Those who take and those who make

albireo · Jan 6, 2025

chuckroast said:
Not quite. The term "Doctor" originally meant "teacher" and was applied to many fields, among them medicine.

Your A.I. generated source is only partially correct.

The term "doctor" does in fact come from the Latin "docere" (we use a couple of words with the same root in modern Italian, for example "docente" = "he/she who teaches" and "dotto" = "erudite/scholarly").

However, the popular conflation doctor<>physician started only in the 14th century and was popularised in the novellas of a Florentine novelist called Franco Sacchetti ("Trecento novelle").

The reason why the mapping "physician=doctor" then took hold and solidified is that physicians were often the only "erudite/scholarly" people common people ever came in contact with.

Alan Edward Klein · Jan 6, 2025

Don_ih said:
The second word is a verb. The forth word is a noun.

It's been mentioned several times.

As for Gregory Crewdson, those photos involve a massive amount of preparation and quite a few people, more similar to movie production than to studio photography (which can also be elaborate and involve many people). He tends to expose a number of near-identical sheets of film that all get scanned and combined into the finished photo on a computer (that work is also executed by someone else - he directs it). He "makes" his photos, to use the terminology Clive introduced this thread with, because of the final manipulation of that image.

If he'd set up the scene, exposed one negative, and made a print from that -- that would be "taking" a photo (as Clive put it).

What he built was the scene.

That was my point. The rest of us rely on God or nature to build the scene. All we do is record it.

Alan Edward Klein · Jan 6, 2025

CMoore said:
Yeah..... this thread hearkens back to posts about "Being An Artist"
And again, i am not just picking on photography. Most hobbies suffer similar scenarios
Some people, when asked, just cannot stop at......... carpenter, painter, guitar player, photographer, sculptor, etc etc etc.
They have to claim to be an "Artist" ............ not unlike people with a PhD, in one field or another, calling themselves a doctor

Even Dr's often don't get their due. A sign of the times.
====================================

So, a physician wakes up at 3am hearing a terrible noise in the basement. When he checks he finds three feet of water and an awful sound. So, he phones his plumber who rushes over.

The plumber heads right down to the basement with his tools. Ten minutes later, he returns and tells the doctor it’s all fixed.

“Wow,” says the doctor. “That’s great. How much do I owe you?”

“$300.” says the plumber.

“$300! You were only down there ten minutes. Even I don’t make that kind of money.”

“Well,” says the plumber. “When I use to practice medicine, I didn’t make as much either.”

Don_ih · Jan 6, 2025

Alan Edward Klein said:
That was my point. The rest of us rely on God or nature to build the scene. All we do is record it.

You can arrange a bowl of oranges and photograh it. You can build a dog house and photograph it. In each instance you are in control of the thing that ends up in your photo but you don't build the photo.

MattKing · Jan 6, 2025

koraks said:
The divide between academic fields wasn't particularly strict in the Renaissance.
On the PhD thing - it's actually amusing to read how e.g. the PhD defense of Felix Platter shows parallels with customs still in use today (see the book by Emmanual Le Roy Ladurie on the Platter family). Platter, coincidentally, was a doctor in medicine, and he obtained a PhD. So he was a doctor, doctor, I guess. Or maybe a doctor, squared, even.

There is a Robert Palmer lyric about that:

MattKing · Jan 6, 2025

Don_ih said:
You can arrange a bowl of oranges and photograh it. You can build a dog house and photograph it. In each instance you are in control of the thing that ends up in your photo but you don't build the photo.

I refer you to those who work with encaustic materials and photography.
To whit: https://photoencaustic.com/

cliveh · Jan 6, 2025

I can't speak for the complexities of those who make, but my idea of take is to look through the viewfinder, focus and compose and then take the picture. From then on I develop and print with zero or minimal intervention in terms of cropping and contrast control.

Alex Benjamin · Jan 6, 2025

After reflexion, I'm with Kenny Rogers on this one:

You've got to know when to take 'em
Know when to make 'em
Know when to walk away
Know when to run.

ogxtina · Jan 6, 2025

I take photos to make a body of work. For me, the "body of work" I'm making means taking lots of photos of the built environment as it is, knowing that the value will be in the future, when the picture no longer captures what's actually on the ground. I shoot mostly in NYC (bc I don't leave the city enough lol) and for my best photos I will do a fair bit of research about the place I photographed, and sometimes (if possible) find archival photos of what it USED to look like because chances are, the building, its environs, and its tenants have changed a lot in the last 100 years (or more).

I figure it's a lifelong project, and eventually my own (by then "old") photos will be the archival photo I use of what a place used to look like when it's inevitably changed again. This is already happening; while backing up my old Sony Cybershot, I found a photo I took of the new World Trade Center *still under construction*. I must have been 11? 12? when I took it, and I'm looking forwarded to reshooting from a similar location just to show the difference in the skyline (with the now long since completed 1 WTC). I just take the photos when I'm out with my camera and the light is right, the thing being "made" is the city itself, which is exactly what motivates me to photograph.

Alan Edward Klein · Jan 6, 2025

Alex Benjamin said:
After reflexion, I'm with Kenny Rogers on this one:

You've got to know when to take 'em
Know when to make 'em
Know when to walk away
Know when to run.

We're on page 6. No one's folding yet.

MattKing · Jan 6, 2025

Alan Edward Klein said:
We're on page 6. No one's folding yet.

I'm sure there are runners though.

Alan Edward Klein · Jan 6, 2025

ogxtina said:
I take photos to make a body of work. For me, the "body of work" I'm making means taking lots of photos of the built environment as it is, knowing that the value will be in the future, when the picture no longer captures what's actually on the ground. I shoot mostly in NYC (bc I don't leave the city enough lol) and for my best photos I will do a fair bit of research about the place I photographed, and sometimes (if possible) find archival photos of what it USED to look like because chances are, the building, its environs, and its tenants have changed a lot in the last 100 years (or more).

I figure it's a lifelong project, and eventually my own (by then "old") photos will be the archival photo I use of what a place used to look like when it's inevitably changed again. This is already happening; while backing up my old Sony Cybershot, I found a photo I took of the new World Trade Center *still under construction*. I must have been 11? 12? when I took it, and I'm looking forwarded to reshooting from a similar location just to show the difference in the skyline (with the now long since completed 1 WTC). I just take the photos when I'm out with my camera and the light is right, the thing being "made" is the city itself, which is exactly what motivates me to photograph.

I'm a New Yorker. Where can we see your pictures?

Don_ih · Jan 6, 2025

MattKing said:
I refer you to those who work with encaustic materials and photography.
To whit: https://photoencaustic.com/

Those are prints. There are lots of ways to MAKE prints.

MattKing · Jan 6, 2025

Don_ih said:
Those are prints. There are lots of ways to MAKE prints.

And many of us regularly incorporate the choice of display method into the entire photographic process.
We make decisions from beginning to end about cropping, exposure, focus, film development and preparation of the final display medium based on what we intend the final result to be.
Just ask those who shoot large format negatives with the intention of making a Salt Print (as an example).

BrianShaw · Jan 6, 2025

Mixed media, like photoencaustic, can be built. From the site:
“> build up layers of wax and embed a print on tissue paper or other very fine paper”

Don_ih · Jan 6, 2025

MattKing said:
And many of us regularly incorporate the choice of display method into the entire photographic process.
We make decisions from beginning to end about cropping, exposure, focus, film development and preparation of the final display medium based on what we intend the final result to be.
Just ask those who shoot large format negatives with the intention of making a Salt Print (as an example).

What's your point?

All of that fits within Clive's idea of "taking". There's nothing particularly special about any of that.

MattKing · Jan 6, 2025

Don_ih said:
What's your point?

All of that fits within Clive's idea of "taking". There's nothing particularly special about any of that.

Or making.
And a lot of those involves building a result from its components, so "built" applies as well.

ogxtina · Jan 6, 2025

Alan Edward Klein said:
I'm a New Yorker. Where can we see your pictures?

For now, instagram (photogxtina) and an adobe portfolio site that I find very limiting (ogxtina.net). My good friend is a freelance website developer, and I've talked with her about helping build me a website that would allow me to add all the extra histories I have in a format that looks good and makes sense to me. But she's in the thick of wedding/honeymoon planning so that will have to wait until the fall. I was an urban studies major in college, so I already have a whole system in place for research and citation organizing, and a lot of existing background info is in that citation organizer, but right now most of the histories/archive photos only exist there. If anything, it feels more like somedays I go to take pictures of places I keep reading about than the other way around.

In particular, I take a lot of pictures that I'm happiest with at the old/new/changing waterfront, and there's a lot of history and reinvention happening that I love capturing. This is one of the few times I put some of the background context into an IG post (bc let's be real, "context" and "social media" are not naturally in alliance)

MattKing · Jan 6, 2025

Speaking generally about these sort of threads, and with a very specific nod to @Don_ih 's perspective on things, it should be clear by now that we all bring our own background, experience, language skills and life outlook to how we view the nuances of meaning to many commonly used words like "take", "make" or even "build".
And there is a lot of irony in the fact that this state of affairs is highlighted in a thread residing on a photography oriented forum, because the problem is made much more complex when one is trying to use words to discuss subjects which are frequently more visual than word based.
As an almost total aside, I was musing on this thread while sort of paying attention to a movie my wife had on the television which featured an English only speaking main character in Norway. One of the interesting bits of dialogue included a part where the Norwegian speaking characters were expressing wonderment at a word in English that was used in multiple circumstances - apparently in Norwegian those circumstances required at least three distinctly different words to describe the various situations that the same single English word was applied to.
Perhaps the vast variety of the possible approaches to what photography can provide requires that the vocabulary be expanded.

koraks · Jan 7, 2025

chuckroast said:
See:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/where-did-the-term-doctor-orig-Tn8dRbnlRQ6EtjUzoQucZg

albireo said:
Your A.I. generated source is only partially correct.

The quality of the AI 'search' thing is to be distrusted and shows the weakness of AI. Consider this:

The word "doctor" comes from the Latin word "doctour," which means "teacher"

"Doctour" is not a Latin word. It's in this case misquoted as such from the source which the AI engine used in this case:

c. 1300, doctour, "Church father," from Old French doctour and directly from Medieval Latin doctor

It goes to show that AI is going places for sure - just not necessarily real places.

Don_ih · Jan 7, 2025

My perspective on things is essentially, at the outset of a discussion, the terminology should be fixed. If someone introduces a lexicon, anyone else should attempt to adhere to it. So, at the very beginning of this thread, Clive mentioned "take" and "make" but not defined in the way most people assume. Even 140 posts in

MattKing said:
Or making.

is ignoring what "making" is supposed to mean in this discussion.

Throughout a discussion, the meaning of a term can be refined. But to claim a word has multiple meanings that all apply at the same time, in the same context, confounds intelligibility.

chuckroast · Jan 7, 2025

albireo said:
Your A.I. generated source is only partially correct.

The term "doctor" does in fact come from the Latin "docere" (we use a couple of words with the same root in modern Italian, for example "docente" = "he/she who teaches" and "dotto" = "erudite/scholarly").

However, the popular conflation doctor<>physician started only in the 14th century and was popularised in the novellas of a Florentine novelist called Franco Sacchetti ("Trecento novelle").

The reason why the mapping "physician=doctor" then took hold and solidified is that physicians were often the only "erudite/scholarly" people common people ever came in contact with.

Interesting, thanks for the clarification.

chuckroast · Jan 7, 2025

koraks said:
The quality of the AI 'search' thing is to be distrusted and shows the weakness of AI. Consider this:

"Doctour" is not a Latin word. It's in this case misquoted as such from the source which the AI engine used in this case:

It goes to show that AI is going places for sure - just not necessarily real places.

The thing I like about Perplexity is that it's not really just a pure AI. It's a search engine that uses AI techniques to answer questions posed in natural language. More importantly, it cites its sources. If you are unsure or disagree with its findings, you can go directly to the sources themselves. This is unlike the more popular AIs where you get answers but you are required to trust their large language models (which I do not). For that matter, it's unlike any number of internet "authorities" that tell you what is "true" but don't cite their sources among which include blogs, social media, and traditional news, (and dare I say it, Photrio posters).

I'd point out that in this very thread, we have two humans with somewhat different views of the origins
of the word "doctor". Since AIs depend on humans for content, they're going to be as confused/contentious/inconsistent as we are

koraks · Jan 7, 2025

chuckroast said:
More importantly, it cites its sources.

Yes, I noticed that - very valuable!

chuckroast said:
Since AIs depend on humans for content, they're going to be as confused/contentious/inconsistent as we are

But in this particular case, "it" is more confused than either (or, really, just plain wrong, not so much confused). But, as you said, it is vastly more transparent than e.g. ChatGPT, which makes it possible to quickly spot the source of the error.

Vaughn · Jan 7, 2025

Sirius Glass said:
No shake & bake refers to earthquakes & fires and a product for coating food with bread crumbs product called "Shake & Bake".

Another form of "Shake and Bake" refers to the personal fire shelters we were issued in the USFS. They were sort of rolled up and if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, you took it out of the package, gave it a good shake to extend it out, stepped into the silver floor-less tent, and fell face-into-the-dirt with the tent over you -- all ready to bake.

Use make, take, create, shoot, capture, or whatever. The only time the issue comes up is in threads like this...we will still understand what the other is saying. Technically, the sun does not rise nor does it set, but we all know what a sunset is. The personal choice of words does reflect a little on how a person approaches photography, which is the most interesting part of these discussions.

Those who take and those who make

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