Posts from the 'Lessons' Category

The Garry Winogrand Problem

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Modern photography, by reason of unceasing technical advance, is eminently capable of producing a mindless accumulation of automatic images, whose meaning at best is peripheral and uncertain, whose tenor at worst is dumbly exploitative and reactionary. Photographers all too frequently make pictures so conceptually casual and brainlessly superficial that their minimal meaning is exhausted at a glance. A great deal of film is wasted by even the best photographers, and almost criminally squandered by the bad and the mediocre.

— from “I Don’t Give a Rap About Gasoline Stations”, via American Suburb X 

 

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Not Too Bright, Not Too Dark

 

Boy

Valencia, April 2015

18% grey. This is what you’re camera is trying to achieve when you put it into any sort of automatic mode. Does not matter if it’s aperture, shutter-speed, if ISO is fixed or you allow it to float: The camera will always strive for something in the middle, not too bright, not too dark.

How do you think can something interesting come out of this? How many guys you met that were lukewarm actually managed to keep your interest for more than 2 minutes? Good looking, yes, maybe, but boring nevertheless. Not too many things, that are not too much of anything, too much darkness, too much light, way too fast or grinded to a screeching halt – nothing that is in the middle of everything ever came out interesting. And still, you tell your camera to do just that: Start something interesting with 18% grey. How’s that gonna work out?

Instead be brave, be bold, don’t shy away from underexposed pictures, blurry shadows, outblown highlights: Images can be faulty, as your vision is faulty, imperfect too. The emotion lurks in the shadow, love has to burn into you, pain is too dark to be bearable… And get out of automatic, damn.

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Stay Healthy For All Time

Tokio, July 2014

This is what sometimes happens: You get mad at people when they somehow don’t seem to “get” your picture. You blame society as a whole, the steady decline in attention-span, Flickr as a place of cat-images and superficiality.

This was a subtle image that sums up a problem almost every advanced western society has to deal with: when these three kids are grown up to make their own money they will have to support the pension for at least two elders. It’s devastating demographical math in a picture.

And the image is not even badly composed, has strong straight lines (transporting these kids into the future), has some balance and gestures.

Problem here is: it wasn’t well placed. I just dumped it into a pile of more obvious pictures I brought back from Japan an it just drowned there. It is a good picture, but I let it down. I didn’t put up the fight for it that it deserved.

There is a lesson here, of course, but for today I prefer to bath in self-pity and curse the world for becoming more superficial every day…

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Ecce Homo

For the easter holidays, we visited friends in Valencia. Apart from my trusty RX100, this was the first time I took my recently acquired Leica M3 from 1955 out for a spin. Photographing the Easter procession, which started at mid-day and went on till late at night was challenging with the M3: It’s of course fully manual, so you just use it as low as you can think you go: I shot wide open (1.8 with the 50mm Summicron) and went down to 1/60 or 1/30 and had the film pushed two stops. You cannot expect pixel-peeping sharpness under these conditions, but there were some glimpses of  what you can do with this camera, but it certainly still needs a lot of practice and experience to use the effects of this camera more deliberately and less random. I’m not sure if I’m hooked yet, but it was an interesting experiment…

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