Campfire

Title: Campfire by Me

Fire looks cool, and it looks even cooler in black and white.

It’s also pretty difficult to shoot, because the exposure is damn near impossible to meter. It winds up being a guess – pick an aperture, try a lot of different shutter speeds, and pick the one you like best later.

Now I’m hungry for s’mores.

Morning Fog

Title: Morning Fog by Me

Ironically, when I first set myself up on Flickr years ago, I wrote in my profile something like “Most of my photos are from Lake George.”

At the time, that was mostly true. Having just gotten my D70 at the time, most of my photos were still 35mm and most of them were shot around Lake George. Mostly because I couldn’t see wasting the film on anything I might find in NJ.

Unfortunately, what happened next was that I entered the real world, no longer had the time to spend more than the occasional weekend at the lake, and digital allowed me the freedom to experiment in ways I wouldn’t have. Pretty soon, my portfolio ballooned with stuff shot in and around where I live in NJ, and these days Lake George is but a tiny sliver of my overall work.

That said, it’s still my favorite place to shoot.

This shot was part luck – it happened that the fog was lifting just as I was walking to get breakfast a couple of weekends ago.

The rest is the magic of lightroom – out of the camera, it was pretty low contrast as you might imagine, with the background washed out. I solved it by maximizing the contrast between the lights and highlights, and leaving the lower half of the tone curve alone. A blue saturation tweak later and I got the photo posted above.

First, they came for the photographers

This is getting absurd.

A man walking through Tom Lee Park pauses to snap a photo of the iconic Hernando DeSoto Bridge. Another man shoots pictures of numerous downtown buildings.

Many would assume the men are tourists taking in the city’s sights, but law enforcement officials say they could be terrorists staking out possible targets.

[...]

“You may think a guy is just shooting pictures, but if you report it to us, we’ll send it on to the FBI and they may have four or five other reports of the same thing,” said Richard Pillsbury with the Tennessee Fusion Center, a collaboration between the Department of Safety and the Department of Homeland Security.

Shelby County sergeant Larry Allen warned attendees at the meeting to look for people who appear to be doing surveillance outside public buildings, such as shopping malls.

“One of the things discussed in the al-Qaeda manual is conducting surveillance of your target,” added Eric Jackson with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. “That could mean looking at a building to see how security is established.”

I feel safer already, don’t you?

The Last One

Title: The Last One by Me

Shot during the 2007 Adirondack balloon festival, towards the end of the balloon launch. For a reason unknown to me, this one never took off. But the solitary balloon makes for a strong composition, in my opinion at least, so I’m sort of glad it didn’t.

I Am Not An Artist Redux

I Am Not An Artist.

That’s a statement I’ve made many times before, so often in fact that it now gets all capital letters and has become somewhat of a mantra of mine.

The main reason I hold this view is because of how I define art. Art, to me, is goal directed. It’s conceived of and intended as a medium for a message. It’s meant to communicate something to the viewer – an emotion, a story, an idea. Often, it’s layered and subject to interpretation – but the point of it is still whatever message it’s conveying. I don’t do that – I just shoot things that I think are pretty or interesting, with no deeper meaning than that.

But another issue that I’ve often had with “art” are the attitudes so often expressed by the art community itself. “Real artists” take it way, way too seriously. They’re control freaks – obsessing about what the viewer can see and how they can see it. And that bugs me to the point that I simply want no part of that community.

(Caution: some not safe for work content in the next two links. I warn you just in case you’re actually at work. If you’re honestly bothered by nudity… you annoy me worst of all.)

One of the things the NYT article I posted about a minute ago enlightened me to was this fantastic treatise by Flickr photographer Merkley, I’m Not A Photographer, which says just about the same thing I’ve tried to say (substituting “Photographer” for “Artist”), only a whole lot better. It’s worth a read, and I thought worthy of its own post.

I take photographs and share images I like. Whether it’s any good or not is up to others to decide, though in all honesty I’d probably evaluate 75% of my own work as “or not”. But in either case, good or not, I’m not making art.

Fine art photography is dead. Long live fine art photography!

An article in the New York Times today takes a look at how Flickr is changing fine art photography:

Consider photography. As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph.

The article describes how (often extensive) post-processing has become a necessary ingredient to Flickr popularity by profiling some of the top Flickr photographers, and how this differs from traditional fine art photography. A quick perusal of Flickr’s Explore validates this – as I write this, this photo by *lemonade* happens to occupy the number one spot. I happen to think it’s brilliant, but it’s demonstrative of the kind of heavy post processing typical of successful Flickr photos – an anathema to many in the art world.

I’ve sometimes been critical of Explore; it tends to favor photos of cliché subjects photos of flowers, sunsets, and cats (case in point, my most recent photo to hit explore was this one of tulips which I posted yesterday). Though the criticism that I try to express isn’t so much that I find something wrong with that, but that it tends to overlook some of the more original and creative stuff on Flickr, at leat in my humble opinion.

Despite this bias (or perhaps, because of it), it does demonstrate just how much of a schism there is between art photography and photography enthusiasts. People respond most enthusiastically to color, to surrealism, to things that are cute and pretty – stuff that the art world mostly shuns. Thomas Hawk, mentioned in the NYT article, puts it more bluntly in his blog than I dare to:

One of the stories that I conveyed to Virginia Heffernan, the reporter at the Times who wrote this article, was a story of a Cartier-Bresson photograph which a critique group of Flickr shouted down as inferior photography without knowing it was an actual Cartier-Bresson. While one take away from that story might be that the general Flickr community simply has poor taste in art, another take away might be to question the previously unquestionable. Was Cartier-Bresson actually that good? And would his work stand up today as it has in the past?

(The incident in question can still be found here. The comment thread is enlightening; draw what conclusions you will.)

For the record, I think Cartier-Bresson is damn good. But he’s not my favorite.

As Thomas Hawk also notes, irrespective of how good famous fine art photographers were, they were selected by a tiny, isolated, out of touch and incestuous group of gatekeepers – who basically dictated what was good and what had value. What we’re seeing now is the democratization of art, at least in the realm of photography.

That much I certainly agree with, and I can’t see it as anything other than a good thing.

The Lonely Man

Title: The Lonely Man by Me

I don’t if he’s actually lonely per se, but he was sitting alone and made for an interesting compositional element. It was shot with a wide angle in Washington Square Park last summer.

Inflation

Inflation by Me

This is just a fun sort of view of a hot air balloon being inflated, shot in the early morning sunlight at the 2007 Adirondack Balloon Festival.

They’re better to eat you with…

Title: My what big teeth you have! by Me

This was taken in New York’s Museum of Natural History – one of my very favorite places on Earth (I was one of those kids who was a dinosaur nut, and it’s something I never really grew out of. But even if you weren’t a dinosaur obssessed eight year old, I should hope the subject of the photo needs no introduction.

The photo itself was shot with my 50mm at f/1.8, the wide aperture creates a very shallow depth of field – keeping that front row of teeth in sharp focus while letting everything else blur in the background.

Ten Photoblogging Tips

I found this kind of interesting – over on the Digital Photography School blog, Natalie Norton offers ten tips for photoblogs such as this.

Some I do already, some I might incorporate in the future, others I don’t do for a reason, as it doesn’t really fit with the main goals I have for this blog. But overall it’s good advice.

One thing that I know I don’t do enough here is link to other places. In my head, that’s supposed to happen in the filler posts, which would go in between the daily photo posts. I don’t really write those nearly as often as I want to or should though, but just writing the daily posts is enough of a time sink. Still, it’s something I plan to make more of an effort with.