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Friday, 19 June 2020

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Must . . . resist . . . fist . . .of . . . PS


maybe with a drone you could have a photo without the trees in the foreground. i have thought of buying a selphie stick to use with my smartphone for the same reason. just to have a higher viewpoint than my extended arm. i have not bought it yet though.

“I'm working on part three of the "working hard" series, and the revamped GX9 impressions” . I assumed you had pulled part two, it no longer exists in the index nor in a search.

I reckon you could get that shot without the trees if you had a drone ;)

Thank you Mike. Both my father and my mother were racist. They couldn’t hide it. They tried hard, very hard to educate us not to be like them. I think they succeeded. Three or four years ago, as a father’s day present, my son wrote me a long letter. One of the things he wrote was, thank you dad, for never allowing me make a racist comment about anyone.

Happy Juneteenths everyone.

I seem to recall one of your older posts where you wrote that you did not like pictures that had too perfect framing; rather that you appreciated the imperfections of, say, edge intrusions. I don’t recall your exact words, but the comment stuck in my mind, as it seemed the opposite of what I expected. You also mentioned along the way, I think, that you were not a great fan of Paul Strand. He is a photographer, in my view, who set an example for consistently paying attention to the edges and to details, and I remember his stating that ‘almost’ getting composition and framing right wasn’t good enough. I like imperfections, stray elements, in some pictures, if they are strategically placed to add visual interest and counterpoint, and to avoid boring or cliche. But that also requires careful attention to detail. The continual striving for those moments and results - when it all comes together - is part of what makes photography so interesting and challenging for me.

Here's what Giorgio Vasari had to say about photographers, ca. 1550 (before Photoshop was invented, obviously):

"...he can’t work from memory or enhance what he copies from life, and so give his work the grace and perfection of art which are beyond the reach of nature, some of whose aspects tend to be less than beautiful."*

So true: even the most able photographer can edit only so much, while the accomplished painter can "correct" every aspect and detail of reality. (Sure, now there's Photoshop, but who uses that? And whether it makes things easier is arguable.)

There's a major silver lining, though. We get to blame reality when things don't work out. That is no small gift, having reality itself as your arch-nemesis. The painter, on the other hand, has nowhere to hide.


*OK, so Vasari was ostensibly disparaging Titian, and possibly Venetian artists in general, piling-on to Michaelangelo's criticism. On the other hand, we have only Vasari's word for it. My guess is he overheard some amateur photographers grousing in a cafe and decided to put those words in the great master's mouth when he sat down to write his great opus. Because writers, too, can edit reality.

You need more height. Get a drone.

Re: removing those foreground trees. I wasn't there, but two ideas occur. 1. Stepladder. 2. Get on the roof of your car, like Ansel.

Yes, you are hitting on a truth here, the poetry of photography has a certain artificial aspect, as does poetry. You are presenting something you hope is more than the thing itself, as so many have said, ideally in a way that doesn't draw too much attention to that fact. This "more" might be an idealized version, it might be something else. Most poetry is bad poetry, of course. :)

Love the Kurosawa quote.

Likewise I love your comment to the peaceful protesters. But I can't help but think of the annual ... promise? prayer? ... at the end of the Seder: "Next year in Jerusalem!" Very few had that dream come true; very few will have their dreams of equality come true here, I fear. May the Good One prove my cynicism wrong!

I seem to have witnessed an instance of "sky show", of "editorialized reality" right here. Still flabbergasted.

I hallucinated reading, on TOP, the second part of the GX9 review. It was somewhere between the several "Working hard" posts and I remember it so vividly, I could almost quote from it. And yet, when I came back here yesterday to reread, it was gone. Oh (capital "O"!). Now I've come back and it's still not here. I must have dreamt it, but what a rant of a dream - or would that be: a dream of a rant - it was. ... But then, if I dreamt it, why does my browser history show I visited a link to it? Curiouser and curiouser ...

"I would if I could". You should consider buying a drone then!

Mike wrote, " I can't get rid of the trees in the foreground, but I would if I could."

Modern technology to the rescue. Mount your camera on a modern UAV (drone) and fly it above the trees. As for framing, present day 360 degree cameras allow you to capture everything (!) and frame in post.

Not cheap but not impossible either.

I once spent several months taking photos of boring scenes and processing and reprocessing images in my spare time to learn how to make the clouds look more like clouds. It taught me a lot about exposure and about processing that paid off in other areas as well. The same could be said for blue skies.

If there's two things that trying to make things look "real" taught me, it's that I have to pay a great deal more attention to how those things really look than I usually do, and that my ideas of how things normally look, which often inform the way I process an image, are gross simplifications that fail to accurately capture the way they look when I pay attention to them.

Trees in the way? You need a Fred Picker Autograph model Zone VI saw...

Nice edit, Moose! I was thinking the places where the near trees overlapped the far shore would be annoying (and maybe they were; but your result is good that way). (Would be harder to do to stand up to a gallery-size print!)

This is a short 8 minute video, but very interesting:

Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement

Can movement tell a story? Sure, if you’re as gifted as Akira Kurosawa. More than any other filmmaker, he had an innate understanding of movement and how to capture it onscreen. Join me today in studying the master, possibly the greatest composer of motion in film history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doaQC-S8de8

You need to get a drone to possibly shoot them

"Nice edit, Moose!

Thanks, David!

(Would be harder to do to stand up to a gallery-size print!)"

Yes, but easier to start with the original file, not a small JPEG. \;~)>

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