Digital Free Again

Tags

artifacts, chemistry, digital photography, enlarging, film, film photography, longevity, negatives, photo paper, photography, print making, scanning, value, wet print

 

Don’t take the title the wrong way – I’m not going to trash digital photography or even personally abandon it. What I can say is that this weekend, for the first time in twenty five years, I went from taking a photograph to printing it without any involvement whatsoever of a digital camera or a scanner.

In other words, the old fashioned way of making photographic prints.

Now, you might ask – why, in this time of digital supremacy and with so many tools available to produce any effect you want from your digitally acquired images, would anyone choose this path?

Partly it’s a nostalgia trip. I’ve done it this way before, it’s fun to try again. Partly, it’s to see just what chemical printing can do these days. There have been technological advances, even as the methodology as a whole has become relegated to a niche. Partly it is to defy that digital look, so ubiquitous and so beguiling in its reproducibility, sharpness and vibrance. The look that is now the de facto standard for excellence. Try getting a film photograph into a contemporary photography competition that does not have a specific category for film – I’ll warrant that your chances will be very slim, and it won’t be anything to do with the quality of the composition. It will just be the look of film, grainy and no way as sharp. A look that screams imperfection to the pixel peeper.

But mostly it’s the realization that’s grown on me over the couple of years that I’ve taken up photographing film again that the best way to present a photograph captured on film is using a technique that shares the chemistry. Creating a photographic print is taking a photograph in reverse. The camera becomes the source of the image, the photographic paper the recipient. And the image is grown and shaped with much the same reagents as are used to develop the original film. There’s an appealing symmetry to this. But it’s more than that. Because both the capture of the image and the creation of the print are analog methods, the process works to analog rules. No little packets of digital information, sampled and algorithmically transformed, are involved here. All depends on the reactivity of silver compounds to incident light, be it on film or photo paper.

What do I mean by best in real terms, though. After all, it’s perfectly possible to print a beautiful looking black and white digital image and those from dedicated black and white printers look especially great. Most people are not going to notice a difference. Nonetheless, I will maintain that there is a quality of seamlessness, comprised of barely discernable yet seemingly infinitely variable shades of gray in a print made from an enlarger and photographic paper. An extremely subtle difference, to be sure, and I’m not convinced it’s enough for me to argue that going the photoactive print method is the only way to go for black and white (color is a different matter altogether, and one I’m not experienced enough to comment on). But it’s good enough to convince me to keep going with wet print making, especially as I now have quite a collection of black and white film negatives built up over the past couple of years. Even if it’s difficult to argue the superiority of film to wet print over digital to digital print, it’s easier to argue that a wet print of a negative produces a better result than a scan of a negative printed digitally. Using an enlarger moderates a film’s grain and really does take full advantage of the full grayscale range contained within a developed film’s emulsion. A scanned negative loses that advantage and if anything accentuates grain and flaws within an image. The flaws can be corrected in Photoshop, the grain is pretty much what you get. Noise reduction algorithms, designed to combat digital noise, really can’t cope with grain.

That said, there are advantages to scanning a negative. An over or underexposed negative is difficult to reproduce well with an enlarger. A scanner in conjunction with good imaging software can pull out more from the image more easily. A scanned image is easy to clean up too, scratches, dust, salt spots – all can be healed out with Photoshop. To fix an enlarged print literally involves painting over the flaws with spotting pens or brushes. That actually is rather fun – it moves your print closer to the world of painting. But each wet print has to be fixed individually – a cleaned up scan will produce clean digital prints forever.

Not that one is likely to make prints forever. At least I’m not. The nice thing about making an enlargement is that, even with your own best efforts to keep everything consistent, there are going to be differences, slight ones to be sure, between each resulting print. Far more so than found in a batch of digital prints. It gives each print a stamp of individuality and makes each more deserving of the common habit of photographic artists to number and limit the print run of their work to generate some sort of exclusivity.

But perhaps the single most important consequence of taking up chemical print making again is simply the fact that I make the print. The vast – and I mean vast – majority of my digital photographs remain confined to the computer and the flat screen; simply being able to see it so easily there somehow works against any desire to get the image onto something solid. It’s true that all my film negatives are scanned and stored in precisely the same way and can be exhibited as such, but the artifactual quality of a film negative leads, in my mind at least, to considering its expression to be most truly represented by another artifact, namely the paper print.

Eventually I will have a box full of prints from my favorite negatives. I’ll warrant that these will have at least as much chance of surviving for posterity as my stored digital images, and I would claim that they actually have a much better chance. Because they will be real solid objects anyone can look at without any need for interpretation via machinery and software and thus wear their value directly. In an age of seemingly infinite reproducibility and swamped daily with millions of new photographs, this quality is likely to stand tall.

 

 

 

Wetland Path

Tags

approval, artistry, bicycle, collections, digital photography, film, Forest Park, fulfillment, history, meaning, path, photography, popularity

I continue swerving, much as I do when I’m riding my bike over a muddy wetland path, between competing aspects of my photography.

On one side, I want to make popular pictures. Literally popular, the ones that get the oohs and aahs and the likes on web pages. On the other side, I want to make personal pictures, pictures that resonate with my life and its history. Sometimes the two coincide. But not very often.

In my heart, I know that photography simply to gain approval is a complete dead end artistically. All I’m really doing here is propping up my insecurities. Very few of the photographs that I’ve taken in the past that fall into this category have any meaning for me today. Ultimately, all I got was a short term buzz that evaporated too quickly.

I’m self-aware enough to be fully cognizant of this personality trait, yet does it stop me seeking that very same approval? No. I still want my oohs, aahs and likes. It’s an addiction that I find very difficult to shake.

But I’m trying. Particularly over the past year, I’ve been to some extent avoiding what one might call local beauty spots or photo ops and simply been documenting my usual daily existence. This had produced an extensive repertoire of photographs of much the same scenes, albeit at different times of year and under differing conditions. None – or few at least – have much affinity to what might be called popular photography.

There are more like a diary – a record of my days. Never before have I been so thorough or consistent in collecting such images, and looking back through the growing collection, I see multiple near-duplicates. But unlike the duplicates that are so easy to rapidly gather with a digital camera as the shutter finger takes over, each one is stamped, however subtly, with an individuality that is a product of its place and time.

At some point, when I am ready, I will take stock of these photographs and consider what to do with them. A collage might be very effective as a visual snapshot of lengthy period of time. Or something else perhaps. Whatever it is, the material I’ll need continues to accumulate and this is satisfying on a deep level. I’m growing something here. It will be most fulfilling to see it flower.

 

 

Into the shadows

Tags

digital photography, film, film photography, moment, photography, redundancy, speed, value

I was idly looking through my Lightroom library and I noticed that I am on track to have taken about 6,500 photographs by the end of the year.

That’s a lot, but if I look at 2014, I took 12,000. In 2013 I took 16,000 – and much the same in the year before that.

Why the drop off?

One answer is obvious, shooting film. I began in May of 2014. Inevitably this slows you down. From the points of view of capacity and cost, you are going to hold back compared to the freedom of shooting multiple digital images. Indeed, the opportunity to shoot dozens or hundreds of alternate views of the same scene is one of the irrefutable attractions of going digital. It’s often touted as a learning tool or aid to perfection – shoot as many as you can to get that ‘just right’ take, playing with all the options that a camera offers you.

I’m not going to argue with that. It’s pointless, and it’s one reason why digital has so many adherents, most of whom will never see any point in shooting film.

Nonetheless, despite this lack of opportunity to ‘get things right’, I’m finding that I’m getting far higher proportion of satisfying photographs these days than I did in the past. Simply put, the value of my photography has increased – not in monetary terms, that is, but in terms of artistic achievement.

I wondered if this was simply a product of making do. If I take just one or two film images compared to tens of digital alternatives, would I not be prone to accept the result simply because that’s all I had?

There may be something to this. Nonetheless, when I look back at scenes photographed in the past with hundreds of alternate digital images, it’s clear that all I’m really accumulating is redundancy. There are often dozens of fine images, each a little different from the other, any one of which I could print and put on my wall with equally satisfying results. True, I am guaranteeing to some extent the capture of a really good image by taking dozens, but I can also capture an equally fine photograph with a single well-considered click, and no number of alternates will rescue a dull or poorly considered original.

But there’s something more going on. For alongside my film photography, I continue to shoot digitally, and I might have thought that I would be just as ready to rapidfire a series of alternates to compensate for any irrecoverable problem with my film efforts. But I don’t. On the contrary, my digital photographing frequency has dropped to close to that of my film shooting. And in no case do I find myself feeling any resulting sense of loss. No, I find myself valuing my digital results more highly and getting a much higher percentage of true keepers.

So can I consider myself a better photographer? Yes, I can. But beyond that, I have become a better appreciator of a particular moment in time and place and much more cognisant of its uniqueness. In other words, not only the resulting photograph but also the scene itself have increased in importance. So much so that I can now put the camera aside to revel in whatever I am looking at. To embrace the moment and the reality of that moment.

The result is that I am moving into the shadows and out of the spotlight. I find it’s much easier to see into the light than out of it.

Ten years gone

Tags

artistry, beginnings, cameras, Canon Rebel XT, chair, digital photography, garden, ignorance, ordinariness

 

IMG_0001.jpg by Richard Keeling on 500px

Ten years ago, give or take a few weeks, I bought – with great excitement and not a little expense – my first digital SLR camera.

A Canon Rebel XT with the kit lens, a distinctly underwhelming 18-55mm slow zoom.

Not that I was really aware of that at the time. I was king of the photography world. Having spent a bit more than $1000 on the camera, I felt like I possessed the supreme instrument of photographic excellence. Certainly, the reviews and ads I had perused before making the purchase led me to believe something along those lines.

I had pretty much fallen for the positive press surrounding this camera. It was one of the earliest affordable (as in not costing many thousands of dollars) ‘serious’ cameras. One that was supposed to take your photography, especially if you were coming from a point and shoot camera, either film or digital, to the next level.

It didn’t. In truth my first year’s output from this Rebel XT was frequently inferior to the results I had been getting beforehand with my older Canon G2 Powershot. Not least because I didn’t really know what I was doing. The photograph above of my back garden, for example, was shot at an unfortunately slow 1/20 sec and shows signs of camera shake. The depth of field was too shallow, the ISO too conservative. Considerations that are second nature to me these days but simply did not enter my consciousness as I played with my new and wonderful camera.

On the other hand it’s a picture that’s not too terrible. It shows the scene as it was. A rather uninteresting scene, to be sure, and not one that would win any awards for composition, but as record of time and place it serves perfectly adequately. Looking out at the same scene today reveals a largely similar view, a pointer to the slowness of time as much as anything else. Even that garden chair is still there, a rather unexpected measure of the durability of industrial plastic.

The rather sweet irony of this particular photograph, blankly undemonstrative in its ordinariness, is that it reveals a genuineness that is, to my eyes, wholly absent from the massaged mass-production that dominates digital photography, at least popular digital photography, today.

Of course, there was and is a whole artistic aesthetic that embraces images such as these, if not exactly this image. This one wouldn’t be embraced by anyone except me I suspect. And even I don’t really embrace it. It’s much more of a point of history than anything else.

That enough though.

When I stopped being a photographer…

Tags

artistry, cameras, convention, digital photography, fashion, film, film photography, Forest Park, forums, history, photography websites, process, technique

…and became an artist.

Not the world’s greatest artist, but artist enough for me.

No ‘ah-ha’ moment. Just a gradual realisation that the ephemera of photography, stuff like lenses, cameras, resolution and sharpness and a thousand other technical details, didn’t really interest me any more.

For that’s what held me back. Concentrating on the tools and not on the result of using those tools. Following, almost slavishly, photography websites like DPReview, Digital Photography School, and The Digital Picture. Don’t get me wrong, these are good sites full of information, advice and active comment forums, yet they concentrate on the minutiae of photography. The nitty gritty. Technical details down to pixel level.

Clearly, if you look at the comments and follow any of the forum threads, information like that is enough for a lot of people. More than enough, judging from the sometimes heated discussions comparing this vs. that.

But it’s all noise in the end. Distracting noise. It removed me from the true point of being a photographer, that is to produce an artistically satisfying image.

Dead Tree, Forest Park by Richard Keeling on 500px

I can’t deny that going back to shooting film helped enormously with this change in attitude. It’s been a full year now since I took up a 35mm film camera and I’m on average shooting 2 rolls of 36 exposure 35mm film and 1/2 a roll of 120 film a week. More images, usually, than I capture using my digital cameras.

Going back to film moved me back to yesterday’s cameras. There was nothing to keep up with any more.

Those photography sites I listed above very occasionally contained an article or comment about film photography, but with the emphasis on it being a niche interest utilized by few and abandoned – happily – by most. Yesterday’s technology. Quaint, nostalgic, the province of the eccentric or the backward. Once in a while, an enlightened author would attempt to highlight the history of photography and try to place today’s digital obsession into some sort of context, but, judging from many comments, such an attempt at perspective flew over most people’s heads. They just weren’t interested.

That’s fine. You don’t have to be a film photographer to be a great photographer. But, to be a great photographer, you need to be a great artist.

So away from the latest and greatest I moved. Not a moment too soon really. It costs money to keep up with all this progress. I spent far more than I needed to. None of it made me a better photographer. A better collector of camera stuff maybe. Perhaps that was once the point, yes, for the urge to collect and complete is pretty strong within me. Not any more though. On the one hand I can look at my collection of lenses and say – “Wow, what a comprehensive set I have. I can cover any photographic eventuality!” On the other, I can look at that collection and see them sitting there, often unused, just things to have. Paradoxically, a mark of inertia. Not artistically helpful at all.

Obviously, that’s not quite the whole story. I can make good use of any one of those lenses. When I do, I feel pleased. But each is simply a tool, a conduit of process. What matters is the result. Today, I deliberate restrict myself to a single or limited repertoire of lenses. Currently with my 35mm shooting I’m using the second lens I ever bought. A cheap consumer grade lens, the Canon EF 28-105mm 3.5-4.5mm II if you really want to know. Discontinued and superseded. But using it is giving me a lot of pleasure. Both in the using and in the result.  


Egret seen through a bush by Richard Keeling on 500px

I also believe it is making me a better photographer. Or, at the very least, a more thoughtful photographer.

Why was I caught?

Tags

Canon, castle, Craster, digital photography, Dunstanburgh, England, equipment, experience, knowledge, learning, Northumberland, technique, upgrade, wasted money

 

Dunstanburgh Castle as seen from Craster. by Richard Keeling on 500px

Take a look at this photograph. It was taken in the summer of 2006 using my first ever digital SLR camera, a Canon Rebel XT and a cheap consumer lens, the EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM that was originally designed for Canon’s line of EOS film cameras.

Now, I didn’t know what I was doing with a camera at that point. I shot primarily in ‘Program’ mode, although I was smart enough to collect my images as RAW files, so the aperture and speed of this image (f/5,1/100) were selected by the camera. Nor was I great at composition, but this picture happened to be adequately balanced. Interestingly, this particular viewpoint completely obscured the village of Craster, leaving only the decaying fishing jetty and the castle in the far distance in view. With the lowering light and muted colors, this gives a desolate and bleak aspect to the image that the small figures of tourists on their way to and from the castle does little to counterpoint.

So it’s an effective mood shot that I would be happy to take today. Even though I would be using ‘Manual’ and carefully selecting my aperture and shutter speed.

What is clear from this image is that nothing could have been added to it had I photographed it with the much better, from a technical point of view, equipment that I spent a great deal of money on as I collected it over the intervening years.

Perhaps it might have been a tad sharper. Or a little less distorted. Or more highly resolved on a larger sensor with more pixels.

But better? No.

At least not from an equipment aspect. Any change, a different aperture, focal point or aspect that I would make today would be based on experience and knowledge gained over the years into the workings of making a photograph.

I could still be using the same camera and lens. (I really could – I still have them). But they’ve been long supplanted with full frame 5D’s and ‘L’ lenses.

Nice things to have. But why was I caught up in the need to improve my equipment to at least the same extent – and I would say more, to be honest – than my need to improve my technique?

Because it was easier.

It’s always easier to buy your way to (apparent) success than it is to work towards it. I could have made a conscious choice to ignore the ads and to ignore the camera enthusiast web sites. Instead, I could have devoted myself to fully learning how to use the camera and lens that I actually had.

But I didn’t. I fooled myself that getting a Canon EOS 30D would give me better pictures than my XT (it didn’t). I fooled myself that an EF 24-105mm f/4L would give me better pictures than that old 28-105mm (it didn’t).

Yes, my options increased as I bought more and more sophisticated equipment. But I didn’t fully use them. Because, still, I did not know what I was doing.

Nine years later, yes, I can say I know what I’m doing and I can appreciate the small advantages that better built and featured equipment give you. But they were, in the strictest sense, completely unnecessary to my development as an artist.

I could have saved a lot of money too.

Photographing the Chain Of Rocks Canal Bridge

Tags

35mm film, black and white, bridge, Chain of Rocks Canal, Chain Of Rocks Canal Bridge, color, digital photography, film, film photography, full frame, medium format, Mississippi River, Rolleiflex

 Three views. 

Chain Of Rocks Canal Bridge by Richard Keeling on 500px

Chain Of Rocks Canal Bridge by Richard Keeling on 500px

 

Chain of Rocks Canal Bridge by Richard Keeling on 500px

The central span of the old bridge was demolished a couple of weeks ago. What remains are the two peripheral spans, each isolated, each looking somewhat like a skeletal Trojan horse.

The three images are all from the same day and the same time, but taken on different cameras. The top is a medium format film image from a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex camara, the second from a Canon Elan 7E single lens reflex film camera, and the third from a Canon 5D Mark III, a single lens reflex digital camera.

Regardless of the change in compositional angle and viewpoint, each image has a feel that is characteristic of the medium of capture. The large negative from the Rolleiflex conveys a drama that is in part due to the square format and in part due to the uniquely fine resolution that medium format film conveys. The grain of this film is no different from that used for 35mm photography, but the much larger size of the captured image effectively shrinks it into a much smoother, sharper and silkier appearance.

Whereas the second image, captured on 35mm film, reveals a more strongly apparent grain. This is not necessarily a bad thing; grain in itself conveys a feel that moves the photographic image closer to that created by a pointillistic painter and it takes on an attractiveness that is in itself most satisfying. But if you are looking for the clearest detail and sharpest image, you won’t find it here.

But you will find in the third image, the digital product of a 22 megapixel sensor, and, in this day and age, the most commonly found  type of photograph.

And you cannot deny the digital image looks very good. Clean, crisp and naturally colorful.

So why do I find my eye gravitating towards the scanned film images you see here? Maybe it’s something to do with the black and whiteness of them, emphasizing the contrast and angularity of the structure. But the color contrast in the digital image is just as stark – grey-browns and pale greens and blues.

It has to be more than simply the content of the image. There’s a psychology at work here. Partly historic, partly aesthetic. I grew up with film photographs and prints. In the text books of my schooldays, bridges such as this would inevitably be portrayed in black and white. What’s more, the bridges found in those books would closely resemble this aging truss bridge structure. The cleaner lines of today’s girder bridges were less commonly found, or, at the very least, less commonly photographed. Is that any surprise? The symmetry, angularity and complexity of the truss bridge is a far more involving subject.

Here the top two photographs far more closely resemble those images from my past, settled via memory into my mental image of what a bridge should look like. Color seems extraneous. Too much unnecessary information.

I found myself drawn repeatedly to this, and to other old bridges, over the past years. I relish the beauty of the structure. I’ve photographed this bridge many times. But it’s only recently, via black and white film, that I’ve captured the emotional feel of this structure. This is perhaps the main reason why film photography continues to fascinate me since I took it up again and confounds any and all technical reasons – and there are many – arguing for the superiority of digital photography.

 

 

Stepping off the bandwagon

Tags

digital photography, gear acquisition syndrome, rat race

There was announcement today of a new digital camera – the Nikon D750, a full frame digital camera with an articulating view screen.

Predictably, announcements from the online camera stores I use, B&H and Adorama, arrived in my mailbox. So did a notice from St. Louis camera shop, Schillers, via Ed Crim, the leader of one of my photography clubs.

I have no doubt the D750 is a fabulous camera. However, even if I was a Nikon user, would I be rushing out to get a copy? To drop another $2,300?

I don’t think so. In fact, even when Canon come out with an equivalent (as they will, this is hardly groundbreaking technology, and Canon already have a number of APS-C sensor articulating cameras), I doubt if I will be even mildly excited about upgrading.

The truth is, dropping $2000 – $3000 plus every two years for the latest, greatest, shiniest digital camera is becoming a zero sum game. Improvements in digital cameras over the past few years have been real but essentially incremental, and none have been necessary for better photography. Once megapixel counts on sensors rose over 10, for all practical purposes any increase was only for the pixel peepers, for those who want to print huge canvases at resolutions satisfactory to an eye an inch away from the paper (and who looks at a huge print that closely anyway, unless, of course, you are a pixel peeper), or for those who want to crop their images radically – the only really useful advantage to my mind. And there are those who maintain that even 10 megapixels is overkill. Even video is now well established, dating usefully back to the Canon 5D Mark II in 2008.

So sell your older camera, you might respond, and use the cash towards the latest version. And that is a perfectly sound argument. However, I’m one who likes to make full use of what I own, and typically only upgrade when the equipment fails, and sometime not even then, opting instead for repair. In the early days of digital, significant improvements came fast. Getting the latest model made sense. But even then, it was clear that the improved equipment didn’t not necessarily translate into better photographs. There are many excellent images from the earliest days of digital SLRs.

Undoubtedly, returning to film photography has thrown the camera equipment rat race into sharper relief for me, but I think I would probably feel the same if I had not touched a roll of film this summer.

I’m stepping off the camera bandwagon. It’s a real relief.

Back to film

Tags

art, digital photography, film photography, Forest Park, Mildred B. Cooper Memorial Chapel, philosophy of art

 

Pavilion by The Muny by Richard Keeling on 500px

I think anyone really interested in photography as art gets to a point where he or she realizes that it’s all been done before. Usually better too. Realizing that, the photographer looks around at all currently fashionable trends and despairs at the relentless technical perfection and concurrent artistic bankruptcy.

It’s almost enough to make you stop dead.

But not quite. What’s the cure? I found that moving away from the mainstream and back into a niche is bringing unexpected dividends and rewards. Dividends in terms of learning, rewards in terms of reawakening the wonder of photography that originally drew me to the art in the first place.

My own niche exploration came out of my return to film photography. Although you can still find color negative film at your local Walgreens, and, provided you use a C-41 process film, get it processed there, albeit for a price about twice what it used to be, it’s clear that film photography has passed out of general popularity. As for black and white film, you’re only going to find that at a specialist camera shop. Expensive too there, so I rely on the online stores such a B&H, Adorama and Freestyle Photography.

Black and white is easy to develop at home, requiring only room temperature, a thermometer, measuring flasks, chemicals, and a light tight developing tank. Color, less so, largely because higher and tightly controlled temperatures are needed. But I may yet venture into C-41 processing. Not, however, the E-6 process used for the slide positive you see scanned above – that I sent to a commercial developing lab.

What is common to all these photographs, the lab-developed color above or the home-developed black and white below, is the restoration of an element absent from digital photography, namely anticipation. Only when I began again to shoot a roll of 36 35mm exposures did this delight make itself apparent. The instant gratification of a screen view of your digital shot seems like an absolute advancement over the patient waiting for a film to be completed, removed from the camera, developed and printed (or, in my case, scanned). And you cannot argue with the ability to instantly review your shot for composition, exposure and lighting that allows you make corrections that might enhance your picture right there and then on the spot.

So why sacrifice that for a process that might, on completion, reveal a wretchedly poor shot that cannot be done over?

Because even that wretchedly poor shot is going to be more emotionally and intellectually involving than many a digital shot, most just tiny variations on a theme that offer nothing except repetition and redundancy. All nearly perfect and all boring. Photograph inflation, one might call it, and just as devaluing as monetary inflation.

Too much of a good thing. And no mistake, digital photography is a good thing. The advantages it offers over film photography, speed, sharpness, low light sensitivity, ease of reproduction and storage, are all quite real and unassailable. But none of this is necessary for good photographic art, even as it encourages in way never seen before in photography a type of technical achievement that so easily seduces the photographer into believing the photograph has inherent worth simply because it is sharp, colorful, in focus and matches the ubiquitous rules of composition (such as the rule of thirds) that are relentlessly repeated by the popular photography websites and best selling books.

Hence the proliferation of millions of similar shots, each devaluing the other.

At least in my eyes. Others, I know, feel quite differently about it. Enjoying a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of “I can do it like the pros”, relishing the ease and speed, the ability to share instantly with friends and family.

None of this appeals. There’s a good reason I don’t own a smartphone despite my frequent use of the internet via computers at home and work. I like boundaries, I like to savor the moment and I like to open my eyes to what’s going on around me. Validation through social media, or indeed through any social interaction, is not something I am looking for. Perhaps that’s the real reason I find today’s cookie-cutter proliferation of digital photographs unsatisfying. In almost every case, display is accompanied by the ability of the viewer to appreciate, via likes, loves or favorites, your work. It becomes, whether intended or not, another form of social interaction. A means of gathering warm strokes. The trouble, for me at least, is that once the accumulation of appreciation surmounts the desire for self-expression, the road to artistry becomes closed, walled off by a sense of doing what others like rather than what you, yourself, like.

The perpetual problem for all artists. Easier, by far, for me as my artistry is not the means I use to generate my living.

So let’s continue this path onto dusty roads, long abandoned by most, and relish the moment.

Mildred B. Cooper Memorial Chapel by Richard Keeling on 500px

Forest Seat

Tags

Bladerunner, chantry wood, digital photography, photography, print film, ways of seeing