Another Take

TOP reader Mark Muse's portrait of Benita, the subject of Patricia Dalzell's portrait that we talked about in this post. (No one has ever told me Benita's last name—maybe she has just the one, like Cher or Ctein?)

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Mark Muse: "Keller."

Comments

[Clayton Lofgren]

Can we talk Ken into another job on this one?

[John Roberts]

See, this is why I'm not an artist. I would have deleted this one for being out of focus, never guessing that this was the only "artistic" shot I had made.

[ben ng]

someone's had a couple....!
(I really enjoy dropping by this site)

[Mike Johnston]

John,
And it wouldn't have been a picture...for you. We are all "after" the things that move us and touch us, and those are emphatically not the same things for everybody. I have a friend, for instance, who loves atonal, non-rhythmic music. Some of it is what many people would call "noise." Yet it's what he craves, and he can distinguish good from bad.

I know a guy for whom technical perfection is a turn-off. If a picture is "well exposed" and "well composed" and "well focused" or, God forbid, pretty, he'll reject it. He's just seen it before, it's obvious to him, uninteresting; he gets nothing from it....

Mike

[Ken Tanaka]

Seems like a very informal snap of Benita. I would never have recognized her! Her appearance and the setting are diametrically different from Patricia's portrait. The conga drums in the background suggest her connection to Cuba/Latin America.

[MJFerron]

I get it but must say that being this out of focus is really not necessary to get the point across. But yes, in the end I am sick of pretty landscapes, perfect flowers, bug macros and smiling portraits.

[Sven W]

I think Ken Tanaka is being generous with the term "very informal snap". This photo looks like a candidate for Mike's post on the 30th June "Don't You Just Hate That".

We've have excellent discussion on what is legitimate manipulation of an image and what isn't + what is Art and what isn't. Surely we can recognise a near miss?

[Karl]

Mark should take advantage of the micro-adjust function on his camera if it has one. Not sure if he noticed but that setup is backfocusing just a hair!

[Will Frostmill]

Mike, when you mentioned that:

I know a guy for whom technical perfection is a turn-off. If a picture is "well exposed" and "well composed" and "well focused" or, God forbid, pretty, he'll reject it. He's just seen it before, it's obvious to him, uninteresting; he gets nothing from it....

I was wondering about something quite similar! I had just done some back-of-the-envelope calculations for (hit rate)(shots/day)(per year) and came to an astonishing number of keepers. I mean, a large number for me to work with, annually, and a truly huge number for a pro.*

I thought to myself, good heavens, what am I going to do with all of those photos? What on earth am I going to want to take pictures of in five years? What will still be interesting?

I begin to see the answer here, at _valerian, (the fellow who does Tokyo Camera Style, John Sypal.) There's a certain joy there, and an acceptance of technically-impure colors and textures.

*even assuming a film-era rate of (36/day)*(365 days)*(1% keepers), you still end up with 131 really nice photos. 5% might not be an unreasonable rate for an expert, so that would be 357 right there. If one shoots easily ten times as much a day with digital...

[Paul Parker]

She looks a totally different person, I wonder which is closest to her true self?
Here is here is website:
http://benitakellerphoto.artspan.com/index.php

Sort of Bio:
http://photo.box.sk/about.php3?id=53
Newspaper article:
http://shepherdstownchronicle.com/page/content.detail/id/500869/Life-through-the-lens-of-Benita-Keller.html
This is quite funny!:
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=577712

Paul

[Bill Rogers]

In my opinion, the subject is not out of focus; rather, the photographer used a slow shutter speed and the subject moved.

Flickr is a good website for people who are turned off by technical perfection. Flickr has many examples of the genre.

[Kerry Glasier]

Reading the comments one keeps going back up to the image and looking afresh, seeing what attracts some and repels others. We see so much 'in your eye' stuff that coming across a quieter image it is all too easy to skim past and dismiss it, especially with its obvious 'fault'. Taking the time to read this photo and then maybe re-evaluate our initial reaction has to be A Good Thing.
KG.
Cornwall.UK

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I must say that this is a monumentally unflattering image. She looks about 7/8ths plastered, and probably about to burst into maudlin tears.