On taking pictures.
Mar. 28th, 2009 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gurdymonkey"It seems digital cameras are all about the freedom to make pictures that suck, at no cost." - Ken Rockwell
"But of course, why should anybody get good when they have a pirated copy of Photoshop and RAW? 'You can "make" any shot good!'" - James Strowe.
"My old teacher - 4 rolls of color slide film a week. Throw out the stuff that sucks." -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sasha_khan
O my readers who have patiently put up with test batches which spilt forth unedited from my new camera, I have been thinking about the process, my process, how my process got to be my process and so forth.
"But of course, why should anybody get good when they have a pirated copy of Photoshop and RAW? 'You can "make" any shot good!'" - James Strowe.
"My old teacher - 4 rolls of color slide film a week. Throw out the stuff that sucks." -
sasha_khan O my readers who have patiently put up with test batches which spilt forth unedited from my new camera, I have been thinking about the process, my process, how my process got to be my process and so forth.
First, some ancient history. The first camera I ever took pictures with was an ancient Kodak my mother permitted me to take on a class trip to Sterling Forest Gardens (when it was still gardens and not just a place to hold a Ren Faire). It was heavy, all metal and glass, and I had to look down into a well at the top at the upside down image of what I was trying to get a picture of. The roll of film inside its bowels did not come in a cartridge, had to be extracted with reverent care and taken to a store that specialized in film processing.
From there, we - because any camera at that time was The Family Camera - graduated to the Kodak Instamatic with its Oh So Mod Flashcubes that gave you four whole shots before you had to toss it in the trash and put a new one on and film that came in cartridges. I recall an ultimately unsatisfying dalliance with a Polaroid Swinger: instant gratification came at the price of truly hideous snapshots. Pictures were for vacations and family gatherings, for documenting Halloween costumes and Christmas present-opening and of course, the ever popular embarrass-your-kids-when-they're-grown by shooting them as nekkid toddlers. We took pictures, we weren't photographers. (Hold that thought. I'll get back to it.)
I was either in college or just out of it when I bought my very own camera with my very own money. It was a Fujifilm 35mm autofocus camera that could handle film speeds up to AS 400. That was an awesome little camera. It went to Europe with me three times in the 1980s and my mother is still using it. I traded up to a Chinon Genesis, another 35mm autofocus job that behaved more like an SLR. It could zoom further than the Fuji (a plus when trying to photograph animals) and the macro feature resulted in my current addiction to botanical shots.
My first digital was about five or six years ago, a battery vampire of an Olympus, all of 2 megapixels and the only reason I got that was as part of a spirit award program at work - I garnered enough points from working on a special project that I could trade it for merchandise. The Fujifilm 3800 was an accidental find on eBay. I was looking for something else, the seller had a new baby and wanted to trade up to something better to capture all those new baby moments and I got it for a song. As mentioned previously, a decent camera: my only gripes were slow-ish shutter speed and performance in low light.
To sum up: I started taking pictures the way most people take pictures. I did it in black and white, in color and on film, for a long time. I never took any courses or played with a true SLR, and when I buy cameras I have no objection to cameras with automatic features that do the work for me.
Now while I was over at the Asian Art Museum testing the new Fujifilm F100fd (sounds like it should have a jet engine and machine guns, doesn't it?), I enjoyed a fascinating little exhibit called Photographic Memories. The earliest date from about 1850, practically the dawn of the camera. "The images on view reflect lives people led in Asia, record the travels people took there – or would like to have taken." Carefully posed (remember, it often took several minutes for exposed film to record an image in early cameras) and in some cases tinted in spectacular color (THIS is not a painting), they may be on the wall of a museum, but they have plenty in common with me on a mule in the Grand Canyon or Dad and Elaine posing next to Thoth in the British Museum.
Is Mr. Rockwell right? Isn't a camera, ANY camera, about the freedom to make pictures? Period?
Thought: The common usage is "taking pictures." Rockwell talks about "making" pictures. What does that connote about how Mr. Rockwell thinks about what he does and what he thinks the rest of us do?
Thought: I have never thought of myself as "photographer." I'm just another yutz with a camera. I mostly take pictures for the same reasons a lot of people do: to hang on to something I want to remember. To take it, to say, "I went there and did this cool thing. I saw that. This is my friend. These are my family." The usual stuff.
One only has to look at some of the murkily lit, blurry, faded snapshots that still reside in most family photo albums. That's not a bad photo, that's my baby! (You want a horror show, you should've seen the godawful family picture taken at my cousin's wedding that my mother had printed special so she could send it to me. Or go scroll through some of the unflattering stuff that makes it into online photo albums and gets announced on SCAToday.net You too can find a bad photo of yourself at some interkingdom war!) Perhaps the difference between a photographer and a picture taker is ruthlessness, being able to look at a roll of 36 shots and keep one, or even throw the entire thing away if need be.
As mentioned, I don't do much electronic editing. A little red-eye reduction, cropping, that's about it. Frankly, that's about all I'm capable of because I never cared to learn. (I've never learned to "draw" with a mouse either. That's what pencils are for!)
Test batches one through three this week were taken using the camera's internal memory (20 shots at 12 mp) or a chip better suited to a 2 megapixel camera (about 40 shots at 12 mp). I HAD to use memory space wisely. Being able to sit down on a bench and erase the suck meant I had a chance to try again and do better.
Today's test batch, was shot at Hakone Gardens in Saratoga California. I realized I had a black-and-white option (!!!) and decided to play with it. I did not keep count how many shots I deleted during the shoot. I scrapped about 20 after they were downloaded and I had a better look at them.
Some of you are photographers. For those of my readers who have not seen their work, go enjoy:
James Strowe (This is what you get for acting like Stalker Guy, Buckwheat. If you'd get an LJ account you could graffiti up my blog with comments like the rest of the class, instead of having to email me with behind the scenes commentaries.)
http://www.livebooksedu.com/jstrowe/
Richard Man (akadidjiman )
http://www.rfman.com/
I'm not sure that digital means the death of good photography. Sure, any yutz with a camera can play, but any yutz with a camera might have grown up with Life Magazine and National Geographic in the house. Any yutz might have Ansel Adams on their office wall, blown up to poster size. Sure, some of us just want to remember Girl's Night Out at karaoke or Baby's First Steps. But some of us do look at other photographers' work and think about what they show us. Occasionally, some of us even try to look at the world and see the picture before we even raise the camera to our eye.
Mr. Rockwell makes some interesting points and you can read more below.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/why-we-love-film.htm
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/filmdig.htm
From there, we - because any camera at that time was The Family Camera - graduated to the Kodak Instamatic with its Oh So Mod Flashcubes that gave you four whole shots before you had to toss it in the trash and put a new one on and film that came in cartridges. I recall an ultimately unsatisfying dalliance with a Polaroid Swinger: instant gratification came at the price of truly hideous snapshots. Pictures were for vacations and family gatherings, for documenting Halloween costumes and Christmas present-opening and of course, the ever popular embarrass-your-kids-when-they're-grown by shooting them as nekkid toddlers. We took pictures, we weren't photographers. (Hold that thought. I'll get back to it.)
I was either in college or just out of it when I bought my very own camera with my very own money. It was a Fujifilm 35mm autofocus camera that could handle film speeds up to AS 400. That was an awesome little camera. It went to Europe with me three times in the 1980s and my mother is still using it. I traded up to a Chinon Genesis, another 35mm autofocus job that behaved more like an SLR. It could zoom further than the Fuji (a plus when trying to photograph animals) and the macro feature resulted in my current addiction to botanical shots.
My first digital was about five or six years ago, a battery vampire of an Olympus, all of 2 megapixels and the only reason I got that was as part of a spirit award program at work - I garnered enough points from working on a special project that I could trade it for merchandise. The Fujifilm 3800 was an accidental find on eBay. I was looking for something else, the seller had a new baby and wanted to trade up to something better to capture all those new baby moments and I got it for a song. As mentioned previously, a decent camera: my only gripes were slow-ish shutter speed and performance in low light.
To sum up: I started taking pictures the way most people take pictures. I did it in black and white, in color and on film, for a long time. I never took any courses or played with a true SLR, and when I buy cameras I have no objection to cameras with automatic features that do the work for me.
Now while I was over at the Asian Art Museum testing the new Fujifilm F100fd (sounds like it should have a jet engine and machine guns, doesn't it?), I enjoyed a fascinating little exhibit called Photographic Memories. The earliest date from about 1850, practically the dawn of the camera. "The images on view reflect lives people led in Asia, record the travels people took there – or would like to have taken." Carefully posed (remember, it often took several minutes for exposed film to record an image in early cameras) and in some cases tinted in spectacular color (THIS is not a painting), they may be on the wall of a museum, but they have plenty in common with me on a mule in the Grand Canyon or Dad and Elaine posing next to Thoth in the British Museum.
Is Mr. Rockwell right? Isn't a camera, ANY camera, about the freedom to make pictures? Period?
Thought: The common usage is "taking pictures." Rockwell talks about "making" pictures. What does that connote about how Mr. Rockwell thinks about what he does and what he thinks the rest of us do?
Thought: I have never thought of myself as "photographer." I'm just another yutz with a camera. I mostly take pictures for the same reasons a lot of people do: to hang on to something I want to remember. To take it, to say, "I went there and did this cool thing. I saw that. This is my friend. These are my family." The usual stuff.
One only has to look at some of the murkily lit, blurry, faded snapshots that still reside in most family photo albums. That's not a bad photo, that's my baby! (You want a horror show, you should've seen the godawful family picture taken at my cousin's wedding that my mother had printed special so she could send it to me. Or go scroll through some of the unflattering stuff that makes it into online photo albums and gets announced on SCAToday.net You too can find a bad photo of yourself at some interkingdom war!) Perhaps the difference between a photographer and a picture taker is ruthlessness, being able to look at a roll of 36 shots and keep one, or even throw the entire thing away if need be.
As mentioned, I don't do much electronic editing. A little red-eye reduction, cropping, that's about it. Frankly, that's about all I'm capable of because I never cared to learn. (I've never learned to "draw" with a mouse either. That's what pencils are for!)
Test batches one through three this week were taken using the camera's internal memory (20 shots at 12 mp) or a chip better suited to a 2 megapixel camera (about 40 shots at 12 mp). I HAD to use memory space wisely. Being able to sit down on a bench and erase the suck meant I had a chance to try again and do better.
Today's test batch, was shot at Hakone Gardens in Saratoga California. I realized I had a black-and-white option (!!!) and decided to play with it. I did not keep count how many shots I deleted during the shoot. I scrapped about 20 after they were downloaded and I had a better look at them.
Some of you are photographers. For those of my readers who have not seen their work, go enjoy:
James Strowe (This is what you get for acting like Stalker Guy, Buckwheat. If you'd get an LJ account you could graffiti up my blog with comments like the rest of the class, instead of having to email me with behind the scenes commentaries.)
http://www.livebooksedu.com/jstrowe/
Richard Man (aka
didjiman )http://www.rfman.com/
I'm not sure that digital means the death of good photography. Sure, any yutz with a camera can play, but any yutz with a camera might have grown up with Life Magazine and National Geographic in the house. Any yutz might have Ansel Adams on their office wall, blown up to poster size. Sure, some of us just want to remember Girl's Night Out at karaoke or Baby's First Steps. But some of us do look at other photographers' work and think about what they show us. Occasionally, some of us even try to look at the world and see the picture before we even raise the camera to our eye.
Mr. Rockwell makes some interesting points and you can read more below.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/why-we-love-film.htm
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/filmdig.htm
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 05:19 am (UTC)Ken Rockwell is a funny guy - he's more a.... technician than a photographer. Look at his photos and judge for yourself.
Even with my IR work, where you *have to* do some post processing work, I tried to keep them at a minimum. There is a difference in taking a picture and making a picture. As you know, I sometimes enhance a picture with calligraphy, but I still believe that there is a moment that speaks to the photographer, and this moment is the essence that should be preserved.
(*) A funny story is that a famous photojournalist (I forgot his name) at the dawn of the 35mm age reluctantly switched to a 35mm camera from his usual larger format camera. When he got off the plane after an assignment, he threw the film canister to a waiting assistant, and said something like "print both of the pictures, they are both good." That is, he still took as much care in shooting as he was before.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 07:19 am (UTC)This week's tests weren't so much about grabbing a memory as learning to use a tool and see what it was capable of. I've been making myself really look and think about the places I've been shooting. Strong colors? Interesting shapes? Should I stand here or here? And today, will that look more interesting in b&w? What things in this place will result in a good image? Definitely a good exercise and one I intend to try to continue with.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 05:36 pm (UTC)Nice photo. Soothing greens.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 07:43 pm (UTC)I definitely agree that there is a difference between art photography and just a record of events. We don't get the really fine art shots nearly as often as we just get records of the day. We may cull 30:1 just to get the record of the day shots, and of those we get maybe 30:1 in fine art shots. It takes a lot more looking and setting up to get the technically sound shots with artistic merit.
Can I get a witness?
Date: 2009-03-29 10:25 pm (UTC)Unfortunately, the West Kingdom History Site is the road to photographic hell, especially given the good old West Kingdom Royal Pavilion Jaundice Effect. Who needs a Night of 1001 Jello Shots when you can simply be photographed at court and made to look like an end-stage cirrhosis patient by the ambient light?
Re: Can I get a witness?
Date: 2009-03-30 12:01 am (UTC)There are good tricks for reducing (and even removing) this issue.
Newer cameras are much better at automatic white-balance. I'm surprised how well mine does, even in odd conditions.
Shooting in RAW can also help a lot.
- Shoot a gray card in the space, in the available light, before things start
- Shoot the event
- Load the image of the gray card in your RAW conversion software
- Sample the gray card image to find the appropriate color temperature and tint
- Apply that color temperature and tint to the rest of the pictures
Jaundice goes away!That's actually probably one of the biggest issues in amateur digital photography. Back when you took photos to a real lab to be processed, a technician would (quickly) tweak the enlarger filters to improve the white balance and colors. It was rarely perfect, but it was better than nothing. Automated processing equipment got rid of the human element, and was better on timing and chemistry but rarely as good at color correction. With digital, only a few people bother to calibrate their displays and printers, much less go in and do simple color correction on their images.
Re: Can I get a witness?
Date: 2009-03-30 12:23 am (UTC)I really wish Flickr was better for browsing. I might visit it more.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 10:16 pm (UTC)Strowe is half-right. With RAW, it's possible to take almost any image, no matter how badly exposed, and diddle it until there's something salvagable, even if the resulting picture barely resembles the original scene. But why?
I'm with Ctein on this one. Do what you have to to get the image. If that means post, that means post. But getting it right in the camera is still the most desirable thing.
Getting it right in the camera is so much easier now, though. Digital is starting to reach the exposure latitude of film, and is exceeding the speed, tonal range and resolution. Smarter exposure systems mean you get a reasonably-exposed shot a lot more often. Smarter focus systems help you avoid focus issues.
With all those technical demons subdued, it comes down to a matter of light and composition, which is the real difficult part...
no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 10:43 pm (UTC)I remember the wait for film processing and opening the envelope and being disappointed by things that didn't come out. Digital beasts allow those of us who attempt to be mindful shutterbugs to know we've laid an egg right away, erase it and try again.
As for Rockwell, anyone who begs other people to donate money to support his website should not call other photographers whores. It's just Not Cool.