> Posted by Innocent (Innocent) on Sunday, December 12, 2004 - 12:14 am:
> its level of performance. With a film camera, you have the choice of > changing the films untill you find the one that suits your requirement > but with digital camera you are stuck with sensor that came with it > (and the lens for the compact range). > Exactly. Which is why only minutes back ago I ordered a new Nikon CP8400. It takes the basics that made the CP5000 ideal for my work and extended and refined them. Realize there is no perfect camera. Every camera - just as every image - is a series of compromises.
The key is to define one's photographic goals and match the hardware to them. Until the CP8400 came on the market, there was no camera AT ANY PRICE that had the unique combination of features of the CP5k. I would not trade it for a D2X or a 1Ds, since neither of these cameras meet my needs. The definition of needs MUST preced the acquisition.
I have perhaps a dozen film cameras that were used over the years of my career. None were bought at random and each was bought after extensive research to solve a clearly definable photographic problem. In each case they gave me a specific edge. My WideLuxe panoramic camera was paid for on its first assignment, as was my PC-Nikkor shift-lens, 600mm solid cat made by Perkin-Elmer the makers of the Hubble Space Telescope and so on. Editors and art directors were particularly fond of using WideLuxe shots as double page spreads.
http://www.larry-bolch.com/portfolio/publications/index.htm
> While photoshop and other similar softwares are abound, I just don't > like the idea of altering or over manipulating my images. > represent the world the way I percieve it at the point in time- a > realist or purist, the old Rubens and Rainbrandt school if you wish.
Corrupt thinking.
In 1826 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce after five years of experimentation finally found a method for fixing a photographic image so it would not immediately fade. Though experimentation had gone on for decades before, this was the key discovery that made the medium viable. Nearly a decade later in 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot succeeded in creating a paper negative and making a positive print in a way similar to the way it is done with film today. Over the next century and a quarter, for EVERY image shot on film, the darkroom was where the life was breathed into the print. It is in this interpretive stage that an exposure becomes a Photograph.
I assume by your above statement that were you shooting film, you would be running around showing your unprocessed negatives, hoping to convince people you are a "purist". Nothing could be further from the truth.
As you may or may not know, the great photographer and teacher Ansel Adams very nearly became a concert pianist instead of a photographer. Using a musical metaphor he said "The exposure is the score, but the print is the performance." With the web, we have a medium that Ansel was unable to experience, but whether the image is presented in analogue or digital form, the need for a finished image is equally important.
It is on location where one gathers the best raw materials, but it is in processing where the art is created. During processing you have the leisure to contemplate what it was that moved you to capture the image, and it is at this time that you infuse your image with the beauty and emotion that inspired you. Ideas are captured with the camera, but the art is in the processing of these ideas.
An unprocessed image is simply raw materials - no different from the fresh eggs, best flour and other quality ingredients that will become an epicure's banquet. As a great chef blends these materials, seasons and cooks to perfection, so does the photographer in the darkroom. I would no more share an unprocessed image than I would feed an honoured guest raw eggs and flour. On the shoot, one tries to get a starting image that will not require major corrections, only interpretation. Rotten ingredients will not make for happy diners - except in Victorian England where the "goose hangs high".
Showing an unprocessed image is to show contempt for your viewers. It certainly means that you are no photographer. It is as if Rubens and Rembrant flaunted tubes of oil colour and raw canvas and called themselves artists. No, you are not a purist - you are a slacker that does half a job and makes excuses. You seek cameras, hoping there will be a magic one to overcome your lack of ambition and skill. No wonder you are having problems with your agency. Just as Rubens and Rembrant worked in their studios realizing their visions at the easel, so does the photographer in the darkroom - no matter whether it is a fume-room or Photoshop.
> To this end I try to use the most optimum tools that are available- > high quality lens and camera body. When I used to paint or draw, I > never compromised with my pens and or brushes or the pigments > themselves. The tools of the trade must be of the highest quality you > can afford.
And the artist must have the skills to use them. The greatest bowed-string instruments ever made, came from early 18th century Cremona. However, handing a Stradivarius to a first year fiddle student would accomplish nothing. It takes someone of the stature of an Itzak Perlman to reveal the secrets of these instruments. A Stradivarius does not make music, but a great fiddle player does - and only after many years of study and constant practice. On the other hand Itzak could take a cheap student fiddle and move the souls of marble statues. Great tools ONLY give the edge to great artists.
> The unfortunate thing about photography as it seems to be practiced > currently is that the many entrants never had any grounding or > appreciation for arts, and so they seem to be limited to technical > aspects of photography. Rarely if ever, do you commonly find any > discussion forum where the art of photography is a main issue.
This is primarily a camera-hardware forum. I have inherited a venerable forum going back to FidoNet days where photographers on many levels hang out with their own kind. It really is not so much about photography as it is about life from a photographer's perspective. Nothing is off-topic and sometimes it seems the subject wanders quite distant from photography specifically, but on closer examination it is photography. For a photographer, life and photography are one and the same.
We do a lot of visual communication as well. Photos may be attached to messages and there is a files area where we share our - generally - personal work. The group is exceedingly collegial, and unique on the Internet. While the earliest members may go back a decade and a half, new members are warmly welcomed.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PhotoGallery/
> I am looking forward to the day when an > opponent is going to present photographic evidence in Court, on that > day I will redicule such evidence to the point that future > photographic evidences will be admitted with a pinch of salt till the > law in this area is changed, then we can thank our layering, masking, > etc Doctors for that.
Again corrupt thinking.
Darkroom magic was not invented by Adobe. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did "sprit photography" double printing all manner of etherial critters into his prints. As early as 1857 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, a Swedish painter/photographer living in England exhibited an allegorical image emulating a painting and made up of no less than 30 separate exposures combined into a single print - "The Morality Lesson". Julia Margaret Cameron following in the style of the Pre-Raphaelites created highly romantic fictions on the urging of her neighbor Alfred Lord Tennison.
The publisher of a newspaper I shot for was in a feud with the mayor of the city, and declared he did not exist - as far as his paper was concerned. We always photographed him on the edge of the picture so he could be cut out. Many of my pictures have similarly been cropped by editors in ways that have completely changed the meaning of the shot. I have had a number of montages assigned to illustrate a feature where all the masking was done with a regular enlarger in the darkroom. Some quite striking. There is little that I can do in Photoshop that I can not do as well in the fume-room. Photographs may not lie, but shooters have been doing so for many years.
If you think that photo manipulation began with Photoshop, you are at least a century and a half out of touch with reality.
> Oh BTW I have changed my mind about the D70, it just didn't feel right > in my hands. I have no doubt that it might be a very capable camera > but I don't do half measure.
Again, hoping for a camera to save you. Forget about the ultimate camera until you have the shooting and processing skills to be able to use it fully. To do otherwise is simply to squander money for no purpose. Take the time to master the fundamentals of shooting and processing. You don't need a state of the art camera to do this until you gain state of the art skills.
Looking at your work, I see a promising eye, but a lack of depth and fluency in the medium. There is a bit of a one-hour lab blandness in your presentations. This is not the camera's fault - it is a lack of follow through and understanding. Your images are working against you. You need to move beyond the snapshot - and that will only come from practice - not a new camera.
And, yes - learn Photoshop fluently. Your images desperately need it.
larry!
http://www.larry-bolch.com/ ICQ 76620504
