Photo by D. Shumake
TOP reader Jim Tiemann sent me this picture, with a note:
"Sometimes we need reminding why they invented cameras...
After watching my wife give birth to our new son, they gave him to me. My sister-in-law took my camera, and I got to cry my eyes out in utter amazement and joy. I'm eternally grateful that she pointed the camera towards us...."
Big congratulations to Jim and his family. And a happy weekend to all.
Mike
(Thanks to Jim)
Some pictures of an encounter with a curious fur seal taken on a trip that TOP reader Alek O. Komarnitsky recently took to Antarctica, South Georgia, and the Falkland Islands.
Alek, who describes himself as a dedicated amateur who "takes way too many pictures and spends way too much time pixel-peeping" (although his wife just says he's "a crazy camera guy"—can anybody relate?), describes the trip as "truly a trip of a lifetime," adding, "if you ever do this, don't just go to Antarctica, do the triangle with Falklands and South Georgia which are even more impressive."
The baby fur seal actually started nibbling on the lens hood of the remote 40D. You can enjoy the whole set and travel along vicariously at his website, where there's more information, too, starting with a map.
Richard Renaldi's Photostream
Richard Renaldi's website
Richard Renaldi's second book, Fall River Boys, is available exclusively from Charles Lane press, $85 unsigned, $90 signed, in a limited edition of 1200 copies.
Featured [partial] Comment by richardplondon: "Funny thing about people photographed with large format, they often have a look of someone 'participating' in something. Ready steady go, this is your moment, show us your stuff...."
Mike replies: Funny, I was looking at this more from a coloristic standpoint, and at the way the flyaway hat brim plays off the plant fronds in the near bokeh....
Stuart Franklin [see featured comment below] took this elegant picture of a familiar figure practicing for the PGA Championship tournament, which begins today at Hazeltine. It's possible to consider it an example of a tiny but honorable niche—"portraits" in which the subject is not facing the camera, like Karsh's picture of Pablo Casals.
Featured Comment by Bahi: "The golf shot might be from a different Stuart Franklin; there's a Getty sports photographer by that name who gets lots of interesting pictures of Tiger Woods and who is unrelated to the Magnum shooter (and recent Magnum President) in the post you're currently linking to on the old TOP site.
By the way, according to a comment at the site below, the President of Magnum got a lot of e-mail about a purported Photoshop disaster that wasn't really a Photoshop disaster at all and which definitely involved the other Stuart Franklin.
http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/2008/06/washington-post-unlikely.html
Mike replies: My mistake. Thanks Bahi. I removed the link. I should have remembered there was a "second" Stuart Franklin from our own discussion of the fascinating "error mimicking" of the Mickelson/Woods shot—which was, as you say, actually not a Photoshop disaster.
As a curmudgeonly aside, when there's an established figure in the field with the same name, it's customary for the later-comer to use a middle initial to distinguish himself. Maybe we should unilaterally name the second Stuart Franklin "Stuart X. Franklin." I suppose it's possible that Getty Stuart Franklin is older than Magnum Stuart Franklin, though—just because I heard of the latter first doesn't necessarily mean he has primacy. —Mike, who has always disliked having a too-common name
Ham Schirmer, Deke's Sailboat
In the interests of full disclosure, Ham's a cousin, and I'm a sucker for sailboats, which I think are often among the most graceful and lovely of all Man's fabrications. I came across this because Ham used it for the cover of an iPhoto book he made recently of his favorite pictures. Slightly cropped (from the bottom, if memory serves), it makes a very good looking book cover.
I hadn't recently seen an iPhoto book (which you can make and order for $30 from within iPhoto '09, which is part of iLife '09, which comes bundled with Macs), and I was impressed with the quality. The last bespoke photo book I made myself was through lulu.com, and the pictures in it had the look of high-quality color Xeroxes; Ham's hardcover had repro more like middling-quality offset—in other words, pretty darn good. If you have an Apple, you ought to try this. (Unless you've already made half a dozen and I'm just late to the party. Come to think of it, Nick Hartmann has been telling me about Apple books for months now....)
Ham made the shot with an Olympus C-5050z at 1/500th sec. at ƒ/4, ISO 64.
Featured Comment by Ernest Theisen: "I tried to use the previous version of iPhoto and it gave me fits so I went to MyPublisher and I got good results. I was told that MyPublisher makes the books for Apple's iPhoto."
Revisiting a couple of topics from the last couple of months:
Photo: W. Eugene Smith
First, a wonderful collection of Kodachrome photographs from the vaults of Fortune magazine, dating from 1939 to 2002, from artists as diverse as Dmitri Kessel, William Vandivert*, Dan Weiner, Robert Doisneau, and Alex Webb, as well as several not at all known for shooting color, such as Ansel Adams, Ralph Steiner, Walker Evans, and W. Eugene Smith (Smith's picture above was taken in 1957 for an article about the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company's then-new building in Hartford. The picture didn't make the issue). A tiny sampling online, but good to look at. (Coincidentally highlights one of Kodachrome's often hidden benefits, too—its good dark-storage archivability.)
We were talking about Kodachrome when it went the way of all things last month.
Photo: Luc Novovitch
On a related note, TOP reader Luc Novovitch passed by Kodachrome Basin State Park in Utah last week on his way to Escalante, and he confirms that the park is still there and still has the same name! (There was some question.) Above is a shot he took on his way through.
Photo: Stan Semuskie
In a "Featured Comment" to our post about adding an aerial shot to your portfolio, photographer Stan Semuskie told a cool story about being hired by Forbes magazine to shoot the home of Nike founder Phil Knight, and how he had a blast that day shooting everything he could see from the chopper. Stan has now put some of the selects from that shoot online; you can practically feel the rush of the air and the beat of the blades. Fun stuff.
On the often visually irritating Life.com site, Astronaut Bruce McCandless is
joined in space by a watermark and two enormous floating arrows.
Life.com has put up a set it calls "The 21 Greatest Space Photos Ever." I have to say I think the jury's still out on Life.com. The JPEGs are often of...well, variable quality, and the interface gets in the way of enjoying the pictures. Take #15 in the linked set, for instance—"the immediately recognizable human form" in the "vastness of space" yes, but then, the two arrows that also appear to be floating in the vastness of space compete with the human form and detract somewhat from the visual impact. (Speaking of that shot, I wonder if Astronaut Bruce McCandless is any relation to Chris McCandless, the protagonist of Jon Krakauer's fine if troubling book Into the Wild
Finally, the always delightful Shorpy.com has some better JPEGs of the late Julius Shulman's architectural work than I was able to link to the other day, including a large, good-quality digitization of Shulman's signature picture.
Mike
(Thanks to Marc Rochkind, Luc, Stan, Robert Lee, and Werner J. Karl)
*Whose former assistant Carl Leonardi is a TOP reader.
Damion Berger [untitled]
This isn't the easiest picture in the world to visually parse. If you're lucky, when you first looked at this you didn't get it right away, and then you did. Made you smile, I bet. I'll give you a hint: it's a perfectly straight photograph, as far as I know. (I hope it is. We should ask Damion.)
It's from the series "In the Deep End." I've known there was a great series of photographs in this subject for literally twenty-five years; I always knew it. (I could never be the one to shoot it, though. Or try. Ever heard that old dictum
that a man can drown in a teacup of water? Well, I am that man.) Every now and then I'd see a hint of it, one shot here or there showing just how rich a subject it could be. There was a fine book out a long time ago from Aperture called Swimmers (actually, it was Aperture no. 111, June 1988
Some of the work is on view all summer long at Bonnie Benrubi Gallery, in the "Hot Fun in the Summertime" show. The gallery is at 41 East 57th Street, 13th Floor, New York, New York 10022, phone 212/888-6007.
UPDATE: I heard from Damion, who tells me that all the pictures in the "Deep End" portfolio are indeed "straight."
From the series Between Two Lakes.
You know, print might be dying*, but it's still really nice for any photographer to get a good cover:
Michael graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a B.A. in Photography in 2004.
*I say this tongue-in-cheek. Print will be around for a few more years yet.
As always, "random" means randomly encountered.
Prints from the Nat Fein estate, including the famous "The Babe Bows Out," can be purchased from vintagephotos.com.
From Friedman's series "Pleasures and Terrors of Kissing." You can see more of the work at Fraction Magazine (Issue 7), and there's an interview with the photographer at Michael Werner's Two Way Lens. There's a lot going on in a number of these pictures, you you might want to stave off closure just a tad longer than usual.
Mike
One of my photo teachers at the Corcoran, Frank DiPerna, owned a print of this photograph. If I recall correctly, Frank felt that everybody who loved photography should have at least a couple of original prints of favorite pictures framed and hanging on their walls, and he brought this in, in its frame, to show to us. He loved it because he liked to go to the ballpark, and for him this shot had all the feeling of a summer day at the ball game.
It will be in Tod's upcoming show in NYC.
Mike
N.b.: As always, "random" as used here means randomly encountered.
Photo: Thierry Legault
Every now and then a photographer manages to capture a truly spectacular sight, and the image becomes instantly famous—so far, I've seen this one on the news, in newspapers, and in numerous places on the internet. Astronomical photographer Thierry Legault (he's authored several books on the subject, the most recent of which, The Art of Astrophotography, will be published in English translation in late 2009) took this "transit" photograph from a location in Florida, using a Canon 5D Mark II mounted to a Takahashi TOA-130 refractor telescope (effective focal length 2,200mm). Shooting through a Baader solar filter, the camera was set on ISO 100 with a 1/8000th shutter speed. Remarkably, the Shuttle Atlantis is traveling at 15,500 miles per hour, and the transit itself lasted only eight-tenths of a second, which gives you an idea of the depth of knowledge and preparedness required of the photographer. This transit was viewable from a swath of territory on Earth only three and a half miles wide.
The picture above, however, is a radical crop. Some great photographs are not designs that are composed merely for pictorial effect, but in this case you really must take a look at the full photograph at Thierry's website (fourth one down)—it's as stark and emblematic as any work of modern art, aesthetically perfect in addition to being a photographic report of something real and seldom seen.
Andrea Land, Elizabeth
- —Andrea Land (from her website)
-
"Continue similar reductions in your list of interests until two or three subjects remains, all of which a.) fire your enthusiasm b.) lend themselves to images, as opposed to words c.) are continuously accessible.
"Let me give you an example. As a teacher I encounter a great number of photographic students who are active in college life, naturally emotional about many aspects of education, and who spend the greater part of their waking life on campus. But in the past 15 years, and over 1,000 students later, I have never seen a photographic project based on what it is like to be a college student. In fact, it is rare indeed to see a photographic student carrying a camera."
- —Bill Jay, from "The Thing Itself"
-
Rereading this passage from Bill Jay's essay "The Thing Itself" yesterday (it was mentioned by Robin in the comments), I thought of Andrea Land. Who would think that there was a series of pictures to be made by photographing something so ordinary as young girls in their rooms, attempting to imply or signify their inner life? And yet Andrea has done it, by some synchronous alchemy of ability, intent, and insight. It is for her a subject that fulfills Bill's three conditions, a., b., and c. And yet I think very few people could do it.
Her pictures in "French Male Adolescent" might also be interesting, but I suspect they are a case where web representations fall too far below the threshold of acceptability to permit them to be adequately seen.
Emilio Morenatti, Afghan Niurkhan, 11, stands next to his tent in Afshar refugee camp in
Kabul, Afghanistan. Niurkhan who lost his parents two months ago during
fighting between coalition forces and Taliban militants fled his
village in Helmand province to seek shelter in the refugee camp in
southern Kabul. (AP Photo)
Emilio Morenatti is based in Pakistan and covers Central Asia for the AP. You can see a blog of his recent work at the Denver Post. Emilio was named 2008 Newspaper Photographer of the Year by PoYI.
Notice how effectively he removes himself from his pictures.
Tim Davis is one of the more fascinating photographers I've found out about recently. I learned about him from Jeff Ladd's book recommendations for us, posted last August. Jeff recommended Tim's book My Life in Politics
"Permanent collection" is equally fascinating in that it seems like such a dull idea on its face (and of course Elliott Erwitt came and went from the same territory long ago), yet the pictures themselves evoke thoughtfulness, perhaps arising from the photographs' insistence on the paintings' corporeality.
There's a book
Featured Comment by Gavin: "Just noticed that on Tim Davis's website in the 'Permanent Collection' area is a photo called 'Betty.' This is a photo of one of Gerhard Richter's paintings of his daughter, made from a photograph. The painting, unlike many of his other 'photo paintings,' is not distorted, and when you view it from a short distance looks like a photo. We seem to be going in circles."
Featured Comment by Calvin Amari: "The 'Betty' image is even more circular than suggested. The Davis photo, as noted, indeed is of a Gerhard Richter painting, which itself is derived from a photo (presumably taken by Richter himself). What sometimes is not fully apprehended is the fact that the subject, Richter's daughter, is not turned staring into space. Rather, she is looking back at one of her father's grey monochromatic paintings rather than at Richter himself. Hence the matryoshka-like nesting problem that Davis extended begins with a painting. (So far as I know, Richter's Grey Painting series, generally dating from the late '60s and early '70s, was not derived from photographs, but one can speculate about exposure problems....)"
I've you've ever looked with fascination out the window of an airplane coming in low, you'll be fascinated by the beauty, horror, and vast sweep of Alex McLean's aerial views.
I thought this one was apropos as a nod to the ongoing Road to the Final Four*, but it's not any better than most of his other pictures. His whole site is worth an extended viewing. I loved it.
His latest book is Over: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point
*An argument against efficiency: you could make basketball much more efficient by giving each team 90 points to start with and then limiting games to 5 minutes. I've always thought basketball could be greatly improved by playing separate 15-minute periods, best three out of five wins. Then, blowouts would only go on for 45 minutes, close games would get an automatic "overtime," and you'd have up to five exciting endings per game instead of just one.
This might not quite convince as a middlin'-sized JPEG, but I'll bet it's a gorgeous print. (When I look at Andy's work I'm imagining superbly crafted large-format prints on fiber paper, but I haven't asked him. I wonder if that is indeed what they are, or if I'm being fooled.) See if you can find some things you like in Andy's portfolio on Picasa.
You might also like his blog, Tao of Photography. Since posting about Josef Sudek the other day, I've had several nice and very interesting email exchanges with readers who are disabled. Regarding Sudek, I used to joke with Sally Mann that I'd use an 8x10 like she does, except that it's too big and heavy for me (Sally's about half my size). But seriously, an 8x10 outfit really is too much camera for me. So I think that, from now on, whenever I feel lazy about some obstacle or another that's standing in my way, I'm going to think of Josef Sudek using his 8x10 camera and doing all his darkroom work with one arm. That's seriously inspiring. As if his work weren't inspiring enough all by itself.
But I digress. I meant to mention that you might be interested in an insightful and well-written article that Andy Ilachinski wrote on Tao of Photography called "Learning to See from the Blind." Worth the read. (It's about a book called Seeing Beyond Sight: Photographs by Blind Teenagers
Do check out Andy's work. I'll bet you can find some you really like.
Every now and then, don't you just see a picture that makes you go, "Man, I wish I'd taken that"? At this point I feel like I've seen most pictures before—in the sense that most pictures belong to genres of many similarly-seen pictures (even if the photographers aren't aware of it)—but here's one I never saw before. (Although it reminds me slightly of this one.) Unfortunately I've lost track of who suggested Giuseppe to me. Whoever it was, thanks.
You can see more of his work here.
UPDATE: It was Dale Moreau. Thanks Dale!
Reader Federico Bervejillo thinks that Paolo Pellegrin's portfolio of movie star pictures in the Times "shows well the high ISO capabilities of the new digital cameras." Interestingly, the camera makes the credits, which read: "Equipment / Canon."
A Buck or Two
