The Online Photographer

Looking Beyond the USP

Guest Post by John Kennerdell

Rosser Reeves (1910–1984), chess master, poet, novelist, political operative (he helped Eisenhower get elected), and father of the unique selling proposition. If that weren't enough, his name adorns one of the world's most famous rubies and he co-wrote a classic book on the game of pool.

From the late 1980s to the early 2000s I freelanced for two Japanese camera manufacturers, one large and conservative, the other smaller and less conventional. Even from my worm's-eye view at the bottom of a long ladder of subcontractors I could sense a clear difference in their philosophies. The big one exuded an almost paternal authority: they were confident they knew best what photographers truly needed. And to be fair, they usually did. By contrast the other one prided itself on its responsiveness to consumers, even if it sometimes led to chasing fads and fancies. I learned not to be too quick to judge one approach as superior to the other.

On one point, though, they agreed. Like almost every other company I know of in Japan, both passionately embraced the concept of the "unique selling proposition," or USP.

Born on Madison Avenue in the middle of the last century, USP is the idea that every product needs a distinguishing feature that sets it apart from all competing products. This is why even a toaster or a refrigerator in Japan cannot be merely a toaster or a refrigerator. It needs to offer "fuzzy logic," or "eco mode," or any of countless other contrivances ranging from brilliant to loony. And it's why you'll never see a camera introduced as simply "our new entry-level DSLR." It'll always be "our new entry-level DSLR with x," where "x" is some marquee feature designed to make you choose it over all others.

So here's my take on camera USPs, especially if you're a dedicated photographer: at best they should mostly be ignored. At worst, they misdirect both reviewers and potential buyers.

One variant of the Canon EOS 10. That red dimple on the lower right was where you pressed the reader to transfer settings. I'll bet most owners didn't use it more than a few dozen times, if at all.

This lesson first dawned on me back in 1990 with the introduction of Canon's EOS 10. It was a mid-level SLR promoted for a new gee-whiz function: it came with a barcode reader and a booklet of codes for 101 different shooting situations. You scanned in the code for your scene and then pressed the reader up against a sensor in the camera, transferring the appropriate settings. Voila, supposedly a perfect photo of fireworks or birthday cake candles or whatever else it was.

Ah, the Japanese love of gimmickry. Clearly any user over the age of 12 would have been better served by a booklet giving theory and practice for each type of shot, so you could learn for yourself. Right, and how many cameras would that sell?

While the barcode silliness might have put off some serious photographers, in fact the EOS 10 was a terrific camera, a real step up from the first generation of EOSs three years before. I bought a pair and they served me well for years. I don't remember if I even bothered to take the barcode reader and booklet out of their wrappers, yet even by then I was cynical enough to be grateful for them. This feature, lame as it was, couldn't have cost Canon more than a couple dollars to add to each camera, and was easily ignored if you so chose. Meanwhile it no doubt pulled in untold thousands of people who wouldn't have otherwise bought this model, essentially helping subsidize a piece of semi-professional gear at a mass-market price.

The Panasonic GF7 in full-on selfie configuration. But nothing says you can't push that screen down to the horizontal and use it to
take photos of, yes, other people.

Here's a more recent example. Last year Panasonic announced the GF7, a Micro 4/3 camera billed as "The one that loves a selfie" thanks to a rear screen that flips up 180 degrees. I'm sure it's a splendid selfie taker, but the marketing campaign—and apparently most of the market too—missed the point that it also makes a wonderfully compact and responsive street photography machine. The thing practically disappears in your palm (it's only a tad bigger than a Minox 35) and yet produces files every bit as good as the top Micro 4/3 bodies. Even the kit lens is better than you'd expect.

The GF7 has already been replaced by a GF8, a trivial update with, inevitably, a new USP: a "Beauty Retouch" feature that can slim your body and smooth your skin. Say what you will but I've never looked more fabulous...er, no, I haven't tried it and you probably needn't either except maybe for laughs. Still, if you're looking for a really tiny camera with serious image quality, don't underestimate these because of the dumbed-down product positioning.

The basic problem is that the aspects of cameras most appreciated by accomplished photographers tend to make for lousy USPs. Imagine pitching them to a tough client in the Sterling Cooper conference room. "Feels exactly right in your hands." I don't think so. "The controls fall just where you want them." Bor-ring. "It takes a picture the instant you press the button, focused and exposed just the way you wanted it." Seriously Draper, that's all you've got?

In short, don't trust the manufacturer to give you the best reason to buy one of their products. Their marketing priorities are elsewhere. Unfortunately sometimes that seems to be the case with their camera design priorities too. But you'll need someone higher up the food chain than I was to tell you about that.

John

Photographer and writer John Kennerdell writes two columns a year for TOP. His past contributions can be found under his name in the "Categories" in the right-hand sidebar.

©2016 by John Kennerdell, all rights reserved

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Featured Comments from:

Ned Bunnell: "Thanks for the great post John. Brought back many fond memories of meetings I had in Japan where we first had to agree on what the USP was and then develop a branding campaign that clearly focused everyone's attention on that single unique attribute. It was culturally very hard for my Japanese counterparts to not give all of their other important specs equal weight in a marketing campaign.

"As a joke one time (to get my point across), I made an ad for a new camera using PowerPoint. There was a tiny photograph of the camera in the lower right corner. The rest of the ad showed the specs set in a very large type size running top to bottom. Everyone laughed when I put this slide up and my big boss, with a smile on his face, said 'so, Ned-san, we need to focus on a single message, right?'"

The Fauxliflex Chronicles

Two extremes on the camera intimidation spectrum. On the left, a recently auctioned Leica rifle camera. It's probably just as well these never caught on. On the right, a nanny with a Rolleiflex.

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Written by John Kennerdell

It was only near the tail end of the film era, around 1998, that I finally acquired the camera I’d longed for since my student days: an old mint-condition Rollei twin-lens reflex. Just hefting its weight and touching those precise German controls made me think, oh yes, here we go. With a machine like this even I ought to be able to carve my name upon the photographic firmament.

Like so much in life, the reality fell short. Not that I really expected the firmament to take much note, but I couldn’t even reliably focus the damn thing. Fair enough, I could if I flipped up the magnifier loupe and squinted right into it, but that kind of defeated the point of waist-level framing. And so eventually off it went to KEH, where I hope it found a new owner with better eyes than mine.

That began my quest to find myself a digital equivalent: a Fauxliflex. I’ll spare you the twists and turns of the search, but suffice to say that by a couple years ago I had not one but two matching bodies that finally fit the bill. Flip-up screens, quiet shutters, good enough image quality. Apart from low light or events (I’ll get to that), they’re mostly all I’ve used since. So I thought it might be time to offer a few thoughts on shooting from the belly button á la digital.

The three-foot-high club
This is the paradoxical and wonderful thing about a waist-level finder: it helps you be more anonymous when shooting candidly, and yet more personal when working with your subject.

Raise a camera to your eye and people take notice. Point it directly at them and their reaction can escalate into concern, nervousness, even anger. Of course we learn to deal with that, and every good street photographer develops his or her own ways to keep things relaxed. Still, the gun-like aspect of an eye-level finder is always going to hold a certain subliminal threat: I’m looking at you through this machine and I’m about to...shoot.

Here's the pair of waist-level digicams I’ve been using for the past few years. The lenses stay attached, black for normal and silver for wide, so I reflexively know what view to expect when I pick them up. That “72,621” is the shutter count—hardly breaking a sweat for a real Rollei but not bad from a $500 consumer appliance.

A waist-level camera is still, clearly, a camera. People can see the lens and if they notice you they'll know perfectly well what you're doing. But there's something of a remove: your immediate attention is not on your subject but your camera. Maybe you're fiddling around with it a bit, geeky and harmless. It's all so low-key that many people don't notice at all. For fly-on-the-wall photography, that's about as non-intrusive as it gets.

Now the flip side: holding a camera halfway down your body is also pretty much ideal whenever you want to engage with a subject. As far as I know, the late Tim Hetherington didn't choose a Rolleiflex out of any special love for film or even the square format. It was a machine thoroughly unsuited to 21st-century combat zones. He used it, by all accounts, because he liked to maintain full contact with his subjects while shooting. By that I mean not just eye contact but talking, interacting, communicating with facial and body language. The camera essentially disappears.

Whether working candidly or otherwise, shooting from the waist brings one more benefit we seldom hear mentioned. You're no longer at eye level, where generally there's nothing else but heads. You're just a bit lower, down where all kinds of other things are happening. There are peoples' bodies, the way they're dressed, the things they're holding and doing, the place they're standing and everything it contains. Yes, using an eye-level finder of course you can point your camera downward, or lean forward or kneel, or do whatever else it takes to get it all in. But from the waist, more often than not, you simply aim the camera straight ahead and a balanced composition falls into place.

In the market, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. I've always liked the kind of framing that happens naturally when working from the waist. Your subjects' heads are suddenly above the horizon, or at least the clutter. You see more of their hands, their bodies, their context. It's decidedly not the perspective you normally get from your own eyes (well, unless you're a child), but photographically often it's just right.

Tips from the hip
Right then, some assorted thoughts on the whole digital waist-level approach. These are purely personal, so take or leave them as you will.

Apart from focusing, the main problem with the Rollei for me was just holding it steady. TLR users had a number of tricks, like pulling it down against a taut neck strap or holding it tight against your belly. But fundamentally, supporting a camera in your two hands is never going to be as steady as also pressing it against something nice and solid like a handy skull, typically your own. Ah ha, you say, but now we have image stabilization. We do, and it’s a big part of what helps these cameras work for me. Yet I don’t believe it’s the panacea that many people now seem to think. The steadier you can hold your camera, the sharper you can still expect your results to be. But here's the good news: the more you shoot with two-point as opposed to three-point support, the better you seem to get at it. TLR shooters used to say as much, but only with experience have I come to believe them.

Instead of arching my index finger over the shutter release, I usually find myself keeping my right thumb flat along the top of the camera and then flexing it to trip the shutter. Partly it just feels more comfortable that way when holding a camera low, partly it may be out of a subconscious recognition that it sends one less visual cue as to the moment of the shot.

Again, if it wasn't clear above, I'm not talking about sneaking photos. It's just about being minimally invasive.

Waist-level viewing might work best for those of us who like to crop square. It’s fine for horizontals too, of course. But verticals? Maybe you could try one of those "fully-articulated"* screens? (I’m just guessing here. They never seem to work for me for anything. Long live the flip-up, in-line screen.)

To me the Fauxliflex feels more natural with single focal-length lenses than zooms. Probably that’s something about knowing where you want to be even before you look at the camera and compose the photo. I treat a waist-level finder mainly as a final confirmation of what’s in the frame, not as a window to peer into while moving all about and zooming in and out. Feel free to differ.

I don't like it with longer lenses, but then I don't use them much, and anyhow wasn't the Tele Rolleiflex a bit of an odd duck too? Waist-level is also usually less than optimal for events and other jobs where everyone knows and accepts that there’s someone with a camera who’s going to be snapping like mad the whole time. When you’re really working a scene, in my opinion still nothing beats the responsiveness and immersive quality of an eye-level optical finder.

Anyhow I'm quite devoted to my Fauxliflexes, and while no doubt even better ones will come along presently, I could happily carry on with exactly what I have now. But perhaps that is where true photographic fulfillment lies: finding what works for you, and then just getting on with it.

John

*A slight misnomer, as they don't swing in the one direction that many of us most want. Sony proved with some of its DSLRs that it is possible to design a true fully-articulated screen, but a side hinge ain't it.

John Kennerdell writes two essays a year for TOP. His past contributions can be found under his name in the Categories list in the right-hand sidebar.

©2015 by John Kennerdell, all rights reserved

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Hugh Crawford (partial comment): "I can not stand using eye level viewing. Composition is so much easier when you aren't looking 'through' the camera."

[For complete comments from which "partial comments" are taken, please see the Comments Section. —Ed.]

Peter Van Dyken: "In a day so long ago when I was thoroughly convinced that it was the camera and not the photographer that made the difference, I bought a Hasselblad with an 80mm lens. I enthusiastically support everything that John mentioned about the experience of waist-level shooting and would add a further consideration that I discovered in sporting about with the 'Blad. I came to appreciate what became to me a very significant difference between eye-level and waist-level composition, that being the difference between shooting with two eyes on the screen as opposed to one. I began to imagine that I saw three dimensions in my efforts to compose. I'm sure for many it would make no difference but for me it was the factor that brought a pleasure into photography that I had not known before."

Kodachromeguy: "One of the nice aesthetic features of portraits taken with a Rolleiflex or Fauxliflex is that the subject is often mid-body. Gents look heroic. And ladies are evenly proportioned—they do not have that absurd big head and tiny diminishing body that you see in Hollywood pictures where a six-foot paparazzi held his monster Canikonflex at eye level while photographing a petite lady."

emptyspaces: "I love using the Olympus face/eye detection feature at waist level."

Klein and the Anti-Technicians

Written by John Kennerdell

From Life is Good & Good for You in New York by William Klein, 1955. Klein once described the book, one suspects not without pride, as "a crash course in what was not to be done in photography."

You might have seen him had you been walking the streets of New York City exactly 60 years ago this winter. Although trained as a painter, he was carrying a camera. And while he lived in Paris, he moved through the city of New York and photographed its people with the ease of a native son. His name was William Klein and he was 26 years old.

When Klein tried to find a publisher for his New York photos before returning to Europe the next year, 1955, the reaction could hardly have been less encouraging. He made the city look like a slum. His framing was random and incoherent. Technique? Fugeddaboutit. As Popular Photography described it on first sight of his work, "meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness." Whatever his game might be, mid-century America clearly wasn’t ready.

Chet Baker, from Jazz by Ed van der Elsken. Dutchman van der Elsken's career ran in parallel to Klein's but increasingly fell under its influence, as seen in this superb 1959 photobook.

Back in France, Klein managed to put out a small volume of 120 of the photos, titled, with Beat irony, Life is Good & Good for You in New York. "I wanted to do [it] as a tabloid gone berserk," he later said, "gross, grainy, over-inked, with a brutal layout, bullhorn headlines." While the European establishment didn’t quite know what to make of it, young, avant-garde photographers loved its raw, anything-goes energy. It was largely through those young photographers, whose names included Ed van der Elsken and Mario Carrieri, that the style if not necessarily the substance of Klein's photography began to ripple out to the world at large.

Nowhere did this new sense of photographic freedom find richer ground than in Japan, a nation still grappling with the ravages of war and the search for a new identity. Restless young Japanese photographers immediately saw in Klein a visual language that they could apply to their own ends. Collectively, five of them became known as the Provoke group, after a short-lived magazine of the time, and described their aesthetic as "Are, bure, bokeh" ("Rough, blurred, and out of focus"). But individually they very much went their own ways. Shomei Tomatsu, the photojournalist of the group, took what he called a "subjective documentary" approach to social and cultural issues. By contrast, Takuma Nakahira's dark urban abstractions felt like equal parts sumi-e and radioactive nightmare. And then, somewhere between those two, Daido Moriyama, the most directly influenced by Klein and soon to become the best known of the group in the West. To this day he roams the back alleys of Shinjuku with a little digicam and wide-angle lens, a street photographer to the last.

From Chewing Gum and Chocolate by Shomei Tomatsu, 1959. The postwar Japan photographer par excellence, Tomatsu admitted to being "obsessed" with the U.S. Occupation and the cultural impact of the West on Japan.

And Klein? He still lives in Paris and seems to savor the role of eternal rebel. Fully 40 years passed before his Life is Good photos were put out in book form in the U.S. The expanded collection, titled William Klein, New York, 1954–1955, more powerfully than ever shows us a young man working at white-hot intensity, following his instincts as an artist rather than a trained photographer. Had his original book been published in the U.S. rather than Europe it's hard to imagine it would have had any less impact than Robert Frank's The Americans, which appeared two years later.

But in the end the point is moot, so ubiquitous has Klein's influence become. Whether in fashion, advertising, or documentary photography—never mind motion pictures—nothing has ever been quite the same since William Klein and that winter on the streets of New York six decades ago.

John

John Kennerdell writes two articles a year for TOP.

Original contents copyright 2015 by John Kennerdell. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Chris Y.: "John Kennerdell should write a lot more for TOP. This was gold as far as I'm concerned. Thank you."

Mike replies: Yeah, but I don't look a gift horse. If ya follow.

Julian Love: "Tate Modern held a large Klein/Moriyama retrospective a couple of years ago. While the photographs themselves were wonderful to look at, full of visual interest, it was the large collection of first edition books that really stood out (most of them loaned by Martin Parr, who seems to own several copies of each). The dramatic layouts combined grainy full-bleed images covered in bold text and graphic shapes. The results were both chaotic and mesmerising."

A Little Lens Tale

The Spyglass Man, Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, 2008. Shot with the seldom-praised Canon 28mm ƒ/1.8 at ƒ/5 on an APS-C body. Trying to demonstrate lens character with a web-size JPEG is an exercise in futility, but in prints I like how this lens smoothly yet distinctly renders the background layers of an image. Maybe you can see a bit of that here.

By John Kennerdell

Quaint as it may sound now, once upon a time many of us bought lenses largely by personal recommendation. While you might have happened across a test of a lens you were considering in one of the photo magazines of the day, often it was just some other photographer whose judgement you trusted. He’d say, here’s the one you want, it’s good. And, in your innocence, that was all you really needed to know.

Today, it seems, we know better. MTF charts, Imatest, DxO and all the rest—why take the word of any mere photographer when we have instant access to such comprehensive, state-of-the-art tools?

OK, I’m sure there are some good non-rhetorical answers to that question, say in fields like aerial survey or scientific photography where the demands made on lenses are purely technical. But for the rest of us, here’s my case for the old pro who says, yeah, just buy this one. And while we’re at it, let’s defend his choice of test instruments: the venerable Mark I human eyeball.

The topic came up a couple months ago when I decided I needed a medium wide-angle lens for the Micro 4/3 cameras I now use most of the time. The obvious choice seemed to be the Olympus 17mm ƒ/1.8, a thoroughly modern (2013) design from a company that clearly knows as much about photographic optics as anyone in the business. But what to make of all the online sniping? "Disappointing"? "Under-performing"? "Ill-considered"? Among at least some lab-coated reviewers and their followers, this "flawed" lens was generating some serious angst.

Here’s a pet theory of mine: when a well-respected manufacturer releases a premium-priced optic that immediately draws criticism for its supposed lack of sharpness, odds are that it might be, for lack of a more exact term, a lens of real character. Most likely, its designers considered it to be sufficient in resolution (evidently an uncomfortable concept for some people), and were looking at qualities beyond that.

My favorite example of this has long been Canon’s EF 28mm ƒ/1.8. It came out almost 20 years ago and is technically none too impressive on 35mm film, never mind digital sensors. Corner sharpness? Forget about it. Color aberrations, coma, etc.—this is not a lens you want to test too closely. And yet to my eyes it had a lovely look, to the point where I bought an APS-C body just to use it. (28mm is too wide for my tastes, while 45mm-e feels about perfect.) That lens, shot fairly close at mid-apertures, still charms me in ways that none of my other Canon lenses do. They’re reliably good, but the 28mm is unreliably great. By that I mean that it doesn't work for every kind of shot, but when it does, it sings.

The problem here, I suspect, is that people tend to look at what's easiest to look at. And in the digital age, nothing is easier to judge than resolution of fine detail. Fail to deliver eyeball-piercing sharpness and, as a lens maker in the 21st century, you’re going to suffer the slings and arrows of an online community that often looks no further than 100% pixel view on their computer screens.

And it's not just resolution. One pixel's worth of color fringing and you can expect the enthusiasts to pile onto a lens for "chromatic aberration" (which they now call by its initials, CA, like an old friend). Never mind that it's often a lens-sensor interaction rather than a true optical fault, and that, even if visible at print sizes, it could easily be fixed in post. Or "bokeh," Japanese for the defocus aberration. Aficionados like to look at "blur disks" and other grossly out-of-focus extremes of the image. I'd suggest that the real appeal of fine lenses more often lies in the beauty of their transitions from in-focus to out-of-focus. Photographic objectives do things that are both obvious and subtle. The better the lens, the more the subtlety counts.

Even sharpness, which after all is a subjective term, has its varieties. In film days we used to talk about "hard sharp" and "smooth sharp" lenses. No doubt there are technical explanations—for a start, more raw resolution for the former, and generally better micro-contrast for the latter—but the main thing was, that was how the images looked, and you picked the look you liked. Want killer sharpness at the expense of some harshness? You could have that. Prefer a rounder, richer look? Then you chose that. Graphs, numbers, and other scientific metrics couldn’t tell you those things. Your eyes could.

Commuters and Thomas Edison, Bangkok, 2014. Snapped with the Olympus 17mm ƒ/1.8 at ƒ/2. It’s plenty sharp, handles colors and tonalities with real elegance, and autofocuses so quickly that it feels like cheating. Plus it's tiny and solid, and has a handy manual-focus clutch. If this is a "flawed" lens, bring on more of them.

To cut to the chase, I bought the Olympus 17mm and, yes, it’s a sweet little lens. Apparently it doesn’t test especially well, but users love it and now I do too. It works just fine alongside the Panasonic 25mm ƒ/1.4, another excellent optic that hasn’t had to endure the same kind of online abuse thanks to its somewhat higher resolution. In use, as a rough equivalent of the classic 35mm/50mm pair, they're both pretty near as good as it gets. Trust your eyes and be happy, I say.

John

See John's Category in the right-hand sidebar for more of his contributions.

©2014 by John Kennerdell, all rights reserved

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Henning Kraggerud: "Yes, and quite often transition between absolute sharpness and out of focus is much more important than resolution pairs on flat surfaces like resolution charts. My new Pentax 20–40mm Limited is one of my nicest-drawing lenses with great strong natural colors yet subtle beautiful color transitions and and impressive micro contrast which pop where needed, and it gets bad reviews."

Seth: "I'm glad to read this, because I was puzzled by most of the other reviews of this lens. Their text seemed almost universally unimpressed, while their accompanying photographs all seemed to show a lens with a perfectly pleasant character. It made me wonder what I was missing."

Albert Erickson: "John and Mike, just so happens I own both the Olympus 17mm and the Panasonic 25mm. I couldn't agree more with John—both are terrific lenses. They are clean, sharp, show great color rendition and fit in a pants pocket. What more do you want from a lens? Thanks for the post; very well said."

PhotoOmaha: "I have definitely had a love/hate relationship with that lens. For me, I could shoot 28mm, 50mm and 85mm all day. I went through three copies of this lens, but at ƒ/1.8, it was basically worthless; the 'bokeh' was horrendous. I do a lot of wedding work, and this should have been one of my go-to lenses. It definitely got left in the bag quite a bit. I always feel, if the lens is advertised to go to ƒ/1.8, why can't I use it at ƒ/1.8?"

The Essential Accessory

Written by John Kennerdell

Some years back I mentioned to Oren that I was buying a car.

"Ah," he said, "the ultimate photographic accessory."

It's an appealing image, cruising the highway like Robert Frank or Lee Friedlander, skidding to a halt at every photo op and then jumping out with cameras blazing. It just doesn't work for me. Once behind the wheel, I seem to fixate on driving, not shooting. Seriously, I can’t even do it on a bicycle. Walking pace seems to be the fastest I can move and still see and take decent photos.

So what is my essential accessory? Camera bags, then? Like everyone else I own dozens. Some even get used, mainly to transport gear. But I've never enjoyed working out of a bag and have come to avoid the kind of photography that demands it (which is generally, and unfortunately, the paying kind). One small body with lens in the hand, some extra batteries and memory cards in a pocket—now there's photographic paradise.

How about a good pair of shoes? That was the top tip when somebody recently asked the members of Magnum. Hard to argue with that, though to my mind proper shoes transcend photography. They're just a really good idea for any activity.

No, I think I have my answer, though it might not resonate with you unless you live somewhere like Glasgow or Seattle or Southeast Asia. For me, the key companion to a camera is...an umbrella.

Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, by Gustave Caillebotte, 1877. A hundred years later and I'm confident that the fellow crossing the street in the middle of the frame would have a camera around his neck.

Yes, I belong to that tribe of photographers who like to go looking for good light as near as possible to bad weather. (Make no mistake, there are plenty of us. As Carl Weese put it once here: "We've had terrible weather all week—clear bright sunlight, blue skies, puffy white clouds.") My perfect day is roiling dark clouds and strange shifting light, with little or no actual sun. While such days almost always bring some rain, it's seldom constant or heavy enough to tempt me into rainwear. It's sufficiently hot and humid here in the tropics without encasing yourself in plastic. And raincoats of course don't do much to protect your camera or, no matter how weatherproof it might be, keep water off its lens.

But the humble umbrella gets it just right: a marvel of lightweight construction perfectly designed to keep both your upper body and camera dry, even if doesn't do such a good job for the rest of you. I admit it, I am a man of slightly soggy trousers.

For all the umbrella's usefulness when deployed, it does even more when at rest. A neatly furled umbrella projects style, confidence, and quiet authority. Or perhaps it's just that it makes its owner look a bit quaint and harmless. All I know is that people seem to relax a little when I carry my umbrella. Maybe they think I'm a lost Englishman and feel sorry for me.

An umbrella can provide support, quite literally. These days I shoot mostly from the waist. Plant an umbrella firmly into the ground and that's exactly the level of the top of the handle. It's probably not as steady as a real monopod but sometimes it's just the ticket, never mind the entertainment value this technique might have for your subjects. Some photographers have actually attached camera mounts to their umbrella handles, though that may be taking it too far. Our role model here is the Parisian flaneur, not MacGyver.

Rainy season, Phnom Penh. Come to my part of the world any time from around July to October and you'll soon be enjoying some
quality time with your umbrella.

Then, even for the most peace-loving among us, there is the umbrella as weapon. My fine English "solid stick" model has proven an effective deterrent to aggressive dogs, thieving monkeys, and, once, an angry goose rapidly inbound toward a delicate part of my body. Do not underestimate the territorial instincts of large domestic fowl, nor the self-defense value of a stout umbrella*.

We also shouldn't forget the more conventional uses of the umbrella in photography. I have one covered in bleached linen, bought in Tokyo, which functions nicely as either impromptu reflector or scrim. More than once I've shot a flash through it too, easy enough to do even with one hand. And yes, you can buy silvery rain umbrellas which I suppose could be rigged up as flash reflectors, though again that may be going a little over the top. A certain dignity is expected of a man with an umbrella, and fussing with bungee cords is no way to achieve it.

And finally, when we get old and creaky, a prospect that no longer feels entirely theoretical to me, an umbrella can of course double as a walking stick. Well, at least until it starts to rain.

So there it is, my unlikely but essential photo accessory. What's yours?

John

*The Japanese even have a martial art based around it: kasa-do ("the way of the umbrella"). If that's not enough for you, there are also umbrellas with knives or even swords hidden in the handle, though I certainly do not condone those. Should you insist on a concealed feature, I suggest the splendid Malacca Cane Flask Umbrella by Brigg, preferably filled with a tot of Talisker 18 Year Old.

John Kennerdell is a writer and photographer based in Southeast Asia. He tries to keep it mostly real at indochina-photoelectric.com, and maybe a little less so at 500px.com/indochinaphotoelectric. You can see more of his writings for TOP under his Category in the right-hand sidebar.

©2013 by John Kennerdell, all rights reserved

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Featured Comments from:

Benjamin Marks: "Ah. I am the choir to whom you are preaching. But, I am afraid after extolling its virtues, you are going to have to provide some brand plugs! I have gone through a seemingly endless series of umbrellas over the past 15 years. The only one even remotely robust enough was a no-name umbrella purchased in London that actually made it several of those aforementioned years before being lost by some wretch (me). Like a good kitchen knife, I would gladly pay four times the going rate for a bumbershoot that was robustly made. So give it up! What is the Leica of anti-rain gear, and where can I find one?"

bongo: "So how do you hold an umbrella and shoot with a camera at the same time? Any advice on technique would be appreciated."

Dave Levingston replies to bongo: "I first used an umbrella while shooting high school football games in the rain many, many years ago. The umbrella simply sits on the top of your head. The shaft goes down in front of you and can be held with the left arm pressed against your chest and you can still steady the camera with your left hand. Not elegant, but it keeps the downpour off the camera and lens."

Richard Tugwell: "I'm not so keen on the brolly as an accessory, but a quick scan of my Lightroom catalogue reveals 374 images tagged in some way with 'umbrella.' Obviously I appreciate it as a motif (or it rains a lot here)."

Are You Real?

From Dave Hill’s "Adventure" series. Lighting, compositing, processing—Dave made his name by cranking it all up to 11. So who needs reality when you can create photographic fantasies this seductive?

-

Written by John Kennerdell

Jazz fans may recognize our title as the name of a memorable song by the great jazzman Benny Golson*. When asked about the words, he supposedly said, "You know, you meet someone and you think, is this just too good? Can this be for real?"

I found myself humming Benny's tune while helping judge a photo contest a few months ago. Technically, the quality of the entries knocked me out. But it almost seemed as if the more accomplished the photographer, the less I believed in their photograph.

Generally the images fell into two categories. First, a clean, beautifully composed if rather anodyne style that recalled traditional commercial photography. Second, a more pumped-up, ultra-dramatic look, the kind that inspired one blogger to ask, "Why do photo contest winners look like movie posters?" And sure enough, those were the ones that took most of the awards.

What both kinds shared, to me anyhow, was a purposeful detachment from the look and feel of the real world. Almost all appeared to be staged and lit, and most had a certain self-consciously "processed" style to them. There were few rough edges but not much spontaneity. Visually, you couldn't help but be impressed. But emotionally I found no jolts, no tugs, nothing much below the high-gloss surface.

I confess to much the same reaction looking at the top-rated images on the big photo-sharing sites. While the nature photography in particular can be extraordinary, these photographers' powers of candid observation rarely extend to the one species of greatest interest to most of us. You know, the one called Homo sapiens. There it's mostly beautiful women or elderly exotics or adorable children, so flawlessly posed and presented that it's hard to believe they have a life outside the frame.

Youth center, South Africa. Good, old-fashioned black-and-white documentary work. The photographer? Dave Hill. It’s gratifying to know that photography's Mr. Spinal Tap enjoys nothing more in his free time than a 35mm camera loaded with Neopan.

OK, I'm prejudiced. I came of age in the last great days of print photojournalism. To me, the most powerful and enduring images are the straightforward visual documents, unstaged and often imperfect, just as the world itself. When I look at old photographs it's most often on the likes of Shorpy or Found. Collections like these teach us that honest images of "ordinary" events, people, and places can take on an unexpected richness and significance over time. These are photos that become more valuable, rather than less, as the years pass.

The young photographers I work with show little appetite for that kind of thing. I've interested a few in the approach many of us used to take to learn photography: find a subject, preferably close to home, and then work to document it over weeks or months or more. Most however prefer to focus on what we might call the expressive side of photography, using all the remarkable tools of digital photography to create something that says more about their own imagination than the world at large. They aspire, it seems to me, not so much toward photography as photo-illustration.

And why shouldn't they? Partly it's a generational thing. Their role models aren't Eugene Smith or Garry Winogrand, but LaChapelle and Rankin. Partly it's easy access to the technology: if you can visualize it, now you can probably do it. But beyond that, it's hard—and only getting harder—going around and poking your camera into other people's actual lives, especially for non-professionals who have no financial or career incentive even to try. Why not set it up, light it up, Nik it up, and assemble something with undeniable visual impact that also slots neatly into the current popular idiom?

"Boys run before a crowd in the 'Junior Race' at Eton College in Windsor, England, August 1919. Photograph courtesy Central News Photo Service." This just happens to be the top post on Found on the day I'm writing this, but it makes a fine demonstration of the time-machine qualities of a good documentary photo: nothing more and nothing less than a fraction of a second of a summer’s day, almost a hundred years ago.

Well, there's no reason not to, if you like. But for those of you who haven't tried your hand at straight documentary photography, here's my case for giving it a shot. Apart from motion pictures, still photography remains the most powerful means we've ever been given to capture moments from the flow of time and then hold them up to say: this is what I saw. This is how it looked, and how it felt, to be alive at this moment in this place. A remarkable thing, when you think of it. But it works only if you turn your camera on the world as it is, not an idealized simulation of it. And most likely, these days, it's not going to win you many photo contests.

©2013 by John Kennerdell, all rights reserved

*Benny recorded a few different versions but to my mind the definitive one is with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers on Moanin' (Blue Note 4003).

John Kennerdell is a writer and photographer based in Southeast Asia. He tries to keep it mostly real at indochina-photoelectric.com, and maybe a little less so at 500px.com/indochinaphotoelectric. You can see more of his writings for TOP under his Category in the right-hand sidebar.

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TOP's links!

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

bill: "I recently entered a juried show, 60 from ~2000 entries were shown. I entered a strong side light chiaroscuro picture. No more manipulation than standard darkroom. I was stunned at the technological manipulation present; 'real' seemed not a consideration at all. During the two openings, I listened to the wows over the manipulated pics, and how if I had spent the time mine could have been really good. The curator apologized but said this is the trend. I don't think most would know 'real' if it jumped up and bit them. Sad."

David: "Very well said Mr. Kennerdell. I'm 38 which makes me not exactly young but not old either. When I got into photography 10 years ago I was primarily interested in taking illustrative shots like you describe. However, while out on one of my many photo expeditions I had a bit of an epiphany. I realized that my photos weren't going to hold up over time. My style of shooting only looked good because it was leveraging the cutting edge of technology. In the not so distant future anyone with a newer camera or better processing technique could come along and take a photo that rendered my images dated and useless. I decided to change my subject matter and style. Fortunately, I was a TOP reader and Mike had introduced me to Shorpy. From then on I tried to shoot with an eye towards history. Will my photo still be interesting in 100 years? That's the question I keep in the back of my mind when I'm out taking pictures these days."

Dennis (partial comment): "The same critque could be applied to this summer's blockbuster season of duds. Lots of imagination in the service of nothing."

Svein-Frode (partial comment): "Digital cameras and Adobe Photoshop is to photography what Roland and Yamaha were to music in the 1980s. New technology that becomes in vogue easily gets overused and abused, but then most things return to normal. After Hair Metal came Grunge, and talking of jazz, even the mighty Miles Davis got lost in synthesized music in the '80s."

Stan B.: "Photography is big enough to accommodate a variety of styles, even extremes. Always has, always will. That doesn't mean that they will all have equal footing and enjoy equal access and appreciation—not by a long shot. As far as the young-uns are concerned, yes, many have no clue whatsoever as to what came before them—that extends to history in general, let alone photographic history. Ironically, it is some of them that have revolted and returned to 'the old ways,' helping keep that tradition alive."

Richard Skoonberg: "My wife, a former art professor, when she saw the first image said, 'It's an illustration. It's an illustration using photographic techniques. It is miles away from photography.' Succinct and to the point."

Clay Olmstead: "This is not the age of subtle. It's the age of getting noticed. Specifically, getting noticed by being more outrageous than anybody else. You see it in art, music, TV and in the news. There's no reason for photography to be immune."

The Unwanted Portrait

By John Kennerdell

Handing out the occasional print, it seems to me, is one small thing we photographers can do in return for our intrusions into the lives of our subjects. It's also its own reward, at least in the corner of the world where I live. Most people hereabouts in rural Southeast Asia have never seen themselves in anything other than random snapshots or a stiff studio portrait. Give them a decent casual headshot and almost always they react with surprise and pleasure.

But this is the story of an exception.

The photo here is one of only two I ever took of this fellow, a moment after we smiled a greeting at each other at a weekly market some years ago. The shot was nothing special, but I liked the guy. He had a look of his own, something jaunty and indomitable. So I printed it up and slipped it into my bag with the other prints I would give out the next week.

As hoped, I found him again. That's when things went wrong. He stared at the photo for a long moment, as if almost unsure who it was. Then, without looking up, he said: "And what do I do with this?"

It was a question nobody had ever asked, and it brought me up short. Well, I started to say, give it to your wife. Then I realized that I'd never seen him with anyone. What if he lived by himself? What indeed would he do with a crinkly, wrinkly replica of his own face? Put it on a wall to make himself feel even older and more alone? Finally I came up with the only thing I could think of. "Maybe your grandchildren would like it," I said. The comment felt lame even as I said it. Kids love gifts from grandparents. But a geezer portrait?

It couldn't have satisfied him, but at least he didn't hand it back. It happens all the time here—you commit a faux pas and people treat you with a quiet graciousness that makes you feel like even more of an oaf.

Whatever he thought of the picture, it seemed to cement a small bond between us. Every week from then on he always made a point of coming over and, in a touchingly un-Asian gesture, shaking my hand. We never talked of much, but more than once he told me he was 79 years old, hale and hearty and still enjoying every day. Until one week when he admitted that no, he wasn't doing so well. It was a statement of fact, nothing else. I saw him a few times more but then, at some point, no more.

Life went on, as it does. I kept returning to the market whenever I was home between travels, still shooting and still occasionally giving out prints, just not to solitary old people. I mean, what had I been thinking?

And then one day I was passing around some prints to the usual general amusement when a pair of young women came up as if on a mission. They began thanking me repeatedly for something I didn't understand. Only when one of them kept saying "Taa...Taa"—Granddad—and I looked into her face did I somehow realize they were talking about this very fellow.

"We have an old wedding photo," she said. "But your picture looks the way we remember him."

So here's to you, Granddad. We barely knew each other but I still smile when I think of you, your hand-rolled cigarettes, your ancient sputtering motorbike, the pleasure you took in having a friend as unlikely as me. Despite your doubts, and mine too, our photograph seems to have found a good home.

John

John Kennerdell, an American who has lived and worked in Southeast Asia for most of his adult life, writes several posts a year for TOP. His website is Indochina Photoelectric. More of his writings for us can be found through the Categories list in the right-hand sidebar.

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:

Dalen Muster: "Love the shot, and love the story! I had a similar experience in a sense. I was shooting candid portraits of sufferers of dementia in the lock-down section of a rest home. I decided to hang a half-dozen interesting ones in a nearby Starbucks. Within a day or so I received a phone call from the manager of Starbucks stating that there was an incident regarding the daughter of one woman's portrait, and that I needed to call her. Apparently she works nearby that Starbucks, and was in line to order her drink. Unaware that I had displayed the photograph of her mother she was caught by surprise when she saw the photo. She then stepped out of line, and proceeded to weep. I had somehow captured an expression that had not been seen in the years since dementia had overcome her.

"Thankfully she was thankful, and not angry. I gave her the print."

Richard Alan Fox: "Many years ago on a walk with my Plaubel 670 through Greenwich Villiage I happened across the artist Chaim Gross sitting on a chair in font of his studio. I asked if I could do a quick portrait and he agreed, click click and I walked on. I made a print and sent it via USPS; two or three weeks latter I saw his obit in the Times.

"Two months later I received a letter from his widow, Rene Gross, saying that Chaim saw the picture before died and was pleased at what was his last portrait. As he had a decades long relationship with Arnold Newman, I felt proud of the image. The letter continued that oh by the way at his Shiva (a Jewish wake) the portrait was on display and was stolen by a member of the public who came to pay respects, and could I please send another copy. I sent it on and that became the beginning of many photos and portraits I did for the family and the Chaim Gross Museum."

Crabby Umbo: "Love this story...

...Moved into a cheap one-room apartment in the center of the city I live in, starting to get on hard times myself, and keep most of my stuff in a storage space. My building is filled with people of all colors, creeds, and ages, with single retirees a big part of it all. Just to keep sharp, I've started doing 'one-roll' portraits, on 120 film, of people who come out for a few minutes to sit in front of the building or have a smoke. They always let me do it, but think I'm crazy, as 'who wants a picture of me?' I always give them a contact sheet, and they're always surprised at how they look. I get a lot of history of all those 'faces', and hear a lot of interesting things, and like to think I make a few of them happy. Not to put a political spin on it, but more than once I've remarked to friends than my life feels far more interesting than if I'd have moved into a cheap apartment in the far-west, all-white suburbs of my metro area...."

I Should Have Said...

I assume too much sometimes.

I should have added, to John Kennerdell's article "In Defense of Depth" yesterday, a reminder that John was the author of the article I published in Photo Techniques in 1997 that introduced the term "bokeh" and the concept behind it to photographers in the West.

I added two other articles to John's—one by Oren Grad on the terminology of bokeh in Japan, and the one that really allowed the trio of articles to be published in Photo Techniques at all, Harold Merklinger's fine investigation of the technical underpinnings of the appearance of out-of-d.o.f. blur. (Photo Techniques, as its name implied, was a technical magazine, and didn't publish a lot of articles about pure aesthetic considerations without also covering the technical side.) But despite the fact that all three articles appeared together, John's was the first and really the central one, and the one that kicked things off.

Please forgive me for assuming that was common knowledge. If I had thought about it for half a second I would have realized it is not.

Mike

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In Defense of Depth

From Russian Noir by Jason Eskenazi

By John Kennerdell

If there's a single received idea that fires up the imagination of my young photographer friends these days, it's that for "professional looking" photographs they should buy fast lenses and then use them at their widest apertures. I've begun hearing them criticize slower lenses and smaller sensors for their lack of "depth of field control." That term once meant something more subtle—we'll come to that in a moment—but now it seems to have become merely shorthand for "Right, let's see how shallow this thing can focus." It's all about blur, baby, blur.

Consider the irony here. For most its history, among the greatest technical challenges of photography was obtaining even adequate depth of field. From extreme lens movements to big lights, tiny apertures, long exposures, and multiple flash pops, photographers bent over backwards simply to get enough of their subject into focus. So why aren't more of us welcoming the ease with which we can do it today?

One answer might be that most enthusiasts coming into photography since the start of the digital era did so via small-sensor cameras. To them, larger sensors with their greater focal lengths produce the exotic shallow-focus look they associate with "serious" photography. The problem begins when razor-thin focus becomes a gimmick or a crutch, a cliché, a contrivance, a visual tic, a distracting and annoying...sorry, I've been looking at way too much student work this week.

Don't get me wrong. Selective focus has always been among photography's most valuable techniques. Even apart from its usefulness in isolating subjects, there is a beauty to the plane of focus that belongs to photography alone, and many of us have gone through a fascination with it.

But if the current hobbyist obsession seems to regard minimal depth of field as a hallmark of a memorable image, some of us relics from the film age might argue pretty much the opposite. The richest photos—the ones we return to again and again, seeing more each time—most often work in layers. They show more rather than less, taking in the full spatial depth of our world rather than just one razor-thin slice of it.

Reality check
Open almost any book of photos by the real masters and mainly you'll see the use of mid to small apertures and ample depth of field. By way of semi-random example here are the first six names I see on the bookshelf next to me: Brassaï, Werner Bischof, Eugene Atget, Joel Meyerowitz, Ryuji Miyamoto, and William Allard. A diverse list, to be sure, but think about it: if they share one skill, it's a keen sense of composition in all three dimensions.

We could name any number of famous examples, but one that has been particularly well documented is Sam Abell’s remarkable photo of a cattle branding. As Alex Webb reportedly said of this image, "This is what we’re all trying to do." And just what's that? In this short video on the making of the photo, Sam describes it as "to create a layered, deep, complex, complicated photograph that doesn't look complex or complicated." That's not a requirement for a great photo, of course, but it does represent a kind of gold standard for many of the very best photographers throughout the history of the medium. And, pretty obviously, it’s usually not achieved with a lens anywhere near wide open.

Colin Firth by Dan Winters. Perfect d.o.f. control.

Portraits, someone says? Take another look at the enduring ones. A few off the top of my head: Sander's pastry chef*, Penn's Cocteau, Karsh's Audrey Hepburn, Avedon's Ezra Pound, Steve McCurry's Afghan Girl, and Steve Jobs by Albert Watson. You'll see less shallow focus than subtle control of focus. Everything that the eye wants to be sharp, is. Everything else tends to be less so, but in a way that looks effortless and natural, never calling attention to itself. (In fact I'd hold that no aspect of good technique ever does, but then maybe I'm a relic that way too.)

The decisive millimeter
Now there is one problem, or let's call it a challenge, when you no longer have masses of blur to hide behind. The deeper the focus, the greater the compositional demands. Not only do you have to press the button at exactly the right moment, but your camera needs to be in exactly the right place when you do. Arranging all those in-focus elements into coherent form makes for a real-time, four-dimensional exercise in which millimeters (or at least inches) can make all the difference between no shot, good shot, and great shot. But that's another topic in itself.

Meanwhile, I don't want to step on any toes. If your idea of photographic fun is ultra-fast lenses and gnat's eyelashes of sharpness against fields of gloriously abstract blur, go for it. As millions have evidently discovered in the past few years alone, it's an easy way to make images that can be very pleasing in their own fashion. Just don't be surprised if some day you look back on all that shallow-focus work and find yourself wishing you'd paid more attention to the third dimension. And don't ask me whose old photos I was looking at when I first began to realize that for myself.

JK

*OK, this one has less depth of field than I recalled. But then he was working with a very big plate and a very long lens. And note the care he's taken despite that to keep every bit of the chef and his mixing bowl in focus—now that's "DOF control."

John Kennerdell, an American who has lived and worked in Southeast Asia for most of his adult life, writes several posts a year for TOP. His website is Indochina Photoelectric. More of his writings for us can be found through the Categories list in the right-hand sidebar.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured [partial] Comment by Elisabeth: "I'm a daily reader of TOP and this has to be one of my favorite articles from the last several months. I like a good super-shallow DOF image as much as anyone, but the experience for me often feels like tasting a piece of candy—a sense of instant gratification that lasts only as long as I'm looking at the photo. I never feel a desire to go back and look at such photos again and again, nor do I learn much from them. They are often beautiful to look at, but rarely reveal anything beyond the first (often only) layer. A lasting image for me is one that has those many layers of content that Sam Abell referred to, and I'm most impressed by photographers who manage to use all three dimensions well, placing multiple elements perfectly within the frame and using the entire 2D space so well that the image feels larger and more content-rich than it would seem it has a right to. I am particularly in awe of street photographers who regularly compose such images on the fly—masterfully choosing the precise moment to capture chaotic, moving elements both near and far and at all points within the frame (even the corners and edges) in such a way that everything seems perfectly placed in the telling of a larger story." [For the rest of Elisabeth's comment, please see the Comments section. —Ed.]

Featured [partial] Comment by Brad Nichol: Aside from the obvious artistic deficits of this fast-glass, razor-thin-d.o.f. obsession—and it is an obsession among many of the students in my classes—there are some real and overlooked technical issues that most don't factor in.

"Most of these slavish advocates spend their time looking at on-screen web images to make judgments. A massive proportion of the images that look suitably sharp as 600px pics on screen look dismally soft when translated to an actual print of any size. These folk are often very disappointed when they try to make actual prints for the wall, blaming their lenses, cameras etc.

"The d.o.f. is so shallow that there is no 'sneeze room' whatsoever. Most cameras' focusing systems are not good enough to reliably nail the shot each time, leading photographers down the path of shooting copious frames in the hope of getting one good one. The great majority of this fast glass is seriously compromised wide open and adds all sorts of nasty aberrations that usually don't help the look of the image in any way. Despite the accepted wisdom, the bokeh produced by many lenses wide open is often far less pleasing than it is one or one-and-a-half stops down."

Mike replies: It's an important, and overlooked, issue. Most lenses, especially fast lenses, just don't perform well wide open. This can be a good look occasionally, but in large part that "slice of sharpness" is, as you say, going to disappoint in terms of just how sharp it is. Or rather isn't.

Featured Comment by Arg: "I think high depth of field became unfashionable when it became the province of cheap cameras. Once shallow depth of field became the exclusive domain of more expensive gear, its stardom was assured."

Featured Comment by Jim Richardson: "A few years ago a stock photo editor I knew was sending out emails to his photographers touting the latest photographic trend that was storming the bastions of conventionality and bringing riches to those smart enough to embrace the new vision. The new technique: magenta skies at sunset, achieved by using an FL-D filter. 'Anyone who isn't producing magenta sunsets will be left out in the stock photo world,' he proclaimed. A year later nothing could else could reliably bring on gagging and vomiting as magenta sunsets.

"This, too, shall pass. Popularity is its own curse."

The Problem with Perfection

Abandoned U.S. Consulate—Danang, by Bill Burke. Burke spent much of the 1980s and '90s traveling through some fairly dodgy parts of Southeast Asia, processing his Polaroids in a bucket. It’s no surprise that his photos display what we might modestly call technical flaws. The surprise is how powerfully their imperfections help capture a sense of time and place.

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By John Kennerdell

Photography has always attracted an interesting mix of artistic and technical types, and since the advent of digital we seem to be getting even more of the latter. Well over half the young photographers I work with (or "teach," the word they like to use) come from scientific backgrounds like programming, engineering, and medicine. They tend to arrive at photography with a confidence that it must be subject to the same kind of rational analysis and processes that apply in their own fields.

Too often this results in what we might call theoretical photography. These fellows (that's their gender, almost always) have all the gear: lenses in every possible focal length, cameras with sensors so noiseless it's almost eerie, software that can all but turn pixels inside out. They've done the research and spent the money. They've read the books and watched the videos. Theoretically, they're ready to create photos of unsurpassed quality. But somehow that isn't quite happening yet. And judging from what I see of the online forums, they're not alone.

Even as an arts and humanities guy—writing and taking pictures are the only real jobs I've ever had—it took me years to appreciate how much of photography turns out to be non-intuitive or even counter-intuitive. The hard part is explaining why.

Take equipment. How can going out the door with less of the stuff result, so often, in returning with more good photos? When is a new camera or lens not necessarily an "upgrade" (a word nobody even used until cameras became computer peripherals)? For that matter, how can a piece of kit that doesn't fare especially well in tests produce more visually satisfying images than one that does?

Or consider technique. Why can a flaw like flare or color cast or motion blur improve a photograph? How can blocked up shadows sometimes say more than deep shadow detail? When do the "rules" of composition become an impediment to a great shot?

(This leads into another topic for another time: how these anomalies extend even to subject matter. Why does shooting a small, personal subject close to home generally end up more successful than going off in pursuit of a grand one far away? Why is parachuting dozens of photojournalists into a country for a day or a week unlikely to produce a book as good as by having just one of them spend a year there?)

At the heart of this, I think, is something more fundamental than learning to separate the technical qualities of photos from the aesthetic ones. While most photographs don't aspire to be art, ultimately their value to us depends on something that art teaches us: direct emotional response. Develop that and, rather quickly, your gear and your expertise begin to feel a lot less important than your subject and your relationship to it. And those are the concerns I see, every time without exception, whenever a new photographer suddenly finds his stride and starts to create truly good work.

John

John Kennerdell, an American who has lived and worked in Southeast Asia for most of his adult life, writes several posts a year for TOP.

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Featured Comment by Stan B.: "Thank you, John—a very important and timely post. In the analogue only days, I often cursed the flaws and inadequacies of film, hoped and prayed when something, anything would come along to replace such an antiquated 19th-century process. And now that the new and improved digital era has arrived, I am truly underwhelmed. Sharpness, resolution and detail abound like never before, and yet, something seems lost and forgotten nevertheless. Perhaps, without my knowing, it was (at least in part) the slight imperfections of craft that enamored me to the medium. Much of what I see today is technically perfect, and perfectly plastic. Perhaps that is why work such as Burke's and Boris Mikhailov's still resonate so strongly with me to this day. The questions you raise towards the end also need to be addressed more often, far more often than all the pixel peeping issues that are constantly regurgitated."

Featured Comment by Doug Howk: "I agree with what you say about the mistaken belief that perfection through equipment yields great photos. But at the same time I too often see images created through some technically imperfect tools as being a short-cut to art, e.g., plastic lenses."

Featured Comment by John Camp: "Okay, this is a cliff I'm willing to jump off.

"I've long argued the simple proposition that at the margins, where excellence lies, people are what they do, or what they're made to do. This is where you find the nerd syndrome (or the jock syndrome, if you prefer—jocks are simply a variety of nerd.)
If you're a technical guy, chances are good that a) you are smart, and b) as a young person, you voluntarily or under pressure from parents focused on a particular kind of learning which was strongly oriented toward the solitary: math, rather than dance; physics, rather than drama. But because you are smart, you grow up and realize that you missed something along the way. You then go looking for an art—you yearn for one—but what you tend to land on is the technical, because that's what you know you're very good at. Photography seems to be a quick answer to your problem.

"But it's not. I am constantly amazed to look at photography forums and see the emphasis on the technical. I've never had a response to my challenge, 'Show me one great photograph whose greatness comes from resolution.' There aren't any—yet on landscape forums, that's all anybody talks about. A top-end medium-format system, which seems to be the great desire of all forum-based landscape wannabes, will cost $100,000 or more...yet all you get is resolution, and nobody can cite a single great photograph that relies on resolution for its greatness. Even those you might be tempted to name (Ansel Adam's 'Moonrise') were shot with cameras whose resolution probably couldn't match a contemporary Canon S-95 point-and-shoot.

"What these people need to be taught is not technical skill, but social concerns. They could learn all the technical stuff they need in a week, but they need in-depth work on the social. That's because when most people were learning about social things, they were compulsively messing with computers (or compulsively shooting baskets.)

"I think if I were to teach people photography (not that I would) I think I might require them to spend a lot of time in social situations, without cameras, simply socializing and asking people what they were up to. I'd encourage them, maybe, to take part in a political campaign as a volunteer, take a dance class, join a drama group. It'd be hard, because that's not where a techie's training lies.

"For people who just can't make themselves do that...well, there's always more resolution."

Featured Comment by Matt Stevens: "Hear hear! But then, I'd be considered old school on account of my age alone."

Featured [partial] Comment by jeffharris: "I read an interesting quote today...which I'll paraphrase badly...A worker uses tools. A craftsman uses tools and their brain. An artist uses tools, brain and their heart. There's so little heart in the images people churn out."

Featured Comment by Sergio Bartelsman: "The general direction photography is thaking is that of reproducing the world as exactly as possible with the technological advances such as high resolution and noiseless pictures and so on. However what I really like about photography is exactly the contrary, that is, how can I distance myself from reality and experience it in a different way than trying to reproduce exactly as it was when I was there."

Featured Comment by Fred: "Edward Weston sought technical perfection as well as artistic. And achieved both. Why didn't Joel Meterowitz shoot Cape Light with his trusted Leica...? There are many aspects of the art of photography that are not easily divorced from the profane technical considerations. I get your point though."

The Liberated Camera: Part II

By John Kennerdell

(Continued from Part I)

About a year ago a young photographer came to me with a question I'd never heard before. What did I think about "face detect" autofocus?

Probably I sighed. Then said something about how modern cameras left us with so little to do that any half-competent photographer just might want to decide where to focus on his own.

There was one problem with this expert advice—I'd never used the feature, not for a single frame. Every photographic instinct told me I was right. But then ignorance is a splendid way of maintaining our pet prejudices. So I resolved to give face detection a fair shake.

Sawannakhet, Laos, 2011. Shot more or less blind from inside a bus by holding the camera out a small ventilation window. I suspect conventional AF would have locked onto the gloved hand or the bright end of the metal bar at the center...or maybe not. In any case, face detect got this one right.

First let's be clear what we're talking about. This isn't like those silly modes that snap when people smile or won't shoot when they blink. It's simply an algorithm that finds and focuses on faces. It lights up a rectangle around the face in question so that you know what it's doing. The newest versions lock specifically onto eyes. I've spent several decades learning how to do just that, first with manual focus and then with autofocus, so I couldn't very well object to the concept. The only question was whether it worked well enough to actually serve the photographer, or if it just got in the way.

As it happened I already owned a camera that offered this feature, a little Micro 4/3 Olympus. So I put on the 20mm lens, turned on face detect AF (it doesn't help that the icon is a smiley face), and tossed it into the bag for my next trip. Three weeks and a couple thousand exposures later, I had my answer.

Pursat, Cambodia, 2011. Here's a clearer example, shot from the waist. Without recomposing, no conventional AF system could have known that my interest was the face in the corner, not that nice contrasty arm in the center.

In a word, it was a slam dunk. OK, that's two words, but seriously: I got hundreds of shots that I probably wouldn't have without it. By the end I was attempting things I wouldn’t have even considered without it, and a lot of those worked out too. It wasn't perfect of course, but it raised my percentage. Ultimately, what more do you want?

Let me stress that this was all full-on freestyle photography. I don't even own an eye-level finder for this camera. I carry it strapped to my right hand and shoot fast and loose, from any position that feels promising. The screen is fairly visible even at oblique angles and the image stabilization helps keep things sharp. Add this—intelligent, reliable AF, with no need to try to focus and recompose—and it was as if the last piece of the puzzle had fallen into place.

Singapore, 2011. And just for fun: trans-species face detect.
Undocumented, but surprisingly effective.

Many photographers, especially more experienced ones, will of course have no interest in face detection. Many, after all, have no interest in taking the camera away from their eye, and there's nothing wrong with that. Others, generally younger and newer, are already routinely using it without a second thought. No doubt some are doing fine work with it. Me? I’m not young or new and I'll probably still leave it turned off much of the time. But at least now I know when to turn it on. And, hopefully, when not to give advice about things I've never tried.

•     •     •

Non-viewfinder shooting has never been for everyone—it almost seems to offend some photographers' sense of order in the universe—but with even top photojournalists now wielding little digicams, never mind snapping with their iPhones, it's clearly gone legitimate. The "perspective of a paralysed Cyclops" (that annoying Mr. Hockney again) is not to be underestimated: most of the great and good photographs of the past half century have been framed via eye-level finders. But the one-eyed view will likely never enjoy such dominance again, and perhaps that's not a bad thing.

John

John Kennerdell is a writer and photographer based in Southeast Asia.

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Featured Comment by expiring_frog: "Thanks for the tip John, something to try on my new camera. Also, what wonderful pictures on your website!"

Mike adds: Not to toot TOP's horn, but this marks the public debut of John's new site. His old one, Studio Hatyai, has been down for some time, and this is the first time Indochina Photoelectric has emerged from beta. I haven't spent any time there yet, but I plan to.

Featured Comment by Louis: "I took some photos in the crypts under Paris and my compact had no problem recognising faces in the mounds of skulls in the gloom!"

Featured Comment by Friedrich: "I like the humility and pragmatism that shine through this article. That's something to strive for."

Featured Comment by Gordon Lewis: "Some cameras, such as the one in my HTC Incredible 2 Android smartphone, take this feature one step further by allowing you to tap the screen to where you want to shift the point of focus. This comes in handy when there is more than one face in the frame and you'd prefer to choose which one to focus on. I wouldn't describe it as fast or elegant, but it works."

Featured Comment by Diego: "Part three—smile shutter! Or how about automatic scene recognition? In-camera merge-to-HDR?"

Mike replies: Now, now, sarcasm isn't necessary.

Featured Comment by Hans: "Like you I initially dismissed this as another annoying gimmick. But then I tried it and was amazed by how well this feature works. When I first ran a few tests, I noticed it was even able to lock onto faces on the TV!"

Question from Dahlia Lee: "Good article! What camera did you use for these street photos? Which one would you recommend for the face detect feature?"

John replies: Hi Dahlia, I used an Olympus E-PL1, just because it was the only camera I had with this feature. (At least I thought it was—now I see that one of my Canon DSLRs has it too.) I have no idea which brands or models do it best, but I'd suspect that all the newer ones are are good enough. It's a bit of a "black-box" feature, so the main thing is to experiment and get to know your camera so you can begin to predict how it's going to respond to different situations. 

Mike adds: Does anyone know of a list of cameras with Face Detection? I haven't found one anywhere, and compiling one seems like it would be a lot of work.

Answer from Adam Lanigan: "Dpreview.com to the rescue. It has a database of cameras (433 in all) that can be filtered by various characteristics and features. It's located here. Under 'Show Advanced Filters' is an option for Face Detection, which cuts the list to 'only' 121 cameras. You can further specify by any other combination of criteria to find your oh-so-perfect shooter."

Featured Comment by Ed Hawco: "Here's where it's a bust for me: you're set in 'face detection' mode, and then you see a great shot in which you want to focus on an object in the foreground with the onlookers in the background slightly blurred. Beeep! Beeep! Sorry. No can do. Face detection says MUST FOCUS ON FACE.

"So you start spinning through the menus trying to find where you turn that feature off (which could be anywhere from two to ten clicks, depending on the camera). By the time it's off, the background people have moved on, the foreground subject has flown to Florida and all that's left is you swearing at your camera.

"One thing I like about my Lumix LX3 is that I can change focus method (manual, autofocus macro, autofocus normal) and aspect ratio without even looking at the camera. I just turn the switches on the lens barrel. It takes milliseconds and I know the positions by feel.

"If there was a camera with face detection switching that fast and physical, I would embrace it. Otherwise, no, because ultimately I would rather miss a shot because of my own incompetence than miss a shot because the camera overrides what I want to photograph."

The Liberated Camera: Part I

By John Kennerdell

"I've finally figured out what's wrong with photography. It's a one-eyed man looking through a little 'ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that?"

—David Hockney

"An extension of my eye," Cartier-Bresson famously called his miniature-format 35mm camera and, Mr. Hockney notwithstanding, it seems to have worked pretty well for him and his successors. In the eight decades since HCB first raised his Leica I to his eye, we have to a remarkable extent come to accept that photography is something done by peering into a machine pressed to the front of our head.

I'd like to talk about another approach: the handheld camera as an extension of the hand, or simply as an unobtrusive device off to the side as we engage directly with the scene before us, both eyes wide open.

It certainly was often so for a couple generations of news photographers with their Speed Graphics and action finders or their Rolleiflexes with their waist-level view. By all accounts, and on evidence of the photographs themselves, they manhandled those cameras into all kinds of positions. And of course it was possible, if rather hit-or-miss, to do it with any relatively small film camera, zone-focused and held against the body or even out at the end of an arm.

Shinjuku, Tokyo, 1990. Shot from the hip with a compact 6x6 camera. The Japanese have a handy fractured-English term for photos taken without looking through the viewfinder: no faindaa.

With the advent of digital, though, the handheld camera gained a feature with the potential to change everything. Those LCD screens on the back of small digicams positively called out for liberation from the eye. Well, to some of us they did. Many others quickly decided that they didn't like composing on the back of a camera, and that was fair enough. Unfortunately a few got so passionate about it that they lost, pardon the expression, their perspective.

"No serious photographer," announced one online guru at the time, "would ever compose on a screen held out in front of him." Er, why not? The biggest criticism seemed to be that it didn’t "look professional." That of course immediately suggested a fine reason to try it. Good photographers tend to do whatever works, and looking like a happy snapper is often the next best thing to an invisible camera. Freeing a camera from the eye not only makes it more mobile, but often less intimidating too.

Russian tourists, Phuket, Thailand, 2010. Composing on the LCD screen—for me, I mean, not her—served two purposes: it let me maintain eye contact (and a smile) with the woman, and it helped me get in close without having to practically rest my chin on her husband’s shoulder.

OK, there were some valid complaints. Those screens could be hard to see in sunlight, and a challenge to older eyes. Without the three-way support of two hands and a head, it could be tricky to hold a camera steady. And, for at least the first few years, what would become known as "live view" was limited to small-sensor cameras.

But dedicated freestyle shooters found ways around those, and soon technology decided that it could help out too. Before long we had articulating screens, image stabilization and, finally, bigger sensors. Some critics remained unconvinced. "A solution looking for a problem," sniffed a leading hobbyist site, of the first digital SLR with live view. Still, many of us immediately had all kinds of ideas for such a device.

Kompong Boeng, Cambodia, 2010. The usual angles weren’t working, so I brought the camera down to about knee height. An eye-level viewfinder would have meant standing in waist-level water.

And just for the record: non-viewfinder shooting doesn’t have to mean holding a camera out at arm's length. It's all about putting it wherever works for the shot. Held down at the waist, against the tension of the strap for stability (TLR shooters will remember this trick). On top of a beanbag or a wine glass or vertically against a wall or post. On a bended knee or angled up from a shoe. Held tight to your chest or on your shoulder or, ironically, even up against your forehead—all of which sound and probably look semi-ridiculous, but why not, if it gets the photo? In my experience the main thing is to be able to visualize your angle of view (a good argument for fixed focal-length lenses) and not to worry about having a perfect view of the screen. Street photography has been compared to dance, and never more so than when you shoot this way. It's an eye at the end of your arm.

I'm always telling new photographers to avoid the "if only" trap. You know, "If only I had x" or "If only they made y," where x is some coveted piece of gear and y is an outright imaginary one, guaranteed to the transform the user into a better photographer. So I guess it serves me right that along comes a whole generation of technologies and products that really do open up authentically new ways to shoot. And, for good measure, one more state-of-the-art feature that might be the most powerful since the LCD screen itself, except that most "serious" photographers apparently haven’t even deigned to notice it yet. Coming in Part II: the camera technology that dares not speak its name.

John

(Continued in Part II)

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Featured Comment by JL: "William Eggleston once told me that he took his pictures 'shotgun style'—i.e., not looking through the viewfinder at all, just sort of pointing it at whatever he wanted to hit, without really aiming. And that was when he was shooting on film. He said he knew the camera well enough that he knew what he what he was going to get. Not sure if I quite believe him—Eggleston likes to say provocative things, and besides, I'm not sure if that's how you shoot a shotgun, either. But I have seen at least one first-rate photographer shoot simply by holding his camera out the window of a car and more or less blindly mashing the shutter. And with burst mode on a digital, and cheap memory, you stand a reasonably good chance of getting something interesting that way."

Reality and Then Some

From "Manufactured Totems," by Alain Delorme

By John Kennerdell

My mom, who in her eighties has become an avid onliner, just emailed me some photos from Alain Delorme's Manufactured Totems series. She also forwarded a note from my brother, referring to my family role as internet mythbuster: "John will undoubtedly call this a hoax."

Well no, not really. The "Manufactured" in the title offers a hint, and the description on Alain's website makes it more explicit: "...the author breaks the rules of the documentary genre, playing with the edit and the color to present us a type of 'augmented reality.' " (For "edit," from montage in the original French, I think "elements" might be a better translation in the context of still photography. In other words, he's compositing.)

Photographers can and will manipulate their images, and of course have done so pretty much since the birth of the medium. Few of us have a problem with that, provided that they don't try to present the result as something it isn't. As I see it, Delorme has given fair warning: these aren't documentary photos.

No, if I have a concern it's to do with the words rather than the pictures. The term "augmented reality," while it comes from the field of real-time computer-generated sensory input, on one level makes a nice description of what's going on here. You probably won't find anything quite like these images on the streets of Shanghai, but you'll certainly see the vehicles that inspired them. On the other hand, "reality" is a fairly loaded word, to be used with care. And "augmented" feels like just the kind of vague qualifier that holds real potential for abuse. (Look for instance at what happened to "enhanced" once it got attached to "interrogation techniques.") Even if you accept the term here, as I suppose I do, that sensation below your feet just might be a very slippery slope. As photographic "reality" increasingly goes off in its own infinite directions, how do we hold the line on the language we use to describe and delimit it?

Meanwhile, not to lose sight of the work itself: Manufactured Totems is a very cool project, well worth a look.

John

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Featured Comment by Stan B.: "Not that augmented...."

Featured Comment by Jeff Hohner: "Interesting art, but not as photography. The fact that the artist presents his work as photographs creates an unnerving dissonance in the viewer. This may be one of his artistic goals and it is an entirely valid one. But because of the historical nature of photography as a more of less documentary medium, one that fixes individual and whole slices of time, I think the artist owes his audience a more explicit description of his montage technique than he has offered. I'd go so far as to request each image be accompanied with the caption 'photo montage.'

"Without such an explicit disclaimer these images are frustrating to parse. For example, most people are aware of the large loads of light goods that can be transported on two wheels. This familiarity combined with our general trust in the veracity of photography leads the viewer to take the preposterous assemblages depicted in these images as real. Without a clue that the images have been manipulated, what else are we to believe? The artist dares us to break out of our faith in the truthfulness of the photographic image, you might say? To use our common sense about physics, balance and scale? Fair enough, but that is a fairly mundane artistic goal already serviced by any number of images already floating about our culture. In the age of Photoshop and the Internet, this point has become a game and a joke. This is clearly not his goal. He has more serious goals at hand presenting as he does themes of work, scale and place, the particulars of which suggest themes of history, change and class.

"Perhaps the dissonance of trying to parse the 'reality' of his pictorial elements is integral to his project, but for me I find it a huge distraction and I get closer to the work, and enjoy it immensely more, once it has been removed by acknowledging the artifice in his technique.

"Put more succinctly, without artspeak—when I first saw the image of the bikes with tires and ladder, I thought to myself, 'What a shot! Waiting for the background to frame the tires, and capturing another fast moving object, the guy with the ladder, also in perfect composition! Whoa!!' Only later, after some reading and clicking, did I realize this was not what I was looking at. The work took on new meaning, still rich but quite different.

"(To stir the pot further, these works should have been painted. What the artist seeks to convey here, figure, place, pregnant composition, is painting's forte. Choosing the medium of photography interferes with his message as I argue above.)"

Mike adds: A short quote from Roger Moore's contribution to the Comments section: "...a Chinese coworker got a set of these pictures in a chain email yesterday. She thought they were real...." Reinforces your point in your second paragraph.

Featured Comment by Pardik: "One thing that Alain Delorme does in this mocumentary is that he breaks the mirror in Hans Kemp's 5th picture. He takes a cliché from the documentary genre (overloaded light transport), and does what everybody unconsciously has been thinking of while looking at Hans Kemp's wonderful photos: throws them off balance, thus (at last) releasing all the tensions in them. Too much then has become too much. When everything is over the guy crucified to the mirror probably finds he doesn't hold his breathe anymore, and can maybe even laugh at the whole thing."

Hans Kemp's fifth picture [from Stan B.'s link]

Three Degrees of Darkness

By John Kennerdell

Used photographers tend to get recycled into new teachers, and through no plan of my own I now appear to be one of them. My qualifications? Well, I’ve already developed a teacher-like knack for hammering on the same favorite points again and again. Some of them ("Are you sure you need to carry around all that gear?") my students would just as soon not hear. Others, they like. One of these is that very low light is often very good light.

Low light: ƒ/2.8, 1/125 sec., ISO 1600 (EV6). Early morning under a low pavilion, considerably darker than it looks here. When shooting film we used to get subjects out of the sunlight and into open shade. Now I often try moving them from the shade into deep shadow, preferably in places like this, where faint light coming in from different directions can be used as ready-made main, fill, and back light.

I call them "near-dark experiences," and in the film era we learned about their beauty the first time we put a camera on a tripod and shot in the half light of dawn or dusk. These days, thanks to digital, they're available even at handheld shutter speeds. To my eye now, just about everything looks more intriguing in really marginal light. Above all, I like what near-darkness does for portraits, both posed and candid.

Lower light: ƒ/2.0, 1/60 sec., ISO 1600 (EV4). Very diffuse pre-dawn light (the eye catchlights are the clouds in the eastern sky before sunrise). For low-light portraiture with the current generation of 35mm DSLRs, this feels like about the sweet spot: dark enough to begin to do interesting things to color and tonality, but still sufficient light for good image quality.

No doubt there are countless photographers exploring this new high-ISO frontier in available-light portraits. But search for words like "low-light portraiture" and you’ll see that many people still seem to think only in terms of the classic low-key look: candlelight or a single bulb illuminating a face against a murky background, that sort of thing. I'd suggest that the real potential begins when shooting an even dimmer, lower-contrast scene and then lifting the whole exposure to the point where it no longer appears dark. Color and tonality subtly transform. Backgrounds blow out, or retain just a hint of color and shape.  Sometimes the result is more muted than an ordinary open-shade or window-light portrait would be. Sometimes, curiously, it's more dramatic.

Lowest light: ƒ/2.0, 1/60 sec., ISO 6400 (EV2). A gloomy day, inside a dark market. This is about the limit, at least for me: hard to see, harder to focus, and rather harsh file quality. But the results are often a pleasant surprise, with all kinds of unexpected interplay between diffuse and directional light, mixed-color sources, and background blur. (And, honestly, no dodging of the eyes. That’s how the camera sees them when in a dark place with large distant light sources on various sides.)

The three levels of darkness I’ve tried to illustrate here are of course pretty arbitrary. They’re also a moving target, given the way the technology keeps advancing. The point—see how it is with teachers?—is that every additional stop of darkness offers its own discoveries even in color portraiture, a photographic genre traditionally associated with fairly ample light. Of all the possibilities that digital capture has brought us, maybe it’s time this one gets a little more attention.

John

John Kennerdell's website is Studio Hatyai.

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Featured Comment by Joe Cameron: "Beautifully put, John. Simple and elegant like your photographs.

There's too much obsessive chatter about lenses this and cameras that. We all know, but mostly forget, that photography is largely about relating to the world as it is given to us, not as we want it to be. We walk out the door with camera in hand expecting the sun and the landscape and the people we meet to conform to some limited notion in our heads of what constitutes a 'good picture,' and in the process, we miss so much of what is offered that day...especially what lies in the softer, quieter, dimmer, less demanding pockets of existence.

"A favorite quote: 'A man smiles by himself in the dark, perhaps because he can see in the dark, perhaps because he can see the dark.' (Yannis Ritsos)

"And a short, sweet book (not a photography book): In Praise of Shadows, by Junichiro Tanizaki.

"P.S. You’ll make a fine teacher...."

Endings and Beginnings

By John Kennerdell

It’s easy to know when a job is done: it’s when you get paid. What’s harder is to decide when it’s time to wind down a long-term personal project.

In 1998, a Japanese aid agency asked me to take some photos of schools and hospitals in rural Cambodia. I’d spent time in Phnom Penh but hadn’t ventured much into the countryside, partly out of safety concerns, partly due to the wretched roads. Helping push your bus through knee-high mud lost its appeal a long time ago.

But we did this trip by riverboat, and it was a revelation. Half the country seemed to be water, served by a vast fleet of elderly boats and impossibly colorful boatmen, porters, and passengers. It felt like a ticket back to the 1950s. I did the job but then stayed on another week just to shoot this waterworld.

My experience has been that we don’t choose our best subjects. They come to us, insistent and demanding. Here was something visually exciting, culturally significant, and likely to fade into history once the road system improved. There was no question but that I had to try to document a bit of it. What to do with the photos, well, I'd work on that later.

So for ten years I kept going back, usually at my own expense. Again and again. Until, sure enough, the boats began to shrink in size and number. The weird and wonderful cargo—pingpong tables and disco balls, looms and livestock, Chinese generators and teakwood beds—grew rare, then pretty much disappeared. Old fellows in fedoras gave way to young ones in baseball caps.

The feeling had been building, but it didn’t hit with full force until one day a couple of months ago. I was on a favorite dock—still a lively little place—but things just weren’t happening. It was as if I were trying to recapture my own best shots and not quite pulling it off. Another photographer fresh to the scene no doubt would have thrived on it. For me, it simply felt like time to move on. Yes, I’ll happily go on shooting the Cambodian boat scene whenever I come across it. I’m just not going to organize large chunks of my life around it any more. Time is finite, and too much else awaits.

As if to prove the point, on the way back to my hotel, crossing the big new bridge over the Mekong, I happened to see an impromptu volleyball game on the shore directly below. Not a subject I’d ever given a thought to, but it was a nice angle and within a few frames I found myself thinking, hmmm, Asian street sports...this could have potential. The start of another project? Well no, probably nothing that ambitious. But who knows? It’s just good to feel a little of the old excitement in a new context. The best subjects and the best shots, one always likes to think, are yet to come.

John

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Featured Comment by Semilog: "The volleyball player may be my favorite photo ever to appear on TOP. Gorgeous, like the very very best dance photography."

Doing What You're There For

By John Kennerdell

So how does a person who is "shy, non-confrontational, and overly considerate of others"—Mike's words but no doubt they describe quite a few of us—reconcile those things with a commitment to street photography? It's a contradiction I've wrestled with for years.

It came up again last week, finding these Vietnamese fishermen playing poker by the Tonle Sap, Cambodia's inland sea. One glance into their hut as I walked past and I saw the shot immediately: the light reflecting in off the water, the angles of the arms and legs, the white accent of the cards, even a cigarette lighter improbably held between the toes of an upraised foot. Unfortunately I also saw three pairs of eyes glaring at me, all of them seeming to say: Keep on walking.

I kept walking. Another five or ten steps until I thought, no, this is what I'm here for. This is what I do. Having seen so much of traditional life in Southeast Asia disappear in the past couple decades, I take my job to be documenting whatever I can find that's left of it. Whether due to shyness, laziness, or procrastination, I've already missed way too much. And a few years from now, when fellows like these will have traded their bamboo huts and playing cards for Starbucks and games on their 4G iPhones, I will have missed this too.

So I walked back, poked my camera in, and gave it my best shot. One of the guys looked bemused, one indifferent, and one hostile enough that it didn't take much imagination to see my camera flying over the rail to go sleep with the fishes of the Tonle Sap. Times like this you understand why even Bruce Gilden snaps only one frame per subject. Exit camera right, wishing them, and all of you at TOP, a good new year: Sua sdey chnam tmey!

______________________

John

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Featured Comment by Damon Schreiber: "What a dynamic shot—this is a fantastic example of street-shooting—it shows context, tells a story and is a moment recorded in time that otherwise would have been lost. It also has the feeling of an encounter, with their eyes probing the camera and by extension, the viewer. Did the camera make them feel uncomfortable? Sounds like it. Am I complicit in an assault by enjoying the photo? Are they going to get in trouble with their wives for playing cards instead of working? Hey, I don't have all the answers!"

Featured Comment by Improbable: "Curious to see whether all those who thought Bruce Gilden was entirely out of line will complain as loudly about this. The way I see it, if you're walking around in NYC you know you're in public, and unless you're homeless you spend time out of public sight too. And in NYC plenty of people are rude to you, it's how the place works, and Gilden is not much more rude. People curse him, he curses back, it's not that far from level. Whereas this sort of thing, in the Third World: this is their lives, this is how much privacy they can afford. And there is often quite a lot of respect for privacy, people don't stare at others who bathe in public. But as a westerner, you're free to walk around and poke your nose in wherever you like, and your high status means people don't actually object until it's pretty extreme. This is not to say that you can't do street work in the Third World, clearly you can. And there is often a lot more going on genuinely in public. But this to me has crossed the line into poking into what should be private. I think this only because of the back-story given, by the way. From the picture alone, it could be from a more documentary approach, in which you obtain some kind of consent from the people you're portraying. And I would have no problem with that. But that's not street."

Featured Comment by Kenneth Jarecke: "I like this image.

"It is a great start...yes, I think there was a better image to be made there, but still this is pretty good.

"I think John could have played his cards a little better (get it, cards, guys playing cards?...oh, never mind) and walked away with an image and story that would have pleased the majority of readers here.

"Here's the deal when it comes to privacy and the butterflies and all of the issues involved with the shooting of strangers:

"Everyone in the entire world over the age of two and of normal intelligences knows exactly what you are doing and what you want when you stroll by with your camera.

"I mean every single one. People aren't dumb. They get it. You might not be able to buy a Domke bag in the U.S.A. but you can buy one by a dozen different makers in Asia.

"The Domke, the Leica, and any reasonable facsimile of the two will get you pegged as a photographer looking to make pictures.

"Chances are, you're never going to get a beating. Chances are you're going to have a dozen great and positive experiences to every negative one.

"Think back to how you felt when a stranger came into your second grade classroom for the day. I'm guessing at some point you wanted the stranger to look at your work, or acknowledge you in some way.

"This is a rough example I know, but to a certain degree the same holds true in the adult world wherever you go today. Of course the trick is communicating in a nonverbal way your intentions.

"How you walk, your posture, where you look, how you hold your camera and where you don't look all contribute to how your presences is received on the street.

"By being there you've disrupted the dance, so are you going to swing to the tune or start stepping on toes? That's the question.

"I think some of the complaints about Bruce's approach is that people think he should be swinging instead of stepping on toes, when in reality his approach seems to work just fine for him in the New York City street dance.

"Certainly the work he produces justifies the approach. I wouldn't recommend this technique in Billings, Montana, by the way. Chances are you would catch a beating.

"The worst thing you can do, at least the one you won't soon forget, is the potential images you passed up. Once you do that, it is easy to start telling yourself that the situation wouldn't have panned out, or the light wasn't really that good, when in fact, you've missed it and you'll never get it again.

"I think that anger is what we are seeing expressed in a hostile attitude masked with the concern for the privacy of the common man and whatnot here.

"Something like: I couldn't do that myself, so how dare you violate the privacy of these poor helpless souls?

"I think that's a form of latent western arrogance that believes that people that live in grass huts or don't have a car can't possibly understand how they are being abused by having someone make their picture (or make their feelings known).

"Given the situation that John was in I would have done something like this: With my camera in my right hand, I would have slipped halfway through the door and sat on my left hip. Give a slight nod and half smile to all three guys, lay the camera on my lap and then bum a smoke with a gesture from my right hand.

"If you get the smoke you're in. Perhaps, you'll be able to leave in ten minutes after you've thoroughly worked the situation; chances are, you'll be drinking tea and visiting someone's dad before long.

"I'm not joking, that's exactly how I would have worked it. I would have had a chance to work the light with an 85, not just the wide, and not just for one frame.

"How do you think it would have worked if you were on assignment for National Geographic? Do you think an editor from D.C. would have arranged the shoot over the phone so you'd be comfortable and welcome?

"One way or another this is what photographers do.

"Yeah, photographs might not tell a story, but they sure get the conversation started!"

A Provocateur Meets His Match

By John Kennerdell

From Karsh snatching the cigar out of Churchill's mouth to Jill Greenberg taking candy from babies, provocation has played a long and not very noble role in photography. No one disputes how effective it can be—witness Avedon's photo of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor the moment he told them his dog had been killed—but ultimately isn't it a pretty cheap trick? Don't we photographers suffer a bad enough rep as is?

Try though as you might to be a fly on the wall, sometimes you can't help but upset a subject. That's how it happened one day last month in rural Cambodia when three children ran up to me with their puppy. He was sick, they said. Could I do something? Please?

There are no vets in places like this, and a westerner operating some high-tech photo gear probably looked more competent to help than anyone else around. But I had to be honest with them. "No," I said, in my broken Khmer, "I can't help." Then, reflexively, I raised my camera to capture the reaction.

Well, an Avedon I'm not. I got the shot but the kids just stood there looking heartbroken. I swear, even the pup had a tear in its eye. So I did something I almost never do. I pulled out a couple of small bills and handed them over, muttering something about buying milk for the dog.

That would have been the end of it, had I not happened by the same place the next day. There they were, kids and puppy, playing as happily and healthily as kids and puppies ever played. Even before they saw me and started laughing, I realized that…well, let's say I have a new respect for the curative powers of milk. And from now on, I'm provoking any child any time I like.

_________________________

John

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