The Online Photographer

Eliot Porter: In the Realm of Nature

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

Hardcover, 144 pages, 9.5 x 0.8 x 11 inches
Published by the J. Paul Getty Museum, November 6, 2012
$26.37 at Amazon.com (U.S.)
£23.76 at Amazon U.K.

Eliot Porter is a seminal figure in the eventual acceptance of color photography as art. The 1962 Sierra Club edition of In Wildness is the Preservation of the World is widely cited as one of the most influential photo books of all time, helping simultaneously launch the environmental movement and the advent of high quality color book reproductions.

Despite its prominence, Porter's work has not been especially well treated in book form since his initial fame in the 1960s. Part of this is technical. The purity and subtlety of color that dye transfer prints are capable of is very difficult to reproduce well with offset lithography. The reds in particular can quickly degenerate into smeared blobs of undifferentiated color. Another challenge is the shift in Porter's color interpretation of the original dye transfer prints over time. As is documented in The Color of Wildness (Aperture, 2001), Porter altered his color interpretation of specific images over the years. The subtle and beautiful photograph "Redbud Trees in Bottomland" exists in versions that vary from cool violet to warm pastel in overall color. Which version do you pick? Finally, the relatively small market for high quality photo books, and relentless cost pressures, makes it very difficult to do justice to such a challenging subject.

Eliot Porter, Redbud Trees in Bottomland

All that makes this new book from the Getty Museum especially welcome. It's a modestly-sized book with a brief foreword by Sierra Club director Michael Brune, followed by a concise biography and summary of Porter's career by Paul Martineau. The photo reproductions are, in a word, superb. They come as close as offset printing can to conveying the tonal delicacy and color purity of dye transfer prints, and compare very favorably to all previous reproductions of Porter's images in book form. All are reproduced with adequate white margins, and none are defaced by printing them across the gutter. My benchmark photograph, "Redbud Trees in Bottomland" (plate 40), is beautifully rendered. It avoids the leaden shadows and cool balance of the version seen in The Color of Wildness as well as the somewhat pallid pastel impression found in Intimate Landscapes (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979). The first sequence of photographs are Porter's very accomplished black-and-white landscapes, and the last sequence are his immaculately lit (think O. Winston Link) photos of birds at the nest. In between are the color images he is best known for.

If you own only one Eliot Porter book, this is the one to have. My only complaint is that the typography is rather charmless, using a stark modernist sanserif typeface. In Wildness... had David Brower's elegant design employing the beautiful Centaur typeface, which was also used by Eleanor Morris Caponigro with even greater skill in Intimate Landscapes.

There are other books out there displaying Eliot Porter's work, though most are out of print. The color reproductions in the Sierra Club's 1962 edition of In Wildness is the Preservation of the World are remarkably good for their day, and they have stood the test of time surprisingly well. The book was so popular that it can often be found in used bookstores. Subsequent Sierra Club editions of Porter's work do not hold up as successfully; those on the Galapagos and Antarctica have reproductions that tend to look chalky and blocked-up. Reproductions in The West (1988) are pretty good; those in Appalachian Wilderness (1970) are mediocre, but the subject matter may make it worthwhile to you. Caveat Emptor. Intimate Landscapes (1979) can be very pricey used, but the reproductions are quite good, if mostly leaning to the pastel side, and the book's design and typography are beautiful. Finally, Aperture's The Color of Wildness (2001) is worth a look. Reproduction quality is hit or miss, with some images coming off very well indeed, others going very dark in the shadows.

Geoff

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim Bullard: "I haven't seen 'Redbud Trees in Bottomland' before (at least that I can remember) so I have no basis for comparison. I have seen an exhibit of his original prints and was reminded of a comment that Porter said Ansel Adams made. After viewing a newly hung exhibit of Porter's Ansel told him 'You don't get good whites.' Based on the exhibit I saw (in the '90s?) I had to agree. That said I like Porter's landscape photographs and I'll have to check out this book."

Charles Cramer: "I remember seeing an exhibition of Porter dye transfer prints at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite perhaps 10 years ago. I was disappointed in the prints, as they seemed rather lifeless. The gallery offers several of Porter's books for sale, and directly comparing the reproductions to the prints reinforced my opinion. I subsequently came to learn that Porter did not use highlight masks when making his dye transfers. Matrix film (used to make the 'printing plates') is incredibly flat in the highlights, and needs the boost that highlight masks provide for proper reproduction from transparency films. Using three-color highlight masks made a huge improvement in my prints. Just because a print is a dye transfer doesn't automatically make it sublime...."

When Is Eliot Porter Not Eliot Porter?

WhenI heard that Ammo Books was reprinting Eliot Porter's great and seminal book In Wildness Is The Preservation of the World, I requested a review copy. No-brainer, I thought: TOP readers will love this.

It pains me to have to give the good folks at Ammo a thumbs-down. I believe they're well-meaning; they gave us the innovative and informative instructional book The Contact Sheet by Steve Crist, now out in paperback (and still recommended). However, not only can I not give their In Wildness... reissue my endorsement, I'm afraid I have to give it a non-recommendation. This is one you want to stay away from.

Danger, Will Robinson.... Avoid! Avoid!

In comparison with the original first edition, which I have, the reproduction in the reissue looks like bad color Xeroxes. The densities are all wrong, the colors are all wrong, the sharpness is missing. It worries me that people who buy this book knowing nothing about Eliot Porter will think this is what his work looks like. It isn't. This is not Eliot Porter.

I think Geoff Wittig agrees with me about this.

Mike

Geoff Wittig adds: I do agree. In the past few weeks I've looked over pretty much everything of Eliot Porter's available in book form. Some is good, a lot more of it is mediocre. One wants to give Ammo credit for reissuing this legendary book, but it's not up to the (1962!) standard of the original, let alone contemporary reproductions.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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The Nice Price

I don't know about you, but from where I sit it's like the steady steam of deals-deals-deals has become a torrent. Every day my inbox is logjammed with the jolly invitations—scratch that, the desperate come-ons—of the season. Don't I want to review this or that gewgaw or app or bag or fundraising project? Wouldn't my readers want to know about this deal or that bargain or those savings?

People are getting sensitive, too. One...person (no insults, now, Mike) lambasted me yesterday for daring to link to that box of Dave Bruback CDs. I would have laughed, except my eyes were rolling so hard. Right, like I make a fortune on linking to ultra-budget $14 CD reissues far from the topic of this website...in an era when people hardly ever buy CDs at all any more anyway. Venal, moneygrubbing Mike. That's it.

Anyway, knowing that I am inviting a rain of scorn on my head, here are a few bargains you might actually want to know about: the splendidly solid, or solidly splendid, Canon EF 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens (not great wide open, but great from ƒ/2 on) for a nice-price $299, at Amazon; and the soon-to-be-late, not-so-popular Nikon 1"-sensor V1 with its 10–30mm lens for only $299 at B&H. That V1 kit is less than half the cost of its much-more-popular 1"-sensor main competitor, the Sony RX100. People evidently think the 1" sensor size is luxurious for an all-in-one digicam—accounting for the popularity of the Sony—but less than adequate for a more serious interchangeable-lens mirrorless camera—accounting for the unpopularity of the V1. But even for less than half the cost?

And for those who will jump on me saying that the slower Canon 50mm is even cheaper than the 50mm ƒ/1.4 on sale—yes, I know, but the ƒ/1.4 is a better lens.

Among B&H's many other deals, two that stand out for Mac fans are this Mac Mini (very popular as a music server, apropos Dave B.) with Applecare for $589, and this 13.3" MacBook Pro with retina display. I'll also link to this, just because I want one myself, even though the last documented case of a human on Planet Earth buying a tower computer happened back in 2009.

As for yesterday, here's the scoop (TMI? Maybe, but as I always say, quoting David Vestal, I'm in the disclosure business, so full steam ahead): I earned a tracked and documented total of $21.09 on the sale of Dave Brubeck CDs through my link yesterday.

If it makes anyone feel any better, I've donated the $21.09 to charity, so as not to be profiting from Dave's demise.

I'm sure it will come as a great satisfaction to my critic yesterday that TOP is having a bad Christmas season this year, and that I'm worried about it.

And yet, though this might come as a great shock to the cynics, I link to things primarily because I think people might be interested to know about them (my inbox be damned), not primarily to make a few bucks off them. Although that's necessary too. I thought a few people (19, as it turned out) might appreciate that Dave Brubeck box. When the same box set was on popmarket a few months ago, the price was so nice I bought three, and gave away two of them to friends.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Speed: "Writing this on the tower computer I bought just three months ago. I'd look like a squinty-eyed and hunchbacked medieval scribe if I had to work all day on a laptop. Also, it's hard to fit three drives and a high performance video card into a laptop. On the other hand, schlepping it to Starbucks is not fun."

Bill Tyler: "I think you should stop making money from links on the same day that every one of your readers also renounce the horrendous practice of receiving income from their labors. It's truly reprehensible that your writing and publishing efforts should enable you to stay warm, dry, and fed. Since we all are forced, much against our will, to read your blog, and since we are all legally compelled to purchase whatever you link to, the idea of you actually benefitting from some third party in the way of referral fees is little short of criminal."

Bob Burnett: "Under the category of boxed sets via TOP, I very much enjoy the 'Lady Day: The Complete Columbia Golden Years' box you touted a few years back. Ten discs. Thirty dollars. I never would have known about it being such a flat- out value otherwise. All praise the mighty TOP music dept. and the 19 @ $1.11 each commissions. That's gotta get you about 1.5 Frescas per purchase in your pocket."

Price Drop Jaw Drop

"Why would anyone buy a digital camera on its maiden launch? Total sucker move. It's like taking hundreds of dollars and hurling them up in the air, where they vanish in a poof of magic smoke."

Seems like an opening you might read on a photography forum, right?

Wrong. They're the words of the esteemed James Wolcott, Cultural Critic of Vanity Fair, frequent contributor to The New Yorker, etc.

His ultimate $45 solution might be a little over the top, but it's interesting to see this issue invading the MSM. Won't be long before the news gets around, at this rate.

Here's the article on vanityfair.com. You've probably read something similar before, except with many more spelling and grammar mistakes, on a forum.

Mike
(Thanks to Tom Voigt)

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

kirk tuck: "OMG. I've made it as a blogger. I've been mentioned on VanityFair.com. Sideways compliment? And in the context of the article, I just bought (at full street prices) both the new Sony a99 and the Sony NEX-6, last Saturday. Damn, I should have read the article first."

Mike adds: OMG indeed. I was jealous. Just as an aside: the Daily Mail recently reported that the abbreviation "OMG" is not an Internet phenomenon—it was used in 1917 in a letter from Lord Fisher to Winston Churchill:

Greg: "When I saw this over the weekend from Wolcott, I had to double check whose feed I was reading! It read so much like something I would read, as you mentioned, on a forum, or something I might find here on TOP. Just another reason why I adore James Wolcott."

Mike C.: "On the OMG thing, you're probably missing some context. In the British diplomatic service, knighthoods 'come up with the rations,' but in a strictly hierarchical way: CMG (Commander of the Order of St. Michael & St. George), known as 'Call Me God.' KCMG (Knight Commander etc.) = 'Kindly Call Me God.' GCMG (Grand Commander etc.) = 'God Calls Me God.' I've been waiting years to offload that bit of trivia...."

Dave Brubeck 1920-2012

Dave Brubeck just died. I grew up on rock and came to jazz late, like a longtime Catholic converting to Buddhism, so Brubeck is still relatively new to me. If you don't know him, try this if you can get it in the next 37 nanoseconds before it sells out. CDs of five of his best records for what amounts to shipping cost. My favorite is Time Further Out, but all five are excellent.

Or if you'd rather not, try this—a quick taste, suggested by Steve Gilbert. The laugh at the end is the drummer, Joe Morello, reportedly relieved that he got through it.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve, Michel, and others)

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Paul De Zan: "I have very little in common with my father, except for the LP collection he assembled in the '50s and early '60s, before he started to lose interest in absolutely everything around age 35; an unhappy marriage and innate overcautiousness will do that to you. When I was small, the music in our house came from tinny AM radio, which I ignored, and from dad's kit-assembled Harman-Kardon Citation V tube-fired amplifier. And the music was Dave Brubeck's music, a bit of Ellington, later Stan Getz, never Miles, but a lot of Dave Brubeck. Brubeck wasn't jazz to me, he was music to me for the first 10–12 years I was on this rock. Paul Desmond was the first musician whose death I grieved. Dave's is just the latest. Sic transit gloria mundi."

Sal Santamaura (partial comment): "To get a sense of the man's true greatness, watch this short video segment."

Steve Biro: "I am 55 years old now, which means I was about five when Time Out featuring 'Take Five' was issued by Columbia. Perhaps it was exposure since (and probably before) birth to my parents' swing records that prepared me (I really enjoyed Benny Goodman as a child). But even at that young age, I was hooked instantly. I honestly cannot remember a time when I did not love both the album and song. It kicked off a lifelong love affair with jazz and the broader world of music. Sure, like most people my age I loved the Beatles and all that came after them. But jazz was and remains my musical center. And I owe it to Dave Brubeck. We are all very fortunate to have had him with us for so long. God speed, Dave. And thank you."

OT: Graphic Novels and Series

By Ctein

A graphic novel is to a comic book as, well, a prose novel is to a short story. Make that a clichéd short story. Traditional comic books are, for the most part, formulaic and structural the same way a TV drama (or a pop song) is. Graphic novels try to tell far more complex and elaborate stories in far less traditional ways than your monthly "Spiderman."

The scope and scale of the graphic novel is limited only by the author's imagination...and their discipline. Occasionally they are created and published as a single project, but far more frequently they appear in serial form as comics until the whole work is done. Assuming it ever is. These projects can take a dozen years to complete. Too often the story never gets finished, or begins to meander hopelessly.

Buying into a serialized graphic novel is an act of faith by the reader that is not always rewarded. It is not an inexpensive act of faith, either. Individual trade paperbacks and collected volumes may be reasonably priced, but a story may take six or 10 volumes to tell. In recommending some of my favorites, I've chosen ones that are all (more or less) complete. Most of these have Wikipedia entries, so I'm keeping descriptions to a minimum for reasons of space.

I'll start off with two that tackle the same question: how do you write a genuinely interesting story about an omnipotent being? I'm talking about someone who wouldn't give Superman a second glance. What can you say about such a person that wouldn't be boring as all hell?

Iredeemable, by Mark Waid, asks, "Being super-Superman and having the entire world depending on you has to be one hell of a psychological burden, so what happens if he snaps? What are the consequences of an omnipotent being having a psychotic break?" I thought the ending was too cute, but the ride is definitely worth it. Try Volume I (of ten) and see what you think.

La Muse, by Adi Tantimedh (Author) and Hugo Petrus (Illustrator) says, "How do you make an omnipotent being interesting? You make her completely irresponsible." Well, why not? There is pretty much nothing she can screw up so badly that she can't undo it. Oh yeah, and give her a long suffering and normal sister. The result is lighthearted, silly, and funny (in an apocalyptic way). It's also just one volume, so it's entirely affordable.

Strangers In Paradise, by Terry Moore, took 15 years and 93 issues to tell, but Terry's a professional and he made it through to the end. At its core it's a romance, in a ménage à trois, "Kill Bill," weirdly lighthearted kind of way. David's in love with Katchoo but she's in love with Francine who isn't at all sure who she's in love with. Well, not for many issues...and, boy, do they have issues (rimshot). For a start there is Katchoo's past as an agent/consort with a criminal band of killer Amazons who've infiltrated the U.S. government. Then there's the money she stole from said organization. Not to mention Francine's ex, Freddy Femur and Katchoo's terrifyingly competent (or maybe that should be competently terrifying) half-sister, Tambi.

I can't recommend Terry's more recent 30-issue novel, Echo. It ends far too abruptly with way too much deus ex machina and way too many unanswered questions. The coda simply does not make any kind of logical sense. I honestly don't know what Terry had in mind, but it reads like he decided, "Oh, to hell with it" and just threw the project away.

Next is the true opus magnus of the field, several intertwined novels, really. I'm speaking of Love and Rockets, by Los Bros Hernandez. It ran 50 issues over 15 years. It kind of breaks my rule because it's not really complete. It's an ongoing saga. Furthermore, publication of the 50 issue run became erratic as The Brothers admitted that they were having trouble keeping to the discipline of producing regular issues. It shows in some of the stories, I think. There seems to be some loss of coherency towards the end. Or maybe it's just that the stories are so complex and intertwined that I lost the thread. I'd have to go back and reread all 50 issues to be sure. Nonetheless, it sets standards for this field that few others have met in terms of writing, character development, and artwork. The three most major novels are collected in these books:

Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories

Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories

Luba

Finally, the most "literary" of all my recommendations: Sandman, written by Neil Gaiman. This, contrary to my opening paragraph, was originally published as a monthly series of comic books by DC.

The focus of Sandman is on Dream, one of a family of immortals. They are more like elemental forces than gods; they include Delirium, Desire, and Despair, and what is arguably Neil's most popular character, Death. She featured in two stand-alone novels, The Time of Your Life and The High Cost of Living. The collected series of 10 volumes, each of which is more or less a standalone novel, is rich and wonderful and I hated when I was done with it so much that I started all over again.

It took the series a while to find its footing. Therefore I do not recommend that you sample it with Volume 1. A better taste might be Volume 5, A Game of You. Don't worry about jumping in in the middle.

But, I think the truly outstanding volume and the one you should really begin with is Brief Lives, Volume 7. It's brilliant, and the prose is everything you could hope for from Neil. Let me close this column by quoting from the first page of Chapter 3, part of a short essay on what it means to live long:

There are not many of them, all things considered: the truly old. Even on this planet, in this age, when people consider a mere hundred years, or thousand, to be an unusual span.

There are, for example, less than ten thousand humanoid individuals alive on this planet today who have personal memories of the saber-toothed tiger, the megatherium, the cave bear.

There are today less than a thousand who walked the streets of Atlantis (the first Atlantis. The other lands that bore that name were shadows, echo-Atlantises, myth lands, and they came later).

There are less than five hundred living humans who remember the human civilizations that predated the great lizards....

And so on.

That's it for this week. Next time it's back to teas. I've discovered something new (to me) that I just have to tell you about!

Ctein

Wednesday columnist Ctein launches a series of OT posts this week to catch up on them—he's been staying on topic too much. Have faith.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ben Marks: "Oh. Wow. Taste in these things is intensely personal, but I have to say, Ctien's recommendations do not have a false note among them. Would add V for Vendetta, Watchmen, and Scott Pilgrim, although they stretch the definitions laid out above. For what it is worth, I think the Hernandez Bros.' work stands with any (any) literature produced in the last century."

Blog Note (Again)

Hey, sorry for being a substandard host the past couple of days. I've been feeling quite poorly lately. Tonight I'm feeling better but still very tired. (I see the doc again tomorrow.)

This is the problem when the whole office staff gets sick at once! Hopefully we'll be back up to full power in a day or three.

Mike, TOP default Director of Personnel

UPDATE: Hmm, well, that's interesting. Doctor's verdict: "classic anxiety attack." Times two.

(P.S. John Camp called this, by the way. Good call.)

Get It Done While You Can

A reader/friend-I've-never-met just wrote to me this morning. He's over the moon about a fabulous print he just had made from a scan by a particular service bureau. It had him talking like he's solved the problem of getting prints made from his archive of 35mm negatives.

Maybe. My advice, from experience: If you get to a point where you're happy with what you're getting, act like there's no tomorrow. Get as much accomplished as quickly as you can. Because it's not going to last.

We get into these sweet spots. And we think they're all "from now on," that they're going to last forever, stretching into a rosy sunset. It's hard to keep in mind that happily ever after only happens in fairy tales.

In 1994, I bought a loft condo just west of Chicago and converted the powder room to a tiny darkroom. I hadn't had a real darkroom in years and I was all happy about finally getting some prints made. Before long, I was doing really the best printing of my life—I had all the equipment on song and was using two papers and two developers for just the right degree of control. I was working a day job and had a small child who couldn't be left alone at night after he went to sleep. Hours after dark with nothing to do but print. I had a large backlog of unprinted negatives. I was making a good salary and had money for supplies. My skills were at their peak. I made the best prints from my own work I'd ever made. I was cranking 'em out, cruising along.

And at some point I got the notion that I should do a portfolio, a sort of master set of all my favorite pictures. I settled on the idea of printing 100 pictures that represented the best of my shooting up till then. I started making the selections, happily poring over old contact sheets. (Made some real discoveries, too, things I'd overlooked when I shot them, including that "floating canoe" I showed you a while back and now can't find.) I got started.

And that's all.

I had no sense of urgency. There was no hurry. What could happen? Nothing was going to change.

But things change. Within ten years, my kid was a teenager, the companies that made my two standard papers were both out of business, I didn't have a darkroom in my home any more, and I was self-employed, meaning my free time was no longer my own.

I sure wish now that I'd been a little more disciplined and actually made that "master set" when I had the chance. That window is mostly closed now.

Same thing happened again c. 2007. I'd bought my first DSLR, I'd gone through all the calibration rigamarole with a certain inkjet-printer-which-must-not-be-named*, I'd done all the experimenting I needed to do with papers, and I was making nice prints that I was happy with. I was set from then on, right? What could go wrong? Surely the camera wouldn't break, the company that made it wouldn't go out of business, and the printer wouldn't develop so many problems that I had to disconnect it and put it in the corner of the living room for the sake of my blood pressure. Except all those things happened. Once again, I should have made more prints while I had everything on song and humming along. (Annoyingly, I even made dozens and dozens of prints of one picture for a print sale, and didn't even keep one for myself. I could always print another one if I ever needed it, right? Except now I can't.)

The specifics don't matter. The moral of the story does matter: thing are going to change. I don't know how, I don't know when, but they will. If you've got everything down pat right now and you've found your perfect service bureau, or you've got plenty of time to do x, or Filbert is making all your prints for you and man oh man is he ever a great printer, or you've found some way of working that's allowing you to work the way you want to...assume a sense of urgency, is my advice. Work hard while you can. Get things done. Because someday someone is going to say to you, "You want us to match an inkjet print? Wow, I haven't even heard that word in five years," or, "Sir, no one works with files from the old Bayer array cameras any more." Or you'll get transferred to Bongo Bongo in the South Pacific and the company has a no cameras rule because the native women don't wear tops. Or Filbert the master printer will win Lotto and enthusiastically devote his life to cocaine. I don't know. I don't know what it will be—all I know is that whatever is, isn't forever. The windows that open, close. When things are on song, sing. Please take my advice.

Mike

*If you say its name you invoke its shrieking curse which will cloud the sky and blot out all sunlight.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Robison: "'I returned to see under the sun that the swift do not have the race, nor the mighty ones the battle, nor do the wise also have the food, nor the understanding ones also have the riches, nor do even those having knowledge have the favor; because time and unforeseen occurrence befall them all.' Eccl. 9:11."

Will: "In other words: Carpe the dang Diem."

Francisco Cubas: "I was in charge of a fine art printing business for two years. I learned through tutorials (mostly from The Luminous Landscape) to decently use an Epson 9900; I had access to Moab and Hahnemuhle papers; I deeply improved my editing skills using DxO, Lightroom and PS. Three months ago I quit and realized I had just two portfolio prints of my own. Great advice Mike, you never know what's going to happen."

Joe: "'Some day,' I said to myself. 'Some day soon I'm going to sit down and spend the time to transfer those irreplaceable reel-to-reel recordings of my old bands onto cassette tapes.' And then a few years later: 'Some day I'm going to sit down and spend the time to transfer those irreplaceable reel-to-reels to my computer.' The reel-to-reel machine is dead. I can't find a way to record onto cassettes, anyway. And how did I used to digitize audio? I forget. I think all that stuff is in a box in the basement. Right next to the moldy reel-to-reel tapes."

Mike replies: I fear you've just told the eventual tale of 99.99% of the world's digital photographs.

Quote o' the Day

-

"I absolutely never, ever crop...except when I want to."

—Frank DiPerna 

-

[I might even have used this as a Quote o' the Day before. It's always been my favorite rule about cropping, and encapsulates what most photographers do as opposed to what they say. Frank is a Washington, D.C. art photographer who teaches (taught?) at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. Although this is almost difficult to reconstitute now, he was an early adopter, devotée, and champion of color photography back when color was very low-status in the world of art photography and it was somewhat iconoclastic for an art photographer to commit to it. —MJ]

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Robert Harshman (partial comment): "...You all crop every time you take a picture, every time. But here instead of cropping it's artistically called framing. Whatever, it is cropping."

Mike replies: No it isn't. I don't agree. Two different words, two different things.

The latter, "cropping," has long meant something one does to a two-dimensional picture after the fact, in a hopeful but often ineffectual attempt to correct the deficiencies of one's efforts to do the former—framing.

If you're good at framing, you seldom have to crop. If you crop habitually, you're unlikely to ever become good at framing.

"Cropping" when done by someone else usually refers to ham-handed vandalism by an editor or graphic designer for the purpose of gratuitously ruining a photographer's perfectly good framing....

On the other hand...[thanks to Jack Foley for this].

FOLLOW-UP: Much to my surprise, it turns out that cropping is a status issue—I actually had to disallow a few comments to this post, they were so strident! And edit some others. Who'd a' thunk?

For one thing, it seems like some people didn't get Frank's joke. He's acknowledging the ideal of composing in-camera but also making fun of it, and implying that everyone will simply do what they want to in the end.

You can make arguments for and against cropping—which I think are interesting, personally—but it isn't a status issue. It's for each photographer to decide for him- or herself. There's nothing wrong with always doing it, doing it sometimes, or never doing it.

john: "Needing to edit posts about cropping is such delicious irony."

Jeff Wilson: "When I studied photography we had a lecturer who delighted in brandishing a set of L shaped edges on every photograph presented to him for inspection. I used to hate those edges and I tried very hard to do all of my framing in the camera. I think he did my visual discipline a huge favour. I very rarely crop, except when using less than 100% finders and something unwanted creeps in on a corner or edge."

Stan B. (partial comment): "One could also make the argument that the tight-assed ones are those forever trying to perfect their work by selective cropping, as opposed to those who say—it either works...or it doesn't."

Photo-Blacksmiths?

For years I had a bumper sticker on my car that simply said "READ." This is not exactly funny, but I was startled to encounter George Eastman, founder of Kodak*, agreeing with me in his final hour:

...Of course, that's not as it appears: his dying words weren't the same admonition as my old bumper sticker. When you click "Read more," you get what he really said:

I found this on Robert Burley's website in support of his new book The Disappearance of Darkness. I'm not going to link to it here; if you want the book, you should buy it through Robert's site—that way he gets a little more income from it.

Robert has documented the demise of film conscientiously and painstakingly since 2005. The book collects his photographs from his travels, which are indicated in this review at The Economist. The Economist review also quotes Robert Burley saying this:

"I was starting to feel like a blacksmith," he says, recalling the large-format camera kit he would unpack in order to capture his waning industrial subjects.

Good analogy. Photo-Blacksmiths...naw, it'll never catch on.

Mike
(Thanks to Ariel E)

*Also a distant cousin of mine, and I am really not joking.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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