It's the experience, not the resolution

[Kirk Keyes]

Dave - If you really want to have fun on a fixed gear bike, take the brake off!

By the way, I have a circa 1955 Legnano (Italian) track bike with Columbus tubing that has been waiting to be put back together for several years now...

[Kirk Keyes]

Oh yeah, I forgot to add, as with fixed gear bikes, it's the experience that is important.

[CXC]

David,

What Kirk said! I've never understood the point of a fixed-gear bike with brakes. Way too easy on your knees, too safe.

[Ellis Vener]

The LAST thing I want to do is sit at home and micromanage my image on a PC for hours, staring at a screen, inventing things that did not exist in the field.

that is a "straw man" position to argue. No says or forces you to do that with digital photography anymore than you are forced to do that with film based photography.

I have a better argument:"I like the way things look when I use large format film and that's why I use it."

[David R Munson]

The brake is no longer there, actually. If I ever ride hills much again, I'll put it back on, but otherwise I haven't used it in months anyway. The lower gearing is also good - riding brakeless just wouldn't work as well if I was still going 48x15 (at least not so long as I'm so out of shape and my legs are so soft). The higher cadence at 45x18 means a nicer spin, too. As long as I'm jacking the thread, I might as well plug this forum, of interest to other fixxers here. Also, this Lucas Brunelle video so people think we're insane.



End thread-jacking. Well, almost. Kirk - if you don't put that Legnano back together, I'm taking it and putting it back together for you! :-)



Anyway, Ellis has, I think, made the best argument yet in this thread. Use what you like because it's what you like.

[d burdeny]

"The LAST thing I want to do is sit at home and micromanage my image on a PC for hours, staring at a screen, inventing things that did not exist in the field."

Interesting….Isn’t that what painters do for the most part?

[Paul Butzi]

"The LAST thing I want to do is sit at home and micromanage my image on a PC for hours, staring at a screen, inventing things that did not exist in the field."

I once saw an excellent TV program that had one segment that was about Connie Imboden - a photographer whose work I find fascinating, horrifying, disturbing, haunting, always interesting and never, ever boring.

In it, she commented ""I do all my own processing and printing. I don't manipulate my images in the darkroom, but I do articulate them in the darkroom."

The segment, part of "EGG, the arts show", is apparently available online at her website - look at the section titled 'video intvws', at www.connieimboden.com

Her artist statement, which you can find on the 'introduction' page of her website, strikes me as one of the most lucid and articulate such statements I've ever read. Most artists statements are psychobabble gobblteygook intended to impress or intimidate without actually being understood, and hers is really impressively clear.

I'm not sure whether I like her work or not, but it impresses me regardless. If she's content to draw a distinction between 'manipulation' and 'articulation', I'm inclined to grant her point of view a lot of merit.

[Jonathan Brewer]

How can you do one without doing the other.......................it's a distintion without a difference.

'Most artists statements are psychobabble gobblteygook intended to impress or intimidate without actually being understood'..............................This is 100% true, I've lucked out w/shots with an effect I hadn't even imagined, and didn't know I captured it until I got the proofs back, then again the idea of getting lucky and finding something new is a legitimate part of art.

I remember some time back somebody saying something to the effect that a picture should stand or fall exactly as they originally framed the image and that a image should never be cropped, reverse that, if you can find a better image by cropping it, then it tells you your framing was off.

Only one counts in the artistic process, does it works, if it works, it's right.

[Richard Fenner]

" if you can find a better image by cropping it, then it tells you your framing was off". Maybe. Or perhaps it tells you that you couldn't afford a longer/shorter lens, or didn't want to have to carry 4 lenses a long distance and made do with two lenses. Is it really so different to crop, rather than to change lenses?

Or maybe I had my 8x10 camera with me and realised this was really a panoramic and wanted to shoot it as 4x10, so I use the 8x10 and crop - is it again a corruption of the process, as some seem to think it is?

[Jonathan Brewer]

I agree with that totally, I was susggesting(to me) the rigidity of a certain way of thinking. Suppose for the sake of argument that you submit an image to somebody, they say they don't like the way it was cropped, also they declare ' if you'll crop the image an inch on all sides it'll be a masterpiece', they'll pay you $50,000 for the rights to the image.

If it's me, I'm in my car on my way to the bank with the money, looking at the picture while I'm stopped at the intersection to see they're right.

As you've touched on above, it could simply be a matter of shooting 8x10, and finding a dynamite crop along panoramic dimensions, if you dig up some gold, it doesn't make one bit of difference what the size of your shovel was.