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.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
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?
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Dr. Evil
Camera: Nikon D200, 1/2 second exposure at -2 EV, ISO at 100.
Lens: Nikkor 50mm at f/1.8
Light: Christmas lights!
Recently I noticed the nice DOF effect that strings of small lights give (taking pictures at a halloween party last week) and decided to work it into a photo. I hung up a string of christmas lights in the background and then focused on a Dr. Evil action figure I had sitting around the house, put the camera on timer mode (less vibration for those shots with a slower shutter speed) (and if the D200 only had timer mode + mirror up, I'd be *so* happy) and pushed the button.
The picture was shot at -2 EV (the camera calculates the proper exposure value for the light at the aperture you've set, then shoots two EV [EV being calculated as EV = log2 * aperture squared over the shutter speed] under what it should be) due to the brightness of the lights in the background and the lack of lighting on the action figure. The RAW file was opened in Photoshop and I upped the exposure until Dr. Evil was clearly visible and then I pasted him onto a layer over the image as it was originally exposed, giving a nicely lit figure over a properly exposed background.
The proper way would be to do a better job lighting it to begin with, but as I was short on time at that particular moment, you do what you can and fix it in Photoshop later :)
The depth of field that a lens with a f1.8 aperture affords is very, very nice. Anything below f2 tends to be a prime lens and the closer the number is to 1, the more expensive the lens.
Nikon 50mm f/1.8 - $100.00
Nikon 50mm f/1.4 - $280.00
Nikon 50mm f/1.2 - $600.00
Leica 50mm f/1.0 Noctilux - $5,500.00
Notice how the price doubles every .2 stops until it gets to f1.0, where it goes insane?
And a few f0.75 50mm lenses exist, namely the Canon XI 50mm f0.75 (currently the fastest camera lens in the world, AFAIK) and the Carl Zeiss, De Oude Delft, Rayxar lenses 50mm lenses (though they're made for X-Ray machines, it seems you can adapt it to a Nikon F mount). I have no idea what they cost and I'm not sure I want to know...
This fellow has a nice page on a few of them: http://www.muellerworld.com/exhibits/fast_lens/
(With photos taken with them!)
Being bereft of vast amounts of cash, I only have a Nikon 50mm f1.8 at the moment. But I can dream. Oh, can I dream...
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