an interesting editorial on the state of photography today

[bobwysiwyg]

From Ian Brown's article:

From Bruce Barnbaum's website:

As suggested above the problem with digital is not inherent in the technology; but rather the technology encourages bad habits, eg. don't compose before taking the image. So maybe you missed the point of the article ;-)

+1 sums it up well.

[Brian Ellis]

From Ian Brown's article:

From Bruce Barnbaum's website:

As suggested above the problem with digital is not inherent in the technology; but rather the technology encourages bad habits, eg. don't compose before taking the image. So maybe you missed the point of the article ;-)

Or maybe you forgot that in terms of composition and care in making photographs, there's no significant difference between how most people use a digital camera and how they used their 35mm cameras.

[Brian Ellis]

Kirk, it is almost impossible to know what you are responding to.
Can we try quoting?

You really didn't know what he was responding to? I had no trouble with it and I doubt that many others did either. You made what I guess you thought was a clever statement that maybe house painting should be called "giclee." He responded. No need for a quote, especially when his statement immediately followed yours.

[Doug Howk]

From above, Brian Ellis said:
[QUOTE]Or maybe you forgot that in terms of composition and care in making photographs, there's no significant difference between how most people use a digital camera and how they used their 35mm cameras.[QUOTE]
Are you saying that 35mm photographers such as Cartier-Bresson shoot similar to digital shooters?
Geoff Dyer, in a june 20th article on Gary Winogrand at LRB, said:

He shot more film than almost any other photographer, so much that he was unable to keep up with the editing, gradually gave up trying to do so and, by the end, had pretty much stopped looking at – or processing – what he’d shot. The much quoted claim that he photographed ‘to find out what something will look like photographed’ became, effectively, ‘to not bother finding out what something will look like photographed, to photograph for the sake of photographing’.

I think the true heirs of the later stage of Winogrand are the digital image takers who don't bother thinking during the taking process. And, like Winogrand, maybe they need to not "process" those forgetable images.

[Brian Ellis]

[QUOTE=Doug Howk;1040418]From above, Brian Ellis said:
[QUOTE]Or maybe you forgot that in terms of composition and care in making photographs, there's no significant difference between how most people use a digital camera and how they used their 35mm cameras.

Are you saying that 35mm photographers such as Cartier-Bresson shoot similar to digital shooters?
Geoff Dyer, in a june 20th article on Gary Winogrand at LRB, said:

I think the true heirs of the later stage of Winogrand are the digital image takers who don't bother thinking during the taking process. And, like Winogrand, maybe they need to not "process" those forgetable images.

No. I referred to "most people" who use digital cameras, not to Cartier-Bresson or anyone like him. Obviously there were many serious photographers who used 35mm cameras just as there are many serious photographers today who use digital cameras. My point was that there's no difference in terms of care of composition (or "thinking" to use your term) between how most 35mm cameras were used and how most digital cameras are used, i.e. that "spray and pray" isn't a phenomenon peculiar to using a digital camera.

[Bob Salomon]

.......very insightful commentary on the state of photography generally today
worth a read in my opinion

I see it differently. Apparently there were lots of very good photographs. There just weren't any good photo journalism stories.

The two are quite different!

[Brian C. Miller]

I see it differently. Apparently there were lots of very good photographs. There just weren't any good photo journalism stories.

The two are quite different!

And all of the carping in the article about too many photographs has been going on since the Kodak Brownie, maybe even from the introduction of commercial dry plates.

The contest required photographers to submit striking and well-composed images to tell a visual story, a photo essay, about wildlife or wilderness – important subjects on our climate-challenged Earth.

Now, there's a hint at what would have tripped the judges' collective trigger.

A story is a cohesive account of events in which something is at stake – a beginning, middle and end tied together with characters, scenes and details (long shots, mid-shots, closeups) that lead to a climax and resolution (or not).

Even the entries that were remotely in the neighbourhood of telling a story – and most were hopelessly lost – were edited incomprehensibly.

And then the article wanders into the majority of photographs in the 1960s (55% babies, 44.999% other crap, 0.001% better than that), and meanders off. So apparently the contest allowed a series of photographs, to engage a person in a non-verbal story about something. And there would have been a bonus for a story about climate-challenged Earth.

I'm guessing that a series of photographs that started with a tree growing in the wilderness, and then following a path to the city dump, would have won. And would have been totally cliché.

[Frank_E]

with apologies to Gary in advance if he didn't want this reposted here….
but then again he did post it on FB so I suspect he is not trying to hide this information...

one of our LFF members entered the competition and posted the images he submitted on his blog
I got this from Face Book which updates me on his blog posts

http://garynylander.blogspot.ca/2013...otography.html

they are certainly very "worthy" landscape images
but I will leave it to others to decide (I guess others already have…) whether the meet the competition criteria

[Gary Nylander]

No problem for the link, Frank E...... I'm not sure if I should have posted my images or not on my blog, but I thought I would throw my images out there to show that my images were "best" that I had and I'm sure that they had must have had much better images than mine, but likely it didn't meet their competition criteria. I do find it a bit odd that out of 500 entries that they wouldn't have been something to pick something....also they charging $10 per entry with the incentive of a $3000 winning prize makes one very suspicious.

[Sal Santamaura]

pathetic attempt at trolling......are we out of high school yet?

Wasn't that question answered years ago when jj was banned?