Gramarye

Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: Why Corbis’ New SnapVillage Stock Photography Agency is a Bad Deal for Photographers

By someone with a competitive motivation — although that doesn’t make his criticism invalid….

Update: But, isn’t there an issue with the sales side of things? I.e., isn’t part of the upshot to using the big-agency spinoffs that image consumers are aware of the connection and are more likely to take them seriously? (Whether or not they should, of course….)

Resembles John Waters; only younger.

Kathleen Connally’s Photoblog – $300 Reward :: A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania

As you can see, I’m still playing around with skitch:

This is another subject I’ve been wrestling with for a while. They’ve put up plastic fencing around an area of Laney that they’re landscaping, and in the morning and afternoon the broken and/or twisted sections can cast some very interesting shadows. I’ve had some difficulty taking good pictures of them, however — they don’t seem to want to fit nicely into the frame, and something is lost in the flatness of two-dimensional representation. (There are quite a lot of examples if you look at stuff on flickr tagged “shadows.”)

In this case, the quasi-helical element where the two sections of fencing come together is interesting, but I had trouble making it as compelling as it was in person — but in the versions I tried with more local contrast to force the eye, it looked *too* dramatic.

This one is a bit more succesful:

I’m not sure why this works where the other one fails, although I think part of it is that the warping effect is integral to the overall shadow, rather than running counter to or underneath it, and thus being overpowered by it.

Here’s a version without all the annoying bits:

One of the skills a photographer is supposed to have which I have not yet (and perhaps never will) is pre-visualization. This was one of the shibboleths of the Adams-Weston crowd, and the basic idea is that you’re supposed to know what’s going to come out of your camera before you go anywhere near the shutter.

This approach is doubtless not just a virtue but a necessity when shooting film with a large-format camera in Yosemite; one can hardly afford to waste time and material, and it’s not as though you could check the LCD to see if you got it right.

None of those conditions apply to me, so there is no necessity; I am not sure whether there is virtue. Almost all my pictures are of targets of opportunity, and I generally have no more than one to five minutes to get out my camera, take as many shots as I think may get me a useful result, and then pack up and move on.

This ubiquitous capture approach has several virtues — it cuts down on the number of things I _wished_ I had gotten a shot of; it encourages me to pay attention to the world around me all the time, not only when I’m in a place where I should expect to find pictures; and most of all, it lets me catch things — like the two or three good shots of black-crowned night herons I’ve managed to snag — that I would otherwise stand little to no chance of getting, unless I set out to get them and then proceeded to make it almost a full-time job.

But it’s also the case that the pace influences the process, not just the output; I hardly ever try to get good composition in-frame; I usually place the subject (or at least the point of focus) dead center and compose after the fact by cropping.

More drastically, I often find that the main subject of an image is not that one I seem to have thought it was when I took the picture; for example:

There is a clear main subject, and it’s obviously the most interesting thing in the frame. But this is the original file:

I only noticed the interesting bit at the stage of cropping and post-processing.

I don’t think of photography as a creative art (I don’t generally stage pictures or engineer situations for taking them), but more as an analytic craft, like non-fiction writing; it is more a matter of peeling away what does not belong than of putting in what does. Given this, it doesn’t seem to me that it makes a difference to the product at what stage in the process the peeling occurs. What is more, I think it means I can apply to photography the rule I apply to writing — if I finish with precisely what I set out to produce, I have missed an opportunity to learn something.

Which, I suppose, means that I don’t take my inability to previsualize as an absent virtue, after all. Bitchin’.