jon_fernquest

<p>Man playing the pipes (downtown Bangkok)</p>

I've lived in Myanmar and Chiangrai province in Thailand for several years and my favorites are Maymyo in Myanmar, an old British hill station that has a beautiful teak former Bombay-Burma trading company rest house turned hotel and stage coaches for public transportation. It's a three hour train ride from Mandalay with nice mild weather. In Chiangrai my favorite is mountain biking and photography in the hills, both break the monotony of the other. You can buy a new or used mountain in the Chiangrai stores for one or two hundred dollars and then sell it back when you leave. Nice destinations: Chiangsaen (sleepy town on the Mekong), Golden Triangle (intersection of two rivers), Maesai and Tachileik (kind of the Tijuana of Thailand), Doi Tung (mountain and famous pagoda), Akha hilltribe villages, Hin Taek (Haw Chinese in the remote mountains), Mae Salong (Haw Chinese in the mountains), Chiang Khong (across from Laos on the Mekong). Much of the beauty you will see will be the in the small villages you pass through to get to your destinations, so take your time.

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Just googled it and found an article on his work in a recent U.C. Berkeley publication. A PDF file in the Fall, 2002 issue:

 

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~csees/publications.html

<p>

I think

<a href="http://www.pascarel.com/">

Nicolas Pascarel's</a>

work on people on the streets of Italy, Cuba, and Cambodia qualifies as

street photography and he uses color slide film with a medium format camera.

(also my teacher for the last two weeks at Alliance Francais Chiangrai, Thailand)

</p>

 

<p>

I don't think he's street photography in the traditional sense because

most of what he's been teaching us is how to approach people and

set up shots that do it right the first time, not whipping off roll after roll

of film. He's very picky about light and the time of day he shoots.

He sets up each shot slowly and precisely.

Now are working in pairs hanging out in one crowded place

for awhile and blending in so people accept your presence and don't notice

your intrusion.

When you are first starting out I think this slow painstaking striving for precision is good.

</p>

IMHO *put useful information on a web page* not in a transitory forum posting.

Save it for posterity.

I was just looking at your filter postings and I find them very useful:

 

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1021&message=3758445

 

...but so are "No Words" forums. They help some people think about ideas or themes while shooting, probably not yourself because you're a professional. Ansel Adams himself said after mastering the zone system the next step was to look at lots of photos critically. Most of the more sophisticated Photography discussion forums

emphasize the sharing of photographic work, like Topica's Street Photography forum.

 

I'd vote for more "No Words".

If 100% of the threads were "No Words" threads,

it still would mean one thing: *that's what the people

want*, but granted in an ideal world we would have two forums:

"People Photography: Technical" and "People Photography: Photographs".

 

Also it would be nice if people didn't word their postings

like they are trying to pick a fight:

"Useful traffic",

"Plague of No Words threads",

"driving out the serious posts",

"the forums could get back on topic",

"a repository for people's reject bin efforts",

"graphic pointless natter".

Give me a break.

This is flaming vocab, not cooperative.

Learn to control yourself.

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Makes me glad I live in Asia. The U.S. is sometimes truly bizarre and offensive and I'm just about at the end of my tether from politely putting up with people attacking me verbally, picking a fight, aiming for the jugular in everything they say because I'm American and then this. Truly racist and disgusting! They should be ashamed of themselves, but the normal cultural arrogance will rule the day. Some Americans are so out of touch with what makes them human.

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<img src="http://www.photo.net/photodb/image-display?photo_id=1301371&size=md">

 

<p>....selling flowers by the side of the road.</p>

I live far away from all the war and the protests in Asia

and to me it all seems like a ten ring circus with at most

symbolic meaning, but occasionally I come across some hard facts

that really disturb me like the U.S. is only now grudgingly giving

a paltry 4 million to the Iraqi opposition to start T.V. broadcasts

(I would assume that this is the price of a few missiles):

 

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030407-9384304.htm

 

This is like finding a logical contradiction in a very

expensive and tediously constructed mathematical proof

that seriously undermines its credibility.

 

IMHO the main use that photos are being made of in this

war is emotional manipulation of public opinion.

I'd exchange all the protest shots I've ever seen for a good

historical photo essay on the Iraqi Opposition.

<img src="http://www.photo.net/photodb/image-display?photo_id=1355206&size=md">

<img src="http://www.photo.net/photodb/image-display?photo_id=1371945&size=md">

P.S. If the search engine used statistical clustering techniques, it could probably do a pretty good job at identifying communities of shared aesthetic values. A lot more people might decide to give ratings just so they could determine who they share common aesthetic values with. I hardly give any now, simply because I don't find they provide me with very much information. I already know I don't agree with a lot of people on a lot of subjects. Even a histogram/distribution would provide some idea of the spread of opinion on a photo.

> Makes it worth the subscription cost to support PN, dont you think?

 

It's worth way more than the subscription price and I'm starting to feel guilty about not subscribing. If I can ever figure out how to use Paypal or some other payment system from foreign lands like Thailand, Korea, or Burma I will subscribe immediately. (Any suggestions?) If there were different grades of subscriptions like $100 for increased services or high bandwidth use, I'd choose that.

 

I think the next step beyond photo.net is the sort of meta-narrative provided by *weblogs* where you could get finer groupings, comparisons, analyses, and categorizations than photo.net provides.

Focal points for *groups of people with shared aesthetic values*. The linear ranking at photo.net kind of ignores this fact, that holding technical competence equal, there are distinct sets of equally valid aesthetic values in the world, (e.g. the European Kertesz's use of soft focus is said not to have been in sync with the aesthetic values of his adopted homeland the U.S.)

 

I read that after learning the Zone System Ansel Adams suggested looking at large numbers of photos analytically, something that photo.net as a resource seems best situated to do!

<img src="http://www.photo.net/photodb/image-display?photo_id=1355108&size=md">

 

<p>Old woman selling owl and puppies as young monk looks on

a little disapprovingly.</p>

<img src="http://www.photo.net/photodb/image-display?photo_id=1355103&size=md">

<img src="http://www.photo.net/photodb/image-display?photo_id=1285844&size=md">

 

<p>Mother and daughter take a break from work.</p>

Thanks for the book suggestion. Here's the link for the new edition

that should be coming out soon:

 

http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/store/books/apmc2.html

 

> The "brew" is different for every image.

 

For me the ideal Photoshop for photographers book would be loaded with interesting photos like photo.net and dissect the interesting things that were done to them with Photoshop analytically. A collection of useful case studies. There are a lot of books on taking photos of buildings, people, etc like this, but I have yet to find a Photoshop book like this.

 

Thanks again for the book suggestion.

Here's what I was looking for. Couldn't find it in any book. Found it in the Topica "Street Photography" mailing list:

 

http://www.topica.com/lists/streetphoto/read/message.html?mid=906739082&sort=d&start=31942

 

I quote:

 

> What's your channel mix brew? I like to try different recipes for B&W.

 

I usually start out with 50% red and 50% green for landscape stuff...

effectively a 'minus-blue' or yellow filter. From that I might crank

up the red if I want to darken the sky but usually that degrades the

image slightly.

 

If the subject has a dominant color, then I will usually try a 'filter'

of that color, which will produce maximum contrast in that subject. EG

for foliage I use a 'green' filter, (50% red and 50% blue).

 

For human skin tones it's worth trying a blue filter, or at least a

filter with a substantial amount of blue.

 

There is a super-sophisticated way of doing channel-mixing to

black-and-white which involves using two adjustment layers: the first

is a hue/saturation layer and the second is a channel mixer layer. By

rotating the hue of the underlying image using the first layer, and

selecting one or two channels only in the channel mixer, you can

produce a much wider theoretical range of effects. I've tried it a few

times and never come up with anything that was that great, but if you a

fiddler it might appeal to you. There's a tutorial on the web but I've

lost the link.

 

JB

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