Drag to set position!
Here we go. Round two! Ding ding.
I can't look at this enough. The lines and angles are magic.
There are a few photographs that get burned into your memory. This is one for me.
Plump in the window. The odd composition makes the girl look even more uncomfortable. Love the processing. Perfect.
More magic. If you don't look closely you might say there is nothing here. Look closely!! Great photo... I wish I took it.
I like photos that make a point. I could wax on about this for a while but we've done that already.
And finally, just because it is bizarre enough....
It was difficult for me to limit myself to those few, but to be fair to the other admins, that's my first wave....
I can't look at this enough. The lines and angles are magic.
There are a few photographs that get burned into your memory. This is one for me.
Plump in the window. The odd composition makes the girl look even more uncomfortable. Love the processing. Perfect.
More magic. If you don't look closely you might say there is nothing here. Look closely!! Great photo... I wish I took it.
I like photos that make a point. I could wax on about this for a while but we've done that already.
And finally, just because it is bizarre enough....
It was difficult for me to limit myself to those few, but to be fair to the other admins, that's my first wave....
All the shots so much unlike mine. Some I like.
I just love the repetition of numbers and overal symmetry (cars on extremes, two groups of three people, unlimited trees, a circle in the middle).
Lots of straight lines and not a single vertical or horizontal. Very dynamic light and strong shapes. The dog is ok as well.
The broken diagonal does it.
More irrationally bound to this. The haircut of the woman and the expression of the man just keep on amusing me.
Simple shapes. The men in the water remind me of LEGO figures. The seagull gives it just that bit of something that makes it not be absolutely dull and empty.
I just love the repetition of numbers and overal symmetry (cars on extremes, two groups of three people, unlimited trees, a circle in the middle).
Lots of straight lines and not a single vertical or horizontal. Very dynamic light and strong shapes. The dog is ok as well.
The broken diagonal does it.
More irrationally bound to this. The haircut of the woman and the expression of the man just keep on amusing me.
Simple shapes. The men in the water remind me of LEGO figures. The seagull gives it just that bit of something that makes it not be absolutely dull and empty.
What can I say.. I'm a sucker for minimalist color (street) shots
same goes for this one
I remember this one being a breath of fresh air after seeing so many static street photos. Love the action, and I thought the ball is kinda neat too.
Foreground/background work perfect together, the reflection is a nice touch too.
I love how out of place he seems to be, composition can't be any better
Another good shot with a subject on the foreground, good timing with everyone in the picture wearing red
I only got until page 15, btw...
same goes for this one
I remember this one being a breath of fresh air after seeing so many static street photos. Love the action, and I thought the ball is kinda neat too.
Foreground/background work perfect together, the reflection is a nice touch too.
I love how out of place he seems to be, composition can't be any better
Another good shot with a subject on the foreground, good timing with everyone in the picture wearing red
I only got until page 15, btw...
Now think about taking this shot. How many steps would you take before you were in the one spot where everything came together perfectly? A lot! I want to know how long hinius took to grab this one. I do.
Well, ok... I think the first thing to mention is that I took this photo one year ago (over Easter in 2007), but only got round to scanning it last week. Back then I still didn't know much at all about shooting 120, still had a lot of the sloppy habits picked up from shooting 35mm & digi. Wasn't rigorous enough.
The whole exercise took about 30-60 seconds, I took about four hurried shots from a single perspective. How do I know if the perspective is right? Well, I guess it just 'feels' right. You walk to a spot, look in the viewfinder and ask yourself if things in the proper place, are all the components properly balanced from a spatial perspective. If it doesn't feel right, ask yourself which component is out of alignment, move to a new spot which will rectify that. Look through viewfinder, confirm it feels right, make exposure. For as long as I've been making pictures it's always been by kind of an instinctive 'feeling' process.
But obviously, there's more than just 'feel', there's also rigour. Two years ago (also over Easter, in 2006), I was making these kinds of pictures in Sicily:
Where the challenge and fun for me was to get as many disparate elements of the image working together. It wasn't good enough to get one or two things aligned, I had to go for four or five. For the third picture, I got 9 elements working but missed out on the tenth.
The thing is, with these kinds of pictures, because you're working with fractions of a second, you're going to have to be less rigorous. Some things will be slightly out of position and you have to go with that because they may be gone a second later. But that approach can also breed complacency: as long as you get the main 'headline', you can too easily excuse other flaws in composition.
I found that I couldn't get away with that approach on medium format. Because your shooting rhythm and pacing is now different, those flaws you could excuse in 35mm are more irredeemable in 120. You simply have no excuse for those flaws (or at least, less of one). I shot tons of shitty images that had a vaguely interesting central point of focus surrounded by a sea of boring, horrible crap. One interesting point does not a good picture make. The whole picture has to work... every element, otherwise throw it away and take something else. Basically, you are forced into being more disciplined by examining and evaluating the entire image and not just the decisive moment.
So the difference is if I took the Tesco shot today I probably wouldn't need 4 exposures, I'd like to think I'd need just 1 or 2. I'd find a composition that works and shoot it. If I found a different perspective that also worked, fine I'd shoot that too. Just be harder on yourself... it'll probably work out for the better in the long run anyway.
Well, ok... I think the first thing to mention is that I took this photo one year ago (over Easter in 2007), but only got round to scanning it last week. Back then I still didn't know much at all about shooting 120, still had a lot of the sloppy habits picked up from shooting 35mm & digi. Wasn't rigorous enough.
The whole exercise took about 30-60 seconds, I took about four hurried shots from a single perspective. How do I know if the perspective is right? Well, I guess it just 'feels' right. You walk to a spot, look in the viewfinder and ask yourself if things in the proper place, are all the components properly balanced from a spatial perspective. If it doesn't feel right, ask yourself which component is out of alignment, move to a new spot which will rectify that. Look through viewfinder, confirm it feels right, make exposure. For as long as I've been making pictures it's always been by kind of an instinctive 'feeling' process.
But obviously, there's more than just 'feel', there's also rigour. Two years ago (also over Easter, in 2006), I was making these kinds of pictures in Sicily:
Where the challenge and fun for me was to get as many disparate elements of the image working together. It wasn't good enough to get one or two things aligned, I had to go for four or five. For the third picture, I got 9 elements working but missed out on the tenth.
The thing is, with these kinds of pictures, because you're working with fractions of a second, you're going to have to be less rigorous. Some things will be slightly out of position and you have to go with that because they may be gone a second later. But that approach can also breed complacency: as long as you get the main 'headline', you can too easily excuse other flaws in composition.
I found that I couldn't get away with that approach on medium format. Because your shooting rhythm and pacing is now different, those flaws you could excuse in 35mm are more irredeemable in 120. You simply have no excuse for those flaws (or at least, less of one). I shot tons of shitty images that had a vaguely interesting central point of focus surrounded by a sea of boring, horrible crap. One interesting point does not a good picture make. The whole picture has to work... every element, otherwise throw it away and take something else. Basically, you are forced into being more disciplined by examining and evaluating the entire image and not just the decisive moment.
So the difference is if I took the Tesco shot today I probably wouldn't need 4 exposures, I'd like to think I'd need just 1 or 2. I'd find a composition that works and shoot it. If I found a different perspective that also worked, fine I'd shoot that too. Just be harder on yourself... it'll probably work out for the better in the long run anyway.
on third, so that i can teach my eye and brain, the tenth is:
A, the guy on the right (camera) , my feeling is that it is good that he is there, but is the one that seems slightly off "good" position.
B, the head above the one with a mustache?
C, none of the above.
C... for me the flaw is the guy in the white shirt, second from right, looking away from the camera. The guy on the right is just a little too far to the right too.
@Hin, I'm interested in your technique for those 4 Sicily shots. Did you end up holding the camera to your eye for a period and waiting for it all to fall into place?
Yep, for these kinds of things, that's the way I work... the camera would be held up for about 5-30 seconds and then you just wait for the scene. Naturally you can't track all the components, but you can track the key ones and have the rest in a sort of a 'blurry' peripheral-vision like state: they'll look like a vague single 'shape'.
But I think the camera needs to be up (for those kinds of shots), because you need to maximise your chances of getting the right moment. The thing about looking at what Winogrand and Meyerowitz do (in this respect) is you have to remember that they're outliers (in terms of talent)... and they'd been doing it for 30-40 years by the time you saw them on video.
As a counterpoint, If you look at the way Trent Parke photographs, sometimes he'll just stand at the one spot for ages, camera in eye, just waiting. I've also seen how Koudelka works close up as well and the common denominator is that these people know what they want. They aren't banging away at everything... they're mentally filtering out a lot of things ('bad scene', 'took a better picture of that 5 years go', 'maybe I would have done this when I first started out, but not any more/). Then they see something and it's like an alarm goes on, they hone in and spend however long it takes to get what interested them. Then camera down and the cycle repeats.
Either way, they are both a skilled art to me and both require a great deal of concentration and grace (i.e., multi-tasking) much more than the hardcore wannabe material.
In my opinion, the hardware-wannabe act, for the most part, is testosterone-driven bullshit, a compensation for something else.
"Look at me, look at how close I am!"
Dude, those pictures suck
"Look at me, I'm in the middle of a riot!"
Dude, those pictures still suck
"Look at me, there's a protest going on, there are lots of pissed-off looking non-white people around me!"
Dude, who gives a f*ck, the pictures still suck
"I photographed a street fight! Then people got angry at me and tried to grab my camera!"
Dude, they were probably just trying to beat those shitty compositions out of your head.
Don't get me wrong... I've taken fight pictures too:
But I think sometimes people have to remember that getting close can and should be more than just the physical interpretation of close.
There's closeness in terms of focus to idea/theme/subject... when you know the photographer's on to something good, that they're so tight and honed in that something positive is going to come out of it. It's an intellectual closeness.
Then there's closeness in the emotional sense... that to me is far more significant and important than someone blundering around with a 28mm trying to prove his cojones (and it is almost without exception a he). A very very good photographer called Olivia Arthur came round to my place last night to show some of her new work: she's photographing women in areas in and around the borders of Europe. The intimacy she managed to development with so many strangers coupled the high quality of the work (the web site really doesn't do it any justice).
Now, that's close. And a lot harder to do.
A, the guy on the right (camera) , my feeling is that it is good that he is there, but is the one that seems slightly off "good" position.
B, the head above the one with a mustache?
C, none of the above.
C... for me the flaw is the guy in the white shirt, second from right, looking away from the camera. The guy on the right is just a little too far to the right too.
@Hin, I'm interested in your technique for those 4 Sicily shots. Did you end up holding the camera to your eye for a period and waiting for it all to fall into place?
Yep, for these kinds of things, that's the way I work... the camera would be held up for about 5-30 seconds and then you just wait for the scene. Naturally you can't track all the components, but you can track the key ones and have the rest in a sort of a 'blurry' peripheral-vision like state: they'll look like a vague single 'shape'.
But I think the camera needs to be up (for those kinds of shots), because you need to maximise your chances of getting the right moment. The thing about looking at what Winogrand and Meyerowitz do (in this respect) is you have to remember that they're outliers (in terms of talent)... and they'd been doing it for 30-40 years by the time you saw them on video.
As a counterpoint, If you look at the way Trent Parke photographs, sometimes he'll just stand at the one spot for ages, camera in eye, just waiting. I've also seen how Koudelka works close up as well and the common denominator is that these people know what they want. They aren't banging away at everything... they're mentally filtering out a lot of things ('bad scene', 'took a better picture of that 5 years go', 'maybe I would have done this when I first started out, but not any more/). Then they see something and it's like an alarm goes on, they hone in and spend however long it takes to get what interested them. Then camera down and the cycle repeats.
Either way, they are both a skilled art to me and both require a great deal of concentration and grace (i.e., multi-tasking) much more than the hardcore wannabe material.
In my opinion, the hardware-wannabe act, for the most part, is testosterone-driven bullshit, a compensation for something else.
"Look at me, look at how close I am!"
Dude, those pictures suck
"Look at me, I'm in the middle of a riot!"
Dude, those pictures still suck
"Look at me, there's a protest going on, there are lots of pissed-off looking non-white people around me!"
Dude, who gives a f*ck, the pictures still suck
"I photographed a street fight! Then people got angry at me and tried to grab my camera!"
Dude, they were probably just trying to beat those shitty compositions out of your head.
Don't get me wrong... I've taken fight pictures too:
But I think sometimes people have to remember that getting close can and should be more than just the physical interpretation of close.
There's closeness in terms of focus to idea/theme/subject... when you know the photographer's on to something good, that they're so tight and honed in that something positive is going to come out of it. It's an intellectual closeness.
Then there's closeness in the emotional sense... that to me is far more significant and important than someone blundering around with a 28mm trying to prove his cojones (and it is almost without exception a he). A very very good photographer called Olivia Arthur came round to my place last night to show some of her new work: she's photographing women in areas in and around the borders of Europe. The intimacy she managed to development with so many strangers coupled the high quality of the work (the web site really doesn't do it any justice).
Now, that's close. And a lot harder to do.