Photography hot takes!

[cirwin2010]

Lets stir the pot! Give us your most inflammatory controversial photography related opinions. Technique, gear, ethics, business, its all fair game!

Well... lets maybe not let it get too hot in here. AI and attacking individuals are off limits!



I'll start:
Extremely shallow DoF is a crutch! Bokeh bros driving Sony GM sales are as allergic to their aperture controls as a BMW owner is to their indicator. There is a time and place for selective focus, but it can't be all the time!

 

[MattKing]

Just a friendly moderator's warning here.
Inflammatory posts can result in moderators acting to edit or delete posts, or close threads.
Controversial is fine, if offered in a civil manner.
Sorry to disappoint

 

[mshchem]

Not inflammatory as long as we don't speculate too much on causes.

Everything is more expensive. I ride my bike to Walmart, as a little reward I would buy a little 1 ounce (28.3g) bag of Lay's chips. 50 cents a bag. Now 58 cents, price was hiked no warning. When I see the new price I declared 16% increase! No way I had the clerk delete the purchase.

Doesn't have to be film, etc to change photo habits. (The money I save on chips goes to film )

My guess is Lay's two highest costs are diesel fuel and cooking oil.

 

[agentlossing]

Film looks better than digital - and digital looks the way it looks and shouldn't be made to look like film. Own your medium.

 

[mshchem]

Film looks better than digital - and digital looks the way it looks and shouldn't be made to look like film. Own your medium.

Do you print your own negatives? Otherwise everything is digital.

 

[thinkbrown]

The 35mm focal length is awful on 35mm film. It's not wide enough to be wide and not narrow enough to be normal.

Give me a 28mm, 40mm, or 50mm any day

 

[agentlossing]

Do you print your own negatives? Otherwise everything is digital.

That's another hot take, right? Because it's not factually accurate.

 

[Milpool]

Is a hot take the same as a pro tip?

 

[mshchem]

That's another hot take, right? Because it's not factually accurate.

OK, slides projected, all analog. Negatives printed by contact or enlarged optically, all analog.

Otherwise scanned then printed by the lab there's digital in the mix. Subtle but there it is.

 

[MurrayMinchin]

People who poo-poo the Zone System as too confining or regimented do not understand it.

Once testing has been completed, processes dialled in and materials understood, it allows for greater creative control.

An example might be: "If I apply a reciprocity factor of X, I must reduce development by Y"

However, if you're looking at a forest scene with nothing in the higher values, applying a reciprocity factor and not reducing development can result in something like plus development, where the middle values get proportionally more separation than the lower values.

What are seen by some as rules in the Zone System are actually guidelines.

The New Zone System Manual by White, Zakia, and Lorenz was an eye opener for me.

 

[MurrayMinchin]

I used 4x5 gear and sheet film because they allowed me to tailor each negative for the print I wanted. Roll film didn't allow this, especially when photographing in Nature where light and subjects are constantly changing.

My digital camera is better. (I now only make hand coated alt process prints).

It also allows each exposure to be singularly tuned to the final print, but the camera can be off the tripod and used for wildlife/bird photography in seconds.

I'm haunted by a lost photo from decades ago. I can still feel the sense of impossibility as a small flock of Barrow's Golden Eyes were emerging from sunset lit fog, their white breasts reflecting the reflected sunset light coming off the shoreline rocks I was photographing with the 4x5.

Today, I'd have a shot at getting that image!

 

[Rick A]

AA was a mediocre photographer. However, he was a master printer, he could pull a rabbit out of a hat.

 

[RalphLambrecht]

Film looks better than digital - and digital looks the way it looks and shouldn't be made to look like film. Own your medium.

but modifying and'optimizing' to your heart's content is where digital shines!

 

[Don_ih]

Inflammatory?

None of it matters at all.

 

[Dan Pavel]

A picture that's not printed is only a virtual picture, it doesn't have a real life. It is only an unfulfilled intention, an wanna be picture. Photography only has a real life when printed, otherwise it's just a miscarriage.

 

[Maris]

The concept of digital information being the basis of photography has become so loosely indulgent that any picture you care to make based on what you have ever seen could be a photograph.
Consider the front end of a common creative process:

Firstly, there needs to be illuminated subject matter. No light? Nothing to see; therefore no photograph.
Second, there needs to be a lens.
Step three requires the lens to form a real optical image.
Then that real optical image impinges on a megapixel sensor.
After that the output of the megapixel sensor is stored in a memory for subsequent processing and physical download.

That seems to be a rationale justifying the identification of digital picture making with photography. But the same sequence also applies to realist paintings.
Here we have artist's eyeball with an eye lens that forms an image in the back of the eye falling on a retina which is indeed a megapixel sensor.
The retina features about 100 megapixels although not all those pixels are alike. Retinal output then goes to the artist's brain where the vision is remembered and subsequently processed for physical download.

If you allow my convoluted argument (surely correct?) that realist painting is functionally equivalent to digital photography then a curious question arises.
And the question is not "what is a photograph?" but rather "what does a realist picture have to do in order not to be a photograph?".

 

[Cholentpot]

If you're shooting black and white film these days and not developing yourself you're missing half the point.

 

[Milpool]

So far most of these are wrong. I think I get it now.

 

[reddesert]

The magical properties that people attribute to color slide films of days of yore, were actually the magical talents of color printers (or prepress operators, or who ever was doing the work of mass reproduction).

 

[MattKing]

Internet Photography forums are a dying breed. The future is on social media!

 

[mshchem]

The magical properties that people attribute to color slide films of days of yore, were actually the magical talents of color printers (or prepress operators, or who ever was doing the work of mass reproduction).

You've not seen original Kodachrome (1950's into the 60's) in person on a light table and projected. The best prints I have from Kodachrome slides are carefully exposed straight Cibachrome prints, simply magical. Also, modern Ektachrome and Fujichrome materials reproduce so nice because that's what they look like. The professional color negative stocks from Kodak are the greatest of all time.

 

[Ulrich Drolshagen]

And the question is not "what is a photograph?" but rather "what does a realist picture have to do in order not to be a photograph?".

First of all, the picture isn't recorded by a machine without human intervention (besides focusing on a subject, choosing aperture and speed and tripping the shutter of cause). Otherwise in a photograph no details of the original subject weren't removed or others added I suppose. But I do not intend to open this can of worms again.

 

[Dan Pavel]

If you allow my convoluted argument (surely correct?) that realist painting is functionally equivalent to digital photography then a curious question arises.
And the question is not "what is a photograph?" but rather "what does a realist picture have to do in order not to be a photograph?".

No, a realistic painting is not a photograph neither in its intentions nor in the way it is made.
A photograph is a mechanical description of an image based on the the average color information of tiny zones of the image - pixels, in the digital photography. A realist painting is also a description of an image but it's not mechanical and and it's based on the relation between forms, lines and colors composing the image. It involves the ability of the painter to discern this relations and his will to reveal or alter them in his painting in accordance with his artistic agenda.
But a carefully composed or/and edited photograph could be evaluated in the way a realist painting is, as a testimony of the photographer abilities and agenda and not as a simple description of an image.

 

[gbroadbridge]

AA was a mediocre photographer. However, he was a master printer, he could pull a rabbit out of a hat.

You're being generous.

 

[tcolgate]

It's OK for the process to be more important to you than the final picture, because it's OK for your photographs,(and yes even your *art*) to just be for you.