The Divide

Tags

aesthetics, art, context, photography

Graves at the Church of Sophia, East Berlin, by Thomas Struth. St. Louis Art Museum.

I find it fitting that a photograph I use to illustrate a concern of mine represents a city that was split in two. This photograph of Berlin dates back to 1992, two years after the reunification of Germany and acts as a commentary on that divide. Scenes such as this were denied to Western photographers in the years of the Cold War.

It’s a strange photograph. I found it today hanging on the wall of a modern art gallery in the St. Louis Art Museum. On the surface, it seems little more than a snapshot. I would very surprised if it, entered in the St. Louis Photography Club competition, made the final 100 (out of 400) entries. My entry into that show, a pretty but essentially a jigsaw or chocolate box cover, did get into that final.

As I say, it’s a pretty picture. But I would not call it great art, and I would never expect to find it hanging on the wall of an art museum.

This is the divide that concerns me. Many photographers I come across make technically highly proficient images, images that in many cases fulfill the conventional aesthetics of what make for a beautiful picture, yet, again, these photographs are not great art.

Why is this?

Ultimately, it is always about context. Most photographers, including myself, are content to follow conventional paths. Sunrises, sunsets, seascapes, landscapes, portraits of beautiful women, still lives of pretty things — subjects that work to make for an attractive image. An attractive image that, in most cases, is context irrelevant.

What do I mean by that?

I mean these pictures fail to provide any sort of context beyond the simple surface attraction of the photograph. There is no commentary. You could swap out and replace the subject, landscape, person- whatever – and end up with essentially exactly the same end result.

Great art works differently. It is intensely concerned with the moment, and better it comes to capturing a moment, the better the art becomes. That’s why the Struth photograph, deliberately set in a specific time and with a specific mood that reflects or comments on that time, is hanging in the St. Louis Art Museum.

It’s ironic, really. Photography on the surface is always about capturing the moment. For some photographers, Cartier-Bresson for example, that ‘decisive moment’ is ultimate goal. Yet very few of us really do it. What we do instead is capture a faux-moment, a readily recognizable frame, that appeals to generalities and not to specifics.

I feel this intensely. It’s the reason why I find so much photography to be empty of meaning. Including much of my own. I’m trying to change this, to look for photographs that embrace context. Even if that context makes little or no sense without some real work by the viewer. Photographers who are acutely aware of how their work comments on the world around them appeal to me enormously, perhaps my favorite being Cindy Sherman.

I’ll never aspire to that level of artistry. But I am aware of it as a goal. What distresses me is how so few of my fellow photographers seem aware at all of these concepts. Is it really that hard?

 

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State of the Art

Tags

aesthetics, artistry, digital, film, history, photography, psychology, technology

Detail from a medieval statue photographed at the St. Louis Art Museum a couple of weeks ago.

A single exposure on a roll of black and white film, developed and scanned by myself. Taken with an ancient (by modern standards) Nikon FE and an old manual focus lens.

State of the art? Hardly. This picture could have been taken at any time from 1978 onwards with exactly the same equipment and type of film and would look much the same. That’s almost forty years.

Look forward to today. The pixel peeping camera reviews of the ever evolving technology of digital photography would be able to consign such an image to a specific year, maybe even to a month based on its appearance and digital structure alone (and let’s ignore the fact the image would have been date-stamped in its EXIF data). Photography has never before been so wedded to the moment.

And never has the moment been so fleeting. The peril of buying a digital camera is that the technology becomes obsolete in absolute terms very quickly. It’s a great marketing strategy; a new camera guarantees you finer quality images. Note, finer quality as in features such resolution and noise, not necessarily so in terms of artistry.

Contrast this with film. Only the quality of the lens used is really going to affect the way the image looks. The camera body itself is largely irrelevant, unless you are comparing 35mm to medium or large format. You might argue, for example, that bodies with faster shutters are more advanced – and so they are in strictly technical terms – but with film you rarely move in ISO sensitivities much above 400. Whether your shutter is maxed out at 1/1000 sec (or even only 1/500 in the case of Rolleiflex) or at 1/8000, pretty much the fastest speed available even with today’s digital cameras, is not going to affect almost all of your photographs.

That’s why, when buying a film body, its age and state of technology is largely meaningless beyond lens compatibility. Again, you can argue about things like manual focus versus autofocus or single point autofocus versus multiple point autofocus, or various types of in-camera light metering, but none of these, in the hands of a photographer who knows his or her camera, is going to affect the quality of the resulting negative.

I like this attribute of film photography. You become part of a lengthy continuum, part of history. That may be film’s most important quality for now it’s clear that the images coming from today’s digital cameras completely outclass film images in resolution and light sensitivity. There is no argument to make against that point – it’s indisputable. Digital is better – if better means more absolutely representative. State of the art.

And yet – I enjoy film photography more. I do it more. I get a better feeling from a film photograph than from most – not all – of my digital photographs.

Clearly, this has be psychological in nature. Why a black and white, relatively indistinct image should be more meaningful that a highly resolved color rendition of the same scene remains difficult to define as a consequence. All of the elements of the image, on upwards from the fact that one is tangible artifact, a silver-stained piece of plastic, whereas the other exists only as a decoded collection of bits and bytes on screen or mapped onto a printer, contribute to this sense of qualitative difference.

As such, appreciation remains unique and personal. As it should be. That’s my state of the art. Long may it continue.

 

 

 

A Lot to Think About

Tags

aesthetics, analysis, artistry, expectation, feelings, photography, purpose, social interaction, success, vision

Ever since I took a short online course in photographic aesthetics through MOMA, I’ve found myself going over and over the reasons why I take pictures.

There are plenty of alternatives. To garner acclaim, through display or competition entries (and winnings if lucky). To document my life. To transform my view of the world. To express, through choice and technique, a particular vision. To keep myself busy. To encourage me to visit new places. To look again at familiar places. To accumulate images to manipulate digitally. To generate artifacts. To play with chemistry. To put pictures up on the web, here and elsewhere. To be seen. To see.

All of these elements – and more – play some part. But perhaps the most pronounced divide that affects my photography is that between the social and the personal. Bridging this is the most difficult aspect of my art and one that I have not yet fully achieved.

How does this play out? Firstly through expectations. When I photograph with a social purpose in mind, essentially an image that is placed for public display, I find myself caught in a conundrum. Do I put out images that I know people will like? Or do I put out images that I like, even though there is no guarantee anyone else will? This relates crucially back to the making of the photograph. Am I making a piece that is deliberately crowd friendly? Or am I making a piece that is truly meaningful to me?

In the early days of my photography this question never really arose. My improvements were all technical and I was proud of them as such. I was learning how to make a photograph. As such, I frequently emulated what was out there and was satisfied with the emulation. But as time went by and I became more assured that I could make a technically competent photograph, it was no longer enough to emulate. Even when such emulations garnered a lot of praise, often from fellow photographers. Technique was no longer enough. Praise was no longer enough. Indeed, I began to become distrustful of both, realising that I was becoming boxed into a set of expectations.

This is how it stands today. Because I have become suspicious of the social aspects of photography, I do not enjoy making social photographs. Even though, for example to enter and maybe win competitions, social photographs are more likely to succeed and be judged successes. Instead my art has become more introspective, moving in directions away from the mainstream (such as embracing the niche interest of film photography). Whatever technical accomplishments I have gained remain, but my work is moving ever more towards the personal and my own peculiar set of passions and involvements.

I might still feel deeply unsettled and uncomfortable about this, ever nagged by the desire to fit in to some perceived standard of what photography should be, were it not for the insights provided by that dip into the world of photographic art. Successful art – the best successful art – works according to its own particular vision, a vision that is often at odds with prevailing fashions and fads. The greatest artists have always been willing to transcend expectation. It’s this insight that is helping me integrate into a coherent concept of what and who I am as a photographer. As I indicated at the beginning of this post, I’m not there yet. That’s why I am writing this! But I will get there, even if it is at some cost (like pulling myself away from seductively pleasing social interactions that work to undermine my particular vision by fostering conformity under the banner of excellence). Ultimately, everything boils down to what do you want out of your photography? Love of process – yes. Acclaim – yes, but with many caveats. Permanence – yes, but with no expectation of recognition of such, a contradictory concept I know. A historical record – absolutely. Artistry – yes, yes, yes.

A convoluted and perhaps over-thought analysis. In truth, my photography is simply an expression of my own character. I am and have always been an outsider. Whenever I get in with the in-crowd, I want out. I feel suffocated by conformity and expectation. Social success provides seconds of pleasure and a lingeringly bitter aftertaste. All I really need to do is to accept and acknowledge this. The art will follow.

 

 

 

Going Retro

Tags

Adox Color Implosion, aesthetics, art, color, concept, consumerism, fashion, film, popularity, retro

This photograph was taken on Christmas Day 2015. It looks older. This is deliberate, a consequence of using a specialist film, Adox Color Implosion, that is formulated to produce muted colors and heavy film grain.

You can do the same thing – or similar at least – with a bevy of ‘nostalgia’ type filters for Lightroom or Photoshop, or indeed with Instagram.

In truth, the ubiquity of Instagram has led to an over-proliferation of artistic-algorithm altered images, all of which are starting to look much the same but let’s let that pass. I don’t use Instagram myself and the effect you see here is about as old fashioned as you can get, short of taking a conventional color film today, magically going back in time thirty years or so, and letting the negative sit in a shoebox in a humid house until today.

It’s not a look I luxuriate in. I like it as an alternative to more polished images but not necessarily as an artistic end in itself. It’s a more a comment, a criticism in truth, of a current trend towards ever more the highly resolved, ultra-sharp and vibrant photography that passes as one form of photographic achievement.

An achievement that is very much predicated by technological advances in both cameras and lenses and as such is woven into the fabric of the camera industry as a means of encouraging sales. For a long while, I went along with this logos, rather unthinkingly following these technological trends as I accumulated ever more advanced digital cameras and lenses.

What stopped me?

I could say it was the realization that I was spending a great deal of money for really only mildly incremental improvements in my equipment, and perhaps that played a part. But really is was art. Not the sort of art you see on most photography websites, but the art you see in a museum. A few years ago my local museum, the St. Louis Art Museum, set up an exhibition of works by the Düsseldorf school of photographers as part of the opening of a new wing. These were revelatory to me. Photographs of industrial objects and deliberately ordinary settings, many with a distinctly lo-fi or retro look – these images were 180° away from the prevailing (and still prevailing) look that fills popular photography websites, magazines and many sales galleries.

I loved them. I loved them for their ordinariness, their emphasis on gritty reality versus colorful sheen, their deliberate anti-pretty concept.

I still do. That way of looking at things allowed me to step away from the consumer product rat race and go looking for increasingly esoteric and obsolete means of taking a photograph. Hence my return to film and a deliberate move away from taking the picture postcard type of images that dominated my photography in earlier years, some good, more bad.

It got me thinking too. I’ve written dozens of posts here over the past years that have helped me hash out what is meaningful to me and what isn’t. I’ve got the point now that I have a personal aesthetic that drives what I do, what I appreciate and what I dislike. I feel pleased with my own work, not all the time and not consistently over time, but enough to give me a continuing sense of achievement that is independent of what anyone else thinks of my work. It’s not fashionable and it’s not popular but it’s true to me.

That’s the peak. I need go no higher. But perhaps I will anyway. We’ll see.

 

 

 

Coming Together – Or Coming Apart?

Tags

aesthetics, art, motivation, personality, philosophy, photography, raison d'etre

Everything I write here is part of a journey. Of course, life is a journey, one we cannot escape until we die, so that really goes without saying but the focus of most my recent writing has been an attempt to make sense of personal aesthetic for my own photography.

This has definitely evolved over time. It is most likely that it will continue to evolve, but I can say that it, much as a single celled conglomerate coalesces into multicellular organism, is taking a definite shape and form.

So what, you might ask. I know a lot of photographers and few of them bother to articulate a particular vision. If deep thought is given to their art, it remains veiled. That’s fine – there really is no requirement to explain yourself. But I feel differently. I think it’s very important to have some sort of rationale for what I do, to place it in some sort of context.

But just what is that context?

I used to think that it was dependent on what others thought of my work. I’ve certainly let what others think of my work influence me in the past, be it as shallow as likes and favorites on a web page or as deep as an analysis in the photo critique group. Or whether a work is accepted or rejected into a photo competition, and, if accepted, how well it does in relation to others.

That is still playing out. I have photographs on sites that allow ratings, I have photographs in a competitive show. But last night I skipped a photo critique at my photography club. I will probably skip a lot more. I’m not going for any more competitions either. A show is a different story and I have one scheduled for later this year. I will have control over those entries – and that’s what I want. I can present my work on my own terms.

On my terms. That’s the context I seek. The difficulty, and it is a difficulty, is that my own judgement about what is a worthwhile versus an indifferent photograph is often at odds with prevailing standards. In other words, I like what a lot of people don’t and dislike what a lot of other people love.

Inevitably, this pushes you to the periphery. I suspect I am judged as eccentric, a little odd in my fascinations. He shoots film? He really doesn’t care about image sharpness? He finds cinematography inspirational for still photography? Perhaps most all – he devotes reams of writing to working out some sort of aesthetic? What a weirdo!

Not that anyone has ever called me a weirdo to my face. My photography colleagues are really very considerate people. But I always sense a gulf between my interests and theirs.

That may just be a mark of my personality. I am by nature introspective, analytical and nonconformist. For my art to be true to me, it also has to show something of those qualities. I believe the best of it does.

Once again, I rehash here much of what I have considered in the past. I know I’ll do this again – and again.  For me it’s important to constantly evaluate and reevaluate what I do and in some ways I envy those who are less self-referential and just do things. I can’t do that. On the contrary I regard my introspection as a gift given to me by my rocky depressed early years and a lot of psychotherapy – oh, and it’s truly a gift and make no mistake about that.  I always knew, somehow, that the pain and despair that pinned me down before I really began to live would reveal some elusive dividend in the years to follow and this has turned out to be the case. It’s given me an enormous sense of being able to be different, and different on my own terms.

That’s the trick. Let’s see where it goes.

 

 

 

Vision

Tags

aesthetics, digital, film, joy, luck, philosophy, photography, pleasure, psychology, vision

I am happier than I have ever been with my photography.

That’s saying something because even in my earlier untutored days I always enjoyed taking pictures.

So what has changed?

Vision.

What do I mean by that?

The most obvious interpretation is simply becoming more aware of what I am looking at. This has happened. I see more. I look at a place or person and can place a metaphorical frame around that scene and can maneuver it into the most pleasing aspect. If I have a camera with me, I can capture that view.

But it’s more than that. I’m able to add many things to my photography. Some technical – – I know how to use shutter speed and aperture, focal lengths and focal points effectively. Others philosophical and psychological. It’s these latter qualities that are moving my photography forward these days.

I have an aesthetic. I know how I want my images to look and I know what I want to photograph. To get to this point I’ve had to unlearn much of what I had absorbed from prevailing photographic wisdom. I spent a long time going along with the crowd, all the while wondering why my results looked good from a conventional point of view but left me feeling empty and unfulfilled. Leaving this behind has meant that much of my photography has moved into areas that are not popular or fashionable. But it has become more meaningful. So much so that even when I produce the occasional popular image I regard it not as the apogee of my current efforts but merely as a point where my own and popular tastes converge, in the process neither elevating nor downgrading the photograph in relation to any others that I prize.

This is a very important realization. Perhaps the most significant factor in my currently very satisfying approach to photography.

The other major component working for me is a greater appreciation of process. I embrace the flow of my art, acknowledging that how I do something is just as important and enjoyable as the result. It’s no coincidence that my picture taking process, from capture to print, has expanded to take in not only the conventional digital tools, such as Lightroom and Photoshop, but also the chemical tools required to develop a film. I can make an image in a lot of different ways and each has its own particular pleasures. Currently I embrace digital and 35mm and medium format film photography. I have little doubt that I will expand further, into large format for example, at some point.

I know a lot. I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’m always trying to learn. My latest adventures will involve creative lighting as I’ve finally gathered up a portable high powered strobe – the Profoto B1 – and some light modifiers. If it’s like everything else I’ve done, embracing this will be slow and incremental but a constant pleasure with every step.

As a hobby, and I remain perpetually grateful that it will always be a hobby, photography has given me so much. I feel very lucky.

 

 

What I’ve Learned

Tags

aesthetics, digital, experience, fashion, film, knowledge, photography

The beginning of a new year is a frequently used opportunity to take stock of things, and why should I be an exception? So I’ll add my own snowflake to the avalanche of similar expressions, in this case concentrating on my photography.

I’ve been using a camera all my life, on or off, becoming only seriously involved over the past decade and a half. This latter period coincided with the digital revolution in image taking and for much of that time I was solely involved with digital.

It’s easy to forget now given the ubiquity of digital photography, be it from cameras or cell phones, the novelty and excitement of the first forays into digital capture. The technology was in its infancy, meaning that it was both expensive and limited compared to today’s standards. But the excitement overrode this. Even though the images were not technically good, indeed for a long time not matching film, the ease of use and the rapidity of seeing results, results that were not limited to 36 on a roll (although, in truth, not a huge amount more on those early low capacity storage media) was glorious. No more trips to local developer and a wait to get your snaps back. Now you had the result instantly, and if, based a quick review of a tiny screen, you weren’t happy with it you could take it again. And again. And again.

When SLRs finally took to digital and the prices fell into the affordable category, it felt like heaven had arrived. I took more pictures during the period between my acquisition of a Canon Rebel XT and a Canon 5D Mark III than at any time before or since. Over one hundred thousand.

Nirvana, right?

Wrong.

Even though I undoubtedly improved as a photographer in many ways, including composition and the technicalities of operating a camera, over that time I did not grow artistically.

If anything I went backwards.

What do I mean by this?

I’m tempted to wave my hands in the air and say it’s just a feeling, but I can articulate some of the qualities. These became apparent to me as I began to catalog and scan my older film photographs. Many of, I might say most, of these were miserable photographs. Inept. Yet a few, more by chance than anything else, possessed a quality of transcendence and deep emotional resonance that surpassed what I’m currently taking with my digital cameras.

Why?

Much had to do with context. Some images are wedded to specific moments of high significance in my life. These always a carry an historical weight. Much also to do with rarity. Frequently I would have only one, or at most a handful, of photographs of a particular time or event. Immediately this gave the image scarcity value. A value that could transform an obviously poorly taken photograph into something very meaningful. Compare this a single one of dozens of digital photographs capturing only the slightest variation in some mountain view or glorious sunset. This picture is essentially worthless. Now, if its neighbors suddenly vaporized and it was left as sole representative, it would suddenly become very valuable indeed. But the reality of digital picture taking is that it’s almost impossible to restrict yourself to a single snap of a scene. At least it was for me during that period. Hence the hundred thousand images.

So what, you might say. Just delete the duplicates. In some cases, yes, that seems easy to do. But more often it’s not. You look at one, then another, vacillating between which to keep and which to lose, and eventually just give up. And so they stay, each one a potential gem, but in toto just lost in the pile.

I have no doubt that one of the many reasons I returned to film photography over the past couple of years was to return exclusivity to my photographs. Even if that exclusivity meant being left with an imperfect take of a never-to-be repeated moment. Artistry is much more than simple aesthetics. A well applied rule of thirds for example. Artistry involves imbuing whatever object your art produces with a human resonance, one that speaks directly to the soul as well as to a sense of form. What quality allows for this communication with the soul? Hard to quantify and hard to explain except that it often differs for individuals based on their experience, knowledge, and empathy. What moves one person may leave another cold. One that moves one generation might leave a future one puzzled and yet another moved once again. Art has its fashions too. I might add that I am mostly out of sympathy with the fashions that dominate current popular photography, but that’s just me and I’m well aware of that.

As I said, during my digital heyday, I frequently took duplicates galore. With film, very few. I still photograph digitally. These days, though, I do it with the restrictions of film in the back of my mind. No or very few duplicates. Simply by altering my process, I have raised the value of my digital photography. Nowadays, each picture, be it film or digital, gets a lot more consideration before I press the shutter button. The results reflect that consideration.

Would I have learned this restraint and consideration without taking up film again? I doubt it. There is little motivation to change when things are easy.

The other, somewhat unexpected, consequence of returning to film is the abrogation of my obsession with the latest and greatest photographic technology. No more gear acquisition syndrome. I meet with fellow photographers and wander away when the inevitable considerations of camera or lens specifications begin to dominate the conversation. Sharpness? Who cares. It may or may not enhance an image, but it’s just one small component whose value has been greatly overrated.

It’s surprisingly freeing, removing yourself from the mainstream. I have returned to what is now a photographic niche. I’m the only member of my photography club who makes film a major component of my work. I like that.

That’s what I’ve learned.

 

 

 

 

Where Am I Now?

Tags

aesthetics, attitude, conformity, individuality, popularity, purpose, vision

 

Talking Trees by Richard Keeling on 500px

I was looking at my 500px profile page this afternoon shortly after writing my post about infrared photography and for perhaps the first time ever – and that means a long time, three years plus on 500px, much longer as a photographer – I felt like this is me.

Me, as in a photographer with interests and activities that no longer register any competitive edge or impulse. Me, as in a photographer who has found a style that fits. Me, as in a photographer who has grown and will continue to grow but in my own way.

That’s a fairly hard position to hold on a photography website like 500px, driven, as it is, by the relentless pressure of likes and favorites, emails promoting the most successful (as in most licensed or most popular) photographs, and the perpetual sense – not confined to 500px by any means – that you are but one of many bobbing in a sea of photographers.

At least it’s hard to hold if you consider your photography as some kind of popularity contest. Let that go, and 500px simply becomes what it should always have been – a forum to display your work.

Partly, of course, the blame for this falls on me. Looking for the wrong rewards.

Easy to do, alas.

But I’m breaking away. This requires a certain degree of isolation and, more importantly, a willingness to open yourself up to influences that completely transcend current contemporary photographic trends. Influences from differing visual arts, cinematography, painting, sketching and beyond those into literature, science and philosophy. Photography can be very small. Perhaps it’s this smallness that is driving me slightly bananas over much of what I see.

Well, we’ll see. Onward.

Red on Green

Tags

aesthetics, color, film, individuality, lens, obsolescence, personality

 

Red on Green by Richard Keeling on 500px

I am slowly tiptoeing into the world of color film photography. Slowly because it has taken a while to gather the courage necessary to start home developing color, a necessary prerequisite to keeping costs down. Commercial developing is both rarer and a lot more expensive than it used to be, an unavoidable consequence of the relegation of film photography to a fringe operation.

No matter. Paradoxically, provided you use fresh reagents and keep a tight control on temperature, in some ways color developing is easier than black and white.

The results can show some variation in color balance depending partly on developing conditions and partly on the type of film used. The above photograph is another shot using the very cheap (comparatively) Agfa Vista 200 film and one that upon developing showed a slight magenta tint that I corrected for with Photoshop. The look is quite different from that obtained with a digital camera. It has a much more organic feel and a warmth that undoubtedly results from the particular color balance characteristic of this film, even with slight color corrections. Not as sharp though and discernably film grainy. Completely free though of both the color and luminence noise characteristic of digital images.

It’s a look that I like and one that will keep me persisting with color film photography.

Sometimes I wonder why and how my own personal photographic aesthetic has changed so much over the past year.  I used to be a sharpness-fixed pixel peeper, chasing the highest resolving digital sensors and lenses. No longer. I’m currently shooting with an old and relatively cheap consumer zoom lens, the Canon EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM, that is marginally inferior to my standard go-to lens of old, the 24-105mm f/4L in terms both of sharpness and distortion. No image stabilization either. It’s a lens I stopped using way back in 2006 when I bought the L lens. Yet here it is today in almost constant use on my outmoded and obsolete Canon camera film bodies. Giving me images such as the one above. Images that I currently prize.

It hard to adequately articulate the relief that this turn backwards has brought me. I have stepped off the photographic consumer treadmill. I’ll never step back on. My pictures, good, bad or ugly, have a different feel that is tangible and that rescues even the most cock-eyed effort from the indifference that plagued the hundreds of digital images that I used to collect daily. In doing so, my art has reclaimed a personality, my personality. I don’t need anything else from it.

No Tips For Me

Tags

aesthetics, digital, film, frog, great photographers, light, tips, vision

A refreshing post from The Lesser Photographer:

They’re popular because they deliver the junk food of photography world; yummy and empty.

The tips are as predictable as they are boring:

• Rule of thirds
• Shoot raw
• Use a tripod
• Use filters
• Rule of Thirds
• Kneel down
• Rule of Thirds!!

First, realize you don’t need tips. They’re built for page views, not education. They’re often full of incorrect information or information that’s incorrect for you.

No tip can tell you the only thing you need to know and it’s something you already know: what you love about photography. If what you love about photography contradicts the tips, the tips can’t be right.

“The junk food of photography”.  This gets it perfectly right, although I prefer to think of them as the “Cosmopolitan Cover’ of photography. Catchy numbers designed to draw you in. And just as reading “Cosmopolitan”, or any other popular magazine for that matter, leaves you with a feeling of wasted time, so do popular photography websites.

Yet I still visit them. I’m as susceptible to junk as anyone. It’s just that I’m a bit more aware these days, and can pull away before I get too involved.

Currently I’m dipping into Ansel Adams’ “The Camera” and “The Negative” for knowledge of technique and into “The Architecture of Vision”, a collection of interviews with Michelangelo Antonioni, for aesthetic advice.

Dipping in this case actually means reading, and without the benefit of bullet points or numbers to powerpoint the message home. But there’s a depth there that is wholly absent on the websites, so much so that it makes me wonder exactly what makes a popular photographer tick.

Is it collecting ever more and sophisticated gear? Is is emulating (aping I prefer to call it) the currently fashionable trends in photography? Is it spending hours massaging an image in Lightroom or Photoshop?

I don’t really know the answer. They’re just questions. But they do speak to a way of making photographs that does not appeal to me.

It’s somewhat isolating, this way of thinking. I feel myself feeling more and more out of sympathy with my friends in my photography clubs, admiring their technical improvements but not finding much kinship in vision. The great photographers – Adams, Cartier-Bresson, Arbus, Capa, Ray, Gursky, Mapplethorpe and many more – these I relish. Primarily because each has a distinct vision of how he or she wants a photograph to look, and that vision stamps an individuality on the resulting image.

That’s what I like. It’s what I would like to aspire to, but I’m a long, long way behind the great photographers. And doubtless always will be.

But that’s OK. At this point I know enough to know what interests me and what does not. That, in itself, is a mark of progress. What has become clear to me, beginning over the past couple of years, is that I am interested in light.

Using film has been a way to getting to know light in a way that is much more visceral than using digital. As an example, I find myself frequently using color filters with black and white film, usually yellow-green, yellow, orange or red, to get a specific range of intensities on my film.

Digitally, it is possible to emulate this using color mixing tools in Lightroom or Photoshop. But there all I am doing is altering the balance of color information recorded as bit and bytes and translated into the colors you see on a screen. With a filter on a lens, I am altering the makeup of light that impinges on that film, and by doing so, I set up subtle variations in the photochemical reactions of that film.

So what you might ask? One way is via electrons in a microchip, the other via silver deposition on a piece of cellulose or polyester.

It’s a fair point. The results, as seen on a screen anyway, may be very similar. But I find a deep satisfaction in working with light itself rather than bit and byte values, even as I acknowledge that those very same types of bit and byte manipulations present my scanned film on screen.

That satisfaction has kept me working with film over the past year. Probably it will for a long time to come. It’s, these days, an offbeat path to follow but it is fun and involving. Where I want to be.

Where I did not want to be was scrabbling through the undergrowth in Forest Park looking for a detached eye piece hood. But every journey has its rewards.

Frog by Richard Keeling on 500px

Never did find the hood though.