulgar, commercial, decorative, literal, workmanlike, and unartistic, the poor stepchild of "real" photography. Photographers who committed to color before then were being bold and making a departure from convention; they were taking a risk, a stand. I was merely trying to make a point about how much that old view has changed. Sorry my meaning wasn't clear! I have appointments all day today and I was writing in a rush.

Dave Karp: "Regarding the idea of various interpretations and styles, it is good to point out that even within one photographer's set of work, interpretation or style may change. Ansel Adams' work demonstrates this phenomenon. People generally associate his work with dramatic vast landscapes, but he started with a very different approach. Even after his embrace of 'straight' photography his work changed and progressed to that dramatic style many remember. Even within my own work, I have made adjustments that impact the look and feel of my photographs. Changes in brands or types of papers, developers, and toning processes impact the look and feel of your work and these choices change over time and interact with 'artistic' choices to impact a photographer's prints."

Mike replies: The late David Vestal used to argue against "vintage prints" for this reason. He felt that later prints made by the same photographer were usually both better prints and also embodied the photographer's most evolved vision and style; whereas the market preferred (and prefers) prints made closest to the time the exposure was made, feeling that they are more authentic and more of the moment. I've personally always felt that as long as the photographer makes the prints or is working with the printer-person of his or her choice, then the print is valid—sometimes earlier ones are better, sometimes later ones are. But certainly every photographer should have the artistic right to revisit, re-evaluate, and remake his or her own work.

(Awkward that "printer" means both "printing machine" and "person who makes prints." Another unfortunate accident of arbitrary terminology.)

Posted on Monday, 24 March 2014 at 11:23 AM in Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (33)

Sunday, 23 March 2014

Important Clarification

So there's that old joke. Man says to his wife, "Honey, you look nice today." Wife answers, "Are you saying I don't look nice every other day?"

In the Sigma DP2M post on Friday, I didn't mean to imply that the Foveon Merrill sensor is the only one that can create natural-looking B&W. It looks to me like it does, but it's not the only one. I also wrote, "I'm seeing excellent digital B&W much more often now, and from different cameras, for example from the E-M5 and the latest Fujis."

Which is like the husband in the joke saying "honey, you look nice today," and then adding, "...of course, you usually do." But I meant it.

I also said, of the rendering of highlights in digital B&W, "...this has been getting better and better over the years, as equipment improves and as digital photographers improve (both of which are happening, I think)." That was meant to imply that, yes, it's partially a matter of individual technique, as Ctein and others asserted at greater length.

There's also the issue, which I did not explore, of peoples' tastes in B&W tonality being different. That's one of the nice things about B&W; it admits of lots of different interpretations and styles. Maybe some of the harsh gradation I see was done on purpose.

It's impossible to fully develop every aspect of every argument or assertion or contention in every post. But saying I like the tonality I was seeing from the Foveon sensor doesn't imply that nothing else looks nice.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Richard Newman: "I'm curious, did you try your D800e in B&W? Its supposed to have excellent dynamic range, especially at lower ISO settings, so it should be able to handle the highlights well. And of course resolution is good, so it seems a good candidate for B&W imaging."

Mike replies: Yes, I've done a lot of B&W with Ye Big Dragoon (the D800—I tested the D800e but bought the cooking version). It's capable, and yet I don't get results I'm quite 100% happy with. As you know there are a thousand ways to convert to B&W in digital imaging, though, so it may well be that I'm just not far enough up the learning curve with it yet, or haven't found the best conversion method/workflow for me. More recently I've been doing the most B&W with the NEX-6.

Lars S.: "Coincidentally I just came across an interview with Michael Ernest Sweet, in which he says: 'I could care less about having 50 shades of gray in a photograph. It's not interesting. I'm not Ansel Adams. I don't care about the tones. You could photocopy my photographs and they would look the way I would like them to—gritty and rough, edgy.'"

Mike replies: That falls under the heading of what I said about B&W admitting of lots of different interpretations and styles. And also by coincidence, I was just looking at Michael Ernest Sweet's work.

I've always said that you have to take mature artists at their word—meaning, you have to assume that the way their work looks is the way they want it to look.

Bernie: "It looks like Gianni Galassi has read your monochrome musings and answered. He has posted his monochrome workflow on his website."

Mike replies: That could be very helpful—to those who want their conversions to look like Gianni's. Like Michael Ernest Sweet's, his is a very distinctive style. It works very well for his photographs. If you look at Gianni's B&W style and then look at Michael's, the big difference between them becomes readily obvious.

This is part of the fun and challenge of black and white, without question—developing a look that you really like and that not only suits but enhances your own work.

Posted on Sunday, 23 March 2014 at 12:50 PM in Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (11)

Friday, 21 March 2014

The Sigma DP2 Merrill and B&W

After grinding ye olde axe, thanks to several readers' comments I spent an entertaining afternoon yesterday checking out the Sigma DP2 Merrill (DP2M) online...reading reviews and looking at all sorts of online samples. You do that sort of thing too, right? I'm not the only one?

I was specifically looking at the camera's black-and-white ability, and I must say I'm impressed.

I'm not going to take the time to collect permissions to reproduce a lot of examples directly here. For one thing, TOP's blog software limits illustrations to 800 pixels wide, which is not very satisfying. But take a look at this picture by Gianni Galassi, this one by "arcaswissi" (an Arca-Swiss is a fine precision view camera, if the name doesn't bring that up in your head), and this one by "junior learner." Certainly looks promising.

It's all in the highlights
Traditionally the big weakness of digital in my opinion is highlight gradation. In far too many pictures I see, photographers are insensitive to letting highlights blast out to saturated pixels—although I will say this has been getting better and better over the years, as equipment improves and as digital photographers improve (both of which are happening, I think). Sometimes this is done on purpose as a valid artistic choice, for instance in this shot by Gwenaël Piaser. In black-and-white printing this was sometimes referred to as "letting the highlights go to paper white," and it was one of those effects or artistic choices that had to be handled carefully because of its, er, often close resemblance to error and incompetence  :-) .

This is exacerbated by all inexperienced photographers' tendency (in all eras) to make pictures too light.

Even when digital highlights aren't blown, digital highlights have a disconcerting (to my eye) tendency to look dead or empty. There's just not as much going on in them, tonally speaking, as there should be. The Foveon sensor seems to remedy this. Here's an example, by "Zanckr," in which the highlights are just on the edge of being too bright but nevertheless retain that sense of "aliveness" I'm talking about. Tonally, this looks much more like what I could have achieved on film than something I'd expect from digital. To me the lower part of the bust is right on the razor edge of blowing out too much (on my calibrated monitor—your mileage may vary), yet it has just barely enough detail that it just reads as "bright" and not "oops."

Unspectacular specularity
There are also sometimes problems going from specular highlights (areas that should be blown out, such as reflected sunlight, light sources, or bright reflections) to adjacent areas of tone; this also seems to be a strength of Sigma's Merrill sensor, as far as I can tell. For example in this picture by Annie Mallégol or this one by "Tom Hh." Unspectacularly natural.

Here's a picture of selective exposure, where a darker area has been exposed properly and a brighter area has been allowed to go light in the background—this is by Elaine Dudzinski. The tones on the band members are all fine, without letting the shadows drop out, but the overexposed background looks very much like what film could do if properly handled—it looks natural, with good tonal transitions, so it doesn't distract or draw the eye away from the subjects. (I would expect this to look a bit better printed, as ink would banish the slight flatness in the shadows and add a bit more richness.)

In all respects relating to the critical highlights the DP2M looks particularly nice. Looking at random pictures from a variety of photographers you're of course likely to see tonality that's all over the place, but even so, the default with the DP2M looks awfully good tonally. The relationships and transitions seem right.

Here's one last example of a scene in which I might expect ordinary everyday digital to let us down. The picture is by 肖蒙 孙—I hope that name appears right on your computer; I don't know what language it is. I might open up the trouser leg and shoe a bit, although the way it appears is one choice. But we're talking about the highlights. Tonally, the light areas here are great—filmlike in the best sense. There's just no trace of digital ugliness.

Foveons to come
Of course, I'm seeing excellent digital B&W much more often now, and from different cameras, for example from the E-M5 and the latest Fujis. One would expect the Foveon sensors to be particularly good at B&W, of course, just because of the way they work. That seems borne out in the examples I looked at yesterday. Very nice.

The DP2M is on the way out (which may mean discounts), soon to be supplanted by the recently announced DP2 Quattro, which has a new sensor with a completely new architecture. Theoretically, the Quattro should do even better with B&W than the Merrill. It'll be interesting to see if that is borne out in results.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim Kofron: "I did promise I'd check—and setting the DP3M to monochrome WB does sync the back LCD to grayscale. I've always found it amusing that the camera that was meant to shine with color (which it does under many circumstances, in my opinion) puts out fantastic B&W images as well. The files hold up very well to B&W, and print exceptionally well. Although there aren't many samples out from the Quattro (Sigma USA is trotting around giant prints from prototypes), one will expect it to be a bit higher resolution, a stop better with noise, and another generation advance in terms of speed (which will only put them a couple generations behind...  :-) ). In seeing the quattro being handled, they appear to be bringing two top wheel controllers to their very nice ergonomics (the Quick Menu system is great for dealing with setting you care about, custom modes are highly flexible, and manual focusing is surprisingly good). I expect it to be a friendly camera for most photographers to operate.

"I'm loving my DP3M, although I still occasionally jam the camera up to my face in hopes that a viewfinder has magically sprouted. Old habits die hard.

"Also, a shout out to the new SPP software. The monochrome mode they've added into the software is a lot of fun to use, and does a great job. The caveat is that this is not Lightroom, where you're blasting through 1000 wedding photos. Think of it as your chemical darkroom, but much faster—and you'll be happy. Perspective is everything."

[Jim is a longtime Sigma/Foveon maven who showed me a lot of very impressive big prints made with this sensor when it was new. I wrote about that experience in a post called "The Sigma Bigprint Unofficial National Tour" in March of '12. —Ed.]

Steve Pritchard: "I find this sort of article very helpful in furthering my understanding of what makes a good B&W photograph. When I look at my own conversions I can tell there's something not quite right at times, but I occasionally find myself at a loss to identify what it is specifically, and therefore how to go about rectifying it. Information like this really helps. I should have spent less time in the snooker hall and more in the darkroom, I guess. Anyway, thanks Mike. A good read, much appreciated."

Mike replies: One of the great advantages of art school was that we (a class or group) frequently discussed the aesthetic effects of the technical aspects of prints, both B&W and color.  That helps both to help you see what is happening in a print—right or wrong—and to help guide you to a personal aesthetic preference. It also becomes easier to learn to match technique to subject matter and to appreciate printing (and post-processing) styles that diverge from your own chosen style.

At the Corcoran, such discussions were deliberately led by two teachers who often had divergent opinions themselves. That helped to defuse students' tendency to accept a single authority as being an arbiter. On more than one occasion I can recall the two teachers arguing. That really made it clear to us that we had to make up our own minds.

The danger of doing it online is that we're possibly not seeing the same thing as we try to discuss it, but I suppose the benefits outweigh the potential pitfalls!

Jim Woodard: "Don't start this! I just bought a Fuji X-T1."

Mike replies: Don't worry, it's not like other sensors can't do B&W. There's already a Fujifilm X-T1 B&W group on Flickr, although there's not much posted there yet.

Oh, and congratulations!

Ian Christie: "Thanks for an interesting piece on Merrill monochrome. After owning a DP2s for a couple of years, I am a Foveon fan and just bought a DP2M—the price reduction makes it unbeatable value now. The results are spectacular and to my eye they match what I used to get from my Mamiya 6. As for the camera body, it is fine—and the menu system is neat and unfussy. ISO 800 and maybe just above are fine with monochrome. I use it with a Voigtlander 40mm OVF and that works perfectly well."

Peter: "It might be simpler (not to mention more fun) to get the results people want in B&W to shoot B&W film. It addresses the technical limitations and mindset issues. Just sayin'. Like a few other commenters, I'm a big fan of a hybrid workflow—shoot on film, develop, scan, tweak and clean up in Photoshop, print the digital file (I like inkjet for B&W and digital C-prints for color). It's not that hard or expensive...."

Mike replies: Actually it kind of is. That's not a reason not to do it, but I don't think it's deniable that it's both more difficult and more expensive.

Zanckr: "Thank you for featuring my photo. This is a first time to be chosen by someone, so I don't know what to say but it's an honor. If you have time and interest, could you edit my photo as you like, please? I've never learned from someone and now I'm feeling that I really have to study to improve my skill. I had been losing the motivation of taking a photo since the loss of my beloved cat, but it's getting back and this post boosts the motivation."

Hugh (partial comment): "I had no intention of buying a new camera. Looked at the examples, ordered a DP2M. There is a quality to the B&W that I really love."

Robin: "The first two photos especially are very nice illustrations of what can be achieved by a good photographer who knows digital development. But they don't seem to be of significantly better quality than what can be obtained in other digital systems, Micro 4/3 for example. Anyone who manages the tonal range of their image can escape without blown highlights, and can massage the actual tone curve exactly as they might like it for the given image. This to me is an ideal result, since otherwise I might be tempted to buy into the most masochistic digital camera system since the days of hooking up an RS-232 cable to transfer images."

A later comment from Robin: "OK, that didn't take me long. I will need to retract my previous doubts. I have now found images that truly demonstrate the potential of this sensor. Quite unbelievable."

robert e: "There's an interesting technical analysis of saturation behavior of Foveon vs. Bayer sensors here. If I understand correctly, the author proposes that highlights in Foveon images look better because the transition to saturation is more color accurate; the accuracy being due to there being much more color crossover in the Foveon, and thus less chance of one channel blowing out much ahead of the others. I should think that in many cases, this more graceful transition (or lack thereof) would translate in monochrome conversion."

Posted on Friday, 21 March 2014 at 10:23 AM in Camera Reviews, Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (52)

Tuesday, 11 March 2014

The Danger of Revisiting Your Work

OverallGirlandDog

Words and picture by Roger Overall

Something peculiar happened to me the other week. Something quite revealing. It makes me wonder whether we can always trust what a photographer says about the original intention of their work.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been having a discussion with an artist about a large print of a pencil drawing he sent me. My writing skills are not capable of describing the drawing to you. It is complex. Quite frankly, it must have taken weeks to complete, though the artist describes it as merely a study for a much more ambitious piece. We’ve had a short, yet rich, conversation about it. I gave him my interpretation. He gave me his. In places, we met. We also diverged greatly. He spoke about themes of honesty and truth. I saw innocence, fear and strength gained through experience.

It’s not uncommon for people to see things in pictures the artist never intended. We all view paintings and photographs from our own individual perspective. We bring our values and beliefs, together with our particular personal circumstances, to bear on a picture. We make elements of the picture connect with them. As a result, the picture has personal meaning for us. It's as if the artist has peered into our soul and made something just for us. Of course, they haven't. They've produced something personal to them. We’ve just been able to mould it to fit our own needs and perspective.

So far, nothing new had emerged from my interaction with the artist. This is where it gets interesting.

The artist had sent the print as a gift. I wanted to reciprocate. After some thought, I sent him the photograph you see here. To my eyes, it contains many of the themes that we had been talking about in relation to his own picture. It fit our dialogue.

The photograph is a metaphor for a child’s innocence and it is tinged with sadness. Children are easily duped, in particular because they have unfettered imaginations. For instance, Westerners spin a yarn about Father Christmas. Although absurd, children have no problem believing it. Their scant knowledge of the real world and their fertile imaginations combine to make the story utterly believable to them. One day, they will awaken. For now, the ruse gives them joy, so we let them persist in their ignorance.

The girl in the photograph is bonding with the dog in the window. She is drawn to it. There is interaction, communication even, in the coming together of paws and hands. But the dog, if you haven’t already noticed, is fake. Paper mache I’m guessing. That doesn’t matter to the child in the slightest. In her mind it's all real.

Of course, the trance will break. She’ll realise soon enough. She'll be pulled back into the reality of the world on her side of the glass (the world reflected in the window—a metaphor itself for the illusion of reality?). The fake world on the other side of it will cease to exist. She might feel cheated. Or she might feel foolish that she believed the dog was real. Either way, she will have lost some innocence. The cold reality of the physical world will have swept away the glow of her imagined one. It’s only a matter of time before that happens. Not just this instance here, with the paper dog. Every day, every child grows a little more aware of the reality of the world they live in. The world isn’t all bad. No. But neither can it live up to the utopian perfection of a child’s fantasy. Often, to awaken to the real world is to shackle your limitless mind.

Blimey. All that from a photograph of my daughter taken on holiday. None of it intended at the time. The photograph was simply meant to capture a moment of her history. Something she'll enjoy when she's older.

In my professional life, I must often put meaning into photographs when I take them. I intend them at the moment of capture to say something. And while I have had the experience of adding more meaning afterwards, it has always accentuated the original intended one.

In the case of the photograph of my daughter, though, I've created a new story around it years later. A cute photograph that has lain dormant on my drives for several years has now taken a firm place in my consciousness because of meaning I’ve retrospectively placed on it. For me, from where I’ve come from as a storytelling photographer, that’s borderline sacrilegious. Connecting the story after taking the picture? Are you nuts? That’s the kind of thing that gets you drummed out of the club pretty tout de suite. Tar and feathers shall be applied at the door.

It gets worse. I could end up convincing myself and others that I envisaged the meaning from the outset. To avoid the tar and feathers, I could claim that I had the insight in the moment and constructed a photograph around it. To do so would only be human. Witness any footballer (American or otherwise) whose wayward pass ended up winning the game for their team. Was it intentional? In the moment, absolutely not. In the post-match interview, it was utterly premeditated. Played for and got. Over time, the lie becomes an accepted truth that trips off the tongue with complete authority.

My artist friend is built of the right stuff. None of my readings of his work changed his stated intention for the piece. Where they matched, he said so. Where they didn't, he deflected them. Maybe that's why he's an artist and I'm not. Or maybe he was holding on to a previous interpretation handed to him by someone else that he liked better? His own long vanished. I doubt it.

Interesting questions remain. Does the intended meaning in our photographs remain the same over time? Or do we retrospectively add story and meaning to them, claiming them as having been planned?

Roger

Roger Overall is a photographer based in Cork, Ireland. Here's his website. More of his essays for TOP can be accessed in his Category in the right-hand sidebar.

©2014 by Roger Overall, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Frank: "Tar and feathers applied at the door. But for what? I have photographed my world with great enthusiasm since I was a child. For varying reasons. To remember. To make a stunning image of a beautiful experience. To learn. To see how I change. Most days I add a few pictures to my collection. When I delete and edit I usually also browse some other pictures. And sometimes enjoy how differently I see them now as opposed to when I took them. The reason I took them has not changed, but I have. And so may my associations or interpretations when I see them later. No need to lie about the original intent. Tar and feathers applied at the door if we do not grow and change and learn and flex our mind!"

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "Take my advice for whatever it may be worth: smart artists leave meaning to their audience. Whether it's a Moore sculpture, a Chagall drawing, or an Overall photograph, the finished work is like a grown child. It will make its own way, or not, in the world. You relinquished your power to control its destined meaning when you decided it finished and sent it on its way...This is the one lesson I've firmly learned after many years hearing some of our time's most renowned living artists (across media) talk about their work."

Dennis: "This is pretty interesting stuff. This is where I, as someone lacking in education in art appreciation, get hung up. I tend to be cynical when I read artists statements of intent. I can absolutely believe that projects are often started with such intent. But they often sound like words contrived to confound that could have as easily been written afterward as beforehand.

"I've even read about projects that came together after the photographer started noticing a trend in his or her photographs taken over a period of years, and I'm inclined to believe this is common. That a photographer will shoot whatever catches his eye, and then go through his archives and look for themes. And maybe expand on them from that point.  It doesn't seem dishonest to me. Maybe that's the difference between a project/series and a single photo; you can shoot the photos and decide on the series once you decide on the intent, but if you're showing a single image, coming up with a story later isn't the same.  Intent plays a role in art; I don't know enough to know how big a role, but it seems that works created with clear intent are viewed differently by some than works created without that intent.

"In any case, it's a very lovely photo, and I like your interpretation of it.  (I think a lot of us see lost innocence in photos of children)."

Rodger Kingston: "Garry Winogrand famously said, 'I photograph to see what the world looks like photographed.' That suggests to me that he was at least as interested in discovering what was in the image he'd made as he was in capturing what he'd seen and responded to in the first place. I find new stuff in my old photos occasionally and think of them as being something like discovering a piece of chocolate in a package I'd thought was empty."

Robert Roaldi: "I read a quote (not exact) by the novelist Margaret Atwood (I think), who was doing a Q&A after a reading. Someone in the audience had mentioned some theme or idea that he had observed while reading her work and asked if she had intended it that way? She answered that if he saw it in there, she was prepared to take the credit for it."

Posted on Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 11:02 AM in Photographic aesthetics, Roger Overall | | Comments (34)

Monday, 03 March 2014

Mike Starts a Fight

This morning I am consigned to Starbucks. Ach. Exile!

Starting a fight was the last thing on my mind when I wrote that post about coffee yesterday, but it provoked a very bitter response from a (now former?) TOP reader named James, who thinks I have very bad judgment about coffee and concluded that therefore I probably also must have very bad judgment about photography, too. He wrote:

I've heard your story before from many other people. I have to imagine that tens of thousands of people would claim that they roast better coffee at home than they can buy. What seems more likely to you, that tens of thousands of people are simply biased in favor of their own DIY creations, or that craft coffee is a fancy sham? And all of the qualification that it's just your own subjective preference? It still reads as humblebrag to me. And I don't like it, and I'm willing to credit you less even about photography because of it.

I did not see that coming, I admit.

I defended myself as best I could (you can read the whole exchange in the Comments section if you care to), noting that home-roasters like me can afford to use better beans and can control freshness—timing—much more easily. To quote me own self:

I just ate some steamed broccoli, and it was better than any broccoli I've ever had at a restaurant. (Really, it was.) That just means I waited until the store had a fresh batch, handpicked the best looking bunch, fixed it just the way I like it, and then ate it sixty seconds after it came off the stove. It doesn't mean I think I'm a better cook than every restaurant chef.

The more I think of it, though, the more that I think this disagreement has some pretty strong parallels to personal photography.

I used to make a similar argument way back in times past about home darkroom workers vs. custom printers. Home-roasted coffee is actually quite comparable to what a skilled amateur printer could do in a home darkroom compared to the output of a commercial custom or exhibition printer. You could often do much better work because you weren't constrained by the amount of paper you could use or the amount of time you could spend, whereas the professional printer was heavily constrained by both. You had the luxury of working on your own presumably consistent negatives, with the same materials over and over again. He might have greater skills and much greater adaptability—better ability to cope with a range of deficiencies in negatives from a wide variety of sources, the quality of which ran the gamut—but even so he couldn't necessarily overcome your inherent advantages within the restrictions of the commercial setting.

John Gossage relates that Charlie Pratt used to work all day to get a print as close to right as he could get it, then he'd let it sit for three days while he contemplated it, and then he'd get back to work on it and refine it till it was just right. On the other hand, a commercial printer I knew well at the time, at a high-end lab, when printing the lab's highest-priced custom product, was given a maximum of three sheets of paper per print and had to print a minimum of five negatives an hour. Whose prints do you think were better? Or at least, whose prints do you think looked better to Charlie?

Even stronger is the issue of calibrating the results to personal preference. I've got a supply of beans called "Geisha" (Panama Geisha Hacienda La Esmerelda) that have won prestigious competitions and are a consensus choice among connoisseurs as being among the very best. Guess what? I don't like Geisha as much as I like Phil's Kona. By trying many premium green beans and picking the ones I like best, then buying those in bulk and roasting them again and again, I'm tailoring my process to my personal and perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic tastes. Professional roasters and baristas, when they're trying for a result of the highest quality (which they don't have the luxury of doing very often), are aiming either at what they think is best or what they think most people will think is best. That's not the same as what I would like best. Reverting back to the parallel with the custom printer: note that even with the most skilled printer in the world, the photographer's input is still essential. Voja Mitrovic is a legendary custom printer, but Peter Turnley still works with him to get each of his prints just right. (Actually those two know each other so well now that they're on autopilot to a significant degree; Voja knows what Peter likes and Peter trusts Voja to eke the best result out of his negatives.) Ctein is doing some work for me now, and he's a supremely skilled printer, but he'll still send me proofs so I can suggest changes. And we'll go back and forth as many times as we need to until the prints are just right...according to me. That's not a sign of weakness or lack of skill; it's an accepted and necessary part of the process for a really good custom printer working for an art photographer.

Was I a better printer than Voja? No, but with my favorite film exposed and developed by me, printing with my equipment and materials, with the luxury of all the paper I wanted and as much time as I wanted to spend, and with my own preferences being the only preferences that I needed to satisfy, yes, I was. And that ain't "humblebrag." (That was a new word to me.)

The parallel extends to editing—and this is where amateur photographers can be "truer to themselves" than other people could be if they were editing the work. Pros shoot and edit based on an exogenous—outward-oriented—standard. They have to provide pictures that conform to a standard, accepted idea of what's "good," so as to please their clients and their clients' broader constituencies. Amateurs, on the other hand, beholden to no one but themselves, can afford to be much more idiosyncratic—as idiosyncratic as they like, actually. And sometimes, the more so the better. I've always considered it a sign of emerging maturity when a student first becomes able to reject conventionally "good" and "perfect" shots from the raw mass of his or her shooting, and begin to choose less perfect, less standard, but more personal and expressive shots to work with.

Maybe you disagree. But then, if you do, it still kinda proves my point, doesn't it? You get it the way you want it. Your personal photography belongs to you, and no one else. And no one else gets to tell you you're wrong about your choices, or what you like and don't. Quite a luxury, when you think about it.

Mike
(Thanks to James Liu)

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Pen Waggener: "Mike, I have to agree with you on this one. I've run a small-town coffeeshop for nearly a decade, and we've been roasting our own beans in tiny batches since way before it was cool—including some of Phil's Kona when I remember to order it. Our bean this morning was a funky Dry-Process Guji Shakiso Ethiopian that we got from Sweet Maria's, and I know a few customers are going to be very excited about it, and another few are gonna call me out because it's too different from our other offerings. I think we make really great coffee, but business requires compromise, and you have the luxury at home to tailor your compromises very specifically to your personal tastes and budget."

Rob: "Haters gonna hate."

Mike replies: I don't think James is a hater at all. In fact I know he's not; he's very thoughtful. I'll be sorry if I lose him as a reader. I didn't mind his comment. It was cogent and he expressed his opinion clearly. I disagree with him in this case and take issue with his characterization of me, but that doesn't even necessarily mean he's wrong. Maybe I just haven't had enough exposure to really good craft coffee. As I said, I'm not an expert by any stretch.

V.I. Voltz: "When I recently worked with a custom printer I paid a daily rate and supplied the paper. I do not pay by the print. That is the way to get the very best output you can."

Mike replies: Smart.

Tim: "I don't know how to tell you this, and I hope you're sitting down, but I don't automatically trust your opinions. Bet that as it may, I almost invariably find them presented in an entertaining—and, sometimes, even enlightening—way, but I also find that I always have to combine your opinions with others, including my own, on a given subject. Shocking! (I will probably never roast my own coffee, but I certainly drink enough to have enjoyed this article.)"

Daniel: "f you are in the mood to experiment, I'd recommend my pals at Entimos. They started off as home-roasters too a while back and now roast as a company. On your scale of 1–10 I'd rank them at 11, but I might be biased.  :-) 

"And since you're into books, I'll pass along one I consistently hear coffee geeks reference: Everything But Espresso: Professional Coffee Brewing Techniques. It's pretty highly renowned if you can find a copy."

Mike replies: That was the most helpful technical book I found. I based a lot of my method on it.

JTW: "From personal experience (with purchased, decent quality, beans) I was amazed at the difference that a change in burr grinders made. At some time Mike, when the mood strikes, can you venture into the mine field of burr grinders for coffee beans?"

Mike replies: I would if I could research it sufficiently. I haven't come up to speed on the subject enough to make recommendations. But a good burr grinder is reputed by many experts—including Scott Rao, the author of the book mentioned just above—to make the biggest difference of anything when you're trying to improve your morning cup. And that was my experience.

James Liu [the James of the post —Ed.]: "Mike, I'm glad you took my comment the right way. I for my part, would not consign you to Starbucks.

"As for access to beans, I'm not even entirely sure you have the very best access to beans like you think. Cafe Imports (and a couple others), who sell wholesale, has a much deeper line than Sweet Maria's, probably more than Sweet Maria's and all the rest put together. In fact, I bet you that your retail green suppliers pick and choose green from a couple of specialty importers themselves. Next, if you're a pro roaster, the importer will send you samples of a bunch of different coffees (potentially more than 20) from each origin and you taste them side by side in a cupping. Then you order the one you want based on your tastes (in collaboration with people whose palates you trust) and you buy that coffee and dial it in over the course of several production roasts. Many roasters have 'direct trade' relationships with farmers where they talk about what works and what doesn't (harvest, processing, nutrients added to the soil, and so on), which microlots from what parts of the farm are worth special attention, and so on. If you're Intelligentsia or one of several other roasters, you're also your own importer and can have even more impact on the beans going back to farm. I can go on. The point is that I know roasters have more control, and there are some that I trust with getting it right, and some (among those) I expect to roast in line with my subjective preferences.

"No, I've never roasted commercially before, but I was a pretty serious barista, and I had some aspirations to roast and even took steps toward that goal once.

"As for your cooking and home printing analogies, I get what you mean. One time, I made some scallops for friends and it was very well received. A week later, one friend even told me that the scallops I made were better than what he ordered from Longman and Eagle (who have earned a Michelin star). I told him of course mine were better, I had all afternoon and evening to cook one dish for a few friends, and the restaurant has to make a full menu for guests.... It's like the commercial printer. There are so many constraints on what gets put on a plate at a restaurant, and the amount of attention that any single plate gets. I'm confident that every single line cook at Longman is better at cooking than I am. I still think I cook better than what the restaurant can turn out when I mean to. (That's not humblebrag, that's just plain brag.) So of course your broccoli is better.

"Where I depart is that I don't think coffee roasting belongs in that category. Cooking and (commercial) printing are more analogous than either is to roasting. I think roasting coffee is more akin to baking baguettes, or barbecue—worthwhile as a hobby, but the true artisans are going to simply blow you out of the water because the ten-thousand-hours rule and the equipment matter a great deal more. Some things work better at scale. A commercial wood-burning oven for the baguette, the capacity to low-and-slow over smoke whole racks of ribs at a time, those matter. It's not quite making your own car or DSLR because you want to, but it's a little farther in that direction than I think you're giving the industry credit for."

Mike replies: I can accept all that. Thanks.

Gildas: "My favorite coffee was the stuff my gran would home roast (in her oven) and then grind a spoonful just before making a cuppa. The smell and taste made the whole world perfect. She got the knack of doing it because the only good coffee available in her region of France post WWII was green beans straight off the boat in big over-the-shoulder bags normally sold to factories that make filter coffee. She got the habit and never stopped I guess."

Posted on Monday, 03 March 2014 at 12:24 PM in Editing and Portfolios, Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (63)

Monday, 10 February 2014

The Mystery of Fashion

Got the following comment from Thomas McInnis about the Victoria Will shot I posted the other day:

I am a die hard fashion photography fan, and this is a gorgeous documentary photograph. I think the biggest hurdle for a lot of people (particularly in North America and certainly here in Australia) is access to good fashion photography. Despite the leveling effect of the Internet, it's the kind of thing that is hard to find unless you already know where to look.

What you see in American Vogue and Harpers et al. is somewhat of a sanitised survey of Pop Fashion Photography. It's like going to the record store and seeing one of those bargain-bin "Best Opera Love Songs" CD sets and assuming (not unjustly) that this Opera stuff is a bit naff!

The industry-leading Nick Knight specified in an interview recently that fashion photography is not photography...but his work is closer to illustration sometimes, and particularly now he is working more with motion rather than stills. I would highly recommend, if you ever have a chance, a look at the monograph of Viviane Sassen, In and Out of Fashion, published by Prestel. It might be a nice counterpoint to what you typically encounter of fashion photography. :-)

As one who finds "fashion photography" (and fashion) a bit opaque, I'm always interested to learn more about what I'm ignorant about. Anyone else have an opinion about the Viviane Sassen book?

Here's the Nick Knight interview. I won't embed it because it's got some nudity in it and so probably doesn't qualify as work- and school-friendly. Speaking of which, the cover of the Sassen book is a nude as well.

Mike
(Thanks to Thomas)

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Mattias: "Well, I have never been keen on fashion photography and have no such book in my photobook collection, but Viviane Sassen's photography managed to pry my eyes wide open and for the first time reconsider. Her strong originality, especially her graphical compositions and fun way of using colour, and the immense sense of mystery in the images have captivated me. I see almost only art and very little to no product marketing in her images and that appeals to me."

Ed Hawco: "Check out the video embedded in this blog post for a glimpse at how illustration-layered some fashion photography can be."

Mike replies: That's astonishing, although I have to say that if I had to do that for a living I'd jump off a building.

Yoram: "Also recommended is The Fashion Book: New and Expanded Edition by Phaidon."

Simon Griffee: "The Victoria Will still shot spoke more to me about fashion than Nick Knight's seven minute video."

Don: "I have no real knowledge of the fashion business but I find Viviane Sassen's work irresistable. I'm not even totally sure why, but I think there is a sculptural quality to her photography that I love. There's also a certain sense of fun and perhaps of not taking things too seriously, though I might be mis-interpreting the latter point. I would also recommend In and Out of Fashion for anyone interested in Sassen's work."

Posted on Monday, 10 February 2014 at 10:10 AM in Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (17)

Saturday, 25 January 2014

Vintage Mike: The Grays Camera

[Originally published in Black & White Photography magazine c. 2006]

By Mike Johnston

I'm nearing the half-century mark in age, and I've been in love with pictures since early childhood, when my parents, bless their hearts, allowed me to clip out my first "collection" from the pages of old National Geographic magazines. Fortunately my love of pictures continued and my sanguine acceptance of vandalism did not.

My biggest problem with photography these days is one that fits right in with the mission of the magazine you hold in your hands: for the most part, I don't like color photographs as well as black and white ones.

Yes, I know that many human beings are wired to feel the opposite. My little boy startled me at age five when he offered his first critique of Daddy's artwork. He had asked me to take a picture of how small his watermelon hard candy had gotten in his mouth, opening his mouth wide and presenting the remarkably diminished candy on his tongue. Never one to refuse a proffered photo opportunity, I took the picture. Later, though, when I showed the print to him, he launched into a tirade that I still think is wonderful: "Daddy, you need a new camera. Your camera is a grays camera. You need a colors camera. When you buy another camera next time you should make sure it has colors in it." And so forth. It was a pure critique, succinct and pointed—art criticism direct from a five-year-old heart.

I have an old friend, Kim Kirkpatrick, a (color) photographer who teaches at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, who I know has a visceral attraction to colors for their own sake. He's a gardener, and he'll plant particular flowers just because of their colors. He and his wife used to drive around to look at Christmas lights just for the pure visual pleasure all those colors offered. Once in a while, the point of one of his photographs might be summed up with a comment such as, "just look at that orange!" Kim doesn't just see colors. He feels them. Others can't even really "see" his gardens, I suspect, even if they are sensitive to the arrangements of colors, because I'm sure he plans for the colors to shift and change as various plants go into and out of bloom. It's an artwork in time that itself unfolds like a blossom, with a pace across the season and a life that progresses in phases and stages. Seeing it once is like seeing two minutes of a movie: you can't get the whole picture, the whole effect.

Whenever in my life I have mimicked a successful photographer, it has been with color photographs. My "best seller" is a color 5x4 photograph of a distant sunlit yellow canoe on a lake at dusk under a cloudy blue-gray sky. It would have served as the "cool with warm accent" shot we were required to do in my basic color theory class in school. People love it, and no doubt they would love it much less in black and white.

Oddly enough, too, I have a well-developed color sense and I’m fastidious about color. My brother, now a Ph.D. psychologist in Rhode Island, once worked for Dr. Norman Rosenthal, who developed the diagnosis and treatment for seasonal affective disorder or SAD. They had for one reason or another developed a series of color perception tests where test subjects were presented with mixed-up colored disks representing a scale of slight variations in hue, value, or chroma and asked to arrange them in order. I aced the tests. I find I’m quite sensitive to the polluted colors common in tri-layer films and papers, what Dr. Bertram Miller called “arrastres” in his color photographic theory. Given an adequately calibrated monitor and printer, I'm very good at color corrections, and I often dislike what passes for "adequate" color correction in other photographers’ work: it sometimes seems obvious that they can't see what their own pictures need.

Old analog techniques
I've never really liked color photography from a technical standpoint. Digital color is better than the color of most analog techniques. The history of color analog techniques is a history of make-do, of never-quite-good-enough. I was repelled by Cibachrome, unless it was masked; John Szarkowski, the great curator, was so disturbed by carbro prints that he seldom showed the work of Paul Outerbridge, who worked in carbro. The only traditional color methods I really cared much for at all were the very rare Kodak Azochrome process (a sort of midway point between color and black and white), dye transfer, and, sometimes, Kodachrome 25 (not 64), provided that the subject luminances matched the film's scale adequately. Digital color is getting better, but it's "simple" in that there are just not enough colors represented in the average DSLR color palette, to my eye at least—digital prints miss the subtle variations seen in large format color. But they are more often much more pure, which is an improvement.

But still, there is just something about color that robs photography of what photography offers me at its best. I think most people have an emotional response to color, which can then be educated and refined by practice, delectation, and connoisseurship. But to me there is just something so pat about color snaps—so quotidian. There is no mystery to them. Or something. I really have no idea, you see, what it is. Tones of gray move me, and colors don't.

This is often lumped into the common criticism, "color is too decorative," a tidbit of dismissive wisdom I think began to circulate in the 1970s. "Color is distracting" is another once-common cavil.

I'm not sure either of those things ever really meant anything to me. Neither accusation has any power any more; where black and white was once the standard and color had to prove itself, the situation is now fast reversing. But it's not a political position in my view. It's a matter of personal response. What seems to be the bottom line for me is that black and white grabs me, satisfies some gut need; it speaks to me. I have an appetite for it, a love for it that is emotional, somehow, native, and wordless at its root. I drink it in. Color doesn't slake that thirst or nourish me as much. Somehow the way that black and white transforms the world makes the subject of the picture more real to me, even though it's less literal—richer, even though there's less information there. It's as if it shows the bones of reality beneath the surface flesh of colors, the truth behind the world's mask. Maybe that's just me.

KellerrichardcolorBWPProud New Papa Richard, with Keller: A pleasant enough
family snapshot in color...

KellerrichardBWforBWP...Achieves much more richness, resonance, balance, and emotional depth in black and white. I simply find it more satisfying. Other
peoples' mileage, of course, varies.

Tones move me, colors don't
I've been shooting more in color recently, because I'm shooting more digital and color is digital's natural mode, at least in the technology that's available to me. My friend Carl Weese once said that digital is the coming of age of color photography, and I think he's right. Yes, you can convert color digital pictures to black and white, and I often do. But how silly is that? You take a Bayer array, that devotes four photosites of three colors to every "parcel" of light rays, and then arrives at intermediate colors by very complicated extrapolation algorithms. How much simpler it would be to simply record value only—that is, illuminance—at every single photosite! Black and white sensors would have more resolution as the same number of megapixels in color, and the processing would be considerably simpler. Perhaps the dynamic range could be better, too. I hope we'll have dedicated black and white sensors someday soon, even though most people can't see why we should want them. I do. I like "grays cameras."

In the meantime, I shall continue to photograph in color, convert it when I can, and miss the days when the colors of photography, as Robert Frank once famously quipped, were black and white.

Mike

Copyright 2006, 2014 by Michael C. Johnston

[Note: This post is a "rerun." I've been recuperating from a health event and trying to minimize workload, so the Comments Section has been closed for most of these rerun posts. However, I'm feeling better, so I'll keep the Comments open for this one. It might be a good way to ease back into work. —Ed.]

Posted on Saturday, 25 January 2014 at 11:40 AM in Photographic aesthetics, Reruns | | Comments (24)

Thursday, 16 January 2014

Fashion and Fad in Fine Photography

This week's column by Ctein

Mike's thought-provoking column on "Connectedness" raised the question: whither goest photography...or prints, anyway?

Personally, I don't have a clue. But it may be instructive to take a quick, anecdotal look at history. It's true that prints have dominated, ever since the invention of the printable negative, by numbers, but the dominance has been sociologically complicated.

Artistically, printing became very important in photography because it allowed alteration. Software "art filters" are just the latest incarnation of a concept that goes back to the very earliest days of printmaking. Back then, considerable effort went into producing prints that emulated, in some fashion or another, painting or drawing. It was the aesthetic. That's what people thought a visual rendition ought to look like. Impressionism was a dominant form in photographic prints (an interesting turnabout, as it was photography's realism that, in significant part, drove the development of Impressionism).

That changed when the ƒ/64 folk and their ilk threw down the gauntlet and declared that fine photography should be inherently realistic. Although wrapped in the flag of artistic sensibility, it was at least as much a pragmatic decision. Making a photographic print look like a painting or drawing is really hard work! Making a straight photographic print is child's play by comparison. Elevating the straight print to the pinnacle of aesthetic sensibility had utilitarian virtues.

That's driven a lot of the sensibilities about photography. Up through the middle of the last century, it was almost all about prints for commerce as well as art. Kodachrome poked a hole in that, and the invention of easily-processed chromogenic slide films tipped the scale entirely. It was so much easier getting a sheet of film developed than having a tri-color carbro or dye transfer print made. Those of you who have been doing photography a long time no doubt heard the near-universal assertion that the only way you could get really good press reproduction was to start with a slide. That was why important and commercially successful photographers used slide film, as well as eliminating the vagaries of print production from the workflow.

But, if you've been doing photography a really, really long time, you know that that assertion was bogus. When chromogenic films started to encroach in a major way on the commercial photography business in the early '50s, printing houses and press operators swore that you couldn't get good reproduction from a slide; you had to work from a print.

It was only about what they knew how to do, but such prejudices have force. By the time I got into photography, in the late 1960s, most printing houses had forgotten how to deal with prints and slides had become the canon. Utilitarianism again. If you were serious about color photography, either artistically or commercially, you used slide film. Fine (darkroom) printing be damned.

Technically it was nonsense, but it was the accepted social norm. My impression is that it remained so until slide films became increasingly difficult to obtain and get processed, all while color negative films and processing became ever more ubiquitous. In other words, not very long ago.

On a parallel track, for a very long time there was a commonly held prejudice that it was black-and-white that made for serious photography; color was a frivolity. Serious photographers didn't work in color. A large fraction of the fine art photography galleries wouldn't even entertain color.

If you think that had nothing to do with the fact that most photographers who were printers could not come close to mastering color, I will be happy to sell you a bridge. The one of your choice; I can provide deeds of title to any of them.

Convenience drives lofty aesthetic sentiments and photography more than many wish to admit. What does that say about the future of photography? In the long-term, absolutely nothing. You can't predict those kind of trends, although we all have opinions. In the short term, so long as electronic conveyance, through various media and channels, becomes more the norm and more convenient, I'm pretty certain that you will see this elevated to the level of an aesthetic, because, in photography, convenience frequently is.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Or, for that matter, working just for screen images, viz. this column. Just keep in mind that the sensibilities and pronouncements are likely to continue to change with technology and convenience.

Ctein

Ctein's column, a day late this week, usually occurs on Wednesdays.

©2014 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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Posted on Thursday, 16 January 2014 at 03:03 AM in Ctein, Photo-tech, Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (24)

Wednesday, 13 November 2013

In Search of a Vocabulary for Image Quality

This week's column by Ctein

A week back, David Dyer-Bennet had an interesting comment on Mike's column, "Do You Really Need Full Frame?" It's worth looking up; in part it read:

We really need to find some way to demonstrate in controlled conditions ... using "pictorial" subjects (not test charts) ... The "tonality differences" that some people see in medium-format vs. 35mm, or today in full-frame vs. Micro 4/3 or whatever.

This relates to a problem I've been wrestling with for several years. How can we describe image quality more fully? I'm pretty well convinced that there are different "looks" to different formats and lenses. The problem figuring out how to analyze them is that we're lacking in a proper vocabulary (I mean that both colloquially and technically). Without such, it's very hard to create the comparisons. Whether it's with test charts or pictorial subjects you can only test for what you can describe. Without the right descriptor, you don't even know what to be looking at.

Example 1: Back in the (mostly) predigital age, British photo magazine writer Roger Hicks and I discussed the "looks" of different film formats quite a bit. We came to the tentative conclusion that what visually distinguished larger format from 35mm (and sometimes medium format) was not resolution and sharpness, as most people opined. We thought it was the disappearance of grain, so that you got clear, transparent tonality with no distracting noise. It took us a while to come to that understanding, because resolution and grain were intimately coupled in film.

Once we had digital photography of some quality, where noise and resolution became substantially independent parameters, comparison images made it clear that our instincts were right. But one couldn't design such comparisons without the right descriptor of the differences.

Example 2: My intuition says there's a lot more to bokeh, analytically, than most folks think. Bokeh isn't directly important to my photographs; I minimize distinctly out-of-focus areas as much as possible, plus I'm pretty insensitive to the nuances of bokeh even when they are present. But I think that indirectly it might have a great deal to do with how a lens "looks."

It's like this: I strongly suspect I can grossly quantify bokeh in terms of a spatial frequency power spectrum as a function of the distance-from-correct-focus. I'm pretty sure I could tell, crudely, good from bad bokeh just by looking at those curves. Harsh bokeh, for example, has a lot more high-frequency power than smooth bokeh.

Why should this connect to the overall "look" of a lens? Because, except for photographs of landscapes at effective infinity, just about no photographs are entirely in focus. The amount of defocus is held down to some tolerable blur circle (your acceptable depth of field), but that is distinctly larger and more diffuse than a pinpoint. The power distribution of spatial frequencies in that little bitty circle, kind of a mini-bokeh, affects the visual rendering—how edges are delineated from broad tonal areas, how microcontrast is enhanced or suppressed, etc.

It even affects depth of field, that range of distances over which subjects appear acceptably sharp. How much edge frequencies are enhanced or suppressed in out-of-focus areas alters our perception of sharpness. Harsh bokeh looks sharper. Even more subtly, the transition from acceptably-sharp to not-acceptable will be affected by that power spectrum.

I have a suspicion that this is all very well understood by the best lens designers (who are either nodding in agreement or laughing their heads off at my speculations), but it's not stuff they discuss with us mere mortals. Lacking a proper vocabulary for understanding this, it's next to impossible for us to devise (let alone analyze) meaningful comparison photographs. And that's only one aspect of lens quality that we find ourselves fumbling over.

Example 3: How about them cameras? Oren Grad and I have been noodling, on and off for years, with the problem of describing how digital cameras render spatial detail. Oren is preternaturally sensitive to the way spatial frequencies get portrayed, as sensitive to those as I am to color. (I can perceive 1/2 CC color differences; on occasion, 1/4 CC.) I can just barely see image characteristics that jump out at him (and grate on his sensibilities like fingernails on a chalkboard). I think he may be picking up on nonlinearities in how spatial frequencies get transformed.

In film photography, we often looked to the "modulation transfer function" (MTF)—how strongly different spatial frequencies are rendered. For example, suppose some MTF curve indicates that at 30 line pair per millimeter, the contrast is 50%. What that means is that spatial frequencies of 30 lp/mm will be reproduced with only 50% as much contrast as they had originally.

Now, there's an assumption there, which is linearity. It doesn't matter what the original contrast was; whatever it is, it's cut in half. The real world doesn't behave quite so nicely, but for film it was a good enough approximation.

It's not so good for digital cameras. There's a huge amount of internal signal processing that goes on before we get our grubby mitts on the photograph (even with RAW). Overall, it makes the photographs look better; we'd be a lot less satisfied with our cameras without it. But it doesn't make any pretense of linearity.

For instance, the canonical way of dealing with noise is to selectively suppress high spatial frequencies of low contrast. In any kind of noise suppression system, the MTF for low contrast subject material will be less than it is for high and the difference between the two will be greater for higher spatial frequencies. That's just one example of what can go on in a digital camera. A real digital camera doesn't just have one MTF curve, it has a whole family of them that are highly subject dependent.

Therein lies our problem. How do we concisely describe these kinds of complicated and nonintuitive behaviors. What kind of vocabulary will let us usefully and precisely describe what we're looking at?

Without such a vocabulary we're just fumbling about, flailing at conceptual will-o'-the-wisps while we try to wrap our heads and aesthetics around aspects of image quality we barely understand.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column appears on Wednesdays.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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Featured Comments from:

Manuel (partial comment): "One possible answer is to sidestep technical considerations and confine the concept of image quality to the realm of subjectivity. A picture is a good one if it pleases you to behold it. This has the virtue of overriding any conceptual hurdles just by exploding them."

NigelRobinson: "This might not be what you are asking but there are established procedures and methods used in winemaking for sensory analysis. You may have come across them during your tea tasting. In particular, it is possible to determine sensitivity thresholds (i.e., how sensitive an individual is to a certain parameter, as you mention for your colour perception). Likewise, when using methods such as t tests, triangle tests, etc., it is possible to assess whether there are real differences between presented samples. This might not help with the vocab you need but might help you step forward."

Terry Letton: "If there is to be any worthwhile outcome to your quest, I think that the first thing to do is to eliminate the notion of better or worse from your categories. The different descriptions of image quality will be just that, different. Then it makes sense to inquire as to the appropriateness of said quality to an individual image. In this sense, image quality is much more than MTF tests and the like; it includes the input of the photographer. Capa then becomes a positive example of image quality rather than the go-to negative example."

Jocky scot: "I rate my camera lens combos by 'loveliness.' The D700 has got it while the OM-D E-M5 does not. I can tell by how the clouds and sky look."

Roberto: "It is fun to see how people with different attitudes (scientific vs. liberal arts) approach the issue. The same word 'quality' seems to be understood differently. I, having a background similar to Ctein's, fully support his quest. It would be useful to have a coherent way to describe the visual features of a picture (don't call it quality that for someone imply 'how good it is'), without reverting to numbers and charts. Which I love, but are hard to map to our visual perception."

Dave Polaschek: "Be careful in chasing after 'quality.' As I recall, it was a quest for quality that drove Phaedrus mad, and turned him into Bob Pirsig who needed to ride around on a motorcycle for a while and figure out his own brain."

Gordon Lewis: "Not only is it difficult to find a vocabulary to describe the esoteric, it's difficult for the uninitiated to understand the vocabulary even when it exists. For example, experienced electric guitarists would know exactly what I meant if I referred to a guitar's tone as being spanky, woody, twangy, wiry, or snarky. Anyone unfamiliar with these terms would probably find them bewildering. I'm not dismissing the search, mind you. I'm just agreeing with Ctein's assertion that these distinctions will still difficult to recognize, even after they have been defined in words."

Thomas McInnis: "As a Gen-Y'er (for want of a better term) in the fashion industry, many of the IQ indicators which are being discussed here seem irrelevant. Most of my experience of photography is print-less. At best a good Steidl book might pass through the studio, but generally photography is consumed in the pages of glossy magazines and on screen. Perhaps bokeh and resolution etc. has some impact on how that imagery is perceived, but largely it seems the race for adequate quality to match the best printing presses is over. I can shoot my work on full-frame, or APS-C, or on a pocket digicam with adequate megapixels and lens sharpness, and for the most part no-one (including my clients) would be the wiser.

"There is one thing for which (in my experience) we lack terminology. Colloquially me and my friends speak of 'space' in an image. For many years we would look at superb fashion editorials and be mystified as to how the photographer could show such a wide perspective, but yet feel so close to the model. Poses and framing were impossible to replicate when fooling around in the studio.

"Then a friend bought a Phase One kit.

"Reflecting back I realised this was the distinction I couldn't identify when I upgraded from APS-C to full frame. There is a difference in 'space,' and although it is common to talk about equivalent focal lengths on different formats with reference to field of view, there is obviously more going on. A 35mm equivalent FOV never feels quite like 35mm—and matching the FOV of 55mm on the Phase One to a full-frame does not result in the same image when photographing a model pulling a distorted and dramatic pose.

"So perhaps someone here can point me in the right direction for terminology to deal with this feeling of closeness and space?"

Posted on Wednesday, 13 November 2013 at 12:55 PM in Ctein, Photo-tech, Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (51)

Friday, 11 October 2013

The Latest Gimmick

So have you seen that new trendy style where someone drops part of an old picture into a new one using Photoshop?

Human beings are strange. They love what they love and they're gonna do what they're gonna do, and that's just that*. Human beings also love gimmicks. And excess. Collectively speaking. We just do.

Being an "idealist" type, I don't care for gimmicks and excess. I like "purism" better. Not as in "my way is better than your way"; it's just what appeals to me, and gratifies me. (Of course I do think my way is better. But everybody thinks that whatever appeals to them is best.)

There have been innumerable gimmicks in photography over the years. Too many to count. Really, all that's changed lately is that a lot of them are easier, and much more widely accessible. Photographers who liked bright, vivid color used to chase after specific film types and high-contrast lenses and so forth, and were still largely blocked from excess of the truly wretched sort. That's no longer the case. Digital means that not only can you indulge in whatever form of excess you want, you can positively wallow in it.

Dropping part of a historical photograph into a modern one of the same scene is one of those gimmicks. One of the latest ones. It seems to bonk people over the head with the startling insight that things happened here in the past that you can't see right this second. As in, a murder happened in this hallway, and a corpse once lay right here where you walk every morning on your way to the parking garage; or, soldiers once fought a pitched battle on this street. And so on.

I dunno. I'm always aware of things like this, so the insight doesn't strike me as particularly deep. And don't get me wrong, I love comparing two different photographs of the same subject separated by time. Still, I wonder about the device of putting the two shots together in one frame. My question would be, why?

It's with great effort, great self-restraint, that I have refrained from illustrating this post. I would like to; this particular gimmick, of dropping a bit of an old photograph into a new one, might be something some people haven't seen. But you see, then it would be in conflict with another of my values, which is that anybody can do anything they dang well please with their own photography as long as they aren't hurting anybody, and it isn't nice to condemn anybody specifically. If don't like infrared, but it would still be rude to put up one specific infrared picture by one specific photographer to illustrate that idea. I don't want to slag anybody specifically for work they obviously like and I don't. Well, actually I do want to, if I'm honest. It's just that I'm trying to be polite.

But back to that "why": I don't understand what's wrong with just putting the whole historical photograph next to a whole modern photograph. Wouldn't that serve exactly the same purpose, only better? I do love to look at such comparisons. Definitely.

I don't know. It isn't up to me; I'm not in charge of all photography. Other people can do what they want. Me, I don't like gimmicks.

Other people generally do. And always will, I guess.

Mike

*If you read (and buy into) The China Study, for instance, it seems clear that there already exists an easy way to minimize your risk of the First-World "diseases of affluence" such as heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes. But we'd rather not. We'd rather eat an excessively rich diet loaded with salt, sugar, and fat, animal protein, and processed foods. It's not that we want to get fat and die young; we don't. It's that a 12-ounce steak for dinner and a pint of ice cream every night before bed is delicious and we'd rather not give it up*. Thanks, though.

I honestly saw this on the news the other night: a teaser about how "a new study" shows that eating fruits and vegetables might not be very good for you after all, followed immediately by a teaser about how you could get to try Burger King's new reduced-calorie French fries for free. What an opportunity! Sure, that's news. Now I ask you, how could anyone possibly think that the news has gotten more influenced by commerce? Nonsense.

While I'm on the subject, I went to watch a pool tournament last night, and one of the contestants was an extremely obese man. Not quite to the level of Iz Kamakawiwo'ole, but almost. Every time he missed and lost the table, he would waddle over to the sidelines and pop into his mouth several large spherical breaded and fried objects about the size of ping-pong balls. I don't know what they were, but they smelled delicious.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Christian: "I think the reason to juxtapose the two images into a single frame is to force the viewer into fully picturing the event then into their perception of now. There's still a momentary disconnect when comparing two photos as you look away from one and then look at the other. That's my take on it, for whatever that's worth."

Steve J: "It's the trendiness of a particular gimmick that becomes quickly tiresome. The first time I saw the superimposed history shots, the series presented a different perspective (effectively playing on my interest in WWII history). But not long after this, online general news sites would announce yet another set, often praising the shots as incredible, amazing, or some other type of superlative.

"At this point, the novelty begins to corrode and the inescapable distaste for faddism (whether fair or not) begins to inform reaction. I should say, however, that the media, not just the photographer, who might have an unquestionably earnest interest in this style, becomes an accomplice. And of course, if these series didn't trigger page clicks, the media would move on. Fingers pointing everywhere.

"But yes, I sympathize with the desire to be open and nonjudgmental while still allowing honest opinion its turn, however conflicting this might be. Undoubtedly, there is a place for everything in photography, including selective color shots, but this does not require indifference, or really even acceptance, just begrudging tolerance I reckon."

Steve Jacob: "Since the advent of digital imaging and Photoshop we can manipulate images in far more extensive ways, which is fine as long as there is equal effort applied to the message itself. Often, when browsing the images on some premium photo website, I am left with the feeling that I have just unwrapped an extravagantly presented and bow-tied parcel to find another pair of socks from Auntie Meg. I'm not a purist, I am very open to new ideas and new styles as they become available, but art has to be more than just technically proficient. It should, at some level, change the way I see or think about the world."

hugh crawford: "Thirty years ago, holding a postcard in the scene was an art school assignment, and it was about 30 years old then. Duchamp or someone? It's hardly new, but some people are doing some interesting stuff with it. Some is quite good. The captions make a huge difference. Or are you thinking of something else?"

Mike replies: I was thinking of something else, but that's a fascinating connection.

Posted on Friday, 11 October 2013 at 12:28 PM in Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (20)

Monday, 07 October 2013

Home Sweet Home

In advance of my forthcoming review of Peter's new book, I'd like to put forward an idea that I've taken potshots at before. It's that, for most people who really care about photography and have been in it for a while, they have a "home base"—a type, style, or technique of photography that means the most to them.

I encounter this again and again (even among people who keep searching, and can't quite find where home is for them). A few real-life but unnamed examples:

  • One friend loves B&W contact prints from large-format negatives, although he also shoots in both 35mm and digital. He has and loves many view cameras.
  • One friend, unfortunately recently deceased, loved pictures of teenagers and concentrated on that subject throughout most of his photographic life.
  • One famous photographer likes small-sensor digicams with plenty of noise and makes very contrasty, very "grainy" black-and-white prints.
  • One friend loves clean color landscapes, often almost abstract. The unpeopled natural world in color is home base for him.
  • Another famous photographer has been using the same equipment for decades and takes "found" pictures he encounters on walkabouts.
  • One friend-I've-never-met loves a certain camera brand and uses all their cameras, from point-and-shoots to a super-expensive medium-format SLR.
  • One photographer is almost completely preoccupied with fashion photography.
  • One friend loves multiple images in many forms, from combined images to images presented together in groups as large as 12.
  • One friend loves New York city and loves pictures of New York city, and collects books of New York city photographs and photographers.
  • Yet another famous photographer used only 35mm B&W and shot 95% of his pictures with a 50mm lens.

And on and on the list could go.

I'll make a few points about this tomorrow but I just wanted to throw this out there so you could think about it. Do you have a "home base"—a kind of photography, or style, or technique, or subject matter that you gravitate toward, or keep coming back to, or love best?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Steve Jacob: "I'm preoccupied with shooting London. Lucky I guess to live in a place that millions fly half way around the world just to visit."

David Dyer-Bennet: "It might be candid portraits for me; I find that's something I slip into even when it's not appropriate (sports photography, say). I certainly can show you a long history of them. And while I shoot landscapes and some flower macros, that's playing around for me, it's not what ever drove me to photograph."

James Sinks: "The night is home. I really can't add anything to that."

Sal Santamaura: "A shout-out to Oren—undoubtedly the friend referred to in your first bullet.   :-) "

Robert: "Surfing. It begins and ends at the beach for me."

Gordon Lewis: "I have no idea what you're talking about."

Mike replies: Well, maybe another example will help. A photographer who likes clear, crisp urban shots, caught on the fly but often looking carefully composed, sometimes accented with a person, often having well-coordinated color, and with strong graphic elements and an awareness of geometry.

Ring any bells at all? Maybe? No?

Julian: "Small-scale landscapes shot on 5x4 is what I keep coming back to. I use digital too but somehow it just isn't the same."

Sean: "It's the city for me. I'm an inner city kid; it's my natural habitat. It doesn't really matter what city I'm in, because the city of my birth (Manchester, England) gives you an attitude that you can't adopt. We're born with it, and I take it to any street I happen to be on, so I never feel like a tourist in a city. A city's noise is my bird song, the smell of its wet pavement and polluted air is sweet to me, and its people are the only wildlife I ever need. Home is where the art is."

Dan Khong: "I am developing a signature style shooting in black and white and square format."

Posted on Monday, 07 October 2013 at 08:16 PM in Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (31)

Wednesday, 18 September 2013

Historical Significances

I hope you won't read this as some big pronouncement or hard-and-fast claim. It might constitute an assertion, of sorts, but I'm not making the assertion aggressively, at all. It's more in the nature of musing—turning ideas over in my mind—.

My thought is that the Caponigros' print will be the only one of our print sales with lasting photo-historical significance.

It has such a clear story. I see it as a future microcosm of 2013—I'll bet even the printing style will one day be recognizably characteristic of the present era. And its status as a rare collaborative work of two well-known photographers who happen to be father and son will never lose interest.

That can't be more than a guess.

My only puzzlement is how to frame mine...and where to put it. Where to put it so I can get to know it.

Caponigroposter

But I promised to tell the story of my poster.

Many years ago, when I first got bitten (hard) by the photography bug, I was moonlighting part-time in a frame shop. One of the other employees, whom I've long since lost track of, was a talented but impoverished painter. During one of the dead times at the shop he and I were shooting the breeze about our favorite artwork on the walls. "That's the only thing in here that's worth a damn," he said, pointing to this poster.

Curiously, I'd never even noticed it before. It was so visually "quiet" amidst all the louder, more "attention-seeking" work on the walls. I looked at it long and hard that day, wondering what my co-worker saw in it.

It didn't sell; which meant it stayed on the wall, while the "Hang In There Baby!" cat and a certain Fred Maroon photo of Georgetown in the snow flew out of the store, replenished again and again. (This happened back in D.C., where I lived for many years.) I found myself looking at it day after day, and, as I did, it began to grow on me. I began to find a sort of peace and nourishment in the simple forms, the delicate tones, the way the stones mutely conjured a mysterious bygone world. Eventually it was like it was the only poster on the shop walls, the only one I saw; it was the only one I wanted to look at.

At the end of a month or so, I found myself one day walking the two miles between home and the shop, deep in thought, probably feeling sorry for myself for having to work all evening after already working an eight-hour day. But one good thing I could look forward to, I thought, was that at least I could visit "my" poster yet again. Then the thought flashed across my mind—if no one's bought it!

I put a down payment on it that day; I think it took me another thirty days to finish paying for it. I lived in a run-down group house at the time, and I painted my room there at my own expense, picking the color entirely to show off the poster. That would have been about 32 years ago now. (It even looked good in moonlight.)

The poster taught me a lesson, too. That many photographs (many advertising images, for instance) are deliberately intended to catch the eye and provide immediate gratification—but their appeal is often quickly exhausted; and some of the best photographs grow on you slowly , and yet continue to reward long familiarity. I still like photographs that have staying power, and it's something I look for in photographs.

Some music is the same way. I'm sure you know of catchy ditties that you loved on first hearing but soon got sick of, and other music that you almost didn't hear at first but have grown to love, and can return to again and again.

The other thing is did is that it introduced me to the work of Paul Caponigro, whose work in books I soon became very familiar with. Unfortunately, I've never seen a show of Paul's original prints, but I did see a few originals when I published a portfolio of his work in one of the magazines I worked for. Maybe one day I'll finally catch up with one of his shows.

There's always something to look forward to in photography.

And oddly enough, when I had my bedroom painted a few weeks ago, I once again chose the color specifically to set off this poster, just like I did in that grimy group house 32 years ago.

Mike
(Thanks to MM)

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Steve D: "Thank you for this. It's timely for me. I'm in my third year of taking photographs (as something other than mere snapshots) and I've noticed that the images I return to again and again are not what I would have 'expected' to gravitate to when I started out. They are not flashy or particularly eye catching but they've 'got me.' I've been trying to verbalize the 'why' of my feelings but it simply escapes me. I like them on an almost primal level and that's that I suppose."

Robert Billings: "I too have a Paul Caponigro poster that has been with me wherever I have lived since the early 1970s. 'Running White Deer, Ireland 1967.'"

Posted on Wednesday, 18 September 2013 at 09:13 PM in Photographers, current, Photographic aesthetics, Print Offers | | Comments (10)

Friday, 06 September 2013

The Dying Minister Picture

Moz-screenshot-514Photo by Jachin Mandeno

"Here we see a terminally ill minister (left) and a church elder discussing with church members the future of the church: what will happen when the minister is deceased? The minister was shorn by chemotherapy; and the elder shaved his head in solidarity. This photo was made in 2010."

I'd just like to make a point in passing here, because this picture (from our recent contest) serves as such a perfect example of the point. A few people contacted me wondering why this picture had been featured. They said they felt it didn't offer them anything photographically. They felt it didn't have enough visual appeal. For them it was "just a snapshot."

They're right, in a way. It's not a treat for the eye. It has no visual drama. It's competently composed, but in appearance it reads like a record shot. There's nothing remarkable about it technically. There's nothing special about the lighting, which is flat and bland. The colors aren't rich or harmonious. And it certainly doesn't "stand alone," or "speak for itself," which some people feel all photographs should; if you were told it showed two middle managers giving a PowerPoint presentation at a sales meeting, you could believe it.

It does have a nice gesture, and that is a visual feature.

The caption explains what the picture does offer the viewer. It explains briefly what we're seeing: a dying or doomed man, who has an open and accepting expression; another man looking on with friendly admiration, smiling, probably at something that was just said. We're told the topic of conversation, the roles of the two persons, the reason for the meeting. We glean a few details—he wears rings on both hands, one of which is probably a wedding band. The microphones indicate either a large gathering or that they're being recorded. We're told a great deal about the situation but we're left to infer a great deal more. What we're left to imagine is the congregation's feeling toward their minister (I imagine I see it reflected in the Elder's expression; I admit I intuit that the minister was popular, even beloved, even though that information isn't provided visually or verbally—that is, it might be my own fantasy projected on the picture); we try to imagine the Minister's own feelings, which we search his face to read, the signs perhaps of fear, perhaps of bravery and acceptance and faith, perhaps of concern for his congregants—some of whom might be imagined to be friends rallying around him for support in his time of need. We certainly imagine this: what is it like to talk about your own impending death?

The picture is nothing special as a picture, except in its meaning...and that's how the picture is rich, very rich...almost...profound. It doesn't have much for the eye, I admit. But there's a great deal in it to think about. There's emotion in it. The human condition is very close by: it leads easily to thoughts about life and death, community, religious faith, the relationships that a church can foster, mutual caring, dealing with disease, and tragedy.

And of course it is a very dramatic picture. It's just not visual drama.

Different things are accepted and popular at different times. If something is widely popular and widely accepted, it often becomes part of the cultural background fabric—the shared assumptions that we seldom question or even notice. These days, for instance, that a photograph should be beautiful and colorful and technically adroit and so forth are all accepted values. That a photo should have meaning...not as much; at this point in time, for whatever reason, we don't really seem to care about the meanings of pictures all that much. If the other valued elements we expect to see are not present, meaning can even be overlooked sometimes.

I just wanted to point out to those who look at this picture and think, "well, it's not very much as a photograph," now you know how I feel when I look at ravishingly gorgeous, richly colored, technically perfect digital confections that are devoid of even a scrap of meaning. Other people see perfection, a visual treat; but part of what I see is the void—what's missing—the lack of meaning, of substance to engage the mind and the heart. When I look at a scenic or a perfectly rendered leaf or whatever, I often feel the same way the people who saw nothing in this picture felt; I have the same complaint: there's not quite enough there for me. When a picture does have meaning, I'm more tolerant of its other failings, which seem less important in the balance.

I'm not saying one's better than the other, really. We all have probably taken plain pictures with deep meaning, and we all have probably taken pretty pictures that don't mean much. But to me it's very important to bear in mind that a photograph can offer a whole lot despite being nondescript in its purely visual aspects. And still be very worthwhile as a photograph, worthy of our thought, attention, and honor.

Mike

ADDENDUM: It's come to my attention that some people are under the mistaken impression that this picture is the winner of the contest! The possibility of that confusion never occurred to me. This was not one of the six finalists, which were discussed below. This is a picture from the contest that I wanted to make a point about for purposes of discussion. I have several others I also want to talk about eventually. Just to be clear, this is not the winner of the contest. The winners haven't been chosen yet. —Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

George LeChat: "How do you know it's not two middle managers at a sales meeting?"

Mike replies: Because the photographer said so. In terms of veracity, a photograph is like a statement: we believe the person, not the picture. That's always the case, to some degree. We have to accept what we're told, or not, based on the same complex evaluations we always have to bring to bear on statements from others.

Plus, I admit (given what I'm doing here, writing in public in a quasi-journalistic mode) I checked the photographer's website, learned the minister's name, Googled him, etc. That's S.O.P. for me here at TOP, for the most part. Can't check everything. Can check a few things.

Ilkku: "One picture is worth thousand words. But a few words can completely change the meaning of a picture. So what is mightier, picture or words?"

Mike replies: First of all, that's a hoary, trivial, trite cliché to which I in no way subscribe. But I'd say what's mightier is the ongoing cognizance that there can be real facts and real truth behind both words and photographs. It isn't the words or the photographs that matter so much per se. If you accept that that photograph is an actual photograph, and shows what it appears to show (I mean two seated men, a computer, two microphones, flowers in the background, etc.), then there is some story behind it. It wasn't conjured out of imagination or fantasy. So, what's going on? Where are we? Who are the people in the picture? What's the situation? What clues do we have? Approaching all photographs that way is simply an essential element of "getting" photography. We almost never know the whole story behind any photograph. We often know enough to move us or make us think or feel.

Sometimes, of course, it's just a fucking cloud. (A quote from a friend after a lecture about Stieglitz's "equivalents.")

Rodger Kingston: "The rejection slip with which Alfred Stieglitz famously responded to many of the submissions he received at An American Place, his New York gallery, read 'Technically perfect, pictorially rotten.'"

Tim: "Thank you for hitting the nail on the head. You've answered a couple of things I've wondered for years, on and off: how does one go about 'reading' a photo and what's a reasonable deduction, and how does that fit into other, popular, genres? Well now I know; I was thinking 'so saturated landscapes on 500px are lacking this degree of story' before I got to the last couple of paragraphs. Or maybe one needs to be a rockologist to extract value from them, perhaps?"

Mike replies: Funny you should choose that example. A number of years ago I published in a magazine a photograph of a geological detail, that showed a whorled and jagged pattern in a rock face. The photographer had titled it something like "a heraldic crest" or some other such allegorical naming based upon something he thought it kinda resembled. And a reader who was a geologist wrote a letter to the magazine explaining in fascinating detail the actual significance of the geological feature, what it meant, where it probably was, how it was formed, etc. It made the photograph no less beautiful but much more interesting. That's a perfect example of what I mean when I say there are facts behind most photographs whether you know them or not. It's why I lack patience with photographers who seem to pursue common, simple, generic pictorial notions seemingly without a speck of curiosity about the reality of the subjects their pictures show.

Ed (partial comment): "I still disagree, Mike. Without a caption the photograph is unremarkable. The caption lets us (you) write our own story. This article affected me more than the picture ever could, or will, if anything the point here is underling the necessity of a good caption when the photograph isn't record enough."

Mike replies: Note that I'm not claiming this is a great photograph. Maybe it's not even a "good"one. (It didn't make the finals in our contest.) What I'm claiming is that it has meaning, and that that is a dimension lacking in many photographs routinely accepted as being "good."

Jeff Hohner: "Moved to tears by your exegesis. Thank you, and thanks for making this important point. This is why TOP is one of my few regular reads."

Jon Bloom: "Apropos of how captioning can alter a meaning of a photo, there is this. So a caption can remove meaning from a photo, or change it, as well as add it."

Posted on Friday, 06 September 2013 at 03:53 AM in Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (65)

Wednesday, 28 August 2013

My Different Modes of Seeing: A Conundrum and a Puzzle

This week's column by Ctein

Earlier this month, I was off photographing at the Peterborough Lift Lock with Christopher Sanderson and Michael Reichmann, using both my IR-converted Olympus Pen and my utterly conventional Olympus E-M5 (guess I can't call it the "OM-D" any longer). Quickly, I became acutely aware of a peculiarity that had been nagging at the back of my consciousness for some weeks.

I never have any problem photographing in several different media at the same time. I wrote about this some years ago, in "I Am The Camera...Or Is It The Other Way Around?" It doesn't matter to me what medium or format I'm using; when I pick up the camera I just naturally compose within the constraints of that tool.

I've always been a telephoto kind of guy. At various times I use everything from extreme wide-angle to extreme telephoto, but moderate telephoto fits best with my mind's eye. The 45mm Olympus lens is my perfect lens. If I were forced to work with one and only one lens, it would be that. It's the lens I always have mounted on the E-M5 when I'm carrying around just the camera and one lens. This is true whether I'm photographing day or night, nature or urban, color or B&W, my "vision" doesn't much change with the medium.

...Except for this: when I'm photographing narrow-band deep infrared, it's different! Then, the right field of view for my mind's eye seems to be strong wide-angle. The Olympus 12mm lens is a lens I'm not particularly fond of for regular work; it just usually doesn't fit with the way I see. Yet in the deep IR it seems to be just about perfect.

Now what's with that?!

As an experiment I tried swapping lenses between the two cameras. Nope. The 45mm on the IR Pen wasn't especially inspiring. Oh, sure, if I worked hard enough, I could find good compositions. I can find good compositions with anything. But mostly it felt like I was forcing myself to see that way, the same way the 12mm usually feels for my regular photography. There's a real strong preference that's not in my imagination, and it's the first time I've ever found myself instinctively drawn to strong wide-angle lens compositions.

I repeat. What's with that?!

Figures 1 and 2 are typical of the work I did that day, with the 12mm on the IR Pen and the 45mm on the E-M5. (A gentle reminder: illustrations illustrate—they do not prove. If you like one of these photos much better than the other, well, that's you. Me, I like them equally well, and this is about me. So, no judgement-passing, please?)

Blog299figure1Fig. 1.

Blog299figure2Fig. 2.

Understand, the question isn't why I like telephoto lenses normally, that's just what it is. The question is what's so different (and why!) when I pick up the IR Pen? I mentioned this to Chris and Michael, and Chris trotted out several quarter-baked notions:

Hypothesis 1: Conventional color and panchromatic B&W are very rich media, tone and color-wise—lots and lots of visual information in every square degree. I don't feel the need for wide angle because I've got plenty of visual content; more may even confuse the picture by trying to say too much at once. Narrow-band deep IR provides much less visual information per square degree, so I can include more material before hitting the "this picture is full" point.

Hypothesis 2: Panchro B&W and color are the normal ways we see the world. Deep narrow band IR is an alien world of novel and unfamiliar information, so I want to grab as much of it as I can in a single photograph, to satisfy my visual curiosity and provide context for new understanding.

Hypothesis 3: I'm simply greedy, sensation-wise. I like complicated photographs. The low info density of the IR has me saying (compositionally), "More, more, I'm still hungry!" which the wide angle provides.

Are any of these right, in part or in whole? I have no idea; I'm not that insightful.

So I tossed the question out to TOP's Brain Trust and something even more interesting and unexpected popped up. Different ones of us were using two quite distinct modes of seeing/composing:

Some of us, including me, pick up a camera and the world turns into Flatland (vis my earlier column). Well, Flatland with layers, he said oxymoronically. The Z-axis is entirely irrelevant to my compositional sense. I don't pay any attention to how elements of the composition are separated from each other by distance. It's only their relationship in the X-Y plane that affects my compositional sense.

Others of us engage in what I would describe as volumetric seeing. They do see the three-dimensional relationships between objects and for them the act of composition is about how they render those three-dimensional relationships in a two-dimensional plane. That Z-axis is very important to them, conceptually. Entirely opposite of me and my ilk.

And what does all of this mean? I do not have the foggiest idea. I just find it fascinating.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Ctein's conundra (is that a word?) appear on TOP on Wednesdays.

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ben ng: "Funny, I'm the same, i.e. when using IR I tend to use more wide-angle compositions. The exception is when shooting performance or portraits.
I see it as using different musical instruments. I take different pictures when I shoot B&W than when I shoot color; when I shoot IR there seems to be a more emotional response...see the results in my flickr link...!

"I just find changing things very refreshing."

Posted on Wednesday, 28 August 2013 at 01:44 PM in Ctein, Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (29)

Monday, 26 August 2013

Vandalism

Note that in what follows, I'm not telling you what to feel about this link; I'm telling you how I feel about it.

Some time ago, I wrote some flippant comments about graffiti artists, and a reader who happens to own a few urban buildings objected strenuously to my insinuations that graffiti could possibly be art and might possibly be worthy of preserving. He felt strongly that I had no perspective on the matter, and regaled us with tales of the difficulties of fighting off the taggers. He considered graffiti to be vandalism. I backed off from my earlier attitude...without sympathizing entirely.

WilloughbyBig Jay McNeely driving the crowd into a frenzy at the Olympic Auditiorium, Los Angeles, 1953. Photo by Bob Willoughby. Photographs that are already perfect do not need "fixing."

I expect some of you to not sympathize entirely, but the whole project of "colorization" just makes me feel tired and old, and sad. It's vandalism. It disregards the way that work evolves to fit techniques and the way that techniques place work in the flow of time and history, and it completely disregards and disrespects the intentionality of the original photographer. Maybe this or that photographer might even have approved of having dopey cartoon pastel colors slathered all over their work ex post facto, but then, if they're dead they can't say.

I mean, really—poor Bob Willoughby! To make such a garish travesty out of his already perfectly eloquent photograph. The willingness of people to treat the work of other individuals as if it's common property to be defaced at will is just debased, and a disgrace. And tawdry, gauche and tasteless to boot. If I never saw another old movie or photograph "colorized" it would be a relief.

Vast differences
I've always been interested in the highly various ways that different kinds of art is treated in society. The conventions seem to be self-perpetuating, even though they are almost accidental. People very casually deface other peoples' photographs, while they would never in a million years "correct" an old oil painting by doing more painting on top of it (well, except in the notorious case of a certain daft old Spanish lady). If a playwright writes a play, almost anyone who stages the play will respect the play as a work of art possessing inherent integrity, and will make sure that every word is spoken as it's written; directors and actors have traditionally kept up a spirited and fastidious debate about ad libitum, which is commonly kept to a minimum on the stages of the world. But in the case of screenplays, the tradition is the opposite. The story is not considered to be the spiritual, artistic, or ethical property of its author, and bowdlerizers are hired willy-nilly to adulterate and adumbrate the original. There is even a formula, in Hollywood, to determine the "authorship" of a screenplay by counting the percentage of the words contributed by the various tinkerers with the script. In this way, the original author's "Hey, how ya doin'?" can be changed to "Hi there, how are you these days?" by a subsequent script-fixer, and the hack will get the credit for all of the words except "how." In this way, it's even possible for the original author, whose story it was, to be pushed out of the credits altogether, since, by rule, only the top three script-tinkerers get credits.

And even Hollywood wonders why there aren't better scripts in Hollywood. Well, it's no wonder to me: where artists are systematically disrespected, you don't inspire good artists to give their best. The only way a screenwriter can get any respect in Hollywood is if they are also the director and/or the producer. So why the vast difference between the way that playwrights are treated, and the respect they get, and the treatment accorded to screenwriters? Beats me. Even Faulkner got no respect in Hollywood, fer chrissake.

For the record: I object strenously to any future colorization of any of my monochrome photographs. If these words on a wayback machine are wagging a finger at you from beyond my grave, shame on you, ya jerk.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp)

UPDATE: Okay, I get the "no harm done" argument, except from a respect and "spiritual ownership" perspective. They're just JPEGs, people are arguing. If you feel that way.

I get that some of the pictures so treated are not artwork but documentary records, too. And yes, the car crash picture does look nice in faux color.

What I don't get are two claims being made in the comments—to the effect that "there were no color options available then" and "color adds more realism." To the first, in many cases there were color options available. The pictures vary, of course, but color film was available in 1953 when Bob Willoughby took the picture in the post. Pursuant to that argument, even if "the photographer would have chosen color if he could," as some people said, they didn't—and they surely wouldn't have taken the same pictures if they had. Color works inherently differently than B&W, and what makes a good color picture doesn't necessarily make a good B&W picture and vice-versa. Artists adapt to their materials, even if their materials are imperfect.

The second claim is arrant nonsense! The colorizers are guessing at and inventing the colors in their color versions. How does anyone know that Einstein's shorts were blue? That's a guess. I fail to see how fictitious details of a photograph add more realism to it. The colors added bear no relationship to whatever the reality might have been. They're purely decorative, eye candy for those who crave their sugar. That one's a really wrongheaded claim, in my view. —Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Jon Bloom: "My reaction to this sort of thing is less outrage (because, hey, nobody is likely to do it to my works) than it is puzzlement. I look at these things and wonder, 'What value did they think they were adding to this?' I'm reminded of what Gary Edgerton said of the colorized Casablanca: 'Casablanca in color ended up being much blander in appearance and, overall, much less visually interesting than its 1942 predecessor.' Exactly."

Joe Holmes: "Interesting detail: the licensing and performance of plays and musical plays requires permission from the play's author to stray from the original concept. Contrast this with music licensing: anyone can cover any song in any way they like just by paying the licensing fee. I ran across an interesting artifact of these rules years ago. I bought a CD by a band called Ye Olde English titled 'Tommy, A Rock-steady Opera,' which was a Ska version of The Who's complete 'Tommy' rock opera. But only a few promo copies of the ska version ever existed (you can still find bootleg copies). Why? Rumor has it that, because 'Tommy' was being produced on Broadway, it was considered a musical play requiring permission of The Who. And the band and the Broadway producers were not agreeing to any competing versions of the musical."

Will: "With you all the way, Mike. Art created in black and white should remain in black and white. But the subject brings up an interesting historical footnote: the colorization of classic films is probably the best thing that ever happened to our film heritage. In order to be colorized, these films had to be thoroughly restored. Because colorization suggested to the rights holders that these films had new value if colorized, it is unlikely these restoration efforts would have occurred otherwise. Many films were saved in this way. But beyond that, public outcry over colorization among film enthusiasts, historians, and critics led to legislative action, including the creation of the National Film Registry, itself a landmark and monumental preservation effort. So vandalism to be sure, but with strangely fortunate consequences. And what of the vandalism itself? It is merely a memory. You can't find colorized versions of Casablanca or It's A Wonderful Life anywhere; but they and Citizen Kane look fantastic, and people will be able to see lesser-known important films like Charles Burnett's A Killer of Sheep for generations to come."

Roy Feldman: "Vandal and Graffiti: Here is a piece I produced for PBS that will air tonight (Same title):

John MacKechnie: "I admit it. I'm an occasional closet de-colorizer. I really dislike the overly photoshopped and HDR'd cartoon-color shots that are in fashion today. So I find myself applying a little Silver Efex Pro ointment. Sometimes it works wonders."

Steve Pritchard: "Ah, Elizabeth Taylor and her legendary violet-coloured eyes. No, hang on, I mean green. No, no, wait a minute.... See, now I'm just confused."

Posted on Monday, 26 August 2013 at 02:21 PM in Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (61)

Thursday, 25 July 2013

Clarification

Just a slight clarification for anyone who might be misunderstanding: in the "Guideposts" post, what I'm suggesting is that you think about how captions, titles, labels, and accompanying explanatory text function, and how they affect or might affect your work before or after it is made; because even not making a decision is a decision, and lack of clarity about meaning generally makes photographers' work weaker.

I'm also curious as to whether being conscious about such things can help guide our work when we're out making it; maybe for some people? For instance, if I recall correctly, Robert Adams said that when he began the work that eventually became From the Missouri West, he assigned himself one rule, which was that every picture had to have some evidence of the presence of people. He made that decision as a conscious antidote to the overdone "pristine wilderness" mode of many Western landscapes. That kind of thing is what I mean by "conceptual guidepost."

If I were a teacher (which I guess I will never be again), one assignment I'd give my students would be to present three pictures that need captions and three pictures that don't....

Mike

P.S. Oh, and pictures with captions have a long history in art photography, too. Jim Goldberg and Duane Michaels are the first ones that pop to mind, and I'm sure I could think of more. It might be an essentially photojournalistic convention, but it's far from foreign to other kinds of photography.

P.P.S. Another tangentially relevant news item: I heard recently that people are now searching through old abandoned "antique store" photos, finding the ones with names on the back, and then posting them for sale on the Internet with the names listed. Then, people who are Googling their own names or the names of a relative find them, and are more likely to buy them.

Some highly improbable reunions are happening via such methods. For instance, a relative recently purchased online a postcard of a local landmark (a hotel), and discovered when the postcard arrived that it had actually been written from one of her relatives to another one! How it ever came to be in the seller's possession she of course had no idea.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Mark Cotter: "As a photography teacher, I'm going to steal that assignment title for my students next year! Thank you."

Ed: "Well, some photographers give meaning to beauty using a caption...turning the beauty into horror. One example is Eva Leitolf, who is well known for her beautiful pictures of mundane places. But when you read the captions these places are far from mundane."

Mike replies: Great example. You certainly can't grasp the meaning of her work without the captions.

JG: "With regard to captions on 'art' photos, I recall seeing several of Phil Borges' gorgeous portraits from Tibet hanging in a gallery back in 1997 and he went so far as to stencil captions onto the glass of the shadow-box frames, which I thought worked very well for that particular body of work. (I also wish that I had purchased a few of them, too, because at the time, most were in the $500–750 range and even the most expensive was 'only' $1,500, all of which is a fraction of what they would sell for today. Plus, of course, the fact that they were absolutely stunning photos, period.) That said, I personally am of the school that a truly great photo doesn't need a caption or sometimes even a title (which is not to say that such things and fancy frames don't add something to the experience of viewing the photo, of course....)"

Posted on Thursday, 25 July 2013 at 11:50 AM in Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (4)

What's Japanese for 'AAAAAIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!'?

Psdisaster

I love Photoshop Disasters in general, but some of them are particularly giggle-inducing. Some poor Japanese schoolboy is going to get totally freaked out by this young lady some day soon.

Also found via Photoshop Disasters: really bad ads, on Buzzfeed. Some of these are so bad they're almost...good. Who says dishonest "photography" is no fun?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Alex Vesey: "Don't know the origin of this image, but now is the season of spooky stories and ghost images in Japan. Popular magazines show photos of strange faces appearing where they should not be, people with missing arms, etc. Prime time TV offers similar fare with young celebs screaming and running around after 'encounters' with spirits. (Think 'Ghost Hunters' crossed with an MTV reality program). For some reason, many of these programs focus on schools at night—guess the homework or the boredom has created lots of lingering teen angst and frustration. This shot falls right into that category. Here are some other examples."

Mike replies: You really think that's what it is? That would be fascinating, but less funny.

Posted on Thursday, 25 July 2013 at 10:46 AM in Around the Web, Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (8)

Monday, 22 July 2013

Are You Real?

Dave_hill_1From Dave Hill’s "Adventure" series. Lighting, compositing, processing—Dave made his name by cranking it all up to 11. So who needs reality when you can create photographic fantasies this seductive?

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Written by John Kennerdell

Jazz fans may recognize our title as the name of a memorable song by the great jazzman Benny Golson*. When asked about the words, he supposedly said, "You know, you meet someone and you think, is this just too good? Can this be for real?"

I found myself humming Benny's tune while helping judge a photo contest a few months ago. Technically, the quality of the entries knocked me out. But it almost seemed as if the more accomplished the photographer, the less I believed in their photograph.

Generally the images fell into two categories. First, a clean, beautifully composed if rather anodyne style that recalled traditional commercial photography. Second, a more pumped-up, ultra-dramatic look, the kind that inspired one blogger to ask, "Why do photo contest winners look like movie posters?" And sure enough, those were the ones that took most of the awards.

What both kinds shared, to me anyhow, was a purposeful detachment from the look and feel of the real world. Almost all appeared to be staged and lit, and most had a certain self-consciously "processed" style to them. There were few rough edges but not much spontaneity. Visually, you couldn't help but be impressed. But emotionally I found no jolts, no tugs, nothing much below the high-gloss surface.

I confess to much the same reaction looking at the top-rated images on the big photo-sharing sites. While the nature photography in particular can be extraordinary, these photographers' powers of candid observation rarely extend to the one species of greatest interest to most of us. You know, the one called Homo sapiens. There it's mostly beautiful women or elderly exotics or adorable children, so flawlessly posed and presented that it's hard to believe they have a life outside the frame.

Dave_hill_2Youth center, South Africa. Good, old-fashioned black-and-white documentary work. The photographer? Dave Hill. It’s gratifying to know that photography's Mr. Spinal Tap enjoys nothing more in his free time than a 35mm camera loaded with Neopan.

OK, I'm prejudiced. I came of age in the last great days of print photojournalism. To me, the most powerful and enduring images are the straightforward visual documents, unstaged and often imperfect, just as the world itself. When I look at old photographs it's most often on the likes of Shorpy or Found. Collections like these teach us that honest images of "ordinary" events, people, and places can take on an unexpected richness and significance over time. These are photos that become more valuable, rather than less, as the years pass.

The young photographers I work with show little appetite for that kind of thing. I've interested a few in the approach many of us used to take to learn photography: find a subject, preferably close to home, and then work to document it over weeks or months or more. Most however prefer to focus on what we might call the expressive side of photography, using all the remarkable tools of digital photography to create something that says more about their own imagination than the world at large. They aspire, it seems to me, not so much toward photography as photo-illustration.

And why shouldn't they? Partly it's a generational thing. Their role models aren't Eugene Smith or Garry Winogrand, but LaChapelle and Rankin. Partly it's easy access to the technology: if you can visualize it, now you can probably do it. But beyond that, it's hard—and only getting harder—going around and poking your camera into other people's actual lives, especially for non-professionals who have no financial or career incentive even to try. Why not set it up, light it up, Nik it up, and assemble something with undeniable visual impact that also slots neatly into the current popular idiom?

Junior_race_eton"Boys run before a crowd in the 'Junior Race' at Eton College in Windsor, England, August 1919. Photograph courtesy Central News Photo Service." This just happens to be the top post on Found on the day I'm writing this, but it makes a fine demonstration of the time-machine qualities of a good documentary photo: nothing more and nothing less than a fraction of a second of a summer’s day, almost a hundred years ago.

Well, there's no reason not to, if you like. But for those of you who haven't tried your hand at straight documentary photography, here's my case for giving it a shot. Apart from motion pictures, still photography remains the most powerful means we've ever been given to capture moments from the flow of time and then hold them up to say: this is what I saw. This is how it looked, and how it felt, to be alive at this moment in this place. A remarkable thing, when you think of it. But it works only if you turn your camera on the world as it is, not an idealized simulation of it. And most likely, these days, it's not going to win you many photo contests.

©2013 by John Kennerdell, all rights reserved

*Benny recorded a few different versions but to my mind the definitive one is with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers on Moanin' (Blue Note 4003).

John Kennerdell is a writer and photographer based in Southeast Asia. He tries to keep it mostly real at indochina-photoelectric.com, and maybe a little less so at 500px.com/indochinaphotoelectric. You can see more of his writings for TOP under his Category in the right-hand sidebar.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

bill: "I recently entered a juried show, 60 from ~2000 entries were shown. I entered a strong side light chiaroscuro picture. No more manipulation than standard darkroom. I was stunned at the technological manipulation present; 'real' seemed not a consideration at all. During the two openings, I listened to the wows over the manipulated pics, and how if I had spent the time mine could have been really good. The curator apologized but said this is the trend. I don't think most would know 'real' if it jumped up and bit them. Sad."

David: "Very well said Mr. Kennerdell. I'm 38 which makes me not exactly young but not old either. When I got into photography 10 years ago I was primarily interested in taking illustrative shots like you describe. However, while out on one of my many photo expeditions I had a bit of an epiphany. I realized that my photos weren't going to hold up over time. My style of shooting only looked good because it was leveraging the cutting edge of technology. In the not so distant future anyone with a newer camera or better processing technique could come along and take a photo that rendered my images dated and useless. I decided to change my subject matter and style. Fortunately, I was a TOP reader and Mike had introduced me to Shorpy. From then on I tried to shoot with an eye towards history. Will my photo still be interesting in 100 years? That's the question I keep in the back of my mind when I'm out taking pictures these days."

Dennis (partial comment): "The same critque could be applied to this summer's blockbuster season of duds. Lots of imagination in the service of nothing."

Svein-Frode (partial comment): "Digital cameras and Adobe Photoshop is to photography what Roland and Yamaha were to music in the 1980s. New technology that becomes in vogue easily gets overused and abused, but then most things return to normal. After Hair Metal came Grunge, and talking of jazz, even the mighty Miles Davis got lost in synthesized music in the '80s."

Stan B.: "Photography is big enough to accommodate a variety of styles, even extremes. Always has, always will. That doesn't mean that they will all have equal footing and enjoy equal access and appreciation—not by a long shot. As far as the young-uns are concerned, yes, many have no clue whatsoever as to what came before them—that extends to history in general, let alone photographic history. Ironically, it is some of them that have revolted and returned to 'the old ways,' helping keep that tradition alive."

Richard Skoonberg: "My wife, a former art professor, when she saw the first image said, 'It's an illustration. It's an illustration using photographic techniques. It is miles away from photography.' Succinct and to the point."

Clay Olmstead: "This is not the age of subtle. It's the age of getting noticed. Specifically, getting noticed by being more outrageous than anybody else. You see it in art, music, TV and in the news. There's no reason for photography to be immune."

Posted on Monday, 22 July 2013 at 12:25 PM in John Kennerdell, Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (56)

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Member since 06/2007