Concision is a virtue. Some writers express themselves thoroughly with only a laconically minimalist assemblage of words. These wordsmiths — deities of pithiness — are my inspiration. For unlike them, I am an adjective junkie cavorting in the company of the loquacious. I imbibe in drunken orgies of word gluttony and succumb most decadently to [...]
After getting downright dirty in details in Part 2, we’re going to begin Part 3 right where we left off — in the mud and the grime and the goo of image quality discussions… Highlight Fetishists There’s been a fair amount of internet chatter over the fact that clipped highlights in a Monochrom are well [...]
In Part 1 of this series, I theorized that nearly every element of a photographer’s perceived needs are really nothing more than his fetishes — and each photographic fetish comes with its own adherents and detractors. I began with a discussion of the camera’s build quality and here, in Part 2, I’ll discuss various imaging [...]
Sharpness is nothing more than a fetish. So, too, is tonality. Noise, contrast, micro-contrast and megapixels? All fetishes. Even black and white. Show me a photographer and I’ll show you a fetishist. Every new camera will titillate some photographers, while disgusting others. Fortunately, none of us are so dysfunctional that we possess every known photo [...]
One day, I realized that photo blogs are never written as parables. On the second day, I wrote a pair of parables. On the third day, I read my parables and realized why photo blogs are never written as parables. On the fourth day, I published them anyway… – — – The Mermaid and the [...]
Term Limits (A Diatribe in 3 Harumphs) PROLOGUE I see him hovering in the fringes of my peripheral vision — analyzing me; analyzing my camera; analyzing my subject. He begins strolling toward me. I take a deep breath, grit my teeth and wait for the inevitable… “You a photographer?” he asks, nodding at my camera. [...]
For many years, I’ve harbored a secret conviction that digital cameras delude us into believing we’re much better photographers than we really are. Snapping up-down and willy-nilly with a blithe disregard for focus, exposure, composition, context, pathos, ethos, irony or significance is a sure-fire way to take a lot of crappy photos. But digital cameras [...]
We live in an era where sharpness, literalness and hyperrealism dominate the modern photographic terrain. In spite of this, my own photography is actually informed by the golden age photojournalists of the 1930s and 1940s, post-war photo essays from the 1950s, and John Szarkowski’s New Documentarian leanings of the 1960s. I wasn’t always this anachronistic. Rather, [...]
I photograph people. On the streets and in public places, my eye and my camera keep a vigilant lookout for the little nuances that help define what it means to be human. Because of this somewhat curious behaviour, I’ve been cursed at, chased and threatened, yet I don’t resent when these street confrontations occur. They’re [...]
Many people assume that writing product reviews is all ice cream and pony rides. After all, who among us wouldn’t desire free use of the latest, shiniest wonder-widget for a week or two? So when I tell you that Leica lent me their new 21mm Super-Elmar-M f/3.4 ASPH for review purposes, you’re excused for concluding [...]
When confronted with the task of comparing two fundamentally disparate objects, cliché-wielding literary hacks frequently assert the two objects are “as different as night and day.” It’s a quick and effective means to punctuate one’s argument that each object is utterly unique and should thus be considered on its own merits. Being somewhat of a [...]
Do you have a term paper to write for photography class? Are you looking to impress a hot hipster with a lomography fetish? Do you suffer from attention deficit disorder? Then this is the article for you. It’s nothing more than a mathematically-challenged baker’s dozen of my own personal photography quotes — unadorned with tedious [...]
It began so innocently. These things often do. With my Leica M2 in hand, I was walking the street and scrutinizing the ordinary life that ebbed and flowed ahead of my purposeful gate. Many of these excursions are unremarkable, but every so often the sky parts and an improbable cluster of events intersect into a [...]
In 1952, pianist David Tudor stepped on stage to perform composer John Cage’s latest work, 4’33″. He sat at the piano, closed the lid over the keyboard and, for the next 4 minutes and 33 seconds, played absolutely nothing. The point of this — John Cage’s most notorious composition — was to illustrate that ambient [...]
A pessimist would suggest that I’m a painfully slow learner. An optimist would opine that I’m refreshingly open-minded. Both would draw their conclusion from the same exact occurrence — my conversion to rangefinder photography after 20 years of shooting SLRs. It’s now been over two years since this fateful switch and I’ve documented the process, [...]
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