The Online Photographer

Art and Artists Question

Which artists would you think might be useful for photographers to know and study?

That was a question I came up with a few days ago, thinking of topics to write about. Trouble is, my list kind of stalled at...four. I was a little shocked that a cascade of names didn't drown my brain. The first three that I thought of immediately were Edward Hopper, Raphael, and Vermeer.

Then I thought of Caravaggio—Mr. Chiaroscuro—and that seems obvious, although I never liked him all that much. His paintings seem violent to me. When I was young I had this persistent sense that I could glean the artist's personality from their art, and when I didn't like what I sensed of the personality, I tended not to like or trust the work.

If ever a cover should not have a red banner across the
corner, it's this one.

After those three I started to run into one peculiar problem. My high school classmate Caroline's daughter, whose name I don't know, was a prolific drawer as a child. When her mother suggested she copy something, when the daughter was nine, she refused, saying, "never go from flat." I love that.

That is, when you're drawing, look at the three-dimensional real world and don't copy something that's already been reduced down into two dimensions by someone else or by some other means. This is a sensitive point with me, because I have a sense when I look at art of all kinds whether "there's a photograph behind it," meaning, the artists is painting or drawing from a photograph. With some art it's obvious, and with some it's almost like a faint shadow and I'm not sure of it. But I tend to like art better when it doesn't have that shadow of a photograph behind it.

It's a bit odd that Hopper is photographic in his vision, yet there isn't that shadow there. And sure enough, Hopper didn't "go from flat." He looked at the real thing and made sketches (many of them) and took written notes. So he might have been a painter who was influenced by photography, but he wasn't one who used photographs to paint from.

Even Vermeer, who died 164 years before the invention of the Daguerreotype was announced, might have been using the lens image as an aid for his painting, according to the (must-see) movie Tim's Vermeer.

Edgar Degas, Race Horses, 1883–85

The problem I ran into was that many latter-day and recent representational artists do have that shadow behind their work. Winslow Homer does; Eakins does, to my eye, although I don't hold it against him—I used to say that Eakins was actually a multimedia artist whose final works happened to be rendered as paintings. (Kind of half a joke, like a lot of my opinions about art.) It's easier to forgive artists who worked closer to the inception of photography; when Degas used photographic cropping in paintings, it was radical and new. A friend tells me that Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera is actually a very interesting book for us photographers, regardless of whether you like Rockwell. I love Jordan Casteel, but would someone look at her work purely to inform their photography? It seems odd to suggest that photographers should study artists to improve their photography when the artist might have used photographs to paint from in the first place.

Maybe what I really should do, rather than to compile such a list as I'm proposing, would be to read Secret Knowledge by David Hockney, which I'm rather shocked to find out is from 2006. (I still think of it as "recent.") It's about that very subject: artists who mediate their vision through or with the lens image vs. those who paint from direct observations of three dimensions, from imagination, or abstractly.

The book has always been a little too expensive for me, and I'm flat out of room for more books, sadly. (Half my reference books that I need for this job are already inaccessible in boxes in the attic of the barn. I'm shocked to discover just now (from Amazon's records) that I actually own Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. It's in a box somewhere and I can't get to it, and out of sight, out of mind. You know what they say: oh well.)

I do tend to forgive artists who were also photographers, which includes Eakins. I have The Photographs of Thomas Eakins somewhere. And it includes the marvelous artist/photographer Saul Leiter whose photography work I cannot get enough of. And David Hockney himself.

Maybe one of my resolutions for 2024 should be to get Secret Knowledge from the library!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

robert e: "I'm going to sort of sidestep the question and suggest studying the artists that move you (whether positively or negatively); just do it deliberately, i.e., with the goal of learning something applicable to photographs.

"Why? First, I think photographers can learn something from most any flat art, including abstracts. Second, there's a lot of art and your time is limited, so you might as well focus on the stuff that resonates personally, that you want to spend more time with anyway. And third, you might learn something about yourself, too."

David Dyer-Bennet: "My mental model is that the thing I could particularly learn about from non-photographic visual artists is composition. (I can of course also learn about that from photographers.) Not to say there aren't other things to learn; there clearly are, particularly if you start including retouching and restoration in 'photography' (because then lots of painting techniques or at least the understanding behind them become relevant).

"('Cropping' is another area where there should be plenty to learn; it's tightly related to composition, too.)

"And, for composition, whether I approve of their techniques or even of their results doesn't really matter, does it? If an image is widely thought to be first-rate, the composition must be at least 'okay,' and is very probably considerably better than that, right? So my looking to figure out how that works has reasonable chances of being enlightening? There's a certain feeling of superiority to be had from thinking you've learned from art you don't like, anyway  :-)  .

"I've been collecting examples and trying to make time to study them, off and on, for over a decade now I guess. Possibly I might even have learned some things."

Roger Bradbury: "Perhaps you should get rid of that funny looking table in the middle of the 'pool' shed, and fill the space with book shelves....  ;-)  "

Mike replies: Part of the original plan: low bookshelves around the edges that cues would clear the top of. Alas, it's not big enough. The room on the floor is needed for footing. The pool shed is big enough, but barely.

A library is actually a perfect room for a pool table. Shelves on all the walls, pool table in the middle. But the room has to be big enough. Take a look at the basement this house in the town I'm thinking of moving to. Very few small houses have any space that is truly big enough for a full size pool table. You need about 19x15 feet clear of any impediments. It's rare to find. I would deal with the less than ideal kitchen, which is probably what's keeping that house from selling.

Oops, am I talking about pool again? I'm not supposed to do that!

Bob Keefer: "I'm going to sidestep the question slightly and suggest a different way for photographers to learn from the classical art world. When people ask me what's the best class to take on photography, I recommend they sign up for a good drawing class. Learning to draw what's in front of you from a decent instructor develops your ability to see the world carefully and accurately, to see what is actually there as opposed to what you expect to see. You also learn about composition and tonal structure of images. Drawing doesn't require talent—only regular practice—and it can deeply change your view of the world and of art."

Len Salem: "Mischievous me suggests that any book by or about any artist you like is worth studying if your intention as a photographer is to express yourself and how you feel about things. Because what, as photographers, many of us need to think about is our intention in making images. Getting to grips with the thought processes of an artist might be valuable help for understanding this. Learning the technique(s) necessary to express that intention is a separate study, and possibly one about which it is easier to become informed or recommend resources."

Hank: "I ran into a Bonnard exhibition during one of my travels a few years back—I think it was at the Tate—and I was struck at how 'photographic' his paintings were. A little research later showed he was a keen amateur photographer."

Mike replies: One of my favorite books is a book of Bonnard's photography. They are not "good," nor do they look at all like my own photographs, but for some reason they just grab me right at base level. Kind of like Howe Gelb's music. Thanks for mentioning him!

Jim R: "When working in color I tend to think of Maxfield Parrish when taking landscape photos after sunset, and William Turner and Hudson School of Art painters when there's water in a scene."

John: "Picasso was supposedly challenged about his distorted representation of an individual—likely his latest mistress. Picasso then asked his interlocutor whether he was married, and if so, did he perhaps have a photograph of her? Out came a wallet and a small snap handed over. 'She’s very beautiful. Such a shame she’s so small, flat, and grey.'

"To Adam Isler’s list of painters, I would add Durer, especially his Great Piece of Turf (Das große Rasenstück); and, George de La Tour, 'The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds,' in the Louvre collections."

Tom Burke: "It would have to be 'realistic' painters, I think. So, for example, still life and genre paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, would inform photographers of similar subjects. And portrait paintings, surely—again, Dutch masters, as well as artists such as Lawrence and Gainsborough. And then there's Joseph Wright 'of Derby.' If you want chiaroscuro without the violence, e.g. 'A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery'. It would be challenging to tackle a subject with that much dynamic range with a digital camera and try control it...."

The Snapshooter

In response to yesterday's post, Calvin Amari commented:

"I know you are making quite a different and meaningful point, but, with all the spirituality and humanism of a toilet seat, I am going to ignore yours and make a different, coldly aesthetic one. What is notable about these vernacular family photos is that they overwhelmingly have zero aesthetic merit. We don't expect every commercial or amateur photographer to have a distinctive style or even a bare spark of creativity, but that batting average really ought not be infinitesimal—and trust me, I have touched and eyeballed hundreds of thousands of these images.

"While I collect modern and contemporary fine art photographs, as well as important 19th century works, for years I also amused myself by being what fine art photography dealers call a 'picker'—which is to say someone who finds vernacular work, or great pictures among vernacular work, that can and should be recontextualized into the fine art world. I am an image junkie, which allows me to go through a photo or ephemera fair like the raptor-in-the-kitchen scene in Jurassic Park (as I was once described in a newsstand magazine that you edited), but a junkie with an eye. (Modesty would detract from my point here.) One can talk about those finds that I bought for a pittance, sold to some of the best dealers in the world, who in turn sold them to important collections, public and private. But my point is to talk about the million instead of the one in a million. A large ephemera photo fair that will take a good 20 hours to plow through over a weekend is not a wellspring of wondrous aesthetic fecundity, and the portraits are the absolute worst. What is remarkable is that virtually all of them show no personality, aesthetic differences, or merit whatsoever. Isn't that weird?"

Mike replies: 'Tis indeed. Your comments, especially the one-in-a-million vs. the 999,999 part, reminded me of a section of a long article I wrote many years ago called "The Photographer's Menagerie." The article outlined the various types of photographer one might be, starting from the most common and advancing to the most accomplished. This is the first one of those categories. It's rather long. I haven't been as much of a picker as you were, and I'm certainly not as well connected to the art and gallery scenes as you, and some of the references are already outdated and quaint (Mickey Dolenz?), but still, it intersects somewhat with your points. It's called...

###

The Snapshooter

...The essential photographer, the type genus, the very base of the great pyramid, is, as everyone knows, the snapshooter. His ranks, of course, are legion. His "language," though hopelessly polyglot, is widely influential: the so-called "snapshot aesthetic" has had an incalculable influence on high art photography during the last three decades.

But the actual snapshooter, like Rousseau’s noble savage, is a species greatly more admired in the abstract than in the event. As long as he is a hypothetical beast he is accorded much honor, and many claims are made for his accomplishments; but in the flesh, like the noble savages in real rather than imaginary rain forests, he is either held in contempt, exploited, or merely ignored.

Snapshots are thought to be like snowflakes, perfect, unique, ephemeral, and numberless. The archetypal snapshooter—or so goes the academical theory—is a sort of idiot savant. He exists in a state of grace; his work is pure, undimmed by expectation, undirected by intention, and undiminished by the imposition of ideas. His pictures are as immediate, as uncontrived, and as purely photographic in their nature as it is possible for photographs to be. The snapshooter is supposedly guileless, unrestricted, neither clotted up with tradition nor weighted down by the dulling strictures of the intellect—not only unrepressed, but irrepressible, and free; and the perfect snapshot is a masterpiece of effortlessness, innocence, natural grace, and disingenuousness—nothing less, some people feel, than the ultimate photographic expression.

This idealized impression is not exactly accurate. In fact, the occasional excellent snapshot is a fortuitous accident. As a class of photograph, actual successful snapshots—real pictures, I mean, as opposed to simply hypothetical ones that exist in some critics’ or theorists’ imaginations—are somewhat akin to the startling pearls of wisdom that occasionally occur to the minds of children, the sort of thing that made Art Linkletter famous. They have that same freshness, that same startling lack of connection to conventional thinking, that same directness, and by depending on these qualities, they do occasionally annex an undeniable insightfulness. But, in general, their existence depends on a principle similar to the one expressed by the maxim which states that even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while: it is statistically true that if you throw a marble onto a square of lawn containing a million blades of grass, it will land on one of them, and the chances were an astonishing million to one that the marble should have landed on that particular blade of grass; but the statistic is misleading, because the marble had to land somewhere. By the same token, occasionally a snapshot comes to light that is aesthetically perfect, literally a one-in-a-million shot; but a one-in-a-million shot is also all that it is. It is not outrageous to claim that snapshots are to skilled photography what childish insights are to philosophy. This may not seem like a bad thing, in these relativistic times, depending on your point of view; but the romantic view of the snapshot as the purest and noblest form of photographic expression is, to paraphrase Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated.

And the archetypal snapshooter, of course, once unmasked, is recognized to be only your Aunt Henrietta, marshaling the family out into the blazing sun on Easter morning; or your little sister Jennifer with her disc camera at her best friend Kristen’s slumber party; or your father, Bud, with his fancy Nikon (on which he knows how to operate exactly six of the thirty-seven available controls), recording for posterity the deep-sea fishing trip he took with your little brother, including the seven bonita and the one flathead dolphin they caught, Spring vacation, 1979.

Generally the prints are smallish and much alike, the desired information is difficult to decipher, the photographer’s secondary intentions are near impossible to decode (the primary intention being simply to “get a shot” of, say, the Washington Monument); the hoped-for effect has turned out to be a disappointment, the color is off, and the drugstore has hacked cousin Eugene off at the shoulders (there, in the back row, third from the left) despite the fact that Eugene is presumed to exist happily whole and complete on the negative, as he is in real life, and as he was (or so your mother says) in the viewfinder. The random celebrity you happened to see at the shopping mall—Mickey Dolenz, say, formerly the drummer for The Monkees—is unrecognizable, to your friends, in the snapshot you took to prove you saw him.

If the pictures are older, either the yellows are fading, or else the whole print is yellowing.

Generally, as anyone who has looked carefully through an appropriately numbing plenitude of snapshots can testify, an overwhelming majority of all snapshots are simply bad pictures: dull, unimaginative, empty, and way, way too approximate. All this is not to suggest either that excellent snapshots don’t exist—of course they do—or that their existence is not an absolutely crucial tool to understanding the nature of photography. It is. But, as far as types of photographers are concerned, a casual snapshooter, despite his formidable reputation in some academic circles, is simply not much of a thing to be.

###

I'm surprised how much this has dated. Hard to put a date on it; early 1990s at the latest. The only place it was ever published was in Ed Buziak's long-defunct Darkroom User magazine, under the nom de plume "L.T. Gray" (el tigre). (I notice that Ed has been busy in his retirement in the heart of France making art.)

Thank to Cal, whom I've been glad to see pop up on TOP again of late.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Last Thoughts About Free Portraits

I just emailed an update about the fate of the blog to my Patreon supporters.

I'll post about the new and exciting GFX 100II, Fuji's brand-new flagship digital camera, on Monday. It's done, but it's awkward to put up a post with all sorts of B&H links in it right as B&H closes for the weekend for Rosh Hashana.

More about the state of portraiture
So for today's post I guess I'd like to follow up on the whole discussion of free portraits. I've done some more thinking about it, and have concluded that the best advice for others might be to go one of two ways:

—>Do street portraits, an honorable genre in which you waylay strangers on die Strasse—you know, la rue—and ask if they can photograph them, turning the encounter into a mini-session but taking only a few shots. Famous practitioners include the bestselling Brandon Stanton, of Humans of New York fame; a personal favorite, the later-life discovery Robert Bergman; and newcomers like YouTuber/IG'er David Guerrero, who Kirk mentioned the other day, is right there in the mix too. (Don't forget that photography has a rich history of embracing rebels, outcasts, subversives, counterculturalists, primitivists, and demotic practitioners as well as the groomed, the trained, the tailored, the connected, the credentialed, and the children of the rich. YouTube and Instagram are perfectly good incubators for the former). Lots of other great photographers work in this genre too, including some of our very own readers.

Or, on the other hand:

—>Charge a lot of money for your portraits and deserve it. Well, if you charge a lot of money, you have to deserve it. To charge a lot means you have to be businesslike, and professional; you have to be dependable and reliable; you will have the right and proper attitude toward your clients; and you will have to provide a product that is excellent and that respects the clients' desires. Even if you set up their expectations yourself, which is de facto what famous portraitists have always done. Meaning, if customers hired Karsh, or Elsa Dorfman, or Platon, or Loretta Lux to do a portrait, that meant they wanted a portrait that looked like a Karsh or an Elsa Dorfman or a Platon or a Loretta Lux! One reader mentioned that part of the product can be to put on a bit of a dog-and-pony show, because clients like that, and there's nothing wrong with that, either. I knew a guy in DC who built a huge and almost fanciful studio designed around photographic themes so that art directors would feel comfortable bringing their clients to the studio for their shoot. Treating clients like they're special, and making the people who hire you look good to the people who hired them, never hurts.

All that advice I got from commenters about free portraits being worth what I was charging for them was probably right. Subjects are suspicious about the product, and probably should be. And I feel entitled to some autonomy and control, but I haven't really earned it because I'm not paying them for that. I haven't made sure the transaction works for both parties transparently.

Karsh posing for portraits, RIT, November 1987

In my defense, it used to be different! Back in the years B.C. (before cellphones), people needed headshots, comps, PR shots, Christmas cards (I did a Christmas card for a Senator once), or just presents for grandma on her birthday. And if you were willing to do it for free for the sake of your portfolio or your art, so much the better for them. They were grateful for it. Some still are, but it's no longer the way it once was, generally.

Anyway, that's my take today. I'm still going to hire a few people as artist's models and try that out. It'll be more data, if nothing else.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Moose's Verticals

Moose, a longtime reader, has kindly and helpfully supplied modified versions of two pictures recently posted here.

Moose prefers corrected verticals, the lack of which bothered him in both pictures. To illustrate his point, he provided pages where you can see the version I posted and his corrected version by hovering your mouse:

First example

Second example

I really don't mind either of his versions. However, I prefer partially corrected verticals, even in view camera work; both of these pictures have received partial correction in my versions. I feel that we expect to see convergence when looking up at a building, for instance, and when it's entirely missing it looks awkward. "Perfectly" corrected keystoning in tall buildings often looks to me like it is keystoned the opposite way, as in this example from Flickr.  Although you may prefer that, to my eye it looks slightly wider at the top than at the bottom, and I don't like that effect. I will most often make corrections in the "Geometry" tab in Photoshop that go part of the way but not all the way to perfect. My goal (as with most corrections) is to make sure the geometry or perspective or rectilinearity or whatever you want to call it doesn't call undue attention to itself—I want it to look natural, but leaving in some camera vision makes sense to me. Like I say, I think Moose's versions are okay, and neither would bother me if I came across them as someone else's work. But I still prefer my versions, in both cases. YM, like Moose's, MV.

Moose's assumptions have led him into a couple of further problems, however. If you look at the first one and go back and forth. Notice how the objects along the bottom of the frame are compacted. The house in particular becomes more squat, and loses its proportions. This might just be a consequence of him having to work from a small published JPEG, and it might be something he could avoid if he had the full file to work with.

However, in the "Mennonite Boys" picture, I had a memory of the scene that made his version look not quite right to me. So on a trip to Watkins Glen a couple of days ago I swung past Dundee to look at the location again. And, sure enough—that telephone pole on the left is not straight in real life! It's tilted. I took a carefully correct picture of it in the daylight, then compared it to a protractor on my computer screen, and I would estimate the tilt to be about 12–13 degrees. So, here, Moose's desire for rectilinearity has led him into literal error! That telephone pole needs to slant in the picture for it to be accurate.

However, note that this is not to say he's wrong, necessarily. If the picture looks best to him that way, then that's the way he would correct it, and he would still be right...for himself. We just differ in our preferences, is all. Neither of us is right or wrong. Straightening a crooked telephone pole is just as much an option as removing a small distraction in post or making any other small editing change in the image. The idea is to make it look right for your definition of "right," whatever that might be.

There's another editing choice in that second picture that's interesting. Another reader said he would crop out the small cluster of lights along the right-hand border. Well, I like that cluster of lights and I wanted it in the frame. But when I did the vertical correction, I lost about half of it—so I grabbed it in Photoshop and restored it to its former place in the frame by moving it over a little. 

One's man's meat, and all that.

One final point. In explaining it to me, Moose justified his preference for straight verticals in terms of what was normal in view camera work. With a view camera, you can correct geometry in-camera. He's right, and, if that goes a ways in explaining how his preferences evolved, it may go some way toward explaining how my preferences evolved too—because I was a 35mm photographer until around 2003 when I got my first digicam. And 35mm photographers have to learn to live with the sometimes wopplejawed geometry the fixed lens captures. If you try to make everything rectilinear, it will just drive you crazy. It's much better just to learn to live with what the camera gives you.

To each his (or her) own.

Big thanks to Moose for providing the illustrations and hence the grist for this discussion!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Allan Graham: "I have to admit that I did the same thing as Moose. As a student, long ago when we still used the pencil and technical pen, I was trained in architectural perspective drawing, in which verticals are never permitted to converge. It's difficult to un-train the brain. And for photography in those days, not being able to afford shift lenses, we resorted to tilting the enlarger base board and using the smallest lens aperture we could get away with."

Mike replies: Ah yes, and some enlargers actually had adjustable lens stages to make that trick easier!

Picture Analysis: Minuses and Plusses

I thought we might take a closer look at the picture of Don Budge I posted the other day. I think it's interesting.

The begin with, I never saw it before I posted it, so it's not something that was previously familiar to me. Wikipedia captions it "Don Budge at White City Stadium, Sydney in December 1937," and Wikimedia Commons calls it "American tennis player Don Budge at the White City Tennis Club in Sydney, Australia." Both say the photographer is unknown and that it's in the public domain. A reverse image search doesn't shed any light, other than to indicate that it only appears on the Web in a few places. The source is a 35mm copy negative from a nitrate original (films in that era were flammable, so original negatives were often copied later on "safety film") in the Hood Collection at the State Library of New South Wales, Australia, which gives the title as simply "Tennis, White City," and the date as Dec. 16th, 1937.

The unknown photographer had quite a lot of problems, some of them fundamental. If you were to name the four most basic things to get right in a photograph, three of them would probably be focus, exposure, and framing. Right away, it's obvious that the central subject is not in focus. Hard to tell where the plane of best focus might be, but it's closer to the crowd on the right than to the tennis player. Then, it's not quite properly exposed: although there's still adequate highlight detail, the picture's a little overexposed and the highest values are blocked. This might have been exacerbated slightly by making the copy, as optical copies tended to add a little contrast as well as lose a little detail and gain a little grain; but the original was overexposed, I can tell you. Third, the photographer appears to have been caught off guard by the height of Budge's follow-through, and managed to clip the top of the racquet, while at the same time leaving too much foreground. So the photographer got all three of these basics wrong. On the good side, he didn't get any of them so wrong that it ruined the picture altogether, so congratulations on that.

Since I know how to play tennis, I can tell you that Budge has just struck a topspin backhand. That allows me to venture a guess: a very short time earlier, he might well have been crouched down, knees bent and racquet back, ready to hit the ball. That position would make the aim of the camera more logical. But if that's correct, then we can surmise the fourth photographic basic the photographer messed up on: timing! He might well have been trying to catch the moment of the stroke or the moment of contact with the ball, but was a little slow, a little late. 

Backhand compliments
But there are a lot of good things about the picture as well. First of all, the subject: it's a picture of one of the greatest tennis players of his era, in his prime, in action. A year later, Don Budge would win the Grand Slam (in the only year he played all four of the grand slam events, by the way!) and turn pro. In 1942, he would injure his shoulder while in the military, and his game would never quite recover. He played his last match in 1961, and died in 2000. So—this is obvious but important—no one can ever take a picture of Don Budge in his prime and in action ever again. That's one function of authentic photographs. Whatever was recorded at the time is as much as posterity will ever have. As time passes, uniqueness compounds, and historical value makes pictures precious that might not be otherwise. Why else would an old copy negative be preserved in a public library archive when the photographer got the framing, focus, exposure and timing all not quite right?

Secondly, the composition is actually quite exquisite. First of all, there's the uncoiled gesture of the player's body, the way he has straightened up and relaxed in his follow-through, the expression of concentration on his face and the intensity of his eyes locked on the ball, the angle of his torso stretched and leaning to the direction of the ball's flight. From the extra ball still held in his tossing hand, we can tell it's his service game. And Budge's body, light against the dark background, plays off the gesture of the body of the ballboy behind him, who is holding his own arm in counterpoint to Budge's, in similarly light clothing, the two of them bookended by sitting linesmen in darker street clothes.

Then of course there's the picture's wonderful punctum: both feet off the ground. If you grant me my guess that the photographer missed the intended moment, then she captured another one. Decisively, we'll say. The feet off the ground are what gives us the effort and the grace of the stroke that the still picture implies. You might even say it's what truly makes it an action shot.

The beauty of chance
Would the picture be better without all those "mistakes"? I actually think not. The problems contribute to an innate sense of dynamism, and impart a feeling of life and motion caught on the fly. Early on in my fascination with photography, I "got" that photographs array along a continuum between the approximate and the perfected, depending on how much control the subject allows the photographer. Action shots like Lartigue's exuberant boyhood photographs, war photographs like Capa's D-Day pictures (Coleman claims he was scared, although I can't see how that diminishes the pictures), or the accidents of demotic snapshots all convey a sense of immediacy and authenticity, amplifying the sense that the picture shows reality recorded, whereas the cool perfection of, say, studio advertising photographs, in which every little thing is controlled, try to give us a glimpse of the ideal from outside of Plato's Cave. But idealized forms and rigid perfection can start to feel fussy and fastidious with familiarity. Not for nothing did "perfectible" forms of photography and video start to mimic the imperfections of recorded-from-life genres, as when fashion photographs started mimicking the look of street photography or television shows started being shot with hand-held cameras with lots of camera motion.

While it's not a great photograph, it has real charm.

I could write more about that, but the hour grows late and the voracious blog must perforce be fed, lest it grow surly! More anon.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Moose: "So, in summary: Here's a photo that breaks all the rules, but is still at least close to great? I have questions, but first, as to some of the problems (Click on any photo for full size.): Original Topaz Photo AI Moose futzing.

"None of the following detract from the photo, but I have a curious mind: 1. The aspect ratio is almost perfect 4:3, not full 35mm frame. Masked on the original film? 2. I assume the men on the folding chairs are linesmen, paying little or no attention. The guy relaxing against the fence is a ball boy? Budge is holding a ball in his left hand. I suspect this is a demo or warm up piece of action. Perhaps even for the photographer? 3. How is Robert McNamara a linesman in Oz? He was 21 at the time, but looks much older. 4. Who did the presumed ball boy's hair?"

Mike replies:

1. All we know is that the copy negative is 35mm, not what the original negative was. I suspect the original picture was taken with a folder, which were very common in the 1930s (see certo6.com for examples), and probably was 645 format.

2. The linesmen pay attention to the line, not the players or the play. Budge is holding the ball in his hand, as I said, because it's his service game: he started with two balls in his hand and served the first one, which they're playing with. Most players no longer do it this way, but even when I was a boy it was common. This is definitely a match, because of the linesman, the ballboy, and the crowd, although they could have been warming up before the start, I suppose. Doesn't look like it to me. And, it has to be a ballboy because there's no other reason he'd be allowed on court.

3. Since it's McNamara, the picture proves that the Pentagon knows the secret to time-travel. (Reminds me of that wonderful incident when someone discovered an old tintype of a 19th-century man who strongly resembled Nick Cage. The conclusion drawn—I hope jokingly—was that the picture proved that Cage is a vampire. Someone else went so far as to prove scientifically that it was not Cage in the old picture, by comparing the lobes and folds of the ear. Like that was necessary. Totally goofy!)

4. I presume the ballboy did the ballboy's hair...remember the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever?

ChrisC: "Timing? Easy for us to say when we have cameras that shoot 12 frames per second. He was probably limited to something like 12 frames a day, assuming something like a Speed Graphic and allowing time to load the film holders in the dark room before heading out for the day. Perhaps that is an article for another day as you can probably fill in more detail."

Mike replies: If it was a folder, which is my guess, he might have had 16 frames, and perhaps an extra roll or two. And Jeff (in the Comments) is right, the film was probably ASA 125 or slower. Tri-X in rollfilm size was still 17 years away.

Michael Fewster: "As an Australian tennis fan who goes back a few years, I'd put my $ on Mike being correct in his analysis for the reasons he has given. The linesmen would have been totally drilled to watch the line and not the play. They probably would not have been so focused if this was the warm-up."

Mark: "If it's in the Hood collection then the photo is by Sam Hood, a well regarded photographer of that era. The SLNSW site says they purchased a large collection of his negatives in 1972 which were transferred to videodisc which was then digitised in 1996 and those images put on the library website. This multi-generation copying process might explain some of what appear to be technical deficiencies in the image. I wouldn't want to pass judgement on his framing, exposure, or focus until I saw a contemporary high res scan from the original film. Another website says he used a Graflex for over 40 years, but doesn't state the format."

Mike replies: Could be a press camera. It's doubtful the original film exists, if it was copied because the original was on a flammable base. Of course I don't know for sure.

jp41: "I am enjoying this post's deep dive into this vintage sports/action photo."

A Response to Moose (B&W Tonality, Part CCCLXXVII)

[UPDATE: P.S.—a P.S. before the fact, you might say—I'm actually thankful to Moose, who is a loyal reader and longtime commenter. It's true that I'm "scolding" him a bit here, but it was an opportunity for a teaching moment and it is useful in that way, and for that I'm grateful. I don't have any hard feelings, at all. Also, as many of us are, with my photographer hat on I admit I'm a little more thin-skinned than in my other roles, because the ego is a little more exposed. Plus, if he really objects to this post then I will take it down.  —Mike, with editor hat on.]

Moose replies: "I certainly would not want this post taken down. So many words and links to images...I expect to provide a response, be it mea culpa or disagreement with the brickbats, most likely a combination. Nor have I had time and attention to absorb all the comments. I do relate to the first featured post, from Lothar Adler. The large number of lively comments do seem to indicate that the issue of photo presentation on the web is very much on many people's minds."

-

Moose wrote, yesterday:

When I visit Mike's photos on Flickr, I wonder why they are almost all so flat, lifeless. Most recent two:

Cauliflower

Sun After Rain [both on Moose's own site —Ed.]

(Click on images to see it big.)

I'm no Zone system maven, but I can see immediately that there is no true black and that tonal detail in middle and upper range are compressed.

Are we being treated like John Szarkowski, to unfinished work? Does web presentation not merit being finished? Let's face it, most people will see most photographs on their screens, not as a print. How do I want my work to be seen?

-

There are three main reasons why this is unfair:

First, please don't mess with my work without my permission, especially if your purpose is to insult me. You didn't ask if that was all right. It's true that I've done "print critiques" here on the blog, but I explicitly ask people to send prints for critique, so they have implicitly granted their permission. If I want to comment on a person's work and change it to what I think looks better, I almost always ask them first (exceptions—I can think of one—were noted at the time). On principle, I almost never use negative examples; I don't hold up peoples' actual work for negative commentary without asking them if it's all right, even though I have the right under Fair Use to do so.

Second, for me, without question, the online JPEGs are not the work. I harped on this repeatedly in the early days of TOP, and don't do so as much any more; one reason for that is that now, sometimes the online JPEGs are the art—that is, that's how the creators of the images want and expect them to be seen. The other reason is that I can't keep repeating truths ad nauseam without becoming a bore. So if Moose bought prints of those images and wants to critique the prints, then I'll listen to his opinion, to an extent. Opinions about online JPEGs don't mean so much to me. The JPEG is just a representation, like a reproduction. We have explored over many years the difference between looking at little online JPEGs and comparing it to original work.

Thirdly, and more importantly: as I also keep saying, also at the risk of becoming a bore, you have to take mature artists at their word. That is, they mean their art to look a certain way, and that's their business, not yours. It's completely your right to decide whether you like it or not, whether you respond to it or not, and to express your response. However, in my opinion, you're making a mistake if you simply measure accomplished photographers according to the same yardstick you use to judge your own work, i.e., judge them by how well they conform to your taste in your own technique.

A few examples: Geoff Wittig and I went to the George Eastman Museum a few years ago to see the Alvin Langdon Coburn exhibit. Coburn's tastes were set in the high period of Pictorialism, and virtually all of his pictures are soft-focus, some extremely so, and have an extremely depressed tonal range—he essentially uses the bottom half of the Zone System range of numbered tones. It's meaningless to walk around such an exhibit and say, again and again, "there are no true whites in this picture!" and "his lens isn't sharp!"

Why? Because it's just a given of the work. He got the work to look the way he wanted it to look. The only way to truly see it is to look at it as if that were true. He's the one who gets to express his own intention, not me and not you.

In contrast, pun intended, some of today's B&W artists love the Structure and Clarity sliders and present work with extremely exaggerated local contrast along with hyper-sharpness. It's a look that was also favored by certain film photographers, for instance Charles Phillips, who made very large prints, designed to be viewed under very bright light, from 8x10 negatives using physical unsharp masks (that is, you really can't see Charles's pictures in little online JPEGs—Nick Hartmann, who saw Charles's presentation of his prints with me in my loft in Chicago, can attest to that). It's an artistic decision: unless you consider the art photographer to be a beginner or a student who simply doesn't know what he or she is doing yet, you need to assume that their work looks the way they want it to look, and judge it on that basis.

I could come up with a lot more examples, but just one more pair: take a look at some JPEGs of the work of Rodger Kingston. Now take a look at some JPEGs of the work of Bruce Haley. Both are accomplished, longtime photographers (and both are at least occasional TOP readers). Rodger likes color to be brilliant, rich, and saturated; this is becoming perhaps less distinctive now as popular taste moves more and more in that direction, but at some point in the not-so-distant past it was even more radical than it is now. Bruce, on the other hand, in his Home Fires I and II books, chooses very muted colors, so much so (in the books—the JPEGs at that link seem to me to present his colors a little bit boosted) that some of them are almost halfway to black-and-white. If you thought either person were a beginner or a student, you might criticize their choices to them. But they are not. The technique of their work looks the way it does because that's the way their work looks right to them, that's the way they want it to look, and that's what they intend. They're different photographers. They see differently. Take it or leave it.

This is not to say that friends can't influence each other: Carl Weese and I got together once in Washington, D.C.—he was shooting a kids soccer game on assignment, among other things—and we compared work. I vigorously defended the low contrast of my prints and he defended the high contrast of his prints just as vigorously...and then, months later, we discovered that we both had quietly modified our printing styles somewhat after our encounter: he had started using a little less contrast in his prints and I had started adding a little more contrast to mine. Unbeknownst to us at the time, each of us had successfully convinced the other to bend a little.

I can't personally say that I am 100% happy with the way my B&W work from the Sigma fp-M looks online yet. I'm still learning. I've pointed out failures (this shot) and asked for readers' help on others. But I am after a certain look because I like that look. I have my tastes, and what they are is up to me.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Lothar Adler: "When I read Moose's comment, I never for a second had the thought that he meant to offend you. I read his post solely from the perspective that he wanted to initiate a discussion about the relatively new problem of tonal design and impression of photographs in the age of constantly variable presentation by means of different media. Since nowadays in new photographic productions it is often no longer taken for granted that a material print must always be the relevant standard for tonal value design. Much more so, as different media behave very differently in terms of tonal value. It may be that the commenter Moose did not follow the usual sequence of permissions, but I was still surprised at how strict your response was in the first part. After all, we are among ourselves...and especially in your very cultured blog, we can assume that we are basically well-intentioned."

MikeR: "This post amused me, for the following reason: Some time ago my wife and I visited a museum (may have been the Art Institute of Chicago?) that had a small room dedicated to Stieglitz's 'Equivalents' series. I went from print to print, then back again. As we left that room, I commented to my wife, 'Stiegletz sucks.' Thinking about it later on, I did reconsider, along the lines of, 'Well, he liked it.'"

Mike replies: This comment made me wonder: are all photographers in all times insecure—even Stieglitz? It's at least possible....  :-)

Clay: "For what it's worth, I like your originals far better than the versions that Moose 'fixed.' That said, if they were my images, I would edit them very differently from either. [Carl said the same thing —MJ] It's like that tagline I heard in a commercial the other day: 'I said what I said.' It applies to photographs too. I think it always best to assume that an image that has been posted looks the way it is meant to look."

SteveW: "Thank you Mike and Moose. I think this one is essential reading, and I appreciate this very much. I struggle with what 'look' I'm striving for, and can go insane with post-processing to the degree I don't even want to take photographs. After reading today's blog I feel that there is a sense of liberation in being at peace with whatever look a person may favor. Don't ask me why I never considered this, lol. I'm an old dawg hobbyist, and it is blogs like today's that really make me appreciate TOP."

cecilia: "I hear your frustration, but I think Moose was completely fair. What is public is judged independent of intent. Full stop. This is hard reality. Sadly, when you anticipate judgement, or worse, cancellation, you can fall into extreme self editing. But I think you normally strike a great balance."

George Davis: "Wow! My favorite post in quite some time. While I agree that Moose should have sought permission before posting those comments and edits, I confess that I am glad that he did, for I see the Mike that drew me to TOP years ago. I wouldn't mind seeing a post where you begin to define your 'looks' and your tastes, not just what you like in your own work, but in others. Anyway, excellent post."

Terry Burnes: "We have a large Galen Rowell photograph in our living room, which my wife gave me as a present. I find it a near-perfect representation of the Eastern Sierra, where we live. It's hard for me to imagine someone not liking it. But when my photography buddy, the only friend with whom I share this interest, walked in and saw it, he immediately told me why he didn't like Rowell's work (overwrought, colors too intense, etc. etc., though this one isn't really that way). Yes, he's entitled to his opinion, but it seemed insensitive to me, to more or less insult a gift from my wife to me, an object which we both obviously like enough to buy and put on our wall in the most prominent position in the house. I think he just should have accepted it for what it is, and our choice to buy and display it. I think Rowell got what he wanted in that print. And so did we."

Mani Sitaraman: "I'm on team Mike on this, rather than team Moose (if there are, indeed, two teams in this matter.) I went to Moose's site, and when I moved the cursor over the pictures, everything suddenly seemed better, much closer to what I would want a black-and-white print to look like. I just assumed it was a quirk of the browser, and then I saw Moose's caption, which told me that the lower contrast version—Mike's original—would appear when the cursor was directly on the image. So much better. I dislike Moose's higher contrast versions, with (for example) the shoreline trees of Keuka Lake blocked up and near jet-black. I'm reminded of what I once read, which perhaps was written by Mike himself, in his online print days. Back in the heyday of the monochrome image, Henri Cartier-Bresson would always hound his printers at Picto, the renowned lab in Paris, to lessen the contrast in prints, to 'bring out the greys.' That's the aesthetic I prefer—silver tones in silver prints are just so pleasing. The aesthetic choice definitely carries over to digital, even as the technology of digital monochrome images pushes back against it and doesn't cooperate."

Sean: "The restraint you show in your photography is admirable and of a kind that is all too rare now. It takes time to make pictures look so effortless. I think those who like to turn things up to eleven do it rapidly and are flat-out wrong most of the time, and that's OK—when it's their pictures."

robert e: "I see the appeal of Moose's versions for hit-and-run viewing, but those are not images I would want to spend any time with. I would get a headache from trying—it's as if every element and detail is clamoring for attention, and there's little sense of harmony or balance across the image as a whole. It's like looking around Times Square or listening to 'exciting' audio speakers. Such experiences may be striking, scintillating, and immediately gratifying—enjoyable in their way—but over even a modest span of time they're exhausting and unfulfilling.

"I tried to think of a forests/trees analogy, or perhaps sweetness in food, but in the context of recent discussion here, what if the act of looking at pictures also falls under the 'process vs. project' dichotomy? There's the 'grok it and move on' school of looking and the 'sit with it and let it work on you' school of looking, and all the shadings and combinations between. Watch museum and gallery patrons for an illustration.

"I think the harsh reality underlying Moose's comment (and perhaps it was his intent merely to provoke this discussion) is that most web users habitually approach images with the 'project' mentality. Well, assuming this is true, and that one gives a damn, how much of the aesthetic of a given work are we supposed to compromise to 'hook' such a gaze, and then once we have it, how do we convert that to the process type of looking that that work is intended to reward? That to me is the fascinating issue here—I believe analogous to the problem of how to depict 3D art using 2D images, but more complicated because there isn't an obvious category mismatch. All I'm sure of is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution."

A Moon Never Hurts

On clear morning, when the dome of the sky is cloudless from horizon to horizon, I can see the line of sunlight from the Earth's shadow start at the top of the bluff on the shore opposite my house and creep down the bluff until it lights up the houses and reaches the lake. I've always thought it might be a good idea to get up before dawn and photograph it. This morning, opening the shade and looking out, I saw the day was brilliantly clear, and the shadow was halfway down the bluff, and I thought—a thought I often think—"Too bad. I should have been out there with the camera. Oh well."

Then I saw it—the Beaver moon, as this full moon is named, was setting above the bluff. I don't live right on the lake—what I like to say is that if my house were on the lake, it wouldn't be my house—and I thought, well, how fast can I get dressed and get down there? I shifted gears into hurry-up mode (like shifting the car from second straight to fifth), threw on some clothes, grabbed the camera, and jogged down to the lake—in my slippers! That's more exercise than I normally get all day, by the way. I'm generally better at naps.

Et voilà: Moonset.

(View large image)

[UPDATE Wednesday evening: This image and the one at "View large image" are variations of the first one I posted Wednesday morning.]

The rising sun has just reached the houses on the shore. That little slash of cloud wasn't there when I was looking from the window; it simply appeared; but that's all right, I like it. I think I can process this better eventually, once I understand it better—hey, even Ansel had to work on his "Moonrise" for years before he got it right. But that takes time. This was just taken a couple of hours ago.

Photographers are always looking for accents, something to save a scene from being just a scene. An oncoming car, a lone seagull—and the moon often serves this function. Every picture needs its punctum. The great 20th century curator John Szarkowski began a lecture about his own photographs by showing several slides while he talked about the fact that he didn't know, because no one can know, what really makes a good picture. Then he reached the punchline: coming to a slide that showed a ladder reaching into an apple tree, he said, "One thing I do know is"—on comes the slide—"a ladder never hurts!"—and suddenly the audience realizes that every picture they'd seen so far had a ladder in it*. The line gets a laugh.

Well, ditto for the moon, sez me. "Moonset" is no "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," and I'm no Ansel Adams, and I like it all the same. After all, pictures can refer to and echo other pictures, right?

Mike

P.S. This picture is cropped to enlarge the main subject a bit. This is the first time that I've wished I had this lens, or this one...the first time I've had any GAS at all since I started photographing with the Sigma fp(m)'s in late August of this year. GAS always gits ya, no matter how happy you are with what you have.

*Compare John Szarkowski's comments (he never liked me to call him just "John" when he was alive—too familiar) with this comment by Keith Cooper of Northlight Images: "This is perhaps the difference between color and black-and-white. And I've found it takes people quite a while to get used to it. Once you do get used to it, you don't even notice you're doing it. And that is to think of shadows, particularly deep shadows, as objects in your composition. Now, this is very similar to the idea of negative space in composition, where what isn't there, and the shape of what isn't there, is as important as what is there; but, in black-and-white, it's much easier just to say, think of shadows as real things. As objects. Because that's how they can look." (Source)

Featured Comments from:

aaron c greenman: " The moon illusion is fascinating, and still unexplained as to why the human brain makes the adjustment. This past August in Crete, the moon rising above the horizon seemed so large (and so red) as to be almost impossible. Because everyone was so mesmerized (and reaching for their cameras), all the businesses on the harbor side turned off their lights to give a better view. But as impressive as the moon was to the eyes, it remained as small as normal in all our photos—which proves that it is a mental phenomenon, not an optical one. Anyway, thank you for the beautiful B&W shot of the lakeside in the evening...reminds me of my several years in Ithaca on Cayuga Lake."

robert e: "An unexpected bonus of waking up ridiculously early to help open the polls this (US) election day was seeing the lunar eclipse. The sky was crystal clear, too. What a picture: red Mars and red-shouldered Orion overhead and the red 'blood moon' low in the sky. I don't know what kind of equipment and skills could have captured that whole scene, but I didn't have either with me."

Matters of Tone [Updated Friday]

As I've looked through samples here and there, it seems clear that there are treatments of tone and effects in B&W that are so prevalent now that they amount to new styles or fashions. They've become a sort of new normal. For example, consider the sample from the Q2M I linked to in the previous post (see it best on flickr):

Guy Ross-Clift, Rendezvous, King Street, Newtown, 2022

There's no right or wrong way for B&W to look. I respect photographers, so I assume that photographers are presenting their work the way they want it to look. So this isn't a criticism, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this. It's not my picture so it's not for me to say what it should look like.

Still, I don't believe that if I were standing there I wouldn't be able to see any detail in the fellow's shoe. It looks like the light is off. I like more of a sense of airiness and a sense of light in a picture, that's all. If it were up to me, I'd print it something more like this:

I'm just modifying the small JPEG I screenshotted from flickr, and I don't have the whole file to work with, so naturally this is only approximate, meant to give you the idea. (I'm fiddling with this with Guy's permission, by the way.)

It's not helpful to think of either one of these as "more filmlike," which is a comment I often see—after all, this is filmlike, and this is filmlike, and this is filmlike. B&W film had a very wide range of expressive potential just like digital B&W does. These are just two different interpretations of this scene. I'm not even entirely sure I like mine better; either one can look "wrong" after you look at the other one for a long time! If it were my picture and I had the original file I'd probably experiment some more. I might try darkening the interior of the car somewhat and see how that works, and I might try reducing the contrast in the folds of the man's dark clothing, because that seems to be calling too much attention to itself in my version. I don't think the woman's face needs undue emphasis, however—spotlighting—because it's clearly the center of interest of the picture and the eye is going to get there soon enough without being led.

In any event, one of the things I'm going to be looking at with these monochrome sensor cameras is whether there's enough information for me to get the files to look the way I want them to look. I'm not interested in whatever the current fashion might be. I'll be wanting my pictures to be my style. Just like I did with film, and just like any monochrome photographer should.

UPDATE Friday:

Richard Parkin mentioned that I actually can upload a bigger file, so I found that. Starting there, I took another run at this. I actually made a GIF of it, but I didn't care for seeing it that way; when we look at one version of something, it has the effect of "normalizing" that rendition, and it can skew your judgement. So you have to be careful what you look at when you're applying modifications. For instance, in darkroom printing, you always start with low contrast and move up on the right contrast; if you start out with two much contrast and progressively apply less, it's much more difficult to know when you've reached the optimum amount.

Here's my second, more serious take:

The biggest problem with the picture is that the woman is actually pretty far out of the depth of field, and there's not a lot of detail available in her face. That surprises me a bit; I would have thought ƒ/8 with a 28mm lens would be holding d-o-f better. And it would have, with grainy, less resolving film (the amount of "bokeh" depends on the resolution of the film/sensor; the greater the resolution, the more obvious it becomes what's in focus and what's not). The focus in the image is placed on the side mirror. It would have been preferable to place the focus right on the woman. But of course the scene was probably way too dynamic for that level of nicety—it was likely a fast, reactive shot. And that reactivity, don't forget, makes the picture—if Guy hadn't caught those clasped hands and that smile, he wouldn't have had this picture at all.

My Photoshop is a little maladroit, as well. I've been using Photoshop since 1994 but I still don't know much about it. What I was trying would probably be better accomplished with a layer mask, but I don't know how.

If this were my picture, this is the point at which I would make a guide print. A guide print is the first good attempt at a print; at that point you begin studying the print and letting that guide any future modifying of the file. There are times when, depending on your printing setup, you might have to make the file look a little worse in order to get what you want in the print; but the print takes over because that's the final, finished form of the work, and it's what matters.

One of my disadvantages in working on this image is that I don't actually know what the light was like, because I'm not the photographer. When I'm working on B&W, I'm often guided by the "feel" of the way the light actually was in the scene. I'm picturing sort of afternoon light on a city street where not a lot of sunlight is getting through. It's a defensible guess anyway. I think my lightening of the woman is fully believable because it's easy to assume there is light from the sky coming in through the raked windshield of the car.

Open this version and the original and place them side by side. There's actually way less contrast in my version, but it looks like the contrast is more vivid because the balance is better. The light on the man is much more realistic but his body is being de-emphasized like he is in the original (unlike my first try). And there's much more "directing," tonally, to the woman.

Mike
(Thanks to Guy)

P.S. Arnold was very proud of that picture of Bill Brandt, by the way, in the first "this is filmlike" example. He deliberately mimicked Brandt's own style, and successfully, too.

Book o' the Week

Chromes is an edit of more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes taken from 10 chronologically ordered binders found in a safe in the Eggleston Artistic Trust. This archive was once used by John Szarkowski, who selected the 48 images printed in Eggleston’s seminal book William Eggleston’s Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished. Three volumes, slipcased.

These book links are your portal to Amazon. Please use our links; they help support the site.

Go to B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

[Thursday comments start here, before the Update —Ed.]

Albert Smith: "I'd bet that any 10 random readers are seeing 10 different things when looking at the images. No two computers are exactly matched, not to mention tablets and phone screens. The true thing would be a print, and then how the print is illuminated comes into play. For what it's worth, and I'm sure it's not worth anything, I prefer the first image. I like contrast. At least on my screen."

Mike replies: It's true. In B&W, more so than in color, exact rendition of values is of heightened importance. The only way to really "fix" the intended look of the final treatment is with a stable print. Not for nothing does the photographer sign the print—it's a stamp of approval, of saying, "this looks the way I want it to look." Anything online is just a hopeful approximation.

Rob Campbell (partial comment): "Perhaps the most pervasive trend in black/white snaps today is encapsulated in those street pix where everything dark is turned into jet black, with only the highlights having any detail. I didn’t like that much at first, then I had a go at it myself. Now, I see it as just another gimmick, an attempt to introduce interest where none really exists. There are scenes where it works, but mostly it just reminds me of poor exposure techniques."

Geoff Wittig: "Black and white photography self-evidently is all about tone, specifically the relative distribution of tones across the available range from paper white to D-max. Other concerns like grain/sharpness and subtle color casts (intentional or otherwise) are secondary.

"That's precisely why I find black and white so much fun! there are endless possible permutations in how you decide to pitch the tonality, from dark and moody to light and airy, high contrast to low, and so forth. You get to decide how to spend your tonal range 'budget.' And this is why I'm a contrarian on the subject of dedicated monochrome sensors. I could be wrong, but it looks like you're stuck with the relatively arbitrary decision the manufacturer (or conversion shop) makes regarding the sensitivity of the sensor to red, blue or green light striking it. With a standard Bayer sensor (or Fuji's X-trans sensor for that matter) you can change this to your heart's content after capture using software, such as Photoshop's black and white conversion layer.

"Back in digital's pre-history, I made black and white prints on an inkjet printer after scanning in Kodak Ektar film negatives. I had been very dissatisfied with prints from B&W negative film, though admittedly this was developed by a commercial lab, as I never tried my hand at traditional darkroom work. Starting with a color negative I could play all I wanted with the tonal balance using color filtration.

"I could be wrong, but starting with a color sensor seems analogous."

aaron c greenman: "For years now, making Leica Monochrom prints with the Piezography Pro (and previous offerings) ink system has given me immense amounts of photographic joy and satisfaction—a true end-to-end digital B&W workflow. Printed on Canson Baryta Photographique has never disappointed. Mike, I would encourage you to engage with Jon Cone for a discussion/interview, I’m sure you would find it fascinating, as would he. Jon is a real innovator in the field. What a fantastic printing system. My dream TOP post 😉."

MikeR: "Rather than a monochrome sensor, top of my photography wish list is a monochrome printer. I've seen work done with a printer converted to a carbon inkset that just blew me away. You know a print is special if in a gallery show with lots of contenders, you keep coming back to one again and again."

[Friday comments start here, after the Update —Ed.]

robert e (partial comment): "These examples and discussion so far illustrate how different BW photography is from color photography, and how malleable a monochrome image is, paradoxically as a result of a substantial limitation. And I contend that this plasticity extends even beyond post-processing and presentation, to the act of looking at the final product. It may have to do with the tension of seeing the familiar in an 'unnatural' way, and how that encourages us to question or play with the act of seeing. That tension, which sometimes shades into wonder, is inherent to all photography, but take away color and it's amplified by an order of magnitude."

Jeff in Colorado: "Highlight recovery is tricky with monochrome sensors, because all channels clip simultaneously."

Mike replies: It's the biggest weakness of digital, in color or B&W. There's a very narrow range between those glaring electronic-looking empty featureless whites and too much undifferentiated dull tone that rob the results of sparkle. (The human eye is very sensitive to tonal variation in highlights and very poor at tonal variation in shadows (dark areas). This parallels the way B&W responds, but digital is naturally the opposite. I'm not sure about this, but I suspect that one of the biggest advantages of very high-MP sensors (say 45+) is that this problem—the visual effects anyway—are easier to overcome. Some of the best high-MP-sensor pictures have very good highlights, or seem to.

Sal Santamaura: "Re 'The focus in the image is placed on the side mirror. It would have been preferable to place the focus right on the woman. But of course the scene was probably way too dynamic for that level of nicety—it was likely a fast, reactive shot.' If I were shooting this with my D810, it would have been (as always) using Live View. Face Detect AF would have had no problem finding and focusing on the woman."

Mike replies: Great point; this scene would have been perfect for face- or eye-detect AF, wouldn't it? A textbook example. However, then he wouldn't have been shooting with a Q2M then, right? Aren't "bare" sensors limited to contrast-detect AF, and therefore can't do face- and eye-detect focus? I don't know for sure, because I don't know enough about how AF works.

Stephen S.: "Face- and eye-detect work perfectly well with contrast-detect autofocus, which is why it is a feature on so many fixed-lens compact 'point and shoot' digital cameras, and in fact first appeared on them."

David Bostedo: "Re '...either one can look "wrong" after you look at the other one for a long time!' That's something I run into often in software. I'll move this or that slider one way or the other, sometimes going to extremes, trying to decide where to place some tone or brightness. And they can often look right in different ways...so I usually wind up somewhere in the middle. Which always makes me wonder if I'm just finding some average, rather than the way I'll want it to look long-term."

Mike replies: It's a problem. As a friend used to say, "careful with those sliders, Eugene"—the reference, for those of you who are not old fogeys, is to Pink Floyd's song "Careful with that Axe, Eugene."

Carl Siracusa: "While I agree with you in general that the look of most B&W photos you see these days is too contrasty, I'd argue that a more important consideration is how well the tonal balance that's been created reinforces the message the photographer is trying to convey. And how convincing that balance is as a reflection of how light behaves. In your sample photo, for instance, I would place the most emphasis on the guy leaning over the car precariously, one foot one the sidewalk and another in the street, almost straining. You should be able to see the strain in the folds of his clothes. And unless there is some particular reason to make the woman's face clearly visible, I would make it only as visible as it needs to be to convey her happiness at seeing him. Otherwise it detracts too much from him and looks unnatural. She is inside a car, after all, and the light falling on her shouldn't be brighter than the light falling on him. I personally would combine the woman in version #1 with the guy in version #3. But obviously, the photographer may have had something else in mind entirely....

Mike replies: That's interesting, and surprises me, because I think the guy is definitely a supporting actor, a secondary character, and the woman is the point of the picture. But this makes it clear how important authorship is for photographs. If you had taken Guy's photograph it would have had a different meaning, and, accordingly, you would have presented it differently.

What to Do, That Is the Question

[Comments have been added.]

Here's our day yesterday. My address is 740 East Lake Road, and the addresses here are the mileages from the town line—so I'm 7.4 miles south of the southern border of the hamlet of Penn Yan, up at the top of the Lake.

Curiously, we get different weather than they do. Snow squalls spill over the massif of the bluff and descend on us—once I got to watch a little one come at me, and I saw it all the way, which was thrilling—but they sometimes hit us and leave Penn Yan alone. Yesterday I was coming from town, and the weather up there and for about the first four miles was fine. No snow and clear roads. Down here it was a different story. We got two or three inches in an hour or two.

It's not the first time I've observed this. Weather is very local in these parts. 

Question: When should you not zap up a digital picture with Dehaze and Clarity and so forth? Answer, when you're trying to show a heavy atmosphere. If I kick up the contrast and clarity of the truck in this, I can make it almost look like it was a nice day.

OoP (Out-of-camera. Or should it be OoP?)

Improved? Not sure about that. You be the judge.

As you can see, I opted for something in the middle. When editing digital images, as in darkroom printing, the how is always the easy part. You can master that relatively easily. What to do—judgement, as I call it—is always the tougher question.

Futbol
Just as a followup, it was quite a weekend in the NFL. To quote Ben Shpigel of the New York Times, "I’m not prone to hyperbole, but THAT WAS THE BEST WEEKEND OF FOOTBALL IN THE HISTORY OF EVER. In case you weren’t watching—and if you weren’t, why not?—all four divisional-round games ended on the final play: three field goals and an overtime touchdown."

The Divisional Round is the quarterfinals, in case you don't know. The remaining four teams will meet in the championship games, to determine the AFC (American Football Conference) and NFC (National Football Conference) champions. The two champions square off in the Superbowl—which is typically a pretty snoozy game.

One little tiny flaw in the picture is that our local team, the poor Bills, from the City of Eternal Football Heartache, fell just short again. They were ahead with 13 seconds left. Unless you've hardened your heart against enjoying any sport ever as a matter of principle or of crankiness, you really should watch the ending to that game. Even if you're not a fan of American football—or of sports at all—you'll get it. Remarkable.

I was rooting for Green Bay, Buffalo, and Tampa Bay, in that order, so all of my teams are out of it, knocked down like bowling pins. I guess I'll root for Cincinnati now. (That means they'll lose. I'm a Jonah, I guess.)

Pool this morning! So I need to get breakfast. At least I often win at that. As my friends put it, I cheat: I practice.  :-)

Mike

Book o' the Week
Eye and Brain by Richard Gregory, Fifth Edition. "As far as I know nothing in the past 50 years is a better explanation of how humans see." —Hugh Crawford

The link is a portal to Amazon. Thank you kindly for helping support The Online Photographer!

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Featured Comments from:

Mark Sampson: "I've spent thousands of hours driving through the murk your photo so accurately describes. That picture makes me recall the mingling of accomplishment and relief I would feel upon reaching my destination, after a long journey in those conditions. Your 'improved?' version merely looks like it was taken an hour later, towards dusk. And Mike, nothing you can do to that image will make it look like a nice day."

Bill Bresler: "When it comes to image adjustments in Photoshop or whatever, I'm reminded of the Cajun Chef who, regarding spicing food, declared, 'A little too much is just enough.' I agree with the chef when I'm cooking. But when I'm editing photos, I tend to stop just short of what looks good on the screen. Sometimes I'll change my mind later, but as long as I still have the raw file, it doesn't matter."

Charlie Dunton's Picture: Seize the Day

Here's what Charlie Dunton of Yorktown, Virginia, had to say about his submission for the "Grandkids" Baker's Dozen portfolio:

"I took this photo of my granddaughter during a visit to a local Five Guys restaurant for lunch. I spent the entire time photographing her, ending up with over 200 images. This [picture shows] one of the few times she gave any indication I was even there.

"Once home, I imported all the photos into Lightroom and discovered I had a nice story board of our lunch together. I selected 35 images that best told the story and added captions to each from her perspective. The caption for this one is, 'Oh, hi, Dadada, you are getting this aren’t you?'

"The story in brief: dip your french fry in a small cup of ketchup and lick the ketchup off the fry; try the same with the end of a crayon from the restaurant followed by a big yuck face; Dad notices ketchup on your chin and brings out a towelette resulting in strong objections; notices she has dried ketchup on her fingers that’s hard to get off so sticks fingers in ketchup cup for a bit, then finds to her amazement that the ketchup now wipes off easily; decides it’s time to change her dress which immediately brings out the finger of doom from Dad followed by a terrible pout face; lays head on table dejected at how long grownups take; new idea, draw Mommy a picture with the crayon; then sing Mommy a song they just learned, 'The Itsy Bitsy Spider,' complete with hand gestures and facial expressions followed by a big high-five from Dad.

"I saved everything in a Lightroom collection and didn’t share it with anyone for over 13 years. Then I had them made into a hardcover book and gave it to her on her 16th birthday. I think she liked it almost as much as I because the first thing she did when she got home was call her best friend and share it with her.

"We still have lunch together on occasion, but I don’t bring my camera any more. She wouldn’t stand for it. But what if I pull out my iPhone and pretend to be playing with it like all the kids do? There’s an idea.

"Sorry for all the words, but how else could I share 35 images when only one was allowed?"

Having not seen the other 34, I'll venture to say that one seems to do nicely!

I have only a couple of comments: first, that photographing active children in motion is actually a pretty good exercise of shooting skills. I was once asked to photograph four small but highly energetic brothers playing in their enclosed but well-outfitted back yard, and since I wasn't being paid I decided to try to do it on the fly, without asking the kids to hold still or pose or otherwise help to make my job easier. It was surprisingly challenging—getting coherent pictures was like trying to swat flies. They were in continual motion and seemed to never pause for long. Pointing the camera seemed a signal to move away. I shot three rolls of 135, which was 105 exposures, and had to settle for a couple of dozen competent shots, five or six to please the parents, and one photograph I thought was really good. Lots of blurs and shots just after the visual peak of the action.

I do like the relaxed, candid quality of this shot; it's clear it's not formally posed and that Charlie wasn't going for formal perfection. I think that makes the picture stronger. Despite the natural, candid feel it's still formally beautiful. The cropping, which would be too tight for some pictures, works with rather than against the gesture of the body and cock of the head, which in turn works with the expression of the mouth; the light is lovely, and the colors are harmonious and complement the lighting in turn. But nothing's excessive or overdone. A nice shot of a happy child mid-flight.

Taking 200 shots of one subject is what I'd call "working a subject." It's quite possible to get a shot this good with one lucky shot with a smartphone, but it will happen only occasionally. If you want to do it on purpose you usually have to work for it, like Charlie Dunton did. As a big-name photographer once said to me, "nobody sees how many shots you throw away."

Children disappear quickly—I still find it hard to believe that Sally Mann's son Emmett, memorialized as a boy in a number of his mother's famous pictures, has lived his whole life and is dead and gone now. Seize the day, they say. While that might be literally impossible, every now and then you can seize a good picture, which, although also impermanent in the long run, will at least outlast the moment.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

The brand new 2021 Apple 10.2-inch iPad (Wi-Fi, 64GB) in Space Gray. My iPad is my least necessary but most-loved Apple device. I could get by with my phone and a desktop computer, but I use this constantly and I like it best. Check out that price.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP—anything you buy while you're there benefits TOP. B&H Photo is closed for the rest of September for Succos.

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

Sharon: "What an adorable child! Well done."

Charlie Dunton: "Mike, Thanks for the kind words. I must confess, this photo of my granddaughter was originally going to be the 'Oh, hi Grandada...' shot, but I had another that worked as well for that purpose and I decided the one I submitted made a much better final photo in the series. The caption for it is actually, 'Well, that's all from adorable moi. We had a lot of fun at Five Guys. TTFN. That's Ta Ta For Now, in case you didn't know.' If you would like to see the other 34, the full series with captions is here. Click the upper left image and then use the 'next' button on the site, or the right arrow key on your keyboard. Thanks again, Charlie Dunton."

Giant Loyle

I got an app for my phone that actually changes the size of people and objects.

Here, my friend Loyle has been transformed into a near-seven-foot giant, and is seen making a shot on my tiny toy pool table.

He didn't like being 6'10" however ("how am I going to fit into my car?"), so I hit another button on the magic app, making him the size of an eight-year-old and restoring my table to its expansive nine-foot length.

(I was just playin' around. Fun with perspective!)

A serious aside: I can't prove this, but I've always believed that as the 182-year history of photography has made its merry way onward, the sophistication of the public in interpreting typical photographic distortions has increased greatly. I undertook a sort of survey of the literature of photography as a student, and it seemed to me that complaints about the various lens distortions were fairly common in the early years even when the distortions themselves were mild. As the decades piled up, people became much more sophisticated as viewers of photographs. We learned to tolerate greater and greater amounts of the kinds of distortions that tended to bother early viewers. The only one I really encounter much these days are complaints about unlevel horizons in seascapes. Tilt that horizon radically, however, and the complaints go quiet—in that case they assume it's intentional. 

As I say, there's no way to prove this. It's just something I believe to be true.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz (Laurence King Publishing, 2017). First published in 1994. In this revised edition, the story of street photography is brought up to date with a re-evaluation of some historical material, the inclusion of more contemporary photographers, and a discussion of the ongoing rise of digital photography.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Here's Bystander at The Book Depository. The following logo is also a link:

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Featured Comments from:

Pen Waggener: "Giant Loyle reminds me of a photo my late father published in a rural Kentucky newspaper in 1977. He wrote a sort-of-weekly column for a few years, and his photo of a farmer with a seemingly gigantic pumpkin grabbed the attention of a reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal, who called asking if it was 'trick photography.' Dad assured him that it was not, although he did admit that 'the perspective is somewhat flattering to the pumpkin.' You can see the photo here."

Brian Stewart: "No framed prints on the walls???"

Mike replies: The room isn't actually finished yet...the molding and window framing haven't been done (the trades are in demand here and it's hard to find anybody who will do such a small job). Plus, no lighting yet. So that remains a future project and probably will for a while.

Sroyon (partial comment): "I think you may be on to something here. In a 1971 interview Cartier-Bresson said a 35mm lens(!) is often used by 'people who want to shout,' and that the distortion is an 'aggressive' effect. What's an 'aggressively wide' lens today, maybe 21mm?"

Sean: "My sister has a portrait hanging in her home of her son and daughter taken by yours truly. They all joke about how my nephew’s forearm looks like the size of leg of lamb in the picture ( he was about six in the photo). I tell ya, I don’t get no respect."

Anton Wilhelm Stolzing: "I like this post, and I appreciate it very much. I have read a bit on the theory of photography, inter alia Roland Barthes, but not even he has brought up the interaction between photography and the development of the 'sophistication of the public,' which is also a kind of awareness, I would say. This opens a new field. Kudos, Mike!"

Albert Smith: "Just a reader's plug for Mike's 'Book O' The Week,' Bystander...if you have any interest in street photography across the entire time that it was viable (when cameras were able to be handheld to current times), this is the book. The photos are mostly chronological and nicely annotated with the shooter and the date. Additionally, and very interesting to me, is a long form interview with Joel Meyerowitz, who worked with everyone in the New York street photography A-team, Frank, Winogrand, Arbus, Friedlander and others...cool stuff for those of us of a certain age. Bought mine at Christmas and Mike's recommendation had me taking it off the shelf."

Didja Get Anything?

So did you get anything? Here's how to add a picture in a comment. If you want to, show us what you got on Street Photography Day.

I didn't make any pictures yesterday, sadly. (Actually "lamely" might be a better word than "sadly" even though nobody says that.)

Hey, look at that
Kenneth Wajda has a really great idea about what makes a street photograph—see what you think. Imagine you're walking with a friend. You see something interesting, so you tap them on the shoulder and say, "look at that." Would your friend know what you mean? Would he or she be interested?

"If you get my attention," he writes, "you better have something worth looking at."

It's a sort of basic litmus test for a street photograph. If you were walking with a friend, would the subject of your shot be worth drawing your friend's attention to? Does it meet that threshold of interest? "This is what I don’t like about much of the street photography I see both online and in gallery exhibitions," Kenneth writes. "It asks for my attention, and then it doesn’t give me anything worthy of my time." Whenever you see a picture that purports to be a street photograph, just ask yourself, if I called a friend's attention to this, would they understand? Would they know why I pointed it out?

I like this idea a lot. Here's the article. Kenneth gives examples, all his own pictures. I love that picture of the burning car. I would definitely call anyone's attention to that. As an illustration, the next picture, of the stairs, is brilliant. It's so much like a lot of "street" photography I see. Peter Turnley has another word for pictures like that stairs picture: he calls it "camera pointing." Just waving a camera around taking random shots of nothing. And Kenneth is right: if you tapped your friend on the shoulder and said "look at that" and pointed to that stairs picture, it's hard to envision anyone having any idea what you were looking at or why they should look too. A lot of what passes for "street photography" online is stuff that's just not worth tapping a friend on the shoulder about.

Mike
(Thanks to Kenneth)

Book o' the Week

There and Back: Photographs from the Edge by Jimmy Chin (available for preorder). "Filmmaker, photographer, and world-class mountaineer Jimmy Chin goes where few can follow to capture stunning images in death-defying situations. There and Back draws from his breathtaking portfolio of photographs, captured over twenty years during cutting-edge expeditions on all seven continents—from skiing Mount Everest, to an unsupported traverse of Tibet's Chang Tang Plateau on foot, to first ascents in Chad’s Ennedi Desert and Antarctica’s Queen Maud Land."

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Here's There and Back at The Book Depository. The following logo is also a link:

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Featured Comments from:

Edwin: "I think a lot of readers were taking the 'tapping your friend's shoulder' too literally. It should be the moment you post your picture on Facebook, in a discussion forum, attach it to an email, or showing it as a print, that you are 'tapping your friend's shoulder and say "hey, look!"' When I am looking through these pictures, I have my finger over the scroll wheel on the mouse. If a picture can freeze my over-the-scroll-wheel finger, it is catching my attention!"

Chroma Information (the Grid Illusion)

This is interesting—it's called the Grid illusion. A color grid is laid over a black-and-white image and, for most of us anyway, our minds fill in solid colors to an impressive degree. Here's the picture on the TYWKIWDBI blog. The red grid over the faces doesn't really work for me, but it's difficult to believe that the yellow, green and blue T-shirts only have color grids laid over them, and that our brains do the rest.

Here's the picture with the grid lines blocked out.

That's how hand-coloring works. A long-ago girlfriend who worked for The Washington Post and did graphics for local television stations was known for her hand-colored B&W photos, and I was always amazed how little detail or precision her colors could have and still work. (She sometimes used colored pencils on matte photo paper and sometimes Marshall's Oils, once a standard for that sort of work and still available from places like dickblick.com.) She was sanguine about colors bleeding over into the wrong areas (or not coloring all of an area), breezily saying things like "it'll look fine." And it did, she was right. I think she knew intuitively how little added color could suggest solid colors to viewers' eye/brains.

The look was that of old colorized postcards, which can have a sort of charm. Of course the colors didn't necessarily have to have much relation to the real colors of the scene, which also bothered me; you could photograph an orange sweater, print it as B&W, and hand-color it green with no one the wiser.

The legend on the grid illusion photo leads us back to some posts by Øyvind Kolås who calls it a "color assimilation grid." His comment: "luminance is a lot more important than the chroma for our visual perception." True, that.

I've guessed in the past that this might be one reason I like B&W more than color...because for some reason my brain is more sensitive to luminance and less to chroma than the way most people perceive things. I know that when I was very young I used to have an innate sense that colors "got in the way" of seeing...no idea how much that might have been due to suggestion or conditioning, but I recall the feeling. When we first got a color TV I was uncomfortable looking at it, and much later I bought one of the last B&W TVs you could buy. In art class and with coloring books I would complain that I never knew what colors to make things (I remember saying to my first grade teacher, when faced with a blank coloring-book page, "but what color is that?"), and I would sometimes complain that there were "only a few" colors...as if all oranges were the same and all blues the same, etc.

And on the other hand I've learned that some other people have a much more visceral, immediate, or emotional connection and response to colors than I do. A clue for me was that Szarkowski disliked Outerbridge because he couldn't stand his colors. In high school art class my bête noire (although we were friendly) was a girl who would churn out paintings at high speed, foregoing detail and edges. Very broad-brush—literally. Her work disturbed me. In retrospect I think she was very sensitive to chroma and what she was doing was putting colors together, because that's what was important to her and it was how her brain saw. And I just didn't get it at the time. It's what Rothko does, only he foregoes all figuration and she hadn't gotten that far. My pencil and pen-and-ink drawings were the opposite: detailed and precise, but monochrome. 

(I do have a strong sense of color harmony. I tend to prefer color photographers who actually actively use color as a primary creative element in their photographs, rather than those who simply photograph in color and don't seem to pay any attention to what the colors are. I should expand on that sometime...but some other time.)

I suspect we each have our individual relationships to color, perhaps even to chroma v. luminance. It's worth interrogating yourself about, anyway.

Mike
(Thanks to Stan B. for the first link, and it's not his blog.)

Book of Interest:

Photographs Not Taken: a collection of photographers' essays, edited by Will Steacy (Daylight Books; Second Revised ed. edition, 2012). Recommended by Mike Chisholm, who has good taste. This is a link to Amazon from TOP.

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

Albert Smith: "Many people are enthralled with the monochrome-only Leica cameras, and on various Fujifilm sites the wish for that brand to put out a similar B&W model usually comes in near the top when people discuss what Fujifilm should do next. I watch YouTube videos from street photographer Alan Schaller who is a master of black and white shooting. His advice video, '7 tips for black & white street photography with Alan Schaller,' says that you should go 100% mono, you can't get good switching to color at will. So this philosophy would add validity to the mono-only cameras. But try as I might, stalking the streets with my Fuji set to Acros, I'm always seeing color even when my EVF is showing black and white. A bright red car parked in front of a blue wall forces me to switch over to color, I can't just accept grey on another shade of grey. I don't think I'd be able to go out with a mono Fuji if they made one. And I was happy when I could afford my first color TV."

Mike replies: Ctein and I disagree about this, but I agree with you and Alan Schaller. I see how the camera sees. So if the camera sees color, pretending it doesn't doesn't work for me. But I had no problem at all shooting B&W exclusively for two decades. Ctein claims it doesn't matter to him, that he can shoot either one at will—at which point in such discussions, I usually remind him that he's not a B&W photographer.

Bob Keefer: "I've made hand-colored black and white photos for more than 20 years. In the beginning, I carefully colored within the lines, sweating every fluttering leaf in a landscape. But I soon realized those photos looked less compelling than the looser ones, usually on throw-away prints, that I did while experimenting with various color combinations. Soon my work became more painterly—and much more convincing. As the photo on the TYWKIWDBI site shows, our eyes do a great job of matching hues with natural boundaries."

Geoff Wittig: "There's a well-known saying in the world of representational painting: value does all the work, and color gets all the credit. Value is the light to dark scale, or black and white. Viewers (and buyers of paintings) often respond emotionally to a painter's color palette, but it's the light to dark value structure that determines how a painting 'reads' from a distance, and that draws a viewer in for a closer look. Emotional mood, sense of atmosphere, the illusion of distance and deep space in a painting? All are largely determined by value, not color. In fact, within surprisingly broad limits, a wide range of color choices will work just fine to create a realistic-looking painting, if the value structure is correct. The one property of color that is important for paintings to read as authentic is color temperature, meaning warm to cool, roughly from the red/orange warm end to the icy cold cobalt blue end of the visual spectrum. This will be immediately familiar to photographers used to employing warming filters for pleasing portraits, or photographing a landscape in the warm light of a setting sun."

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "The way the human brain works in fascinating. Just look up the homunculus fallacy.

"I can recommend Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing by Margaret Livingstone. B&W and Chroma vision are processed through different parts of the brain. B&W vision / outlines / edges etc. came first, and chroma is a later evolutionary adaption for animals that are active during the day—I think for identifying plants etc to eat or avoid. Night vision has little to no need for colour.

"She outlines many visual effects that trip the differences in processing—including that colour does not need to fill the boundaries. She explains the science known at time of publishing, and notes her speculations as such too. Thanks to Geoff for his comment, eye-opener to me (boom boom), noting value is discussed extensively in this book. But the way Geoff framed the point is very illuminating (sorry, on a roll).

"I'm on my second attempt to read the book. It's not a light read. By the end of a day's work from home, my mind is usually numb / mush. I need something lighter to 'distract' my mind and give it a chance to defrag from work, before tackling something else of substance. I no longer have the commute home, during which time I would usually peruse my favoured photography sites and the news—not that I'm saying TOP is lightweight.  ;~)

"I'll stop there before I dig myself in any deeper."

Mike replies: No offense taken. TOP is not lightweight enough. I'd get more readers if it were more so.

Will: "The Gird Isiollun msot rmednis me of the wlel konwn fcat taht msot rdaeres hvae no dltfifiucy raindeg a ppgararah of txet wtih asbrud sllepnig as lnog as the fsirt and lsat ltreets are crerctloy paelced. The brain is a fascinating machine indeed!"

Photographing With the Wrong Camera

Following on from yesterday, here are two pictures of mine that I desperately wish hadn't been taken with a phone:

Keuka in the Rain

Butters at the Window

Longtime readers will have seen these before, but they're good examples of why it's best to photograph with the right camera as much as possible. The way photography works—for me, anyway, and yes, your mileage may vary—is that if you keep looking and keep photographing, every now and then you get a good one. Every now and then you get lucky, you might say. Every now and then things come together in that mysterious way and the magic happens.

But I failed here, in an important sense. All I had at hand was my phone. Neither picture prints decently—and in the top picture especially, the phone just plain failed to record the marvelous glowing turquoise color of the lake, which was the reason I stopped the car in the first place. You can see a hint of it, but the reality is missing in action.

Now, you can say that I got "a" picture in both cases, and if I hadn't had my phone in my hand I wouldn't have gotten a picture at all. True. But you're seeing them in about the only way they work—as little JPEGs online. They also look good on my phone screen, of course. So, imagine if I were a photographer who normally works with an APS-C Fuji and prints to 15 inches in the long dimension on a 13x19" sheet. And imagine that both of these shots would have fit right into the rest of my work visually—quiet, lyrical pictures that relate to my real life; the lake where I live, my dog by the window in my house. I've failed because I was gifted with two successes that can't be made into prints that fit in with the rest of my work. These should have been in the portfolio...but I had the wrong camera in my hands when I took them.

I think it's in the book Photography Until Now (1989) that John Szarkowski makes the case that it is about the camera...it's just not all about the camera. He makes the case that if you look back at history carefully enough, you can see how developments in cameras changed what people photographed and how they photographed.

It's been one of the features (I'm deliberately using a neutral word) of my life that I often have the "wrong" camera with me, for the simple reason that I've been a camera reviewer. If you accept the fact that the "magic" happens rarely, the converse is that the magic doesn't stop happening just because you're out and about with a camera that won't give you the results you like or need.

Here's an example:

I was testing the Ricoh GXR, a quirky little camera with lens/sensor modules that clicked into the same body shell. Here I had a module in the camera that provided a zoom lens with a thumbnail-sized, 2011-era point-and-shoot sensor. But it was just a neighborhood block party...my house is in the background here. How was I to know the universe was going to smile on me with a real picture? It was a very unpromising situation, the kind of event where normally I'd just get a bunch of crappy meaningless snapshots of people standing around eating hot dogs. But the Fire Department showed up, a fireman turned the hose on for the kids, and this miraculous little scene unfolded. You might not like this picture, but for me and my work it's right there, a hit. But again, I just had the wrong camera with me. It barely even recorded the rainbows! Much weaker in the picture than to the eye. I've always regretted that I got this picture and yet didn't get it. My life is dotted with such success/failures. They go with the territory for me.

You can choose to use any camera that suits your conception for a body of work. Nancy Rexroth made an influential body of work with a plastic toy Diana camera; Ernst Haas used super-slow early Kodachrome and learned to exploit what seemed to most people to be limitations; Elsa Dorfman made her life's work with a 20x24-inch Polaroid. Each one made their choice of tools fit the work they wanted to do, and in that sense "any camera will work" and "the camera doesn't matter." But how can anyone imagine that you could make Ernst Haas shoot with a 20x24" Polaroid without having it change his work entirely? Would Haas's Leica and Kodachrome make pictures that would fit in Rexroth's book Iowa? Would Elsa Dorfman be able to shoot with a toy Diana and exhibit the results seamlessly alongside her 20x24" Polaroids? Of course not, in all three cases.

Digital flattens the differences and distinctions somewhat, and more of the characteristics of the final image can be moved to post-processing—they're not as inherent in the tools and materials as they used to be. But surely you can see how a smartphone camera can be the right tool for some bodies of work and the wrong tool for others. It depends what you're trying to do, and it depends on what the rest of your work looks like.

Again, feel free to disagree. We're all different. Just because something is true for me doesn't mean it has to be true for you.

Mike

P.S. It really might be time for me to do a OC/OL/OY. My muse needs nourishment!

[How to Put a Picture in a Comment]

Product o' the Week:

Fingertip Pulse Oximeter. The link is from TOP to Amazon. This relates to health, not photography—it replaces one of the advanced functions on the latest Apple Watch. Takes your pulse and measures your blood oxygen. For heart monitoring, checking for COVID (low blood oxygen is an early warning sign) and slow heartbeat. I'm learning to correlate the way I feel with the readings. Works with iOS and Android. Nifty little device, super easy to use, and cheap.

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

Michael J. Perini: "I don't know anyone who cares about making expressive pictures who doesn't have a bunch of 'nice picture, wrong camera' pictures.

"Smartphone cameras are a double-edged sword. More people take more pictures than ever before because of them: they have ushered in a whole new kind of super-convenient note-taking photography. Video and stills are always at our fingertips—with a level of quality that by any historical standard of 'power to weight ratio' is astonishing.

"That's all good. Like every camera it has limitations, things it is good at and things it isn't so good at. It has also given us the single most potent reason to not carry a different 'better' camera.

"It is often said the the difference between professionals and amateurs is that pros don't show their misses. A really good photograph is a confluence of circumstances: the event, a photographer to see it, and a camera capable of capturing their full vision. If any one of those things is missing, at best all it can be is 'close, but no cigar.' Every photographer including Elsa Dorfman and Ernst Haas has lots of photographs that in their own opinion are 'close but no cigar.' They don't show them. That takes a great deal of discipline.

"I know I have been guilty many times of showing my 'nice picture, wrong camera' pictures—and sometimes I think it's OK because I'm showing them casually to friends and family. I'm grateful I had the iPhone with me. But I don't put them in my 'portfolio' so to speak.

"We also all live lives that aren't always about photography , so not always having the 'best' camera for the job at hand is perfectly understandable.

"Even the most conscious photographer will come across situations where a different camera or lens would have been better. It is part of the deal. You can't really worry about what you didn't get; it is much more fun to be happy about what you did get."

DZ: "Nothing makes you happy. Those are two fine photographs—well-seen, nicely composed. They show you really connecting with the world. So what if they can’t be printed 15 inches wide? You’ve got plenty of photographs that can be. A failure 'in an important sense'? Don’t define yourself down." 

Michael: "If I were a photographer who normally works with an APS-C Fuji and prints to 15 inches in the long dimension on a 13x19" sheet, I‘d always have the Fuji at hand.  😉😎  "

Mike replies: I was just thinking something similar myself. Maybe my disaffection is with myself, for not being more dedicated. Successful photographers are very dedicated. They work hard and long, and keep at it, and surmount all sorts of difficulties. They're dogged and determined. Meanwhile, I want to have had my good camera with me, but somehow not enough to...have my good camera with me. At some level it's my lack of dedication and commitment that's to blame.

Rant: Smartphone Contest

This post relates to the last one. In fact I almost put them together in one post, but I thought the point here might get lost if I buried it.

Disclaimer: This is none of my business. Anyone can have any sort of contest they want to, and judges can judge however they want to.

But: Somebody sent me a link to some of the iPhone Photography Awards winners, and, based on the sampling presented, at least, I really strongly disagree with the judges' approach.

See disclaimer.

Further qualifying/waffling (in advance of the big slam): of course, anyone can take any picture they want to with any camera they want to. If you want to use an iPhone for the same kind of pictures you'd take with an SLR—"across categories such as Nature, Abstract, City Life, Portrait and People" [groan]—knock yourself out.

However, I think that misses the point of what makes smartphone cameras unique and different as cameras, and it totally misses the character of what I think of as the best sort of smartphone pictures. The salient properties of smartphones are that most everybody—well, for some first-world definition of everybody—has one, everybody carries theirs most of the time, and they're so simple anybody can use one and anybody can get a well-exposed, color-balanced shot most of the time. Cropping is as simple as pinching and spreading two fingers. People tend to use them to take pictures of quotidian things in their humdrum lives, remarkable things they were unprepared to encounter, and pictures of casual but extraordinary intimacy that they have access to only because of who they are and their relationships to whomever or whatever they're photographing. Not to mention serendipitous accidents that happen totally by chance. (In cue sports when a ball goes in in some purely lucky fashion, it's called a "fluke."* Great smartphone shots sometimes are amazing flukes, pure and simple.)

So where is the best of that sort of thing? The sort of thing iPhones are peculiarly and specifically good at?

Not long ago a friend here showed me a wonderful snap of his twin grandsons, toddlers in diapers, who were energetically helping each other climb up into the family refrigerator after bedtime. By chance they were as well composed as putti in a Renaissance frieze**. That's one example of the kind of thing a non-photographer grandpa can get a picture of only because of his unique access and familial intimacy. That's the kind of picture a smartphone can enable that an outside photographer coming in all prepared with serious kit would never get.

I just do not need to see some conventional anodyne desiccated "Abstract" shot with an iPhone as opposed to being shot with an ordinary camera. Who needs it?

Go find some shots that only exist because smartphone cameras do, and then come back and see me.

That's my take.

But see disclaimer.  :-)

Mike

[How to put a picture in a comment]

*The snooker at the end is my favorite. (A snooker is when the object ball is blocked from the cue ball.)

**Pun intended.

Product o' the Week:

Fingertip Pulse Oximeter. The link is from TOP to Amazon. This relates to health, not photography—it replaces one of the advanced functions on the latest Apple Watch. Takes your pulse and measures your blood oxygen. For heart monitoring, checking for COVID (low blood oxygen is an early warning sign) and slow heartbeat. I'm learning to correlate the way I feel with the readings. Works with iOS and Android. Nifty little device, super easy to use, and cheap.

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

Andrew L: "I agree with you. I have long been an avid proponent of what could be called the snapshot, but maybe 'slice of life' or something would be a better moniker, since snapshots were traditionally very posed much of the time. But these images that capture life events in the making, people at their most unguarded, memorable glimpses, these are vastly more interesting than the competition winners, which are all aping traditional 'real camera' genres and stylings. If you're trying to get something that looks exactly like what would have been gotten much easier with a full-size camera, a high-quality lens, and fully available settings, you may be nothing more than a masochist!"

Peter Komar: "Hello Mike, I loved every single image in that link. I know I am not smart enough to get your point of your post but it succeeded in getting me to look at the images. I would love to have any single one of those images framed and hanging in my home. They are exceptional in my humble opinion. Do you appreciate any of them as simply good photography?"

Mike replies: Hi Peter. I would be the last one to tell you what to like! But what I personally miss in the group presented by the WaPo is emotion, whimsy, chance and happenstance, a sense of any personal meaning for the photographer, mystery and wonder...the "snapshot or slice of life" that Andrew L mentions. I guess my basic problem is that I really love realness and life and meaning and a sense of the poetic in photographs, and really great iPhone snapshots, while rare, can so easily have all these things. Maybe I should mount a protest exhibition and go find some smartphone photographs that I feel actually represent the best of the genre....

Bill Poole: "Hmm. The Post's editors must have debated using 'iPhone'—a registered Apple trademark—as opposed to 'smartphone,' which you used. Apple marketing may be pleased; Apple legal, perhaps less so."

Mike replies: I haven't been able to find out much about it, but it's not the Post's contest. The Post had nothing to do with it except that it's publicizing some of the winners. The contest is run by an outfit called "iPhone Photography Awards (IPPAWARDS)" at 401 E 76th Street 3W, New York City, New York, 10021, which, according to zoominfo, has 25 employees and annual revenues of $4 million. It charges entry fees of between $3.02 and $5.50 per image, and the prizes, per the IPPAWARDS.com website, are: 

18 Gold Bars :: The 1st place winner of the 18 categories will win a Gold Bar from the most recognizable private gold mint in the world.

18 Platinum Bars :: The 2nd and 3rd place winners of the 18 categories will win a Platinum Bar from the most recognizable private gold mint in the world.

[...] and the top 3 winners will receive a prize to be announced later.

The pictures on the IPPAWARDS website appear to show gold and platinum bars of 1g weight (right), although this is not stated in print that I can find. As of today, 1g of gold is worth $57.77, and 1g of platinum is worth $34.02. So that means the announced prizes are worth a maximum of $57.77 to one winner and $1,642.22 in toto (give or take, according to fluctuations in the cost of precious metals), or about the cost of one iPhone 12 Pro Max and one high-end iPhone SE (give or take, according to fluctuations in the cost of iPhones.)

Someone else can do the explaining of the differential between the above and revenues of $4 million, as I'm not a business-y type of guy.

Bruce Bordner: "Well, as soon as you see 'iPhone' it's obviously marketing. There was nothing wrong with any of the photos, but they didn't seem like 'winners' to me. I liked two. However I am very interested in the evolving low-light and other capabilities that phones have with multi-image processing. CPU-assisted photography is branching out, with instant effects and 'filters.' These things have a look of their own; let's see that. Don't just compete with DSLRs; show the way forward."

Steve C (partial comment): "I was also pleasantly surprised by a lot of the pictures in the competition, and agree with everyone who says who cares what kind of camera they were taken with...except that they did seem almost as if each one had been chosen based on its ability to [impress] the viewer that a phone could be used to produce that picture. And I think this kinda gets at where you're coming from, Mike. They're phone pictures that look like pictures you'd expect from bigger cameras. A good picture is a good picture, but different cameras do have a certain look or at least certain mode of operation—and you can work with or against that for various kinds of effect. This competition did feel like it was pictures taken against the mode that phone cameras are best known for. Mike, you're asking the question 'What if we went with their grain instead?' I think it's a really good question."

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "To say the least, I’m disappointed by your reaction. I’ve no energy to debate the matter. It just seems so self-evident that '…photography ain’t really about cameras.'"

Mike replies: But...it wasn't me who named it the iPhone Photography Awards! Seems like they did kinda make it about the cameras....

Stan B.: "Smartphone companies no longer have to convince anyone that their phones are capable image-makers for their everyday tasks and encounters. They've been busy selling that they are formidable cameras in their own right, capable of competing with 'real' cameras on their own terms—the underlying theme of that contest."

Rick: "I think I agree with you here; these photos are technically fine to good, but most of them don't exhibit the particular intimate spontaneity that phone cameras (and in the past, small point-and-shoots) are well equipped to capture. However, I think there's a couple of seemingly disparate threads that address this:

1.) Contests generally exist to make money. This one charges a fee. I won't guess at the motivations of those who started this competition, but it seems to me that the pool of potential customers—the competitors—for an iPhone-specific contest is much larger than the pool of customers for a contest targeting 'serious' photographers. More customers = more $$$. The judges are simply looking for technically good images that fit a reproducible aesthetic and have a universal appeal that they might be able to use to further promote the contest so the contest can continue to make more money.

2.) This contest promotes the idea that having a smartphone camera is just as good as having a 'real' camera because this idea can do nothing but popularize the contest and therefore make more money. People have ideas of what a good photo is; these ideas are informed by media consumption of all sorts. We can see how the winners match all sorts of cliches of what 'professional,' technically good images look like. People see these images, equate them with professional and serious photography, see they too have a phone, and feel then that they too can create such if they just have a phone with a decent camera. Then they enter the contest and make more money for the whoever is putting it on.

"This is a long-winded way of saying that—in my opinion—this contest trades on stereotypes of 'serious' photographic imagery to promote itself so that it may make more money for whoever is putting it on. The types of images that smartphones are uniquely positioned to be able to do—the ones you want to see—don't predictably fit the 'serious' aesthetic that the contest uses to appeal to iPhone users."

What Is an 'Art Photographer'?

Art photography, AKA fine art photography, is just a way of doing photography. It's either a mode of approach or a mode of practice. I'll start with the latter first because it's easy to describe.

Mode of practice: I'll just sort of sketch the standard traditional post-1970 convention; obviously there are many variations. An art photographer typically works on discrete projects, creating what are called "bodies of work." There are tandem goals: to "show" or to be collected. A show can be anything from inclusion in a juried group show or being displayed at a commercial art gallery, to a solo retrospective at a major museum (a "retrospective" attempts to represent the artist's entire career up to the time of the exhibition, and usually is reserved for mid-life or later). These accomplishments are typically listed chronologically, most recent first, in a curriculum vitae (CV) that also includes related accomplishments such as the photographer's academic education and photo-related awards and grants. To be collected is to have one of your prints purchased by a museum for its permanent collection, or by a private buyer known to be collecting along some sort of coherent guidelines or principles (i.e., not just someone who is buying a few pictures haphazardly as decor, for instance). These are also listed on the CV, although sometimes private collectors don't want to be listed by name.

Often, although not always, the art photographer will have a job that relates to her work, for instance teaching at the college level or higher. Many successful art photographers have what's called "gallery representation," meaning they have been selected to be among those artists with an ongoing exclusive or limited association with an art gallery. Finally, a crowning accomplishment for an art photographer is to have their work published in books, called monographs, produced by established publishing houses. A monograph is a book showcasing pictures by a single photographer. Really successful art photographers see their every project reach book form. The highest level of this—the apotheosis, you might say—might be Steidl attempting to publish virtually everything Robert Frank ever created.

Here's a typical exhibition record for a successful photographer, this one for British landscape photographer Jem Southam, maintained by his American gallery, Robert Mann.

Usually, many of these accomplishments support and amplify each other. In many cases photographers work very hard to add to their CVs, and looking at the categories exposes how their activities are focused. A thorough CV might include:

• Solo and two-person shows
• Selected group shows
• Awards and grants
• Collections (institutions or individuals who hold the photographer's work)
• Publications (meaning, of the photographer's own work)
• Selected bibliography (meaning, published writing about the photographer or her work)
• It also might or might not include a record of his or her education and a selected work history, depending on where the CV is presented and whether the education and work history is relevant.

Also, the bigger the name, the more selective the CV. Smaller, earlier accomplishments drop off the list as later, more impressive ones are added. Robert Adams's gallery lists just a few of his museum shows—but in formidable venues such as the Jeu de Paume, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Getty, and SF MoMA—as well as a longer list of articles about him in major arts and generalist publications. That's considered enough. A comprehensive CV for him would run to many pages with hundreds of entries.

Sometimes, photographers are so "big" that they dispense with the CV altogether—the implication being that they're so famous they don't need one. But you'd be surprised at how many photographers who we would consider to be well established are still marketing themselves and struggling for their share of the available oxygen.  

Speaking of which, note that one thing that wouldn't be included in a traditional art photography CV would be a client list and tearsheets, meaning published advertisements or other kinds of commercial photography clipped from paper publications and so forth. Although, at a very high level, top commercial photographers segue (easily or uneasily) into art-photographer mode, a harder trick for lesser names to pull off without detracting from their status on one side or the other of the divide. An example of this was the subject of one of my earliest published reviews, top fashion photographer Richard Avedon's art-photography project "In the American West." From the other direction, a number of well-known art photographers now and in the past are available to be hired for commercial work, but you'd never know it from their resumés.

It's worth noting that the career activities sketched above are changing, in ways that are not yet standardized, defined, or universally accepted. Younger and newer photographers and digital imagers are sidestepping the traditional gatekeepers (and also sometimes the hegemony of mainstream academic and critical taste) by exhibiting their work and becoming known on social media and by connecting with new audiences in innovative and unconventional ways. The young Moldovan-American photographer Masha Sardari, to name a single example, has 8.8k followers on Facebook.

Mode of approach: Of course, you can still be an "art photographer" even if you don't practice as one. What distinguishes an art photographer in that case?

Don't hold me to this, because definitions are fraught with peril, but, basically, any time you see a picture that's more about the photographer and what they're trying to say than it is a record or a document of what's pictured, you're in the neighborhood of art photography. Art photographers are self-directed, and their work is about feelings, ideas, and effects on the viewer more than it is about the subjects of the pictures. The difference can be very subtle, as in the distinction between an advertising photograph of the Marlboro Man and Richard Prince's copy of the same picture, or the workmanlike photographs in Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's Evidence transformed by being curated as, and presented as, art. Art photography is about expression. "Expressive photography" is almost a synonym.

But do note that in "self-directed," both parts of the term are important. Art photography isn't directed or dictated by others, and it might not serve an immediate purpose, but it absolutely is directed—in many cases highly so. Just because nobody tells a hobbyist what to do and he photographs whatever he pleases doesn't make him an art photographer. Look at the work of basically any famous art photographer you care to name and you'll see someone with a strong or even obsessive sense of what he or she is after, and, usually, highly developed and coherent strategies as to how to get there. Many of their aims, intentions, theories and philosophies, means of communication, and what they're trying to express can be radically different from those same things in other photographers, often highly distinctive just to their own work. Compare the work of Diane Arbus, say, with that of Bernd and Hilla Becher, for instance, or Julie Blackmon's work to that of Daido Moriyama. It's entirely impossible to mistake either for the other.

Julie Blackmon

Daido Moriayama

With different intents, means, and strategies, no one could
ever mistake one of these art photographers for the other.

What else it is
I'd also make the claim that art photography can depend on not only what the photographer is trying to say but how he or she says it, whether that means beautiful alternative processes such as Pt/Pd from LF negs, or intricate Photoshop creations, or photo-based mixed media. This claim is somewhat outside of current art establishment norms and links more to craft traditions, but hey, I've always lived and worked in the trenches, never in ivory towers; and I look at things primarily with sympathy to the concerns of the photographers.

In any case, "art photography" is a highly defined term, and very well understood among those to whom it's important (although such people do tend to like to play with the boundaries). It's no more pretentious to call someone an "art photographer" than it is to call someone a lawyer or a carpenter.

It would be great fun to run through a range of various kinds of art photography, with examples, but that's the kind of project a blog writer would never have time for...maybe a three-week to three-month writing project. Too much of a luxury for me.

Hope this helps, though, as far as it goes.

Mike

Book of interest* this week:

A Better Life for their Children by Andrew Feiler, University of Georgia Press, published last month. Read the description at the link—fascinating. It's the story of one of the earliest philanthropic collaborations between Jews and African Americans, one that drove dramatic improvement in black education. The story's told visually. *"Book of Interest" means I haven't seen it, but would like to.

The following image is also a link. You support TOP by buying through these portals.

Original contents copyright 2021 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:

Colin: "Fascinating! Thanks for this. I've often wondered about the term. Is it now slightly old-fashioned or still in regular use? Personally, I struggle with all such definitions as, of course, is the right of anyone making stuff. I've never liked the terms street, landscape, portrait, etc. I don't even much like the term photographer which I know is ridiculous because it's my primary tool and way of engaging with the world. No-one likes feeling boxed in, and language both defines and enables and limits and directs. The introductory text on my website keeps getting honed down and pared away; sometimes I wonder whether I'll end up with just 'My name is Colin Buttimer'!"

Joe: "Years ago I gave a lecture and slideshow to a group at the National Arts Club in Manhattan, talking about my work as a fine art photographer, and at the end I took questions. One very skeptical guy in the crowd, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, challenged me, 'What exactly is a fine art photographer?' Off the top of my head I said that's a photographer who shoots with the goal of having his prints hang on a wall. I thought to myself, that's probably the most concise possible definition. Next question."

Kenneth Tanaka: "As a nightcap to this topic I think some TOP readers might enjoy this tangentially-related new book by Andy Grundberg: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to the Digital Age. I've only recently started it myself but it's bound to alternately make you laugh and to probably anger you. Grundberg is a good, albeit rather dry, writer on photography in the art world with many seminal titles to his name."

Three Pictures Under Discussion

So let's look at a few actual pictures. These all come from the same sharing site and several are made with the same lens, but there's no need to read anything into that.

A digression first
Before I start, though, I just wanted to comment on one thing in passing: in looking for a deliberately soft lens that doesn't go for the analytical/clinical/forensic look, I happened across one of those very cheap third-party manual-focus lenses (I sometimes jokingly call them "fourth-party" lenses—you know, sorta like "off-off-Broadway"—but nobody gets the joke). It only costs around a hundred bucks, and it looks like it might be quite nice for intentionally less-than-sharp portraits.

So then what does the first review say? "This lens is total crap! It's soft at every aperture!"

...Which seems unfair. He's criticizing the fact that the $100 lens he bought is not the same as a $500 lens. Whose fault is that though? His, if you ask me. If you insist on a lens that renders like a $477 Nikkor, then save your money for a bleepin' $477 Nikkor, ya broke-ass, no-cash-having jamoke. Leave the soft $99 lenses to those who are looking for soft lenses.

There, now I feel better.

Picture 1
Okay, now on to the pictures. When you open this first picture, just look at it sitting a normal distance from your screen, without being critical. Pretty standard, right? And looks okay. At a glance, you know what's going on: sharp, in-focus blooms in front, fading into progressively more blur in the distance. So now take a look.

But zoom in by clicking to enlarge it two times, and we find to our astonishment that virtually nothing in the picture is sharp, save a few leaves on the left-hand side of the frame. None of the blooms are sharp, not even the one at the lower right which seemed like the prime candidate at first glance.

But remember 3R prints, the once-ubiquitous standard so-called "drugstore prints" that were 3.5x5 inches in size? This would look fine at that size. Those 3R prints were optimized to mask slop and imprecision of many kinds. It was a system designed to routinely make silk purses out of sow's ears.

Picture 2
Or take this one. Now, in my humble opinion at least, this portrait (which gets the important things right, the expressions and what it implies of the relationships—and it's a nice enough composition, too) has a few more pressing technical problems, specifically a tonal scale that's way too short and what looks to me like a virtual green filter (you can see it in the gums, which should be a much lighter tone that doesn't draw attention, and that characteristic mottling of the skin tones. Light skin often has slight reddish mottling which is nearly invisible, or rather inoffensive, to our eyes, but it's highlighted in an unpleasant way when you make the reddishness darker with a green filter). But again, if you look at it uncritically at the original screen size, it looks fine. But, enlarged, the boy (middle figure) is clearly less sharp than the other two and the face on the left is less sharp than the face on the right.

When I was a custom printmaker (I always said "custom printer" but that was before a "printer" was a black plastic box made by Epson), I would often call clients to inform them that a certain negative would only go to a certain size. My clients were mostly photographers, and they would almost always assume that I was talking about technical parameters. They might reply something like "I've enlarged Tri-X negs from the Hassie to 16x20 before and they looked fine." Sometimes I was indeed talking about technical parameters, such as the size at which a slight touch of camera shake became too obvious. But I was usually using my judgement about the size at which that specific image would most effective. For example, if I were printing this picture, I might suggest a smaller size as the max, to avoid drawing attention to the disparity of sharpness between the three faces. Printing it overlarge would just draw the viewer's attention to the differences in sharpness, and those differences are absolutely immaterial to the picture.

I might even cheat a bit and actually soften the sharpness of the face on the right. Have to be careful with that, though, because that would never be something you want to call attention to.

Picture 3
It's actually not easy for non-specialists to detect very small amounts of blur, whether it's out-of-D-o-F blur or camera shake. I'm more sensitive to it than the average bear*, but I can't claim to be infallible. Sometimes you almost intuit its presence depending on how large you're seeing the image. On this third and final picture, there are three women dressed in blue T-shirts front and center. Look at the middle woman first when you open the link.

She looks fine, right? Comma, at that size. But, again, after you enlarge this and look critically, you can see more easily that she's actually not at the plane of best focus. The woman on the left, with the tiara and the portrait of the photographer in her purple sunglasses, is the most sharp. The smiling woman on the right is now clearly out of the depth of field, even though she's in the D-o-F at the smaller size.

I would probably have simply placed the focus on the middle of the three women and stopped down one more stop. That can sometimes be a bit risky, of course, and I'm betting you know why: because if you misjudge and get the woman closest to the lens—the woman with the tiara—a little too soft, you draw too much attention to that. (As a general rule, subjects closest to camera position need to be sharp, and it can be distracting if they aren't.) Hence the extra stop of increased D-o-F, as a safety margin...assuming I'd have the presence of mind to adjust in the heat of the moment, which I probably wouldn't. But those are the things that experience teaches you to judge.

(Oh, and that "portrait" of the photographer in the sunglasses? I'm betting it's the other photographer. It seems to me that the three ladies are looking at someone taking their picture, and it's not the guy who took this picture. Because of the angle of their heads, I'm betting we're seeing the other photographer in the sunglasses, the one who they're looking at. Just my interpretation.)

How to evaluate your own pictures
So how can you start to get a sense for the optimum sizes of your own pictures? There's actually a pretty easy way, although it takes a fair amount of experience. Assuming your eyesight works for the distances involved and your room is big enough, just fill your editing monitor with the image, and stand up and back away from the monitor! As you move farther and farther away, notice how the image subtly changes and how the level of visible detail gradually diminishes. If you study what you see and learn to "feel into" the image and how it works, you'll start to get a sense of how much each image can take of enlargement, and the way different degrees of revealed detail "work" for that particular picture.

As mentioned above, though, I'd encourage you not to look at mere technical parameters, but rather to look at how the specific image is functioning in terms of content and meaning. All of what we've been discussing is a judgement call, a balancing act, based on what in the picture you want to call attention to, and what would be a distraction that would detract from the picture if it is spotlighted too much. This is influenced by technical parameters but is not a technical issue at root. It depends on each specific picture, and how you want that picture to work.

Mike
(Thanks to Junpei, Jim, and Glen, the photographers of these three pictures)

Ed. note: The second link was missing when I posted this. Gah. Sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

*That's actually a Yogi Bear reference, and if you even recognize that name you're showing your age as badly as I am.  :-)  Five life points if you know who the cartoon bear was named for.

ADDENDUM: Here's some truly trivial trivia for ya. Do you know why Yogi Bear had a collar?

The answer, says Wikipedia, is because it allowed animators to redraw only his head when he was seen speaking, and not have to redraw his entire body. This was a cost-cutting measure by Hanna-Barbera, the studio that produced the cartoon. It reduced the number of frames needed for a cartoon from ~14,000 to ~2,000.

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Featured Comments from:

Gavin Paterson: "It’s Yogi Berra, baseball player, but I do have an advantage, as I worked for the Australian subsidiary of Hanna Barbera in the '80s, when we still produced animated series for USA networks, such as the Flintstones, Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear, and the Jetsons—now that’s showing my age!"

V.I. Voltz: "Yogi Bear was named after Yogi 'You can observe a lot by just watching' Berra. My kids watch YouTube; we had to make do with cartoons, which, at first, were in black-and-white."

Rob de Loe: "You can do as many of these posts as you like...."

hugh crawford: "I got the bear reference, but you missed the opportunity to call out your Boo Boo. Did you know there is a Daws Butler stream on Spotify?"

Mike replies: I never knew his name before! Thanks for that.

w98abee: "The Yogi Bear reference was like deja vu all over again."

Guy Couture: "Thanks, Mike, for this clear explanation. I think it's the first time I see it explained this way. No doubt you're a good teacher."

Mike replies: Gracias Guy.

Jim Kofron: "Photography is 90% mental, the other half is camera gear...."

Steve Renwick: "The bear's namesake might have said, 'Most pictures are not as sharp as they look.'"

Lawrence Huggins: "Why would you bother to devote any of your time to writing about three such unexceptional photos?"

Mike replies: Because they are...

Cary Talbot: "Nice examples to illustrate your point, Mike. Reminds me of something I read in a photography book by Scott Kelby. He was stressing the importance of zooming in on your image when 'chimping' it on the back LCD to make sure you nailed the focus because 'everything looks tack sharp on a 2.5-inch screen.'"

Mike replies: Yes. And, in like wise, just as with the old 3R prints the small size of a smartphone-as-display masks a multitude of sins.

John Robison: "Ah yes, 3R prints. I well remember an ad by Keystone Camera for a cheap 126 camera, comparing results from it to a Hasselblad. Of course, in a magazine reproduction at a 3R print size, there didn’t appear much difference.

"When working at a camera store, more than once customers would bring in a strip of 35mm negatives with the sample 3R print and ask for a 8x10 enlargement. Grabbing a 10x magnifier would often reveal that the neg was just not up to that degree of enlargement. It was surprisingly hard to explain this to customers. Some would insist that we send in their order anyway. Once a year, at inventory time we always had a box of enlargements refused by customers that were written off and discarded.

Mike replies: They never want to take your word for it, do they?

Blur Never Sleeps

Internet, that big fellow with the scattered brain, seems to think that bokeh or out-of-D-o-F-blur is a fixed property of a lens. It's not.

For starters, the higher the resolution of your system (lens + sensor + processing treatment + presentation method), the more will be out of focus and the less will be sharp.

Let's say these lines represent distances from camera position, which is off to the right somewhere. You are precisely focused on the "10" in this graph, meaning that's the plane of best focus. The numbers stand for higher or lower resolution.

Camera position —>

|                |             |         |      |    |    |       |         |            |            |    

5               6            7        8      9  10  9      8         7           6           5

If you're using equipment and methods capable of a resolution we're calling "10," then you can distinguish between 10 and 9, and the 9 from the 8 and so on. Only a small area around the 10 looks sharpest, and the 9 and 8 look progressively less so.

Now just imagine you're using a system that's only capable of a maximum of "8" as its highest resolution. Then, the area of highest resolution in your picture now appears to have expanded—it goes all the way from the one 8 to the other 8, because you can't distinguish any difference in blurriness vs. clarity within that distance range. Furthermore, the 7 distance is now closer to the zone of best focus, so there is more more depth of field. Sounds strange, but the lower the system resolution, the more depth of field there is in the picture.

So the higher your system resolution, the less will be in focus for any given aperture.

This would predict that photographers should be using smaller apertures now. But they're not. Encouraged by advancements in optics that enable high center sharpness at wide apertures, plus the current fashion of photographing everything with the lens wide open no matter how it looks, photographers tend to use wider apertures now rather than smaller ones.

One oddity this has led to is that photographers who are trying to make an isolated central subject "pop" off the background are going too far and not getting all of the central object in focus. So you'll see things like a single flower against a blurry green background, but the flower petals closest to and farthest from camera position will be slightly blurry, which reduces that sense of "popping" off the background. Oh well: having as much as possible out of the D-o-F has evolved into a status marker, showing that the photographer can afford big sensors and fast lenses. Photographers even say this in words sometimes, protesting that they're not going to shoot something at ƒ/2.8 when they paid for an ƒ/1.2 lens.

Unwelcome comments
Additionally, system resolution is highly dependent on another factor that has nothing to do with the lens, aperture, focus distance, and the sensor and its resolution: namely, degree of enlargement, or how many pixels in the file you're using to look at the image. I'm sure we've all had the experience of looking at an image small on our screens and thinking it's fine, only to enlarge it to 100% and realize that more areas than we first thought are unsharp.

This is not merely an illusion. Throw away enough pixels, and you're effectively reducing the system resolution; and as you do, more and more distances from camera position will be in the zone of best focus. In the terms of our illustration above, let's say you reduce the system resolution to what we're calling "7." What that means is that everything in the picture with a resolution of 7 or above will appear to be at peak sharpness. It's not just the peak sharpness that you can see; it's the peak sharpness that exists in the small rendering.

There was a time when most digital cameras did not have enough pixels—I can recall when "a million pixels" was considered an impressive landmark of progress. Now, though, almost all digital cameras have an excess number of pixels for common uses. So you can demonstrate the above claim for yourself. Simply find a large file that has lots of subtle differences in focus when viewed at 100% (closeups of flowering plants with multiple blossoms work nicely for this) and reduce its size progressively. As it gets smaller, differences in degree of blur you know are there will be masked, and more and more will look "sharp." 

At some sharing sites you can now enlarge posted pictures so much that it's easier to see when the photographer has missed focus or used too large an aperture. Sometimes it makes me wonder if some photographers now even recognize what slight misfocus looks like! I saw a picture the other day—a full length portrait of a woman on a beach—where the entire figure was subtly out of focus. Looking at the sand she stood on, it was clear that the plane of focus had been placed about two feet beyond the woman, and, then, such a large aperture had been used that the woman's face and body were not within the depth-of-field.  At smaller sizes, though (such that the entire vertical frame could be seen at once on my 27" monitor), the picture looked fine. Only when it was enlarged was the incorrect focus revealed.

Many is the time I'm tempted to leave a comment on some poor stranger's picture saying, "you do realize this entire picture is out of focus, right?" But "restraint of tongue and pen" is a helpful maxim to live by. He or she doesn't want to encounter that among all the other comments saying "fantastic capture" and "great pic."

It's tempting to make blanket condemnations that begin with "photographers these days...," but it's easy to be critical. Let's be real: photographers have struggled with focus and D-o-F in every era. It's one of the basic issues of what we call technique. Maybe it's easier to see these days, but it's always been an issue we have to contend with, and one of the choices we have to try to control.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Mani Sitaraman: "Re: 'Internet, that big fellow with the scattered brain, seems to think that bokeh or out-of-D-o-F-blur is a fixed property of a lens. It's not.' The internet has created a large circle of confusion about the topic. Information online about depth of field tends to be unfocused and so, details are imprecise."

John Hufnagel: "A digital discussion of the 'circles of confusion' concepts I learned back in the mid 1970s. I've tried to explain this on various internet forums and mostly failed; no one is as blind as one who refuses to see."

Mike replies: I actually refuse to discuss it most of the time. For some reason, out on the wilds of the internet, those who are armed with partial knowledge, part of which is untrue, act like attack dogs on this subject. The reason is probably that there are a number of coherent-seeming misconceptions out there which feel persuasive to people even though they are wrong.

Plus, once you hash through the subject and exhaust yourself bringing the crowd up to speed, that crowd dissipates and a new one forms, a new one as contentious and belligerent as the first crowd was at first. It's neverending toil, like the rock of Sisyphos.

Bill Tyler: "The idea of low resolution yielding large depth of field reaches its ultimate in a pinhole camera. Everything is equally out of focus. And it's an interesting look, for some subjects."

David W Scott (partial comment): "I have learned not to judge other’s photos by close inspection. That lesson came from attending an exhibition of large prints by Yousuf Karsh. Standing nose to nose with Ernest Hemingway (one of Karsh’s most celebrated portraits) you could immediately see that Hemingway’s eyes were out of focus—the actual plane of sharpness was somewhere forward in Hemingway’s beard and his fisherman’s sweater. It spoiled the picture for a moment...and then I backed away from the print and let myself enjoy it!"

Mike replies: I've actually used that very picture as a teaching tool on this subject. There are also several H.C.-B. shots where the main subject is subtly out of focus which made for good discussion.

Gaspar Heurtley: "On one hand, you’re absolutely right. Period. On the other, about the picture of the woman on the beach: maybe the photographer knew that the picture was slightly out of focus but posted it anyway because he/she knew that no one is ever going to see it at 100% (let alone print it). I suspect many pro photographers share their work exclusively online and have learned that they can widen the margin of error, based on where their target audience is going to see the pictures (mostly cell phone screens and poorly calibrated monitors)."

Mike replies: Yes, and if Henri Cartier-Bresson can do it, why can't she?

Open Mike (a day late): The Way Photographs Should Look

This is an awkward subject, and I'm sure my attempts to verbalize it will be awkward and perhaps inept. So please forgive me if my words are insufficient. I'm hoping I'll manage to communicate anyway—that you'll "know what I mean."

All photographs translate the visual world we see with our eyes into some form or other. All of these forms have characteristics. With experience, we learn what characteristics belong to which equipment, techniques, and tastes.

So my question is, do you have a favorite kind of way that you prefer photographs to look?

I'm not talking about a litmus test...I'm not suggesting if you like one look it means you can't appreciate many others. I assume that the more photographs you look at knowledgeably, the more catholic (small c) your taste is. I'm not accusing anyone of being narrow-minded.

Years ago I had an exchange with Howard Bond, an underappreciated large format photographer. He, of course, has a broad ability to appreciate many types of photographs. I, too, have a broad ability to appreciate many types of photographs. But where our discussion of formats seemed to be leading, in the end, was that I had a certain kind of photograph I liked to see best—a 35mm B&W negative from fast film (i.e., Tri-X, HP-5+) printed full-frame on something close to 11x14 paper—and he had a certain kind of photograph he liked to see best—an 8x10 negative, also B&W, printed larger but still mid-sized I'd call it, with Zone System technique. (See Howard and get an idea of the print sizes he likes at this link).

I don't think it's a bad idea to have a sort of prototype of the way you like best to see the visual world translated by the camera. We have an appetite for these things, because when we see what we like best it actually creates a sort of visceral satisfaction for that goes beyond the merely intellectual—we can get a sort of "charge" out of it, a sense or even a sensation of gratification. The reason it's not a bad idea is that it's really unavoidable for many artists. It's an inherent part of expressing what we call a "style." You'd never mistake an Edward Weston print for a Eugene Richards print, or an Uta Barth for a Gregory Crewdson.

Some people have more than one style they work in. Carl Weese is a dedicated platinum/palladium printer but he makes other kinds of work as well. And I suppose some people don't have any preference at all...although I would have to confess to being slightly biased against such claims. Sort of like when someone says "I like all kinds of music!" (That post was one of the most fun to write of all the posts and articles I've ever written.)

And some people change, of course. Ctein used to "translate" his visual world into 16x20" dye transfer prints. Now he makes somewhat smaller color inkjet prints from Micro 4/3 files. (Do you subscribe to "Ctein's Occasional Newsletter"? You should; it's very non-intrusive and often entertaining and informative.)

However, I'm having a bit of a mini-crisis here...because I have to admit, my old allegiance to my "Photo 101" style as I called it—B&W Tri-X, printed with a filed-out negative carrier on an 11x14 sheet—is just that now, "old." I don't practice it any more and haven't for years. So what's my preferred type of photograph now? Hmm, I might have to do some soul-searching myself!

Mike

Book o' this Week:
Black in White America 1963–1965 by Leonard Freed, a new reprint of this classic from the Civil Rights era. I got to meet Leonard Freed once. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

Original contents copyright 2021 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:

Grant (partial comment): "Like most people, I like all photos and all music except for the stuff I don't like."

Mike replies: Great line. I love it.

Geoff Wittig: "Another thought-provoking post, Mike. I rarely think much about what kind of photograph and what print size and presentation I like. Which already betrays a range of assumptions on my part; it’s the photographic print I love. Book reproductions are substitutes of varying degrees of sufficiency, but never as good. And on-screen representation is a completely tangential experience to me.

"I was reared on Ansel Adams, and I still see a good black-and-white photograph as a relatively large print with a tonal distribution very deliberately chosen for artistic effect. One that guides the eye and takes me on a satisfying journey while still demonstrating reverence for the natural world. So I’ve been drawn to beautiful prints by Clyde Butcher, John Sexton, Howard Bond and Roman Loranc. Michael Kenna’s in there too. I respect the work of documentary photographers like Eugene Richards and Larry Towell, but they’re not quite my thing. When I look at Koudelka’s work in Gypsies [link —Ed.] I find his stark tonalities like nails on a chalkboard. They look all wrong to me.

"I also realize I have a very narrow view of what a color photograph should look like. I love large, carefully crafted prints with color that can be subtle or rich, but never gaudy. Robert Glenn Ketchum’s early work, (his newer stuff is a bit too garish) Edward Burtynsky’s prints, Charles Cramer’s thoughtful inkjet prints and Christopher Burkett’s exquisite Cibachromes are my touchstones. I also love the unsentimental yet affectionate photographs of the built environment by Jeff Brouws; hard to describe their unpretentious beauty. Next to his work, Stephen Shore’s strikes me as smug and sarcastic.

"So I guess that identifies my organizing principle for how a photograph should look. I need to see and feel the photographer’s interest in, and perhaps love for, the subject. A carefully made print crafted with intention gives me that."

Dillan K: "Speaking of 'the way photographs should look,' thanks for bringing Howard Bond to my attention. I like the way his photographs look! I'm sorry that I didn't know about him earlier. I've lived a sheltered life. I appreciate it when you broaden my knowledge of accomplished photographers."

Photographic Value System

Who is Bunny and what killed him or her?
A long time ago, some literary friends were arguing about what allows readers to get "pulled into" a book of fiction. They were arguing nuts and bolts—one was claiming that Hemingway's simple, declarative style allowed more readers "a way in" to the stories he was telling, because more of them could understand him easily. Here's an example of his prose, in case you've heard of him but never read him:

Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited. He kicked his suitcase under the table to be sure it was there. Perhaps it would be better to put it back under the seat, against the wall. He leaned down and shoved it under. Then he leaned forward on the table and went to sleep.

That's from the short story "The Undefeated."

This was leading to some heated words about "writing down" to the audience and so forth, probably from people who were tired of defending their own more ornate or involved writing styles.

I thought about it, and I decided that what draws me into reading has nothing to do with nuts and bolts at all. It's in wanting to know what happens. What's called "the hook." As soon as I get the hook, that's when the word-by-word, line-by-line reading vanishes for me and I start speeding through it, propelled forward. Here's the beginning of Donna Tartt's The Secret History:

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

Who is Bunny and what killed him or her? Who's the us of "our"? Are they in the mountains? Is Bunny dead and buried or dead and unburied? The first thing that springs to mind is a plane crash leading to a survivalist situation, but at the same time I know that might be wrong. I want to find out all these things. Prose style be damned, I would read on.

(It's a famous one-line opener.)

Intrusions
My wonderful former psychoanalyst, Karen Maroda, who has written many books in her field, feels that everyone has a basic value system. (I got the idea she also feels that many people aren't aware of what their own basic value systems are. But I mustn't put words in her mouth.) My basic value system is essentially psychological—I always return to psychological explanations by way of first principles, as my way of explaining the world to myself.

Photographically speaking—to hop to safe ground—I do have a pretty distinct value system. I like pictures that get me to engage with the subject. For all my apparent preoccupation with it, technique is a means to an end for me. It's secondary, not primary. Like prose style. So I like technique that doesn't call attention to itself—more specifically, I dislike technique that pulls my attention away from engagement with the picture.

I'd like to discuss two very different photographs, both of black females, one a young woman, one a girl. Here's Scottish photographer Leanne Boulton's "Silver Lining." It's pretty simple, straightforward picture, a portrait in the genre of "people on the street," and could be effective in context. Here the young woman is girded against accidental contact in many ways: sunglasses hide her eyes, earbuds allow her to either not hear or pretend not to hear, her hair is hidden by a cap, her hands turn inward and seem to literally hold her own torso, her expression is blank in the mask we adopt in public that says don't mess with me, nothing to see here, pass on by. Even in the angle of her head we get the idea she's not looking at us—that is, at the camera—from behind those sunglasses.

Of course, all this could be exactly what the photographer is examining and wants us to look at. I'm not criticizing.

Airless
Understand, I'm not the authority over anyone but me, but I have a right to encounter photographs as myself and to honor my own reaction—one of my basic principles is embodied in a phrase I wrote decades ago, "I have a right to respond to art as if my encounter with it matters to me." So what I say only applies to me and my own reaction.

However, everything about the technique here, to my eye, intrudes. The tonal scale has that distinctly depressed midrange so common in digital. I call it (as shorthand) "airlessness"—that is, it fights against showing us a sense of atmosphere. It does this by making all the middle values darker. The light ends up not looking real—the light that might have been there got sucked out of the scene by the oppressive tonality. I can't tell what time of day it is except from clues. The background, though readable as context, is unpleasant because the bokeh is jangly and jumpy. It gives the picture an unsettled feeling. Detail is way too hyped-up—back in the days when I hung around with a lot of wannabe Ansels, a friend privately called the style "zippy-zappy zoner sh*t," and the phrase has always stuck in my mind as something to avoid. Of course we're long past the popularity of the Zone System, but Photoshop makes similar looks easier and faster to achieve. In this case the zippy-zappy look draws my eye to meaningless details, such as the fake-fur lining of the coat, the fabric lanyard around her neck that holds her her ID and the words on it. (Have you ever been sitting somewhere bored and find yourself reading gratuitous words that happen to be visible nearby, just because they're there? It always gives me the feeling that I've allowed a particle of junk to enter my brain against my will.) The zipper, the half-seen necklace, all the "cranial accessories" as Mitch Hedberg once called all the stuff we wear on our head. Even the photographer, with her title, seems to be drawing our attention to...the coat lining, which is emphasized by the excessive local contrast.

Or maybe the title's just a handy label. I'm not interested in the coat lining, in any event.

Just for fun I processed the JPEG as if it were my picture, and I tried to de-emphasize the coat lining. (I tried to contact the photographer for permission to show you my version, but she—perhaps wisely!—didn't reply. She's a good photographer, by the way—see for instance her 16 Questions, about a color photograph that's quite successful. She can't help it if one grumpy old former custom printer over in America happens to be allergic to the B&W technique she's chosen. Can't please all the people, etc.)

All of this might be intentional on the part of the photographer, but it all colludes in making the photograph unappealing for me. YMMV.

Natural
Now compare that with an even simpler shot—formally just a headshot—"Michelle [Happiness]" by Stefan Elf, who might be from Sweden given what little I can find about him. (His website doesn't load for me.) His Photostream shows a much less accomplished and less directed photographer. Leanne Boulton is much more intentional and directed. But as a single image this picture is coherent, integrated, and has much more life. It seems to show a real moment. It engages me in that it seems like a particular moment, and it makes me want to know more about what surrounds this moment—who is this, why is she happy, who is she responding to, what's outside the frame?

I'd be willing to believe that if there were eight frames shot, this one was the one, and none of the others would do.

Technically nothing distracts. There's nothing rote or static in the pose. I like the slight awkwardness—here the slightly off-kilter composition just adds to the sense of immediacy, of the picture's individuality if you will. I don't get the sense that this is just one more exposure among a bunch of similar but slightly different exposures. In "Silver Lining" all I sense is the transaction—"May I take your photo?" "What would you like me to do?" "Just stand there"—followed by six or eight frames from which none truly stands out. Can we help but note that all the young woman's efforts to go unnoticed have gotten her noticed? The best-laid schemes. (I'm being too hard on "Silver Lining," you perceive, just to make my points.) In "Michelle [Happiness]" nothing about the technique intrudes. The depth of field is fine, the tonality is natural, the light is plain, detail is neither unpleasantly etched nor ostentatiously suppressed. To me there's an effortless sense of wholeness about it.

That sense of naturalness, coherence, and integrity is what I like in photographic technique. It should be like ballet dancing—all the effort put into it is only meaningful if the result looks effortless.

I'm me and you aren't
Anyway, this whole thing is just to say—I'm only going by my own value system. Yours might vary considerably. You might hang out with different friends who value different things. You might think every picture is all about how exaggerated and vivid the detail can be, and you might not even think about representing natural light at all—the idea might not even be on your radar. You might be a B&W-hater (they're out there in digiworld.) I don't know. My values aren't the only values, they're just mine.

We are who we are, as viewers as in every other sense.

Mike

P.S. I believe I have the right, according to Fair Use, to publish both of these pictures here—Fair Use specifically allows for works to be quoted for the purpose of commenting on or criticizing them, and that's surely what I've just done. But on the other hand, we're a photography website, and we support photographers, so I like to get permission. I often do receive permission when I try to contact people through Flickr or other sharing sites—just not this month. And sometimes not even next month. Once, a guy took eight months to respond. By then I had long forgotten why I wanted to show his picture in the first place. It's awkward, in other words.

Book o' this Week:
Black in White America 1963–1965 by Leonard Freed, a new reprint of this classic from the Civil Rights era. I got to meet Leonard Freed once. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

Original contents copyright 2021 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:

John Camp: "As you said, YMMV, and mine does. I think the first shot is terrific, and I'm more interested in this kind of work than any other kind of photography, except perhaps some portraiture. That first shot says everything about the world we now inhabit, and it's like a latter-day riff on Edward Hopper—this young woman is as isolated and alone as Hopper's characters, while at the same time she's passing through a busy world. The earbud and sunglasses and hand gestures are classic; she's in her own world, tight, defensive, possibly hostile. The second shot, I would treasure if it were a shot of my daughter. But it's not, so to me, it's a nice snapshot. In cases like this I think YMMV should be changed to EMMV—everybody's mileage may vary."

Chris Hunt: "Question I asked myself while reading this post—so how would you feel about the two photos if the styles were swapped?"

Mike replies: Well, the tl;dr version of this post is that the technique of "Silver Lining" impedes or obstructs my ability to contemplate and appreciate what it shows, while in the second picture the technique seems (to me) to get out of the way. So if the styles were reversed I'd like the first better and the second worse.

In fact, after reading your question, I imagined the second photo with the look of the first imposed on it, and even though I was just seeing it in my mind's eye it actually kind of upset me a little.  :-)

Dave (partial comment): "Re: Who is Bunny and what killed him or her? I prefer the 'Bunny' prose to Hemingway's. Hemingway's example is too full of sentences with nearly the same length. It's just harder to get into a flow when I'm always encountering a period to stop my progress. Additionally, Hemingway has harsher words (hot, Zurito, kicked) which makes it seem more staccato sounding than the 'Bunny' excerpt.

"Re: Intrusions, the photo example with the harsh look surprised me. I had read the entire post before clicking on the photo links. Most digital photos on the web must have that look because I had to think about the points you made before realizing that indeed parts of the photo really were too sharp. The second photo is simply terrific. Great work by Stefan Elf!"