Musings on photography both analog and digital
I was listening to a podcast this morning (the excellent "Prime Lenses" photography podcast by Iain Farrell), and the guest mentioned the era of Lomography: a time long, long ago (the internet will tell you it was 2011, but that coincides mostly with the rise of Instagram, as far as I can tell. Instagram offered… Continue reading The Banshees of Lomography
Last time I wrote about the power to surprise and arrest us that a photograph has by being printed and placed into real-world surroundings. But what if we want to make photographs to appear in a book, or to try and capture a moment of the restless viewer's time on the internet? We can do… Continue reading Two Working Elements of a Photograph, Part 2
What qualities are we looking for when making a photograph? I have a few thoughts on the question (naturally!). At a certain level, I think we are interested in photographs that are both surprising and familiar. There is a process of looking that every good photograph entails in its viewer. It can't be read all… Continue reading Two Working Elements of a Photograph, Part 1
I've started shooting and posting a photo a day, on an online community. It's a pretty common project, the photo-a-day. You can find all sorts of permutations all over the photographic web. I've done several of these in monthly installments, but this time it's open-ended. Like always, the importance of daily photo challenges is to… Continue reading Turn Something In
Photography should be let go from its association with art. Not because art cannot encompass photography, but because it is hard to separate the complex web which "art" references. If we no longer worried about measuring up or impressing anyone with our photos, if they were no longer required to reference any artistic conventions, then… Continue reading Art Versus Heart
When do we come to the end of wanting to produce "competent" photographs? I have been pondering this question as I go through my catalogue of photographs taken - many of them remembered, some forgotten, and some re-seen as I encounter them again after sitting in cold storage on a hard drive. Few are the… Continue reading Value of a Back Catalogue
Things have been upended, we all know this and deal with it on a daily basis. Even in my neck of the global woods (shout-out to the podcast Stuff They Don't Want You to Know for that line, which I shamelessly stole), daily life has not been the same for quite some time now. Most… Continue reading Street Notes, July 2020
Micro Four Thirds cameras are frequently criticized due to their sensors being smaller than full frame, which makes it harder for photographers to get the "look" that's become emblematic of large sensors: shallow depth-of-field, smooth highlight transitions and lots of dynamic range. These characteristics were usually present (with the exception of the last, which… Continue reading Getting the Analogue Film Look from Micro Four Thirds In-Camera
My wife and I recently took a short trip up the Pacific coast, and since my Ricoh GR III was in the shop, I only brought along one camera, the Voigtlander Bessa T, and one lens, the Color Skopar 35mm f2.5. While not the smallest combination, it did fit into a couple of jacket pockets… Continue reading Bessa T, Skopar and Superia Xtra 400 Make a Nice Combination
The snapshot has a longstanding connotation of inferiority. Even if you enjoy making them, you probably acknowledge this apparent consensus, and perhaps even feel guilty about owning up to taking snapshots. This would be a mistake, for to assume that a snapshot must be a bad photograph is to miss what a snapshot is: not… Continue reading Are Snapshots Inferior Photos?
The Sprocket Docket 