The Online Photographer

At first I didn't know how to contact this photographer, but a kindly reader, William Flowers, clued me in about how to use Flickr Mail. I haven't kept up with Flickr's changes well enough, obviously.

Photo by Juan Amores

Eventually I was able to contact the photographer, Juan Amores (his real name—he goes by "John Love" in various places) and he did give me permission to publish it. You might still want to look at it at this link, where it's bigger and easier to see.

I like the tension between the strong colors of the manmade "frames" and the subtler, more earthy colors of the natural scene, but what strikes me about this picture is the balanced eccentricity of it, "eccentric" in the sense of off-centeredness. The graphic elements have strong echoes—the natural scene split into three areas by two strong horizontals echoed by a horizontal line in the green area on the left, the two small spherical shapes (bolt heads, I suppose) echoing between left and right—all the reinforcing and yet not quite matching curves. And I like the degree of bokeh in the foreground objects—just enough to make a contrast of soft and sharp, but not too blurry, as we more often see these days.

The picture reminds me a bit, in its colors and strong design, of Harald Mante's work.

The accents probably save the picture from being just an exercise—the ship on the body of water and that improbable and odd bowed metal pole bisecting the circular "picture within the picture"—those elements give the picture of bit of life and somehow give the eye a bit more "permission" to dwell on the formal compositional aspects. You have to be careful about echoes in photographs—they can be sort of dulling somehow, metronomic, if they're too obvious. That the green and orange colors are so nicely complementary adds a nice touch—supporting the "balanced but unbalanced" feel of the picture.

Well seen.

I happened across Juan's picture (randomly, hence the post title) at fredmiranda.com, while paging my way through a massive Sigma DP2 Merrill thread.

Mike
(Thanks to Juan and William)

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.

TOP's links!

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

Dave Levingston: "That's a wonderful photograph."

Juan Amores: "Thanks, it's an honor for me!!"

New York Fashion Week, for Vogue. Photo by Victoria Will.

In my opinion this gets the palm as one of the best fashion shots ever made. At least of the year.

Granted, I might be cheating—we all have styles and genres of photography we like more than others, and, generally speaking, fashion photography—along with, for instance, insect photography—is one of the genres I don't personally have a feel for; and this shot might intersect more than most fashion photos with the social-documentary mode of photography that I do like. Still, a fine, interesting, and elegant picture, whatever genre you want to assign it to.

Victoria Will is the photographer who took the haunting tintype of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman that I discussed three days ago. (The processing for that photo was done by Josh Wool.) I spent some time at Victoria's website—she's an excellent photographer. Celebrity portraiture is another genre of photography that generally leaves me cold, but I thought her portrait of Brad Pitt was outstanding as well.

TOP will be off tomorrow, as usual, so that I can sit around feeling guilty about not doing housework. We'll return with an "Open Mike" on Sunday morning.

Mike
(Thanks to Jeff Greer)

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.

TOP's links!

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

Kalli: "This is to fashion photography a bit like what Garry Winogrand's classic football field shot is to sports photography. It's all street to me."

Fish. Kodak SLR/n and Nikkor 24–85mm.

Picture and words by Dave Reichert

"I was 40 years old when I got my first dog. That first one, Fish, was a coydog (a coyote-dog hybrid) that we found in a campground at a lake where I was fishing. I got skunked that day, so she had to take that name—I wasn't going home without a fish.

"She was a wonderful dog—smart, loving, protective later of our newborn daughter, and a real character. She used to love to play with the bears. Many nights, I found myself running outside in a bathrobe, with a flashlight in one hand and a revolver in the other. Fish would have a bear treed, and I'd have to fire the gun to scare it off. When it got to the bottom of the tree, she'd bark and nip the bear's butt, then chase it off into the woods.

"Fish lived to a ripe old age of about 13. After years of diabetes, with daily insulin shots, she developed cataracts and lost her sight. Eventually she went deaf, and the day came when we did what we had to. She was a special dog, the standard by which I've measured every other dog."

Dave

Words and photograph © 2014 by Dave Reichert, all rights reserved

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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

Richard Khanlian: "Fish sounds like a wonderful dog. When we lived in the foothills of the southern Rockies we had a golden retriever named Leo. At night he'd sometimes run out through the dog door when he heard a coyote pack nearby and come home the next morning looking quite pleased with himself. We used to imagine him sitting in a circle with the coyotes, swapping stories comparing life in the wild with life among humans. Maybe he even fathered a coydog or two."

Mark Hobson: "A beautiful picture of a cherished companion which, over time, will no doubt incite many pleasant memories. However...the chances that Fish was a coydog are slim to none, simply because an abundance of recent peer-reviewed DNA research—for instance here and here—strongly supports wolf-coyote hybridization and virtually no evidence for dog-coyote hybridization. Here in the Adirondacks, the coydog myth is alive and well as it has been throughout the NE where the Eastern Coyote is abundant. This coyote is much larger and slightly more aggressive than its Western relative due to wolf (Canadian Red Wolf)-coyote hybridization which occurred during the Western coyote migration through Canada to the NE. It was the size difference alone which led to the mistaken belief that coyotes had mated with dogs.

"Caveat—don't know why I get so worked up when I hear/read the word 'coydog' but, in any event, like it or not, I seem to be on a mission to eradicate the very idea of dog-coyote hybridization."

Mike replies: I think that's known as a "pet peeve." Not uncommon! And, thanks for the information.

Thomas Turnbull: "Wonderful picture and a touching story. What really arrested my attention, though, was its synchronicity with a PBS program that I saw just last week: 'The story of the mysterious coywolf, a mixture of Western Coyote and Eastern Wolf, premiered Wednesday, January 22, 2014, on PBS.' Very well done and definitely news to me! (Don't know anything about their going to the dogs, but the Coywolf, at least, isn't any Fish story….)"

David Brown: "In spite of Mr. Hobson's pet peeve, I owned a coydog as a child in the 1960s. 'Fluffy' (I am not making this up) was an intentional breeding of a domesticated coyote and a German Shepherd. She was a bit bigger than a coyote, but had all the markings of a classic shepherd. I miss her still."

Mike replies: I wonder if dogs and coyotes have different numbers of chromosomes, rendering their offspring infertile like most mules and hinnies? That would account for lack of DNA evidence for coydog lineage in the wild, but allow for single-generation mixes such as Fluffy. IANAE!

Photo by Paul Swee

A reader named Dan suggested Paul Swee in response to the "50 Photographers You Should Know" post. You'll want to check out all this guy's pictures and pick out your own favorites—not just the initially startling illusion above. He's amazingly talented. Reminds me of our old friend Juan Buhler, which is high praise.

A friend suggested once that we like what we do ourselves, and we like what we can't do ourselves. Which is profound, if you think about it. The former because we identify with work that mirrors our own struggles for expression, and the latter because what we can't do ourselves seems difficult to us and hence all the more impressive. I can't do street photography. But I admire it. Street photography is to photography what poetry is to literature.

Mike
(Thanks to Dan)

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.

TOP's links!

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

October Morning at Denenchofu. Photo by David Hufford

I happened across this arresting picture while browsing Flickr for pictures taken with the Panasonic/Leica 25mm ƒ/1.4. It looks a bit better there. I like the painterly color palette, which looks almost too perfect not to have been built up gradually and carefully, as in a painting.

The umbrella reminded me a bit of Gordon Lewis's "Precipitation"—and then I noticed the picture's small mystery—where's the precipitation? She must be using her umbrella as a parasol.

It turns out that David Hufford, the photographer, is a TOP reader, so I asked him for permission to show you, and here you are. Thanks to David.

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.

TOP's links!

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

Yoram N.: "It seems David has a 'thing' for umbrellas. Streaming along his Flickr stream you can find many beautiful umbrella photos."

Steve Pritchard: "Many moons ago, on a trip to Thailand I noticed at the end of the working day that young men riding small motorcycles would collect their girlfriends or wives from their offices to take them home. The women would sit side-saddle and balance precariously on the pillion while holding up their handbag or briefcase in both hands as a shield against the sun's rays, while their partners wove dangerously through seven lanes of traffic in the Bangkok rush hour. It was explained to me later that a pale complexion was a prized status symbol, denoting someone with a good office job who did not have to toil in the fields or do manual labour. I don't know if the same may be true in Tokyo, but it might serve to explain the small mystery in David's serene photograph."

David Miller: "Sometimes it seems that there are too many photographs in the world…but not enough by David Hufford. Thanks for the link Mike—what a treasure! Thanks for the photographs, David—what a treasure chest!"

Darrell Marquette: "If you live in Phoenix, you will frequently see people using umbrellas on bright sunny days."

Ben Rosengart: "I use that lens almost to the exclusion of all others."

Mike replies: Nice stuff! And a portrait of Voja too!

D. Hufford: [the featured photographer]: "Thanks, Mike. Yes, she is using that as a parasol. It's very common in Japan during the summer. In fact, some men have taken to using them too. I do have a thing for umbrellas. I often have to force myself to refrain from taking photos of them.

"Thanks for the kind comments, everyone."

Mike replies: What? Rule numero uno...never refrain from taking pictures of what you want to take pictures of. Embrace your peculiarities, don't resist them. That's how we find our way as photographers.

Seriously.

Gordon Lewis: "Apparently the woman I photographed gets around. She's been sighted in Donenchofu, Japan. I guess the weather is better there."

Portrait by Hannah Price, of a man who cat-called her on the street.

Hannah Price moved from a small town in Colorado to Philadelphia, and noticed that she was getting cat-called a lot. So she turned her camera on the men who were doing it.

She says she's not judging them, although taking their pictures is a way of turning the "male gaze" around and taking back the power. "But it's just another way of dealing with the experience, of trying to understand it."

She says she doesn't always respond with photography because in some cases it feels like it might be dangerous. But "...most of them, the majority of them, respond quite well just 'cause I'm responding...I explain to them that I'm a photographer and I'm interested in making a portrait."

See this article on code switch for more, including a video.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)

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.

TOP's links!

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Emie in the Truck, Rockport, Maine, 2008. Photo by Cig Harvey

So I spent a good part of yesterday on an extended web-surfing odyssey looking at the work of a great many contemporary portraitists to see if their subjects are typically smiling or not. (Fascinating how such a seemingly trivial, offhand post can lead to such an involved discussion.) And the evidence is overwhelming: among important portrait photographers in almost any genre (art photography, editorial photography, etc.), smiling subjects are very much the exception rather than the rule. The average seems to be maybe one smile for every ten portraits, at least on the basis of what I saw yesterday. So it's not an historical thing at all: most serious portraits (again, no pun intended) are unsmiling ones.

I was going to put together a post consisting of twelve example portraits by a dozen contemporary portrait photographers as a demonstration of this, but halfway through I thought, "what's the use? It won't prove anything to anyone." You could just as easily pick twelve smiling portraits. Neither proves anything. So I gave that up.

But along the way (the guiding motto of the Web being: one thing leads to another), I discovered Cig Harvey, a name I'd never encountered before.

Have a look.

Those in love with bright colors will love her.

She has a book out, too.

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.

TOP's links!

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Photo by Bryan Schutmaat

Reaching across genres—using photographs of objects, buildings, interiors, landscapes, and portraits—Bryan Schutmaat has attempted to show what life is like in the half-forgotten old mining towns of the American West.

You'll definitely want to see the whole set online. It's called "Grays the Mountain Sends."

Mike
(Thanks to Enrique G.)

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.

TOP's links!

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

Andre: "Several of the places Bryan Schutmaat photographed look very familiar to me. One I recognize for sure: Tonopah, Nevada. You can make out the big red letters spelling out 'Mizpah Hotel' on top of one of the buildings. I grew up about 100 miles from there, and as my dad was interested in prospecting we checked out all sorts of old mines, mills, ghost towns, and towns inexorably heading for ghost town status.

"Mr. Schutmaat's done an excellent job of capturing the mood of these places. The residents tend to be hardy and grizzled, and with the low populations and isolation often don't have a lot to do. Prior to the advent of satellite TV you often couldn't receive any TV or radio stations in those places, except at night when you'd tune in the high-power stations from Mexico or southern California. Adults made their own entertainment, playing cards, drinking, etc. Kids dreamed about getting out, to the 'big cities' like Reno or Vegas. Dilapidated buildings and decaying cars litter the edges of town.

"For the indoor scenes, throw on some 1970s country music to set the mood. Outdoors it tended to be remarkably quiet, although sound carried a long ways—if a semi was passing by on the highway, you'd often hear it when it was still a couple of miles away."

Richard Khanlian: "Wow! Lovely and wistful and sad."

Jim Skates: "As I was looking at the photographs on his site I was thinking that these seemed very familiar. I then looked at his resume and realized that he had sent his film to the lab where I work and I had sleeved his negatives. It was great to to see them in a positive way."

Mike replies: Herman Krieger is going to appreciate that last comment.

Andy Goss: "Very evocative photos. Unfortunately, I forwarded to my wife the link to his work. She noticed an evident mistake the photographer made, which greatly reduces the value of his work (to me). Except by a great cosmic chance, in two of the pictures there appears to be the same jar of peanut butter, having the same signature wave of gap in the peanut butter visible along its side. Most likely a plant in the photos. A set-up. Makes me wonder what else in the photos staged indoors is a setup. The outdoors photos especially are still wonderful, but I had enjoyed and been moved by them all, until this."

Mike replies: Sharp eye on the part of your wife. She's talking about this detail from the TV interior:

However, knowing how many photographers work, I think it's very likely that both shots were simply made in the same home, possibly where the photographer stays when he's out West or the home of one of his friends. The scenario you and she are suggesting—the photographer carting around the same jar of peanut butter to different domiciles for use as a prop—violates Occam's Razor!

(Side note to Andy: I did get your reply, but if you want to have a private conversation with me, you need to give me some way to contact you.)

Photo by Eddie Soloway

Nature photographer Eddie Soloway's name came up in a private multi-way email conversation I've been part of, and since the last three posts have been "dry" (no pictures) I thought our Friday needed some color.

I've been less and less attracted to straightahead naturey photography as I've gotten older, but it's a very important subgenre to many, and Eddie, whom I confess I'd never heard of before yesterday, has made a good career for himself, from what I'm hearing, with lots of fans, students, and followers. I like his quote in the "Gentle Edges" category: "There is a beautiful soft line that separates and connects sky and water." I also like how he plays with unsharpness of other kinds in some of his work.

Interestingly, along with his color nature work he practices photogravure, another of those increasingly fringe processes clinging to life out in a hostile environment. Makes him one of the good guys in my book.

Here's Eddie's website.

Mike
(Thanks to John, Carl, Lyle, Oren, and Tony)

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.

TOP's links!

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

David Elesh: "I took a workshop with Eddie through Maine Media Workshops a few years ago and found it quite valuable. He encouraged us students to think in what I would call a painterly fashion, and I would describe his work as painterly. I find I can look at his work for long periods. I own two."

Pete F.: "Very nice work, it really appeals to me, and one of the better websites I've seen—clean, simple and effective. Mike, this is what I like best about TOP. Through you I find photographers, websites and books I would never find on my own. Thanks."

Photo by Dimitris Makrygiannakis

Dimitris Makrygiannakis is "ngravity" on flickr—check out his Photostream, which features lots of good things to look at. His profile says he's a medical doctor from Heraklion, Crete, Greece, now living in Stockholm, Sweden. You might not be seeing quite everything in this, at least not right away—see a larger version here.

TOP is off tomorrow, as usual (ahem), but I'll be back with an "Open Mike" on Sunday. Enjoy your weekend in good health!

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Caddy)

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.

TOP's links!

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Yhonnie and Indiana. Photo by Janelle Low.

Iain Dawson wrote to suggest that since I'd done a "Random Excellence" for dog people (of which he is one), I should give equal time to cat people.

Janelle Low is the 2013 winner of the National Photographic Portrait Prize from the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia. She photographed Yhonnie Scarce and her pet cat Indiana just days before the cat's death at nearly 19 years of age.

You can see all of the Contest finalists at this page.

Mike
(Thanks to Iain)

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.

TOP's links!

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

Sylvain G.: "Beautiful picture. I went to Janelle's site to find she was selling a limited edition of 12 prints. $4,000 each. Oh well."

Mike replies: Guess she isn't a TOP reader then. :-) 

[Bloviation alert —> Mike goes on a harangue:] To my earlier point about limited editions, this will be great for her if she sells ten of them, and would otherwise have sold six at, say, $850. But now imagine how she's going to feel if all 12 prints sell quickly. She makes a relatively spectacular $48,000. But then, week after week, more and more cat lovers contact her asking for a print. Several offer her more than the original asking price of $4,000. As the years go by, she gets twenty requests a year for prints, and two dealers decline to represent her because they can't sell the famous prizewinning cat picture. Meanwhile, each time one of the original 12 is resold, it goes for more and more money.

I'm not saying this would happen for this picture, but it could. In which case, she has really done herself wrong by limiting the edition.

Now say all this happens, and she never manages to take another picture as famous and as much in demand as this one.

That's the argument against limited editions. The upside is that she might realize a few more sales—and higher proceeds from the sales—now. The downside is that she's just willingly put a fairly low ceiling on her lifetime income for a print that people all the way across the world in Wisconsin (of all places!) are talking about.

And you just never know about demand...it's fickle, and can be fugitive. You don't know which of your pictures is going to actually inspire demand. Is this one that will inspire sustained sales? My instinct says no. So maybe she's made a smart choice. But I can tell you that we sold several hundred prints of Peter's picture of Paris in his first sale, and then we sold several hundred more in his second sale. What if we had tried to boost sales in the first sale by saying that the image would never be printed again?

And just to throw another wrinkle into the argument, what if this is a very salable picture at $400 but not salable at all at $4,000? What if she's put a fine-art price on a picture that can't carry that load? Then she's priced herself out of her natural market; she sells none—never mind that the edition is limited—; and she fails to profit at all from her good fortune in winning the prize. [/Harangue. Apologies to Janelle for commandeering her post to make a point.]

Simon Robinson: "My name is Simon, and I am a cataholic. There, it's out in the open—I feel much better now! One of my favourite books is Classic Cats by Great Photographers. In this book you can find great photographs of cats by Nadar, Steichen, Cartier-Bresson, Kertesz, etc. It's a top book ('top book'—see what I did there!) for any cat and photography connoisseur."

Gene Forsythe: "The contemplation and thoughtfulness in her face is obvious and heart-touching, even on first observation. However, this is definately a case where the one line description of the photo adds an emotional context to the image that truly touches the viewer. I don't always care for photograph titles, but I do think that simple descriptions can add context and help viewers understand the image, and thus are sometimes useful. This is one of those cases."

David: "Even before I read the text it was fairly evident what the picture 'is about'—namely, the cat's poor health and the loving owner, and I'm not an animal owner or 'cat person' at all. It paints a simple story, as the best photos always do."

Terence Morrissey: "Good photo, it tells a story."

Sven W: "Yes, but is it a portrait of the cat or it's owner? In some ways this image is less of a portrait and more of a representation of the relationship between the cat and it's owner."

Mike replies: An interesting question. The category was portraits, and the photographer (as David and Terence and many other commenters mentioned) snuck a story into the proceedings...although I'd argue that portraits can legitimately portray relationships (a product I used to sell when I did portraits was the engagement portrait. The idea was that an informal portrait of the couple while they're in love and being themselves—and one which the photographer can take his or her time making—can be more personal than the formal wedding portrait where they're all gussied up). I guess this is a categorical issue rather than a photographic one, though.

Photo by Chris Gibbs, from the series "Dog Musher." See the whole set—some good stuff there. The interface is a little hinky—if you're seeing an image fill up your whole screen, click the little circle in the upper-right-hand corner. To see the whole images the page should look like this:

I've always thought it was kind of funny how some things push our buttons and some don't. If we're smart, it can help determine what we choose to photograph. But it even sometimes determines—partly, at least—what kind of photographs we look at. I personally have a very hard time getting into pictures of bugs, a subject of intense interest for a lot of people. I've tried repeatedly, but I've found there's just very little fascination there for me. But I love dogs, and get a lot of enjoyment out of pictures of them. There's no right or wrong, of course—only what's good or not-so-good for you.

I first learned about this when I took over Photo Techniques from the wonderful Editor David Alan Jay. David said that when he first got the job he thought, "Finally, there's going to be photo magazine with no pictures of children." He really didn't care for pictures of kids. I've always liked kids as a photographic subject, so his statements about it started me thinking.

"Dog Musher" came up as a topic when we announced Google's great deal on Nik software the other day. Chris tells me most of the B&W shots in the series were processed with Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.

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.

TOP's links

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

Tom Basista: "About Dogs and Kids: I worked as a photojournalist for nearly 20 years. My first editor told me that if you want to sell newspapers, put a photo of a dog or a kid on the front page. To sell a lot of papers, put a photo of a kid with a dog on the front page."

Mike replies: I think TV has taken a page out of that book. My smart dog Lulu has learned to recognize dogs on TV, and she's extremely good at detecting their presence...which happens constantly. She will leap at the TV when there are radically cropped dogs, very distant dogs, and very fast, fleeting cuts of dog images. She recognizes and will bark at cartoon dogs. Cartoon dogs that aren't moving are about the only representation that can fool her. She's like an alarm that sounds whenever a dog is used on TV....

Anthony Bridges: "The best movie I've seen for awhile is watching this slideshow. There is a lot said in these photos and a lot that is implied and some real emotional character. Thanks for sharing this link."

Photograph by Marcin Ryczek

There are pictures you like and pictures you don't, but only rarely can one be called a "tour de force." (Random House Dictionary: "An exceptional achievement by an artist, author, or the like, that is unlikely to be equaled by that person or anyone else; stroke of genius"; Collins English Dictionary: "A masterly or brilliant stroke, creation, effect, or accomplishment.") Karl Knize, who sent us the link, titled his email "The Ultimate B&W Photograph?" You see his point.

This is by Polish photographer Marcin Ryczek, of a man feeding swans and ducks by a river in Krakow. For pictures of people feeding birds by a riverbank, of which I've seen numberless examples over many years, I guess this about closes the category.

Here's Marcin's Facebook Page, where you can see a bigger version. I like this shot, too (but then, I would).

Mike
(Thanks to Karl)

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.

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

Adam Lanigan: "Gorgeous. I'm always tormented when seeing photos like that. I feel the need to rise to a higher level blended perfectly with the desire to just hang it all up."

Ahem: "Whenever I see 'tour de force' on a book description, I stop reading since it's a tired, over-used phrase. Once in a blue moon (see what I did there?) it is an apt description. This is one of those cases."

Mike replies: I change the channel whenever a commercial begins, "Introducing the revolutionary...."

Photo by Camus Wyatt, from "A Seaside City," November 2010

In some cases "Random Excellence" is meant to highlight just a particular picture, and in other cases a whole body of work. This is an example of the latter. I usually have no trouble picking a single photograph out of many, but in New Zealand photographer Camus Wyatt's case I was almost at a loss. So many of his pictures are so great that none really stand out from the rest.

I confess that my taste in photo technique is sufficiently traditional (substitute "old fashioned" if you insist) that the harshly over-sharpened, overly contrasty JPEGs on Camus' site are almost like fingernails on a blackboard to me, and do interfere to some extent with my enjoyment of his pictures. But on the other hand, what a talent. Take a good look around Camus Wyatt's website when you get a chance—it will get the rest of your week off to a good start.

Mike
(Thanks to Mark Banas)

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.

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

Bruce: "I click on your blog every morning before work, and got so involved with Camus' work, I almost missed my train. As a Kiwi living in Aussie, (New Zealander living in Australia, for the rest of the world), it's wonderful to see totally unique images of NZ life with an eye to die for! Wow what a talent. His monochrome vision makes me want to switch my camera onto mono and go out for a day and see the world in a new and exciting way. Thanks for the link, Mike and Mark."

Jim Simmons: "As a Wellingtonian who shows at the same gallery that Camus shows at and thus knows him a wee bit, I'm happy to report three relevant factoids: Camus's prints are exquisite, he's one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, and his excellent body of work is the result of hard work in the service of striving to learn and master his craft. I'm thrilled for Camus and for TOP's audience that this connection has been made. What a delightful surprise for me to take my daily TOP dip and discover that you've discovered Camus!"

Taran Morgan's Delray—a shot from his blog—looks a little too "digital" for my own taste, but it also conveys, more effectively than most, a sense of the menace and the chaos of rising weather. And it looks like a reaction to reality, rather than a standard "stormy seas" picture copied conceptually from other stormy seas pictures. It made me think of the recent storm in the East.

Taran's cousin, Windsor Morgan, is also a photographer.

Mike
(Thanks to Mike Plews)

Original contents copyright 2012 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.
A book of interest today:

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

TOP reader Gary Nylander is a newspaper photographer in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, Canada. A reader calle MM (a good friend of the site, actually) left a comment, in the "Insecure" post, saying, "The phrase 'All that matters is the image; whether you use film or digital doesn't matter' is usually just a long way of saying 'I've gone all digital.' You won't meet many film photographers who feel that way."

Shortly after that, Gary posted a comment that said, "Its all about the image, doesn't matter if you shoot film or digital." So I contacted Gary and asked him what he uses, just to test MM's theory.

Wrong in this case. Gary says "...for my day to day work as a newspaper photographer...I use digital; I love it! And for my personal work, which is almost all black and white, I shoot film (large format); I love it!"

He even wrote a post about it on his own blog.

I have to say I completely disagree with his premise, that "it's all about the image." I don't think it is at all. And I might write about that soon, or someday. But reading his post did make me think one thing: if anybody claims to "hate" film, or to "hate" digital, then I really don't see how they can also claim they like photography. At the very least, I think they're being unnecessarily doctrinaire. And it even offends me a bit, to be honest*. Just my own two cents.

Mike
(Thanks to Gary and MM)

*Which is what's behind this sudden flurry of film posts.

Original contents copyright 2012 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.
A book of interest today:

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

Markus Spring: "I follow Gary's blog since some years now and found his down-to-earth way of black-and-white landscapes always refreshing. Photographers like him keep the art of photography fresh, being it digital or analog."

JD Elliott: "I learned photography on digital cameras. Loved it. Still do. I started exploring film photography because I wanted to understand the process behind some of my favorite images and how they were made. I've stuck with film just because I enjoy the process. I've never been aware of enjoying the process of anything. Ever. For me this clicked something in my brain and I just love the process of developing and printing with film. I will continue to do it as long as I can. Which I'm betting, due to the availability of wet glass and daguerreotype methods, will be the rest of my life. And I could never look down on anyone else's preferences on this if something in their brain clicked for them and they enjoyed their process as much as I enjoy mine. :-) "