Loose Stuff ...

Shall we start on the subject of Leicas?  It's not like I've talked about that before, is it?

I came across this piece (NSFW) on the internet today.  Frankly, his complaints about image quality are hard for me to see, even though I reflexively agree with him, but his rant at the end was an interesting new thought on my old digital vs. analog question.  Indeed, I have and regularly use Leicas that are 60 years old.  They work great, and it puts me in direct control of the image (no auto functions causing the camera to refuse to fire because it thinks I'm making a mistake, no weird artifacts added by some secondary processing function, and so on ...)

But how long will there be film -- nice, Kodak-made Tri-X, for example -- not to mention the chemistry and so on to process it?  I have said that one could take solace in the fact that there are photographers out there still making daguerreotypes and ambrotypes -- techniques from the very earliest days of photography -- but those are processes that use very basic chemicals that can be combined in essentially a home lab.  35 mm Tri-X is not something you can cobble together in your garage.

Back in December, Craig Mod contemplated about this subject in the New Yorker.  He told his story of transition from various film cameras, through digital to his positive impressions of pictures shot during one trip on an iPhone.  "Tracing the evolution from the Nikon 8008 to the Nikon D70 to the GX1, we see cameras transitioning into what they were bound to become: networked lenses," he wrote.  In other words, he sees the whole process of photography shifting as the value of the pictures themselves become increasingly measured by the ability of people to see them through the network.  I'm not sure I agree (per the Vivian Maier Test), but it is an interesting thought.

Vivian Maier

 Finally, there's this.  Spoiler alert: this is the final sentence: "No doubt, cameras capabilities will continue to improve and amaze, but I wonder as camera design evolves just how much joy will be left in the process of taking photos?"  However, the journey to that point is quick and interesting.

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."

There Are Not Ten Million Photojournalists with iPhones

Contrary to the recent smartphone ad, anyone with a camera of some sort is not a "photojournalist," for the same reason that someone with a stethoscope is not a doctor.  They are people with cameras who might make an image of something happening, and like fish roe, one in ten-thousand may survive to become a decent picture.

With the recent events around the Boston Marathon bombing, there has been a useful illustration and, secondarily, reaction to emphasize this point.  Kenneth Jarecke made the point extremely well in his blog, and even one of the photographers there, the man who made what may become the iconographic images of the initial event, said it very clearly and well in an interview with Poynter.

"What newspapers and professional journalists need to realize, and the world has to realize," John Tlumacki said at the very end of the piece, "is that we are news photographers, not somebody out there with an iPhone and a camera, jumping over people to put images on YouTube. Our job is act as professionals and to show the world images that they can’t see because they aren’t there.

"I’m so sick of citizen journalism, which kind of dilutes the real professionals’ work. I am promoting real journalism, because I think that what we do is kind of unappreciated and slips into the background."

I recently did a book review for NPPA's News Photographer magazine that, I fear, morphed into a rant about one-man-bands in television news and all the other ills (many corporate driven in a blind, uneducated effort to save a few pennies) that have begun to grind my gears recently.  In it, I cited an event I experienced, where a TV station executive blithely announced to his news staff, including a number of photographers, that "all the best news pictures through history were shot by amateurs." He smiled, as if to soften the blow, and began to run on for a while about the Zapruder Film.

We can laugh about it, we can hope it goes away when the truth becomes obvious, we can scream and weep about it, but I can't help but sense that this is all just a part of the coarsening and decay of the quality of journalism and news.

What's Wrong with These Pictures?

I was in the kitchen the other day, when a simple still life struck me as interesting.  But, here's the thing: It wasn't just the subject and light that caught my imagination ...

You see, it's interesting and all -- nice, soft, raking light, reflections, lots of exciting colors and shapes -- but in this image, it's not really striking.  It's not something that would make you stop walking by and look.  But what I saw in my head was this:

Now that's much more arresting.  Still not satisfying for me, though, as we lost the bright colors.  So I tried one more thing:

That was more like it.  Perhaps not perfect -- I think a painting, say oil or watercolor, might be even more what I want -- but it was good enough for the moment.  And then I paused. What really did I think I was up to?

With the rise of the iPhone and its many photographic apps, there has been an accompanying rise in controversy (like when a New York Times photographer made a bid for the Pulitzer).  First, it was bad enough that digital cameras made amateurs think they could be professionals, because the cost-free making of thousands of exposures while the ever-increasingly smarter cameras did all the complicated exposure calculations for you allowed them to actually make a nice frame or two.  But now your ever convenient phone did the same, and had a bunch of options that took care of the processing and Photoshopping process for you too!

Secondly, these effects -- effects that in the past required you to actually know how to handle film in particular ways or, for that matter, make a wet plate exposure using techniques a century old (see second exposure above) -- were far more dangerous than merely relieving the "photographer" of any need for knowledge or experience.  They tempted one to make frankly bad or nonsensical exposures, overlay them with a thick coating of special effects, and then act like they were somehow now "good."

So what the hell did I think I was doing when I made those two artsy images?  And are they really better than the first one?  (Actually, the first one is the last, timewise, as it occured to me after making the other two that I was leaning, as so many have, on the iPhone's fancy apps, and I wanted to blog about this.  So I shot it untouched using the iPhone as a "control" of sorts.  It was frankly too much work to get out a DSLR and make an even more conventional control.)

Since the Hipstamatic Tinto 1884 package came out, I've noticed a lot of my photographer friends using it.  And, to be totally honest, I promptly sought it out as soon as I learned what to search for.  It's a cool little effect, and I have been interested in the look and technology of wet plate photography (though I haven't had the chance to try it) for a while now.

However, though I may be able to rationalize my hackneyed use of the Tinto by claiming an interest in photographic history, I have to ask whether I and all my friends are just leaning on it as a crutch to make otherwise mediocre or uninteresting pictures somehow fascinating and artsy.

This reminds me of an anecdote I love to tell when the question of photo manipulation comes up.  I was standing with another photographer, he older and working for a newspaper, waiting for the start of a Pentagon news conference one day.  It was still in the days of film, the earliest versions of Photoshop were just gaining acceptance.  He told me how a young, techno-savvy photographer was showing him all the things that could be done with the program, saving under- or over-exposed pictures, correcting faults, evening out bright and dark spots, and so on.  He ended with the punch line: "I asked him, 'Wouldn't it be easier just to make a proper exposure in the first place?'"

So I have to wonder: Wouldn't it be easier just to make a proper, interesting photo in the first place, rather than something that depends so on special effects to be attractive?  And, countering that, is this yet another example of Marshal McLuhan's overused axiom that the medium is the message?  Is art what you make of the tools, and art designed with certain tools in mind (just as I shot the second picture above specifically with the Tinto package in mind) still art?