Thank you, thank you very much. This can surely be of value.
A good friend has told me (in my own words) that if you cannot "see", then you cannot expect good photos.
-- Will
Your good friend was right.
The difficulty may not be your own - it could be that you just need to see more photography from pre-digital days in order to get a feeling for what it was about.
But where to look? I imagine that there are few if any magazines today that feature the art of film; this in itself (the art using film) is a difficult idea to grasp, because you can't really separate the mind and eye behind the picture from the image - because the same person once used a film camera and then took to the digital ones, all that's changed is his mechancal workshop. In practice, unless he's very careful, all he will do differently with digital is shoot much more, more nor better. The temptation to shoot on the off-chance that something might work is hard to resist.
Anyway, if you want to see great film work, look at this site:
http://www.ernst-haas.comHowever, as with most of my own much more modest stuff which was on film, the transition to the electronic page changes the nature of what you are looking at, and even looking at digital printing is not the same as was wet chemistry printing.
Maybe the best thing is to see if you can visit exhibitions of real wet chemical prints - bromides, chloro-bromides, that kind of thing. For what it's worth, forget about the exotic stuff like platinum etc. because there is a huge amount to be learned from more basic (and far more attractive in my view) 'normal' photographic prints - good ones, of course.
Rob C
