It's kind of interesting to observe the transition from film to digital. It truly is the end of an era. What's really interesting is how people react to it.
In some of the places I frequent, a subject that comes up on a regular basis is 'film vs digital' or 'who still shoots with film only?'. The topic is posted on the assumption that people who shoot entirely with film, or still shoot anything at all with film are in some way better at photography than their foolish peers who have entirely embraced digital photography.
Film certainly has its advantages, but when you look at all the people that make a living from photography, 99% of them shoot in digital now. That's very, very telling.
I look at the work of people who proudly state that the use 'only film' or 'mostly film'. Without exception, their work is sub-par compared to their peers who are at the same point in their career.
Interesting.
To conjecture as to why the vast majority of film users are sub-par photographers leads to even more questions, none of them with happy answers I fear.
There are exceptions, art photographers and photographers for whom digital isn't an option for their particular subject. But they're the exceptions.
It's tiring to read posts trumpeting the value of film photography when the work of those who do so speaks to the opposite.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Magnum Photos and Crappy Photography
With fine art over a certain age, it's fairly easy to decide what's crap and what's good art. A hundred years, or a few hundred years allows for perspective and distance that are impossible to achieve at the time.
Photography is a funny thing. It's a new art form. Historically speaking, that doesn't happen too often. Being new means that it's harder to say with any authority as to what is good and what is crap.
Coming from a fine art background and years of studying art history, it's pretty easy to distinguish why Michelangelo was a far better sculptor than many of his contemporaries who created very respectable sculpture in their own right.
If you met Michelangelo today, not knowing who he was, only able to judge him by the quality of his work, what would you write about him? "There's this Michelangelo guy who makes some pretty impressive sculpture, but will he be anything but a footnote in history?" Until history happens, so to speak, you really can't say. Time bears out the quality of our judgments.
I look at the various photographers represented by the Magnum Photos collective, and I read their website and wonder "Are they really all that and a bag of chips? Or is the collective opinion about those photographers a bit over-rated?" Truthfully speaking, quite a bit of the work shown *is* impressive.
Whether they've set the highest bar in the field of photography or not is a much harder thing to say. Two hundred years from now, how will their photos be viewed? Will Henri Cartier-Bresson be viewed as the equivalent of the Monet of his time, or as the equivalent of Sisley? In other words, you ask the common person on the street if they've heard of a painter called "Monet" before and most people will say "Yeah!". You ask the common person on the street if they've heard of a painter called "Sisley" and most people will say "Who?"
Perhaps it stems from my skeptical nature, but when I see many of my contemporaries in the photography world saying that the Magnum Photographers are the end-all be all of people photography, I hesitate to jump on the idealogical bandwagon. They're good, and some shots can easily be declared as excellent, but... It's hard to say whether collectively, they're "really all that and a bag of chips". I hesitate to make any judgment from anything less than a highly informed position.
Of course a lot of people at the time Impressionism became popular thought that the movement was complete crap and the lesson that denotes is quickly obvious. People at the time were wrong and Impressionism is most certainly not complete crap. In fact, as art movements go, it was pretty damn good.
But for every equivalent of the Impressionist movement, there's ten Rococo's or worse.
Where do the Magnum photographers fall between those two lines? To one side, or somewhere in-between?
Someone with a time machine get back to me on this.
Photography is a funny thing. It's a new art form. Historically speaking, that doesn't happen too often. Being new means that it's harder to say with any authority as to what is good and what is crap.
Coming from a fine art background and years of studying art history, it's pretty easy to distinguish why Michelangelo was a far better sculptor than many of his contemporaries who created very respectable sculpture in their own right.
If you met Michelangelo today, not knowing who he was, only able to judge him by the quality of his work, what would you write about him? "There's this Michelangelo guy who makes some pretty impressive sculpture, but will he be anything but a footnote in history?" Until history happens, so to speak, you really can't say. Time bears out the quality of our judgments.
I look at the various photographers represented by the Magnum Photos collective, and I read their website and wonder "Are they really all that and a bag of chips? Or is the collective opinion about those photographers a bit over-rated?" Truthfully speaking, quite a bit of the work shown *is* impressive.
Whether they've set the highest bar in the field of photography or not is a much harder thing to say. Two hundred years from now, how will their photos be viewed? Will Henri Cartier-Bresson be viewed as the equivalent of the Monet of his time, or as the equivalent of Sisley? In other words, you ask the common person on the street if they've heard of a painter called "Monet" before and most people will say "Yeah!". You ask the common person on the street if they've heard of a painter called "Sisley" and most people will say "Who?"
Perhaps it stems from my skeptical nature, but when I see many of my contemporaries in the photography world saying that the Magnum Photographers are the end-all be all of people photography, I hesitate to jump on the idealogical bandwagon. They're good, and some shots can easily be declared as excellent, but... It's hard to say whether collectively, they're "really all that and a bag of chips". I hesitate to make any judgment from anything less than a highly informed position.
Of course a lot of people at the time Impressionism became popular thought that the movement was complete crap and the lesson that denotes is quickly obvious. People at the time were wrong and Impressionism is most certainly not complete crap. In fact, as art movements go, it was pretty damn good.
But for every equivalent of the Impressionist movement, there's ten Rococo's or worse.
Where do the Magnum photographers fall between those two lines? To one side, or somewhere in-between?
Someone with a time machine get back to me on this.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Mr. Ducky in 3D
So, I've had this pair of 3D glasses sitting around the house, you know, the classic movie theater style, one eye red, the other blue / cyan. And I've always wanted to make stereoscopic pictures to take advantage of the whole 3D picture thing. So I finally did.
Patenteux.com was quite useful with some helpful instructions and their kindly provided Photoshop PSD template. Another useful resource to be noted is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which has a Computer Science department that kindly hosts a very, very extensive manual on the math and everything else that goes into making anaglyphs here (PDF format).
The long and short of it is that for human beings, one eye is separated by 6cm or so from the other. So you might think, 'ah, just move the camera 6cm or so from one shot to the next and that's it!'. Not quite. For the best 3D effect, the ideal distance from one shot to the next is 1/30th the distance from your subject.
Say you have a rubber ducky 30cm away from the camera. Well, you'd move the camera 1cm to the right for the second shot, rather than 6cm, which is way, way too much for an object so close. And if you're outdoors, and your subject is 30 meters away (I'm using the metric system because imperial / english units suck for math purposes), the ideal distance would be 1m from shot to shot, rather than 6cm.
Now you too can make your own anaglyphs!
Monday, April 7, 2008
So long, Project 365
I'm finally done with Project 365. You can see all the shots here.
Project 365 is more or less like marathon training for a photographer. Taking a picture every day for 365 days in a row is pretty hard, as it turns out. And much like anything that you practice at constantly, you get better at it. Take for example the first and last images:
April 1st, 2007:
March 31st 2008:
To put it mildly, I've gotten a lot better.
Here are a few shots from over the course of the year that stand out in my mind:
Project 365 is more or less like marathon training for a photographer. Taking a picture every day for 365 days in a row is pretty hard, as it turns out. And much like anything that you practice at constantly, you get better at it. Take for example the first and last images:
April 1st, 2007:
March 31st 2008:
To put it mildly, I've gotten a lot better.
Here are a few shots from over the course of the year that stand out in my mind:
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Ragging On Commercial Photographers
Being critical of people in your own field is usually a no-no, but never making waves can be boring and being critical is only bad if you're an ass about it.
That said, I think there is some room to rag on commercial photographers ;)
Someone once wrote a satirical post about the various levels of photographers, from highest to lowest. Amusingly enough, they placed the artistic photographer at the top, and as I happen to be that sort of photographer, it was certainly ego warming. And 'professional' was third from the bottom. Also ego warming ;)
(on a serious note, I would never wish to imply that one type of photographer has any more inherent worth than another outside of humorous writing)
Professional photography is problematic in one respect, even professional photographers themselves have noted it. It kills creativity.
Maybe not totally. But it certainly does dampen it. Even one of the wildest, if not *the* wildest commercial photographer, David LaChapelle, could be said to be 'not going anywhere artistically' if he happened to exhibit his work as it now stands two times in the same decade.
Every commercial photo tends to make portraits look like this:
Instead of this:
Everything in commercial photography tends to be bright, clear and sharp. Unsurprisingly, these are the things people tend to appreciate the most when trying to gain information from a photo. And photos made for money tend to have a point that best serves the making of money. Ie, if it doesn't get you buying paper towels, it doesn't have a place.
Photojournalists aren't much better. The photos are always in the service of something, rather than the other way around. And as such, they suffer in terms of creativity.
Every now and then, I stumble on a photographer who seems remarkably competent in terms of technical ability. Things are well lit, clean, clear and... Fairly ho-hum. Usually if people have that level of technical ability, their artistic ability is better. I've never seen a (good) artist who's technical ability outstripped their artistic ability. When I see it on the internet, a bit of digging always turns up the following information: The photographer was, or still is a commercial photographer, or a photographer for reasons beyond photography itself.
It's just kind of frustrating to see what are technically very good photos from people, but to never see anything remarkable from them.
Not that I have a ton of room to talk or anything, mind you. 99.9% of what I put out is still crap. But I do know enough to be able to talk about the subject. And this is what I see.
That said, I think there is some room to rag on commercial photographers ;)
Someone once wrote a satirical post about the various levels of photographers, from highest to lowest. Amusingly enough, they placed the artistic photographer at the top, and as I happen to be that sort of photographer, it was certainly ego warming. And 'professional' was third from the bottom. Also ego warming ;)
(on a serious note, I would never wish to imply that one type of photographer has any more inherent worth than another outside of humorous writing)
Professional photography is problematic in one respect, even professional photographers themselves have noted it. It kills creativity.
Maybe not totally. But it certainly does dampen it. Even one of the wildest, if not *the* wildest commercial photographer, David LaChapelle, could be said to be 'not going anywhere artistically' if he happened to exhibit his work as it now stands two times in the same decade.
Every commercial photo tends to make portraits look like this:
Instead of this:
Everything in commercial photography tends to be bright, clear and sharp. Unsurprisingly, these are the things people tend to appreciate the most when trying to gain information from a photo. And photos made for money tend to have a point that best serves the making of money. Ie, if it doesn't get you buying paper towels, it doesn't have a place.
Photojournalists aren't much better. The photos are always in the service of something, rather than the other way around. And as such, they suffer in terms of creativity.
Every now and then, I stumble on a photographer who seems remarkably competent in terms of technical ability. Things are well lit, clean, clear and... Fairly ho-hum. Usually if people have that level of technical ability, their artistic ability is better. I've never seen a (good) artist who's technical ability outstripped their artistic ability. When I see it on the internet, a bit of digging always turns up the following information: The photographer was, or still is a commercial photographer, or a photographer for reasons beyond photography itself.
It's just kind of frustrating to see what are technically very good photos from people, but to never see anything remarkable from them.
Not that I have a ton of room to talk or anything, mind you. 99.9% of what I put out is still crap. But I do know enough to be able to talk about the subject. And this is what I see.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Heaven Help Me, I'm Considering Buying A Film Camera!
"This was your father's camera. This is the tool of a photographer. ... An elegant tool for a more civilized age."
I haven't updated this in quite a while, but I thought it was notable that I'm actually considering getting a camera that *gasp!* uses film.
The camera in question is the Holga 120N. Why?
1. It's dirt cheap at $25.
2. It's a medium format camera (6x6).
I've been wanting to play with a medium format camera for a while, just to experience the massive amount of resolution it affords. Holga isn't exactly known for its fine optics (quite the opposite, actually...), but hey, it's a good inexpensive test of whether or not I want to fool around with this type of photography or not.
If I find another inexpensive 6x6 rollfilm medium format camera that actually has a *glass* lens for about the same price, I might go with that instead. A built in light meter would also be nice, but eh. Half the fun, right?
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