clayten_hamacher1

Talentless, at least in the context of museum/gallery worthy photos. Out of context both are merely badly framed snapshots. The girl doesn't just have a bush behind her - it's difficult to see where her head stops and the bush begins. The one of the laughing man simply shows that people with mishung curtains still find things funny. Great art here? No.

The test of course would be to take 10 Friedlander photos and 10 random miscentered snapshots that fit the general theme. Mix them and see if the experts (who theoretically haven't seen any of these twenty photos before) can pick them out reliably. Presumably, the work of a drunk snapshooter with a disposable camera should be distinguishable from that of the greatest photographer...

Even if there is genius in his work, it's in the concept - perhaps his photos are supposed to contrast other work by other artists. A few photos in a given style can provide useful context to other photos, or can provide an example that would take the proverbial thousand words to describe. However if everything you do is badly framed and of uninteresting subjects, maybe you really are a hack.

It's interesting to note that a three-year old with a disposable P&S could create Friedlander's work. A toddler with finger-paints could reproduce much modern art. I, with MS Paint, could create "Voice of Fire" by Barnett Newman. All this suggests that the only thing making the art famous (and worth a lot) is the name on the canvas, because I certainly haven't sold many prints at my asking price of a mere $100K.

Maybe this was a sokal hoax but where the hoaxer cashed the cheque before revealing the hoax and decided to keep it secret.

Maybe we should get James Randi to debunk bad art, and pretentious art critics, as well as just psychic kooks.

1) You mean, 300dpi, for whatever size you wish to print? Yes, various image editor programs (Photoshop, etc) will do this. There are tricks that supposedly make it look better, but you can simply do a resample.

2) Not at all. You don't add anything to the image by adding more pixels, but it doesn't hurt it either. (Unless you resize it down, or resize it too many times, etc) It's just a bigger copy of the same thing.

3) I doubt you *need* to, but many fussy photographers do this so that they can control all the stages except the actual printing. Theoretically you can do a better job, so you may want to.

It seems funny how so many people here are talking about how rectangular photos are superior, how squares are boring, and so on. Many medium-format photos are square and they don't appear boring. PhilG's phots are a perfect example. Furthermore, 35mm is the size and shape that it is because it was designed to use commonly available movie film because there were literally miles of it laying around.

You shouldn't shoot to any specific aspect ratio, shoot what flatters the subject and crop away the excess.

btw, Wafers are 6" or 8" (or larger) CIRCLES used to make chips. Any size and shape of chips is okay as long as they all fit in the circle.

There's no practical or asthetic reason why the market couldn't switch to square sensors. Well, a square 31x31 would have 961mm of area, a 36x24 has 864mm of area - the square would be a bit harder to make because it's larger. But that's offset by getting more pixels, so it's fairly neutral.

Tips... Hmmm. I've never shot film - maybe three rolls in a totally auto fixed-focus P&S - so I'm not really qualified to answer. That said, I'll give it a try. :)

Digital cameras have a smaller dynamic range and blow out highlights fairly easily. I've heard it's somewhat like slide film. As someone else said, check the histogram. If there's a clump of lines at either end you've lost detail.

Compositing two pictures is quite easy - just use a tripod and take two shots a few stops apart.

Film is now cheap - shoot like crazy.

B&W can be done easily in photoshop and choosing which channels to use gives the effect of colorized filters.

Get comfortable with using RAW for when you *need* the shot to work. It's more trouble but much safer. I've accidently lost a lot of detail in a shot when I've shot JPG and left the camera on daylight white-balance when walking indoors and then had to color-correct in photoshop.

Play with the ISO settings, it's not quite like film (nicer IMHO) but you may want to get familiar with how it looks at high ISOs. (And how it's not there at low ISOs.)

If you're into serious quality, don't count on the kit lens. I think it's much better than some people say, but it is 3x $100 zoom, it's soft in the corners at telephoto and suffers fairly badly from flare. It's a nice getting-to-know-the-camera lens.

And now a jump five years into the future, when many pros have a digital SLR...

I'm going to have to mostly agree with the idea that the FoundImage tag, or one like it, doesn't go far enough to ensure the viewer that the image is an accurate representation of reality. Many examples of ways to make film images not accurately represent reality were given. Double exposures could be used to put a rainbow in a scene where it wouldn't normally be found, and yet the image would be unmodified, straight off the film. Then there's the issue of film - even ignoring black and white, many films reproduce color differently.

The other side of this is that it's unreasonably discriminatory. Digital images are often touched up on the computer to do exactly the same legitimate things that are done with filters or in the darkroom, if you were working with film. Moreso, these things are often done to make the picture more accurately resemble reality. (Adjusting the contrast, sharpening, etc.)

To be useful, a line must be drawn at something that would make a non-technical viewer feel deceived. To them removing cavorting rabbits would probably change the feel dramatically, but darkening the sky is about the same as putting on sunglasses, a change everyone is familiar with.

As technology advances, things that were impossible will become possible, perhaps even in-camera, so ruling on specific technologies doesn't seem useful. At some point film with a wider light sensitivity than the human eye might be made, or digital cameras might start combining bracketed images in-camera (perhaps even without being asked) to increase the dynamic range. These don't seem unreasonable to use, and there doesn't seem to be any difference between the super film and super digital image.

My concern is that any sort of mark like this is going to let some hideous abuses through (anything done pre-shutter) and disallow some things that would render whole technologies useless, while not doing anything to really help the consumer tell the difference between an image that they could have seen if they were there, and a fantasy image.

Because of this, I think this sort of mark just confuses the issue without adding value, and shouldn't be used. However, If you were to create a standard that was based completely on the feeling of dismay that a layman would feel, given the raw source material (pre-filters even) and the final picture and regardless of specific technologies, I would support it.