What do you find worth documenting?

Donald, just saying that words/photos is one viable format. Doesn't say anything about the percieved quality of words and or photos. Also, I hope because I cited Farm ad and Smith that it was constured I implied that documentary must have pathos. That would be putting words in my mouth. Just used them as an example that documentaries have points of view, whatever they may be. A lot of good documentaries can be well shot corporate catalogues as far as that is concerned. The social gravitas school, is one powerful and rich tradition of documentary photograph ala Smith, Salgado, etc. etc.

Donald,

 

If you click on my name, you will find a list of mini-documentary projects I have made in the past few months. I am doing sort of "event-driven" documentary in which the event itself is just a background but people or their mood is what I tried to capture. Sort of along the line of HC-B's "George VI's coronation".

Liu, you have some very nice images there! Forgive my ignorance but how

do you do it so that there are threads listed under your name? I'm pretty PN

illiterate.

With HTML code, you can put anything in your biography ;-)

Here is <a href="http://www.photo.net/pvt/basic-info-update">the link</a> to update basic information.

Ah. HTML code. I've decided that HTML and me are not compatible. I had

enough of text tagging back when the leading word processor was WordStar!

I'll stick to Dreamweaver for my web needs or do without. Thanks anyway! : )

A case in point. Stand by...

<center><img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/3136550-lg.jpg"></center>

This happens to be the end of a festival in my neighborhood, Okubo-machi, Akashi. It could be anywhere in Japan. Where does not matter. The time or the purpose of the festival does not matter either. The photograph is alpha and omega. The emphasis is on character and not on situation.

 

I shot this with a Contax IIIa + Voigtlander SC 25/4 on color ISO 800 film and desaturated in Photoshop.

Nice photo Alex! I agree that many of the photos people (including me) in Japan make could be almost anywhere in the country. I guess I've tired of these sorts of photos (festival photos) and am working on trying to capture more of the daily life -- which here in Zentsuji can be pretty mundane. What makes this doubly hard to commit to is that even the most mediocre photo of a guy in a Hapi coat or a woman in kimono will impress "the folks back home" much more than any insightful photo I might make of the real Japan (well ONE of the real Japans).

Thanks, Donald. This is probably not one of my best or most meaningful shots--it certainly isn't documentary in the stern sense of the word--but it is one of my favorites. It followed an absolute horror of a shoot. I mean the camera had no film. Ran to camera store, bought film, loaded, ran back, shot this and a few other shots as everything ended. The lady with the cat that swallowed the canary smile, the set smiles on the other maids and the guy in back who is probably drunk off his gord--yeah, a good old-fashioned anywhere in Japan matsuri.

 

You know, Donald, you're just across the Inland Sea from me. We really ought to get together.

Take lots of photos in your community. Shoot people at the gas station, the grocery store, etc. When you have grandchildren, you'll be glad you did!

 

I absolutely love looking at old photos of my community from the early 1900s. I've been living in my city for 23 years and I'm really sorry that I wasn't into photography when I first moved here. The many orange groves have been plowed under to make way for housing tracts. The empty fields in my neighborhood that once served as grazing are now filled with two story houses. Oh how I wish I had those shots to pull out and remininisce over! (I know, I sound like I'm 80...I'm 45, but to many of you who are young enough to be my kids, 45 and 80 is probably about the same! LOL)

 

I need to get out and take some shots. K-Mart is a 99-cent store, Target is empty. It packed up and moved across the city line. Burger King is now a check cashing store and a hardware store I once worked at is now one of those cheesy indoor swapmeets. These may not make for asthetically pleasing shots, but they would say something about my community...hopefully just the time we're in and not the future that is yet to come. <shivers at the thought>