Where is Yelhsa (ashely morrison)?

[landscapephoto]

1.  Talking shop with another pro is not the same beast as 'chatting' within a broader, public audience. That some do both proves nothing either way. And what pros actually exchange is seldom what amateurs might be hoping to hear or pick up on. Personal remains just that. Frankly, the number of pros on LuLa seems to be a very small minority of poster indeed.

2.   Nobody claimed it to be a universal state; I do claim it to be a generally desired one, though.

3.  Exactly my point: it's the playing that excites many people, not the job, the profession of producing photographs to order.

4.  Same as per 3.

5.  Owning a Leica ceased to be any badge of professionalism the moment US/UK war photographers discovered Japanese lenses. The advent of the Nikon F nailed the last nail. There was a very long period of my pro life where I could have been a Leica owner but it never became part of my kit: too limited (M type) and ditto the R versions which for as long as I was interested didn't offer 100% screen viewing: fatal for anyone doing pro work on 135 cameras. Don't forget that Arles is about a very narrow band of photographic thought, hardly professional photography in the sense of somebody working for ad. agencies or general commerce. If anything, it seems to have become little more than a portfolio-viewing exercise; with reportage virtually dead in the water, what else could anyone reasonably expect? Magnum ain't what it used to represent to the outer world some years ago. To live it had to change, seek other markets not as heroically 'romantic' as the earnest young turks at Arles might imagine...

As to what developers were to be used, that was, again, an am. problem: I used D76 for every black/white film type I processed after I turned pro. There was simply no real, valid reason to do otherwise. You learned how to work within a minimal range of film types worth using, on the formats you had, and the times they needed in the soup. That was it. Any more than that, and you were back in a camera club.

Buy hey, that's just my post to which you responded, and just how I see it; I'm sure there are as many opinions as there are readers. The definitive reason would have to come from the absent one.

Rob C

1 Then, if the pros seldom exchange what amateurs might be hoping to hear or pick up on, why not having the exchange on a special section that the amateurs would not have to read?

2 You are right that plenty of amateurs desire to turn professional. What I am arguing is that the attitude of the ones who have no such desire is important to understand the situation.

3-4 Agreed.

5 You are right when you say that Nikon and D76 was what the pros used at the time. My argument was that, at the time, amateurs fought over these subjects, which had no interests for the pros. I see a parallel with today's amateurs discussing subjects like resolution or corner sharpness which have no interest for the pros.

[landscapephoto]

Rob C. asked why post?

For me early on it was to learn about the transition from film to digital.  Actually since I shoot human subject oriented advertising,  (is that a genre?)  I found the best source of learning digital capture and workflow was wedding photographers.
(...)

Thank you for your answer.

After reading it, it seems to me that the kind of pro who, basically, work on assignments, is a bit like a movie crew. For movie making, because of the complexity of the process, the function is divided between different persons: director, but also art director (responsible for the look of the set), costume designer /stylist, lightning director, camera operator. The director gets the assignment in the form of a scenario and is responsible to translate that into a visual product with the crew.
In photography, usually, the same guy wears all these hats and that confuses things for amateurs. In photography, a pro gets an assignment (which is not as detailed as a film scenario, but the underlying idea is the same) and is responsible to translate it into a series of pictures. He will need to arrange a set, lights, models, props, etc...

It seems to me that what you are interested to talk about is what the director does. On the contrary, amateurs only see the function of the guy behind the camera, the camera operator, and are interested in discussing the various knobs and handles the camera has.

Now: it is possible to discuss that function of a director in a photo forum. Actually, this is exactly what Yelhsa did and still does in his blog: present the assignment (the house) and show with before and after pictures the work of the crew to present the house in the way desired by the customer.

But if you want to discuss this and have other pros present their work in this way, I feel that you would get better results with a pro section. At present, you are using the MF section of a landscape forum to discuss assignments for product and people photography, in the hope that the price of the cameras will have selected the pros (as it did a few years ago). But, because second hand MF cameras have become more affordable, there are no amateurs owning one and they are interested in discussing the various knobs and handles their new MF camera has.

[Rob C]

I just came across this:

http://www.jnevins.com/garywinograndreading.htm

Dogmatically and by various definitions, it absolutely should be elsewhere, but it stikes me that it fits right here better than anywhere else, simply because I believe it's pertinent to what's going down at the moment in this thread...

Rob C

[landscapephoto]

Thanks for that, but regarding the negativity: it worries me too.

Well... maybe it should worry you. Maybe you should talk about it with your physician. Depression is treatable and you don't deserve all that negativity in your hard earned retirement. Just saying.

Plenty of people find great pleasure in crafting images, even when they are not getting paid for it. So if you find crafting images futile without the monetary gain, maybe it is just you and not all of them.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Not to gang up on Rob, just to suggest that humans have had the urge to snap (i.e., record) the world around them long before cameras were invented, like 35,000 years long ago, in caves. I doubt they were paid for it.

[Rob C]

Keith, Slobodan, landscapephoto:

Okay, I suppose I'm seeing too much through my own prism; problem is, it's the only one I have.

But I can't honestly see it as "depression"; more as simply a realisation of reality. None can be a virgin again, and came a time I realised that I, at least, had to stop pretending. As for the cavemen: they didn't live long enough to get bored scratching.

Anyway, the offending posts have been removed, so let's hope the world moves along in peace.

Regarding the lottery: there's always next week!

;-)

Rob

[landscapephoto]

Keith, Slobodan, landscapephoto:

Okay, I suppose I'm seeing too much through my own prism; problem is, it's the only one I have.

But I can't honestly see it as "depression"; more as simply a realisation of reality. None can be a virgin again, and came a time I realised that I, at least, had to stop pretending. As for the cavemen: they didn't live long enough to get bored scratching.

Depression feels like realisation of reality.

You worry about yourself (you said so) and the people reading what you wrote in that thread worry as well. Just ask for an independent opinion.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... But I can't honestly see it as "depression"; more as simply a realisation of reality...

"And on the brave and crazy wings of youth
They went flying around in the rain
And their feathers, once so fine, grew torn and tattered
And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings'

Before The Deluge by Jackson Browne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SX-HFcSIoU

[Rob C]

"And on the brave and crazy wings of youth
They went flying around in the rain
And their feathers, once so fine, grew torn and tattered
And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings'

Before The Deluge by Jackson Browne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SX-HFcSIoU

That's cool! I also discovered this a moment ago:

Garry Winogrand / recommended books

 Winogrand: Figments From The Real World
Szarkowski, director of MOMA's photography department, cultivated Winogrand and, after his death in 1984, was left with the task of editing 6500 rolls of unprinted (and 2500 rolls of undeveloped) 35mm negatives (about 300,000 unedited images altogether). Nine stages of Winogrand's work are presented chronologically here and in a traveling exhibition, along with a sizable selection of "unfinished" later work described by Szarkowski as "deeply flawed" and "pointless."

That says a lot about photography. Perhaps it's about how much of it you have done -or should do - in a lifetime: diminishing returns, and all that jazz. Saturation Point: maybe American landscapers find it at Zabriskie Point.

;-)

Rob

[Jager]

Winogrand is one of my favorite photographers.  But most of his goodness was from his early years.  Electric stuff.  Alas, his latter-day work was mundane to the point of pointlessness, IMHO.  I don't know if he was depressed or discouraged or just simply lost his mojo, but there was more than a hint of a tell in those thousands of undeveloped rolls.  Tragic, really.

Part of art is need.  We do it because we're driven to.  Part is joy.  The happiness that comes from crafting a tiny bit of truth.

Seems to me Winogrand ended up just doing it out of habit.  Any art, certainly any joy, was long gone.

[Rob C]

Winogrand is one of my favorite photographers.  But most of his goodness was from his early years.  Electric stuff.  Alas, his latter-day work was mundane to the point of pointlessness, IMHO.  I don't know if he was depressed or discouraged or just simply lost his mojo, but there was more than a hint of a tell in those thousands of undeveloped rolls.  Tragic, really.

Part of art is need.  We do it because we're driven to.  Part is joy.  The happiness that comes from crafting a tiny bit of truth.

Seems to me Winogrand ended up just doing it out of habit.  Any art, certainly any joy, was long gone.

Art. I thought I used to have definitions that mattered (to me) and then they slowly went the way of most other things we think we are certain about. I have come to the conclusion that art - whatever it is - is a God-part, and if we are touched by it, then good for us for as long as the magic sticks. But any expectations that it should bring us anything beyond its own intrinsic reward in the doing of, is madness. It may or it may not - not part of the divine deal; if anything, it's probably the unconscious Faustian one that brings other rewards.

I hesitate to go there again and re-articulate my opinion, which is that I fear the same fate probably awaits anyone who does too much of it. It can well, as you suggest, become habit, which is fine just as long you don't catch on to what's going down. I think Garry was far from alone in reaching that point. Maybe Robert Frank was smarter: did his climactic thing prematurely and never went back. It's no fun realising you might be like one of those mechanical toys that fell over and can't stop marching until the spring unwinds.

I've been a fan of Saul Leiter since the end of the 50s, and he was well on the go before that. In interviews many decades later towards the end of his life, when sudden re-recognition engulfed him, he mourns the passing of his anonymity and the way people keep wanting another piece of him. But he was quite old and Winogrand not.

I don't really think it depression, not that I know a lot about any of those people to judge, but I think depression is a state that covers much more than just the interface between you and your 'art' if you have one. Who knows?

Gotta fly, cash my huge lottery win, buy some vegetables and have another coffee. As I'm buying another ticket, the win won't even buy the coffee. Life.

Rob C