... And Also

I seem to have an ever expanding list of websites that I want to point out or comment upon, and I keep putting off doing it because I try to do the collections all at once, or in a theme, but I think I need to just start doling these out as I get it done.

There is, for example, this warning about the inevitable creative and work plateau everyone will face.

"Society has a funny way of reminding people that there’s this order for things, and at this point your Facebook wall is exploding with friends’ puppies and houses and engagements and marriages and babies. And you start asking yourself… what have you done with your life?!"

Next, I'm always amused by and interested in a blog post that gets your attention cleverly, and delivers by being more clever, like this one.

"Let’s do some math," Etienne Schottel writes.  "What can we get for $2,800 (which is quite something I must admit)?

"A) The Sony RX1 killer-camera-that-fits-in-your-pocket-alas-not-in-my-French-undersized-pockets. ...

"B) A Leica lens which is so sharp that it is considered as a weapon in some countries.

"C) A one-year flight ticket which will offer you so many good moments and pictures that you’ll never regret it.

"Yes, my answer is C. This is the price of the ticket (for one person) we paid for our one-year trip. But, you can change the amount for something smaller, even $300 my answer remains “C”. I will always prefer using my money to go somewhere I don’t know that any new camera and that is my Grail. Period (I love them)."

Good point, in its way.  As I've blogged a couple times before, and mentioned on The Guy with the Leica,  truly the best camera is the one you have, and having something decent while in an interesting place is a good combination.

But maybe not a great one.

I think he misses two points: That the camera used can affect the picture, and there are pictures everywhere.

I have blogged before about my love of the Leica M and in particular the ones I own.  As I've said before, the M style camera just makes me see things differently, basically with more awareness.  Another, more esoteric way I have put it: The M makes it clear to me what a 50mm lens is for.

However, what's more important, I think, is the idea of putting your head in the right place to shoot.  Why is it that things are more interesting and somehow more visual when you're traveling?  Why is a small Chinese child in Beijing photogenic, but your neighbor's toddler cute, but just another kid?  Try looking at your world as a visitor.  It might actually surprise you what you now see and what becomes interesting.

Finally, there's this cri de coeur by a wedding photographer.   She relates how she made herself crazy looking at other photographers' work, but then just stopped cold turkey.

"Instead? I read books. I listened to music. I drank whiskey with my friends and had impromptu dance parties in my living room. I binge-watched TV shows and ate entire boxes of doughnuts. I took road trips, stayed up all night, slept in all day. I snuggled my husband, my sisters, my nephews. I wrote and drew and sewed and took pictures with my iPhone — my iPhone, for heaven’s sake!
 
"In short: I lived. And I discovered that if I would just live my life and be a person, if I would commune with other people who live and love and ARE, inspiration grew. It blossomed out of me like herbs in the windowsill, taller overnight, greener by the hour.
 
"And instead of incessantly reminding myself of all the ways in which I fell short — the money I wasn’t earning, the gear I wasn’t acquiring, the pictures I didn’t even know how to make — I stepped back and saw that wedding photography — this beautiful, terrible, exhausting, wonderful thing I called my job — was really a direct path to communion."

It's a good lesson, I think, for all of us.  We became what we are, and became good at what we do,  not because of imitation, but because of us and all the learning and studying and various influences of all the things that interest us.  You don't have to "find your joy," it's right there, where you put it down.

The NEW Leica!

The new Leica T System

Normally, no one is happier than I when the words "new" and "Leica" come in the same sentence, and I understand that when you make a premium product (eg: expensive ... well, incredibly expensive), you need to reach out to as many customers in that limited demographic as you can, but lately I've had a stunning disinterest in some new releases from my favorite camera company.

First, it was the X Vario, and now the new T System.  It was announced in one of the big events Leica has specialized in since its glorious 9/9/09 revelation of the M9 -- a camera I would most definitely be interested in.  People are acting very excited, despite Leica releasing what PetaPixel called "The Most Boring Ad You've Ever Seen."

I still have to drill down into the technical stuff to better understand what this is, but from the company descriptions and stories about it I have glanced through, it may yet be another Leica that's not for me.

I recoil at the happy snap look, despite the Rolex-like, carved-from-a-solid-metal-block construction.  Maybe I should be more open minded, not judging the camera just by its appearance (and Leica's regularly pairing with designers from Audi or Volkswagen or some fashion house; what does that have to do with photography?)

But here's the thing: what I love about the M system is the way it makes me think and act and See when I go to make a picture.  I explain to people that those cameras make me look at the world in a different way, and approach it to make a picture in a different way.  You can't just hand me some rich man's tourist toy and expect the same reaction.

And in Yet Other Blogs ...

In a blog on one of my favorite pet peeves -- wanted something for nothing, and failing to value the work that goes into making something seem effortless -- there is the British musician Whitey, who reacted unhappily to a request to use his music for free.  Frankly, I do love his reaction, even as it echoes several other similar rants -- one most notably by Harlan Ellison.

His epilog, however, is interesting:

I don’t want payment for everything. I don’t even care that much about money, I give away my music all the time. You and I live in a society where filesharing is the norm. I’m fine with that.

But i don’t give my music away to large, affluent companies who wish to use it to make themselves more money. Who can afford to pay, but who smell the filesharing buffet and want to grab themselves a free plate. That is a different scenario.

Now, I'm no absolutist about this.  I've often said that if, for example, there's a cause you're really into, and you want to contribute your work, more power to you.  I've done it and will happily do it again.  But, like Whitey and so many others, I am sick to death with people thinking that creative work -- work made up not of some tangible raw product, but years of hard training and experience -- like photography is something anyone can do and should just be given for free, especially to a commercial enterprise.

However, I do back away from the faint smell of crypto-socialism there.  I'm sure he's proud of that, and more power to him -- that's his right -- but the fact that it's a large, affluent company as opposed to a small company or even a charity is, to me, only a question of rates and usage.  As someone once told me years ago, when that charity comes to you asking you to shoot their giant fundraiser for free "for the cause," ask: Are you paying for the room, the food, the waiters?  Who printed the programs?  Did they do that on their own dime "for the cause?"  The answer usually comes that you're the only one who is not considered a professional producing something with value.

The fact that it's an affluent company is neither here nor there in the moral question (though an understandable consideration in a practical sense).  It reminds me of the priest a few years ago, who as part of his Christmas sermon said it was okay to shoplift from large stores.

Also in the moral realm comes this from PetaPixel about "White Guy Photography."  That, according to author Nick Vossbrink, "is the approach which entails traveling, or moving, someplace with the intent of documenting and photographing so as to 'explain' or 'capture' it for others. And the amount of privilege required to start such a project and make those kinds of claims is generally limited to (but not exclusively the domain of) white guys."  This I think is a variant on a long held complaint (by me as well as others) that the prizes and other accolades that drive the desire to do these projects all seem to go to stories about the same sort of tragic Third Worlders, preferably of some sort of fashionable minority.  The styles of the times may change (slightly) the specifics, but it is often the same through the years.

"I’m done with it, " Vossbrink says, and I've got to agree with him.  As he ably puts it: "I’m tired of the outsider view which treats cities as urban jungles full of diversity which have to be tamed. I’m tired of the idea that you can just drive through a culture snapping photos and claim to be presenting it to the rest of us. I’m tired of the idea that non-white or native people are exotic objects. I’m tired of the lack of context which results in the photos providing little to no information about the actual culture being depicted."

So what's the alternative?  Frankly, there are tons of interesting stories out there -- a few people have undertaken projects to prove that literally everyone has an interesting story to tell, CBS' Steve Hartman being perhaps the most visible example.  But in the end, only two things will bring about change: a public willing to pay to see certain stories, and a shift in the fickle fashion trends of the media elite.  In other words: we'll stop getting White Guy Photography when it becomes trendy and rewarding to do something else.  So basically, never.

And finally, there's this:

It is perhaps the perfect blog post: Catchy headline with an au courant technobabble term in it, an unexpected pairing of the modern with the historic, and a text that not only relates to both the picture and the hed but actually segues from old to new and back again well while actually teaching you something.  Pretty cool.

I'm jealous.

Light Reading

I do look a lot at other blogs, if for no other reason than to try to figure out how they manage to post so often.  A couple caught my attention today as they addressed things I have either blogged on or referenced vaguely before.

Photography Talk has an entry on the "Six Most Annoying Trends in Photography" that I pretty much agree with.  I must admit I blanched a bit when I got to Number 6: "Professional Know-It-Alls," but was relieved when I found I hardly fell into their definition, which involved those who live by rigid rules. 

Meanwhile, Japan Camera Hunter (an oddly named blog these days, as it has expanded into a rather interesting spot for thoughts on street and film -- as opposed to digital -- photography) has a piece titled "Why your phone is not your friend."  The hed caught my eye, and again I feared that it was something it is not. 

Lately, on my other blog -- or "phlog," as I like to call it, as it centers more on my pictures -- I have been forced to admit that, though Leica is in its name ("The Guy with the Leica") I've not been able to process the film I've been shooting in my Leicas.  It's a money thing that's been going on for some two years now, and frankly I choose not to blog about that merely because I think it would come across as whining.  That's neither here nor there.  My point is (and, as Ellen Degeneres would say, "I do have one") that I've had to substitute pictures I've shot with digital Nikons and, more often, my iPhone.

This was not shot with a Leica.

from The Gut with the Leica "phlog"

When I first broke down and posted the iPhone pics, I did it under the "camera you have" rule (as in: "The best camera is the one you have with you"), but I've got to say as I've returned to them, they're not that bad.  Maybe, I feared, I was missing something.  Nope.  Japan Camera Hunter is merely afraid that, with one's head down on the little smartphone screen, one is missing the real world passing by. 

Finally, here's another from the endlessly fascinating PetaPixel site, "Five Painless Steps for Getting Rid of the Fear of Street Photography Once and for All."  Again, I'm not sure that it's directly on the mark implied by the title (which is a real mouthful -- don't they have copy editors over there?)  It will only take a minute to read, but I can save you even that by saying it comes down to two things: Engage with people to stop being afraid of them; most people like having their picture made.  Still, worth the minute to get all the thoughts and encouragement in between.

Amongst those thoughts was an interesting take on the famous Robert Capa quote, "If your photos aren't good enough, you're not close enough."  The author, Oliver Duong, thinks Capa has been generally misunderstood by having his words taken far too literally.

"What Capa meant was to get closer to your work, to what you are doing," Duong writes.  "If your photographs aren’t good enough, you are not connected enough. How does that help in regards to fear and street photography? It tells you that you do not have to get physically close to your subject as the sole goal."  Frankly that sounds more like Cornel than Robert to me, but I've been very wrong about things like that before.  (Remind to tell you my embarrassing story about "Stonewall" Jackson someday.)

I think his point is valid -- I once read that Henri Cartier-Bresson complained about having to use his 35mm instead of 50mm lens too much when he shot in the US -- but I think Capa is misunderstood on a much more literal level.  Many new photographers are afraid to get right into the midst of the action, and so they produce pictures that reflect their distant, stand-offish attitude.  A better picture brings across the feel and swirl of events, and usually that requires the photographer to get right in on top of them.

Also, let's remember Capa was primarily known as a war photographer (though I'd bet war pictures only make up about a third or a quarter of his work).  An AP photographer once told me he covered war with a 20mm and a 300mm lens, as the action was either right next to you or really far away, and I noticed pictures of another photographer friend, Frank Johnston, when he covered Vietnam, inevitably showed him with only two camera bodies: a Leica with something wide angle (a 28?) and a Nikon F with the immortal 105.

Look at all those great war photographs.  I'll bet you can count the ones shot with a long lens on one hand.

Frank Johnston shooting for UPI in Danang in 1967.

From UPI

Also, when I called it up, there were some intriguing titles at the bottom, like "Joel Meyerowitz Says He Despises Bruce Gilden's Attitude, Calls Him a Bully."