The Online Photographer

Past Blasts: Heaven and Hell

[Note: The Online Photographer's M.C., majordomo, and Chief Bottlewasher, Mike J., just had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]

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Mike Goes to Heaven: I'm in a world where God isn't the only one who cares how things look. The angels, too, have a modicum of aesthetic sense, and have bothered to see to it that our surroundings are pleasant and interesting. (They do this by giving the task of architecture and design to those angels who actually have an aptitude for it, and preventing the wanton and haphazard destruction and industrial development of the landscape.)

Everywhere I look, I see pictures. To record one, I need only blink my eyes. A file of what I saw is provided for me that has the tonal scale of Kodak Tri-X but never gets grainy in the highlights, always has more than enough dynamic range, and always has more resolution than I need for the size of enlargement I choose. Later, deft and cunning assistant angels render my perfectly corrected file onto actual film for contact printing on real gelatin silver paper. I'm in heaven.

Mike Goes to Hell: Although I'm only allowed to use one camera, I'm always as heavily draped with equipment as the fellow at right. The camera I have to use hefts like a brick made of lead, and has a lens on it that's too long, zooms too much and too slowly, and always seems to be at the other end of its range from the end I want. The camera itself has some 400 knobs and buttons on it, and 38,000 discrete combinations of settings—but the connections between the buttons, dials, and switches randomly migrate, and are never the same. The camera is digital, and all the files have histograms that jam up against both ends of the scale, and too much saturation.

In hell, I see even more and better pictures than I saw in heaven—but I just barely miss almost all of them. It's something different every time: I have the camera set wrong, or the camera refuses to autofocus, or it refocuses just as I take the shot, or the viewfinder blacks out because the AEL button has spontaneously become the "B" setting.

The only things that will stay still for me, and that I can always get beautifully exposed, sharp pictures of, are flower blossoms and cats. If anything else turns out perfectly, my computer mistakenly deletes it, or runs a program that resaves it as a JPEG over and over.

And, of course, the Devil is my client. With every picture I present to him, no matter how hard I work on it to redress its shortcomings, he finds just enough wrong that he can justify not paying me...or paying expenses only. He promises to pay on a 30-day billing cycle, but actually it takes a random number of days greater than 2x30 before the check arrives. I have no legal recourse, naturally, even though there are lawyers everywhere. And I never have the opportunity to refuse his jobs: he's the only client I have lined up for the next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, on and on, forever. I'm in hell.

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2006
(Photo believed to be by "S. Smith" from PBase; in 2006 I went to great efforts to try to find him or her, to no avail.)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(Sorry! There are no comments this week—the moderator is also stuck supine staring at the ceiling.)

Past Blasts: Its Own Reward

[Note: The Online Photographer's M.C., majordomo, and Chief Bottlewasher, Mike J., just had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]

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Upon reaching a certain level of competence or accomplishment we photographers seem to feel that we should start getting attention.

I see this as more a characteristic of the activity of photography itself than it is a commentary on any individual's skills or talents. There's something about the way we commonly conceive of this activity that encourages the thought that we should be rewarded, somehow, for being able to do it.

Maybe it's the fact that some people are rewarded for it. Everyone knows the examples of the professional photographer and the artist-photographer, who, they imagine, are showered and fêted with money or recognition or both.

Not so often, really. The average "name" photographer is more like a recording star who no longer has a record contract. They, too, are usually feeling some version of the photographer's lament...just at a higher level than most of the rest of us. Fees are down, nobody's paying for original photography any more, I'm not selling many prints, my last book didn't sell well.

My question is, why does the idea persist that fame and earnings—more broadly, attention and admiration—should naturally be contingent on practicing this activity? What is it about photography that makes us feel we should get attention for doing it?

Look at other recreational activities. Water skiing, hunting, woodworking, bird-watching, cooking, video-gaming—or any of a thousand others. I suppose in each of those fields there are a tiny minority who get paid for what they do or are famous for it, although I can't name a single water-skiier nor imagine how someone who's good at knitting might become well known for it. Mostly, such things are their own reward. We hike in the woods, or travel for miles to eat at a nice restaurant, or teach our dogs tricks, or arrange wildflowers in vases, or work out, or visit famous battlefield parks, or build model railroads, or sew, because those things are fun for us, that's all.

We don't think, hey, I'm really good at scrapbooking. When am I going to get an award for this? Or...you know, I'm a hell of a great foodie. I go to the farmer's market every week and I read a ton of recipes. Why is someone not giving me money?

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2015

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(Sorry! There are no comments this week—the moderator is also stuck supine staring at the ceiling.)

Past Blasts: 'Image Virtues'

[Note: The Online Photographer's M.C., majordomo, and Chief Bottlewasher, Mike J., just had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]

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[The other day], a number of people chose to assume that I was talking about conventional "image quality." I wasn't. I was talking about "the results you want." That could be anything.

I don't care about "image quality," anyway. I care more about image properties.

What does that mean?

When it comes to photographs, a "property" is what I call "quality" without the value judgment attached. And with a much broader range of possibilities.

Grainlessness might be an aspect of image quality. To me it's just a property—as is extreme graininess. Or anything in between. Accurate color might be another aspect of conventional "image quality." That's a property too—as is deliberately or adventitiously inaccurate color. And so on.

People suffer from very oppressive ideas about which properties of images are "good." Certain properties are said to be "good" and their absence "bad." I choose not to submit to that oppression. Shake loose your shackles, your bonds and fetters! Free yourself!

Ahem.

But really, photographers talking about "image quality" are like pious people talking about moral virtue. Certain image qualities have to be "good." Lack of those "good" qualities is a shortcoming...a failure...a sin. "Bad."

Sharpness is the most highly prized, the most widely accepted, image virtue. But who says an image has to be sharp? Some are, some aren't. Some sharp images look like crap and some sharp images look great. Unsharp images, ditto—sometimes that can look good, sometimes not. It depends.

Sharpness is a property that suits some pictures and not others. Some photographers treat it like a virtue, as if possessing more of it confers ever more glory and honor upon them.

They're wrong about that. What, you can't imagine a thoroughly bad photograph that's extremely sharp? Never seen one? I've seen thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions, even.

Consider that during the time of the pictorialist movement—and among the amateurs that kept its values alive in its aftermath—the same assumption held sway, except in the reverse. Image unsharpness was the virtue, the accepted convention.

I used to see a fair number of pictures that were ruined because they weren't sharp enough. Those days are mostly gone. Even modest cameras and lenses can take pictures that are plenty sharp these days.

Granted, it's somewhat more difficult to make a photograph work when it suffers from unvirtuous properties—you have to be sensitive to the effect those properties have, the way they function visually, and how well they suit a particular picture and its message, instead of being just plain clueless about all those things. And in order to achieve the virtuous properties, your equipment, materials, and techniques need to be capable of it. There is a certain—slight—honor in that, I suppose.

But in general we should stop being such image virtue bigots, and stop seeing "image quality" as this great big value judgement looming above everything. We're not talking about morality here. We're just talking about the properties of photographs. No property automatically makes a photograph better. No property automatically disqualifies a photograph from being good. Being bigoted just closes us off to a greater range of possibility in our own work, and to a greater and more subtle range of possibility in the accomplishments of others.

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2012

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(Sorry! There are no comments this week—the moderator is also stuck supine staring at the ceiling.)

Past Blasts: 'The Cure for Camera Agony'

[Note: The Online Photographer's M.C., majordomo, and Chief Bottlewasher, Mike J., just had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and delectation, a few blasts from the past. At least one will be published every day while Mike's away. But so sorry—no comments (the moderator is also staring at the ceiling...).]

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What's the cure for camera agony of any sort? Just work. Shoot. Get interested in something. Take stock of what equipment you already have, and figure out what it can be used for. Go shoot. Get involved in the pictures. If your camera isn't the last word in high ISOs, then find a little more light and shoot at lower ISOs. You'll live. If your camera doesn't have the best dynamic range, then avoid high-contrast scenes. If your camera won't print really, really big, then make your prints a little smaller. It won't kill you, I promise. It ain't the camera.

The more that people get interested in the pictures they're making, the less they obsess about equipment. Try it. It's really true—it really works.

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2008

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Amazon.com • Amazon UK • Amazon Canada
Amazon Germany • B&H Photo • Adorama

(Sorry! There are no comments this week—the moderator is also stuck supine staring at the ceiling.)