Rob, that's good to hear, the problem is your keyboard doesn't seem to be in sync with the notion. Your posts seem to suggest that you find little to love about what you do and little to love about photography, photographers...really, you name it.
You describe your cameras as bookends and the process as techno-centric. Have you considered selling them and buying something you can actually carry and use rather than wait until they are valueless? If you really find post processing so intolerable you could do worse than shoot jpegs and consider the job done, much as you did with film, preferably with a camera that actually delivers usable results rather than a 'fone'.
Your say it isn't about making money anymore and yet don't seem able to come to terms with the notion or to move on from it.
Rob, we go back a long way and have always said it as we see it, but man, your pain is tangible.
Keith
Keith –
I don’t think I see my life quite as you see my life. ;-)
I have no problem with photographers – with those I have always respected, at least - and certainly don’t wish to come over as any iconoclast. Equally, I’m not in the business of blind adoration. I see great work and I see crap; I see great fashion and awful street; wonderful travel work and lousy architectural. And the thing is, each photographer appears (to me) to be pretty much limited to a single good zone within which he can outshine the competition.
Bookends. Indeed; and no, I can’t sell the only one I do want to sell – the D200. I have spent and lost a friggin’ king’s ransom on cameras and lenses ever since I went crazy and sold the ‘blads. I always came back, eventually, to 35mm and Nikon. I have no need for any camera that gives me more than can the D700. What I have need for is better health, which I can’t buy, or some magic potion that allows me, again, the strength to walk the walk with that Gitzo slung over my shoulder and the bag over the other. For better or for worse, the stuff I have is the last repository of my mad money!
I’m not the most masculine of men; I’m not of the age and/or physical stature that holds wannabe thieves at bay; were I to stroll around Palma in my habitual T-shirt and jeans, wearing an M9 (that I don’t have) and my Rolex (that I have had since before James Bond got around to it)), I’d be pretty unlikely to come home the way I left it. I’d probably not even make it out the underground car-park. Hell, even the cellphone is at risk!
Another thing you misunderstand about my world-view: I have no fight with post-processing apart from not being very good at it; my stance re. film v. digital is on another plane: I’ve tried to be clear on it, but let me try once again: film photography (and we didn’t call it that or think of it as that at the time - it was just ‘photography’) attracted me because of several things in my own nature. I wanted to be a painter but lacked the skill to make it a success; I wanted to go to art school but could not because the school I was in discouraged ‘art’ as being a class reserved for duffers; I was steered towards English and the Sciences and Maths, where the latter only reached an acceptable exam level via coaching from my girlfriend, Ann, who shone there. In those days, you tended to do as you were told. (And there was National Service, a two-year threat held over the head as in sword-style between the ages of 17 and, I think, 26. Heysoos! You can see me as cut out for that career?)
So, photography was very much a substitute for painting, a natural extension – as you also seem to have found – of the one into the other. In my mind, there is a natural divide between those who love technology and those who love art. This may not be true for anyone other than myself, but it’s that personal truth that counts. And that’s why I know that were photography in the 50s in the same state it is now, with all of this pixel-peeping, menu-tracking and generally inconvenient functionality, it wouldn’t have seemed like an attraction to me. Keith, I still hate having to work out how to make the Video machine function. Worse, it does both DVD and VCR, and I have missed several things I wanted to record because of it and the inability to come to terms with it. It’s how I am, for better or for worse.
Making money. If by that you refer to models, yes; I have no wish to pay them the pro rate for my own pleasure. Worse, even if I were a millionaire and able to indulge those things, it wouldn’t work. I have always needed to have the incentive of the assignment to be able to raise both my game and the interest level to where it should be. Any old fool, this one included, can go out and snap away. But to what end? Without the commission, there is, for me, no point. It was my biggest problem when shooting stock, and the main reason why most of the successful stuff was derived from commissioned calendar shoots: the pix were born from the pressure of the work. It was how it functioned for me, made it tick. And I can tell you, every model with whom I discussed it felt the same: stock shoots were not usually welcomed other than for the money. Even there it was all about ego and purpose, and the worst commissions they ever got were to work for camera clubs or ‘workshops’, all of which were avoided if anything else was available. Good models are as concerned about what they do as are photographers, perhaps even more so because they are recognized.
To end, and in order to go make lunch, there is a need for something beyond the mere doing of the thing; purpose is just as important and being assigned to do something is the best validation of which I can think.
Rob C
