Very Low Light Stuff

[farnz]

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this is what elliot erwitt said about robert franks pictures

 

""(snipped) ... the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. ... (snipped)

For Elliot Erwitt to crassly write off the quality of Ansel Adams's work as no better than the quality of a postcard, IMO, says a whole lot more about Elliot Erwitt than it does about Ansel Adams's work.

 

Pete.

[Guest stnami]

. the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. .

Placed in a gift shop at postcard size sure his work will fullfill that role, placed in a gallery it will be viewed at a different level and in a workshop situation it becomes a learning tool

[robertwright]

Well- errr- yes. For instance it can be argued that Breitner was a better painter because he was a photographer too -and vica versa.

 

So in other words, it can't hurt. But I wonder about that.

 

I think the causality we want to be there says more about photography's fitful relationship to traditional notions of art than it does anything else.

 

Same with my Oscar Peterson reference. Jazz musicians are always compared to 'legit' musicians. The moniker 'legit' says it all.

 

But I am being a little obtuse overall.

[Guest stnami]

Same with my Oscar Peterson reference. Jazz musicians are always compared to 'legit' musicians. The moniker 'legit' says it all.

That is due to the situation that many see "tradition" as the means of measure. In art the measure in social and commercial terms has been the Classic (Greek) and the Rennaisance periods (especially Renaissance as most still write talk from a painting perspective). If we used the Fluxus art movement (Bueys, Nam June Paik, Kaprow John Cage the best known etc) as our mean the so called arguments would differ

[robertwright]

That is due to the situation that many see "tradition" as the means of measure. In art the measure in social and commercial terms has been the classic and the renaissance periods. If we used the Fluxus art movement (Bueys, Nam June Paik, Kaprow John Cage the best known etc) as our mean the so called arguments would differ

 

Photography and painting are sometimes both used to make "pictures". I think this similarity of results is often confused with a similarity of method and intention.

 

Of course everyone is welcome to get their influences from whatever medium they choose.

 

I just think it is interesting that two of the Twentieth Centuries greatest influences', Photography and Jazz, are both sometimes poor cousin to this day.

 

For some reason Cinema didn't really have to shake Theatre as influence. It has always stood on it's own legs.

[pklein]

To me, art is about communication. Perhaps of fact, perhaps of feeling. But the artist is making something which, when we encounter it, is going to convey to us something akin to what the artist was thinking or feeling when they made it. That's the core of it--we will view also the work according to our own time, life, prejudices, likes, dislikes.

 

To some degree, art is also about making mudpies. It's the sheer joy of getting your fingers into the materials and putting together something that gives you an "aha" feeling. Here, though, a person with vision and technique is going to have a better chance of making a meaningful mudpie, or at least a mudpie that is meaningful to people other than just him or herself.

 

Speaking of prejudices, I'm sorry that Elliot Erwitt, who I admire, made the "postcard" remark about Ansel Adams, who I also admire. He was viewing Adams through the lens of his own time and artistic preferences, and for him, Adams comes up short.

 

But Adams is at least generation older than Erwitt. When Adams developed his style, nobody was doing anything quite like it. Wagnerian, post-Romantic landscape photography. All that meticulous technique was about being able to not just depict, but express the grandeur of the American West.

 

Erwitt is more about playful juxtapositions, human relationships, and pictures where something about the subject satirizes itself. The two photographers are so different that it's not surprising that one of them might not be the other's cup of tea. And Erwitt had the advantage of viewing much of Adams' work with hindsight.

 

There are different ways to be master of your materials. Irving Berlin and Paul McCartney couldn't read or write music notation, but few would argue that they didn't know what they were doing. On the other hand, three chords, the ability to shout and a libido do not necessarily a musician make.

 

--Peter

[sean_reid]

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I always get piqued when the that hoary chestnut about "painting" comes out with regard to photography; it is either that photography is better because of, or, inspite of, its relation to painting or that it is worse than.

 

Do we ever say that so-and-so painter is better because he trained as a photographer first?

 

If I had started out as a sculptor would that make my pictures any better?

 

Sometimes in Jazz you get that attribution, Oscar Peterson for example, trained as a classical pianist. He is undoubtedly one of the greats, you feel the influence of his training, yet many jazz musicians never had this kind of training and excel.

 

Jazz doesn't need help, nor does photography. Training as a painter might indeed make you better as an artist, but then so would learning to sing Opera or Musicals. To equate the two is usually tendentious in my opinion.

 

I agree, there 'are no rules about either'.

 

sorry ot.

 

best

 

Robert

 

I'm not sure why those comments would come in response to my post. What, specifically, did I say that you take issue with?

 

Sean

[robertwright]

I'm not sure why those comments would come in response to my post. What, specifically, did I say that you take issue with?

 

Sean

 

I was being ot and obtuse simultaneously:D

 

my personal feeling is that photography needs painting like a fish needs a bicycle.

 

that is obtuse too. Of course there are influences, but I think many times painting is brought in as a backstop to the failings of photography. Plus all those other things I said.

 

sorry to tee-off on your post specifically.

 

edit-going back, I think you were saying that winogrand, having trained as a painter, had a specific idea of how he liked to render space, volume, form, etc in his picture, and therefore made some conscious decisions with regard to craft and tools to get what he was after. Or conversely he found the way reality was depicted by his particular photo-technique compelling. Technique in service of intent. Is this correct?

[robertwright]

I think for me painting is so radically different from photography that I refuse to see the connection beyond the fact that both make pictures. However, painting is actually 3-D, photography is 2-D although a "photograph" as Shore points out is a 2-D representation of a 3-D space on a 3-D object-a "print".

 

I think it is a case where the similarities are not a useful as the differences. Photography is unique as a medium obviously because of the differences to painting. And for me the most interesting explorations of that medium have been by artists who have exploited the differences more than the similarities.

 

going back to the op-while I don't like those images, if I was going to like them it would be because of their inherent digital-ness you could say, not because they aped some sort of painterly style. so in other words, more noise, more distortion.

 

to go way OT I don't really think digital photography is quote unquote photography, which for me is bound by the photo-chemical process, the fixing of light on a medium.

 

Digital photography for me is more "imaging" than photography, although some of the tools are the same.

[sean_reid]

edit-going back, I think you were saying that winogrand, having trained as a painter, had a specific idea of how he liked to render space, volume, form, etc in his picture, and therefore made some conscious decisions with regard to craft and tools to get what he was after. Or conversely he found the way reality was depicted by his particular photo-technique compelling. Technique in service of intent. Is this correct?

 

Yes.

 

Winogrand was in a bookstore once with Leo Rubinfien and said, about a painting by Titian seen in a book: "Look, Leo...another great photographer."

 

The days in which photographers tried to prop photography up on the lap of painting largely faded when pictorialism (in photography) died out. Photographers and painters face many of the same tasks and sometimes an artist in one medium learns from the other as well. But that's not a question of importance or borrowed legitimacy. It's more like saying that some steel workers learn from carpenters and vice-versa...

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[robertwright]

Yes.

 

Winogrand was in a bookstore once with Leo Rubinfien and said, about a painting by Titian seen in a book: "Look, Leo...another great photographer."

 

The days in which photographers tried to prop photography up on the lap of painting largely faded when pictorialism (in photography) died out. Photographers and painters face many of the same tasks and sometimes an artist in one medium learns from the other as well. But that's not a question of importance or borrowed legitimacy. It's more like saying that some steel workers learn from carpenters and vice-versa...

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

 

I think in the gallery world, the legitimacy is borrowed every day, but that is really ot...

 

When you hear the senior editor of the new york times magazine gush on and on about how a certain image has "painterly" qualities you realize photography will always engender those comparisons. It makes me a little sad actually.

[Guest stnami]

installations in art are still known as something you trip over in the dark ............... video is still viewed as graduates having fun or artists learning to play film makers ......painters come in and out of fashion.........photography is held in high esteem, well for now ..digital opened up a host of new horizons

[brill64]

...that dam lampshade is annoying me

[chrism]

Isn't the problem that we wear two hats here? Being interested in cameras and photography in general we look at photographs from a technical perspective, but if we were not photogeeks we would assess it as a picture. It is easy to criticise HCB's work as poorly exposed, poorly focussed and we know he didn't care as much as he might about darkrooms. But as pictures that cause an effect on the viewer, his photographs work well. We just have to remember which hat we are supposed to be wearing when we look at an image.

Anthony Burgess tried to define art as (I may be misquoting) something fashioned from paint, clay, sound etc, and intended to cause the viewer/listener to experience an emotion or be taught to feel differently about their world. Such a definition is doomed to be incomplete, but not a bad stab at it from the old fraud.

 

Chris

[Haans]

Put me in the "mood" camp. I like them...especially the first. Keep working on it Guy...I hate flashes too.

[sean_reid]

Isn't the problem that we wear two hats here? Being interested in cameras and photography in general we look at photographs from a technical perspective, but if we were not photogeeks we would assess it as a picture.

Chris

 

Who's we? <G>

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[Jamie Roberts]

Well, the images are orders of magnitude too dark for me, thanks, regardless of the ISO used. They also exhibit little or no tonality in the mid-highlights, and yes, the shadow modelling where you can call it that (because everything is shadowy) is pretty sinister. Put another way--the wedding story told by these shots is not one I'd particularly want to tell.

 

To those of you who "hate flash"--you really should try to get over it

 

Light is light... artificial or natural. Now, it can take years and $$ to "get it" with film, bit you have a digital camera so there's no excuse for not experimenting with supplemental light till you have something workable and portable. Try video light if flash intimidates you. Just make sure to think "off camera." Think of what makes great light great and try to create that..

 

I also think people might be surprised how little light you really need to make a huge difference to the look of shots like this.

 

And, again, it doesn't mean you stick a flash on your camera and blast away... but you can create great light with only a little effort where none--or too little--existed before. Even easier if you're shooting BW because then you don't care about mixing light colour.

 

IMO, of course, and YMMV

[scott kirkpatrick]

Apropos of terrible light and use of bounce flash, take a look at the W. Eugene Smith photos that I unearthed from the Life Magazine archives and posted in a little article on TOP about a week ago. Some of the commenters turned up lighting details -- he had a habit in desperate lighting (Schweitzer, Minamata, ...) of tossing in a bounce flash against dirt floors, brown ceilings, whatever it took. And the results, even in pictures that never became famous, show that the extra effort was worth it.

 

scott

[AlanG]

...Put another way--the wedding story told by these shots is not one I'd particularly want to tell...

 

 

There is a story here? Maybe some see a mood, but I don't see much communication.

 

As for use of supplementary light... Isn't this simply a basic skill that clients expect from us? I think flash units have been around since Sept 23, 1930. And photographers were using flash powder and hot lights long before that. Margaret Bourke-White illuminated industrial locations with magnesium flares.

 

"Margaret's success was due to both her people skills and her technical skills. Her experience at Otis is a good example. As she explains in Portrait of Myself, the Otis security people were reluctant to let her shoot for many reasons: First, steel making was a defense industry, so they wanted to be sure national security was not affected. Second, she was a woman and in those days people wondered if a woman and her delicate cameras could stand up to the intense heat, hazard, and generally dirty and gritty conditions inside a steel mill. When she got permission, the technical problems began. Black and white film in that era was sensitive to blue light, not the reds and oranges of hot steel -- she could see the beauty, but the pictures were coming out all black. She solved this problem by bringing along a new style of magnesium flare (which produces white light) and having assistants hold them to light her scenes. The result of her being able to work well with both people and technology resulted in some of the best steel factory pictures of that era, and these pictures earned her national attention." (from Wikipedia)

 

Yes regarding Gene Smith too as previously mentioned. His famous image of the family around the deceased patriarch was lit from above with a flash bulb.

 

Why would anyone see virtue in being such a purist that then ends up limiting his/her own ability to communicate and thus fails to tell the story in at least a satisfactory and hopefully dynamic and interesting manner?

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[andym911]

lets face it , the 4 OP images are weak to say the least, technically poor and if I had shot them I would never dream of posting them here,,,,prefer to hit the 'delete' button and move on.(I recognize some great shots by the OP on his site but these are not comparable)

 

this whole 'paint'...'draw'....terminology would surely make a few great photographers of the past and present turn in their graves/beds...

 

Is it just me or does anybody else think they are 'mobile phone quality'

 

andy