I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you here Russ. For most people, mistakes are a vital part of learning. That includes other people's mistakes. If an image does not fit the genre, the more knowledgeable people have an opportunity to point out the differences. This than becomes a valuable learning resource: people can find all sorts of images (good and bad), plus an explanation of why it works or not.
The problem as I see it currently, is that the differences aren't pointed out adequately, and discussions end up in bickering "is too, is not, etc...", which subsequently leads to ad hominum remarks of "who made you the gatekeeper" etc...
It's important to note that the failure of a student, as they say, is the teacher's mistake. That includes breaking down the mistakes into comprehendible chunks, and it also includes providing motivation to actually study the masters if one thinks that will help.
Hi Oscar, You may be surprised to learn that I agree with you, at least about making mistakes. As I pointed out in “On Street Photography,” if you’re going to learn to do it you need to shoot and shoot and shoot. It’s important to shoot stuff you know isn’t going to be good, just for the practice in composition and camera function.
In that article I said: “How do you capture a good street photograph? If you look carefully at the street photographs of masters like Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, or Robert Frank, you soon realize that the best of them are snapshots, gut reactions to what they saw before them, but not planned intersections with the scene.”
The most important thing you need to learn about street it what the function of good street is. It isn’t to show some guy eating lunch. The function of street is to show something important about that guy eating lunch. What are his thoughts? If he’s with someone, how does he relate to that other person? How does he relate to his surroundings? A certain amount of ambiguity helps. Does he really care much about that other person? It ain’t easy to do anything like that, but if you don’t succeed you don’t really have a street shot. What you have is a picture of some guy eating lunch. Which is why I said, in that article: “. . .you’ll shoot bags and bags of bloopers, a smaller number of not too bad shots, and the rare picture you should be willing to show. Beyond that, there’s the kind of picture upon which you’d be willing to hang your reputation. If you can average one of those a year you’re getting pretty good.”
But I don’t agree that looking at the bloopers posted by others helps you learn about street photography, or any photography. In the first place, you need to be familiar with a genre to be able to identify a blooper. In the second place, if you’re hoping to learn something about a genre by looking at photographs on LuLa, bloopers will lead you astray. Bottom line, I think it’s stupid for LuLa to try to identify genres. LuLa simply isn’t the right place for that, so I’d like to see both “showcases” disappear.
Oh, and finally, for Keith: Having done it for three years in various parts of Eastern and Southeast Asia, I can tell you that trying to do good street in a foreign environment is almost impossible. You get interesting pictures of the local environment, but the kind of relationship between people and between people and their environment that makes for good street mostly is beyond you because you’re not a native and don’t really understand those relationships in this environment. You still can get lucky, but that’s what it is: luck. Well. . . come to think of it, as HCB said, “It’s all luck. You just have to be receptive. That’s all.”
