[ratpack] Photo thought for the day
- From: humminboid@xxxxxxxxxxx
- To: ratpack <ratpack@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:00:36 +0000 (UTC)
Ken Rockwell at kenrockwell.com is a bit of a huckster, but does have some
valuable insights for us photo hackers now and again.
THIS is a case in point... i think he's talking to me!
In these days, photo hobbyists concerned themselves with cameras and lenses
about as much as they concerned themselves with darkroom magic.
Unlike today, half their attention was spent on selecting among the staggering
number of choices of film, paper and darkroom chemicals.
Today hobbyists get excited by high ISOs, and in the old days, hobbyists would
always be trying out some magic developer to get finer grain or crazier high
speeds. Some things never change.
Hobbyists would experiment with numerous brands of printing paper, each with a
different look.
Real photographers settled on just a couple of types of film, paper and
chemicals and then learned how to perfect their look using those tools.
Hobbyists rarely made good photos because by the time they got close to getting
good pictures with one set-up, they'd give up and try a new kind of developer.
( Ooooh, I resembled that statement! D-76 1:1, or Microdol, or Diafine, or
Ethol UFG, orrrr...Luminous, or Polycontrast, or Ilfobrome...?)
By the 1990s, photography equipment had evolved to its highest state.
We also saw the introduction of digital photography to consumers.
.
A very bad thing happened to the hobby by the late 1990s.
Men were increasingly drawn away from photography, and model trains, and
everything... manly...,(emphasis mine) into computers.
Why?
.
When computers could receive information from other computers, that meant that
computers were now pornography portals to the world. I'm dead serious: the
photography hobby almost died in the late 1990s and very early 2000s.
The photography hobby was back with a vengeance by the mid 2000s.
Digital saved the hobby.
By pure dumb luck, digital photography recaptured all the guys who went away to
play with their computers.
With digital cameras, it was trivial to get your pictures into your computer,
(wellll...maybe for some...) and then to play with them in your computer until
you went blind. ( It'll do that ?)
Today
Today the photography hobby has retreated almost entirely away from shooting,
and gone back into the computer.
Just as most of the hobby was concerned with chemistry at its inception, few
photo hobbyists worry about taking pictures anymore. Instead, it's all about
Lightroom or Camera Raw, workflows, profiles, HDR or whatever.
Hobbyists actually believe that, armed with their computers, that they are now
alchemists who can turn turds into great pictures.
MEMORIZE this! Artists can turn turds into art , but bad photos never get any
better than when they were taken. (YAY, Rockwell!)
Hobbyists created photography. Sadly, hobbyists are usually too busy playing
with the toys to create any meaningful photographs...If anyone doubts the
foolishness of the current obsession with software shenanigans, have a look at
an old photo magazine from the 1950s and see how much time was spent back then
worrying about darkroom chemicals.
(For that matter, like Paul says, look at the current photos that are published
in whichever magazine, and see how many are just plain ordinary! Then look at
National Geographic or better yet, old issues of LIFE magazine, or Ansel Adams'
work. Analyze those pictures, and try to do what they did.) Make you a better
photog> Yes,it will!
Today we look back at all that and can't fathom how using one chemical or
another had any significance compared to how much more important it would have
been to take pictures of something interesting.
There were articles on topics like how to do color separation negatives, and
when we look at the "good" and "bad" examples today, all we notice is "heck,
one might be a better reproduction, but who cares, it's still an awful picture
of weeds in someone's backyard!" (known in photospeak as "crappy pixes")
I see exactly the same problem today. (NO! Really?)
It's obvious looking back at old magazines that the only thing that mattered
was getting to the right place at the right time to take a picture of the right
thing... ( f/8, and BE there!)
... and the choice of developer and wash treatments, 90% of what the magazines
went off about, was irrelevant.
Today, its the same thing. magazines go off about how to "fix" your pictures in
your computer, but let's face it: the only way to fix them is, always , get to
the right place at the right time and see the right picture before you press
the shutter.
( I'm gonna copy that one, and paste it on my bathroom mirror!)
If you waste your time making 3,600 exposures from the same place to stitch in
four dimensions, it doesn't matter how much spatial (gigapan and pan-focus) or
luminous (HDR) range or resolution you have, if it's a picture of something
boring.
If it sucks, who cares if it's GPS geotagged? If it's great, it's because of
the lighting and timing , which has nothing to do with the location.
A photo of an important event is rarely important by itself. It is the event
which was important, not the photo. Making a strong photo is much more
difficult than just being there with a tripod.
Hobbyists are so distracted by wondering which raw converter to use, worried
about printer and camera profiles, wasting hours doing gigapan and HDR and
pan-focus captures, and then wasting even more hours in front of their screens
putting these all together back into photos and then screwing them up further
with more plugins, that no hobbyists have any time left to look for better
pictures.
Artists and photographers are still out shooting, but the hobbyist of today is
crippled by wasting the majority of his potentially creative efforts dicking
around on his computer.
Photographic artists often bemoan this state of affairs, not seeing the great
divide between themselves and the hobbyists. (Them and Us? Pros versus
Hackers? Cowboys and Indians?)
Artists mourn the passing of serious photography, until I point out that the
serious workers have always been the few, and that those few are still there.
What is a very bright point is that without all the hobbyists, the photo
hardware and software industry would have collapsed to a tiny fraction of its
current size back in the early 2000s.
As always, there would be little available for photography today if it wasn't
for those nutty hobbyists (yay, us'ns!) buying so much gear and software.
Without them, we'd still have what we had back in the 1990s, which is fine with
me.
Now, what do you guys think? Later, C.
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