hatley

<i>"A Nikon F5 (or the F6) makes images on film. Scan the images into your computer' and you have more megapixels than you need to tinker with and alter after the fact. But advertising hype has created the idea that a 'new, improved' digital camera body will make you a "better" photographer."</i>

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I don't know that it has all that much to do with a perception that digital makes better photographs - most folks I know who are just starting in photography still respect film as the epoch. I can't count how many times folks have said something like "oh but I just use a little digital point and shoot". But anyway, not to get strangled in a digital vs wet process debate.

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The bottom line is that with chemical process, it takes a lot more time to either process or have your film processed, then scan it in than it does to just shoot the image and then access it immediately. That makes digital much more condusive to newspaper photojournalism, hype or no hype. In that particular segment of photography, time to press is paramount.

<i>I know some Russians.</i>

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Jinx! hehe

<i>"Of course the other thing is that Tokyo is so dense, and Japan is so Tokyo-centric in terms of culture- I think the greater metro area is something like 12 million people? That is like combining all of New York City and LA. If you did that, like Tokyo you would have many small independent galleries in which to see current photographic work. (for fun imagine NY(541sq miles) and LA (393sq miles) together crammed into 239 square miles- about the size of Detroit!)"</i>

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Its just boggling. In Houston, our population is around 2million. In 600 sq miles. Its frightening almost how crowded Tokyo has to be. Definitely a must experience, its been on my todo list far too long.

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<i>"There are no doubt many more people out there making interesting photographs who just don't have the access to (or want to) put them on the web.</i>

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Seriously. I tried finding some of the folks on your list that were new to me and my google skills either left something to be desired or a bunch of them are very Japan oriented so far. I wonder what all the billions of folks in China are up to, India - etc.

 

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http://www.skjstudio.com/russian/

<br>A few Russian photographers... Khaldei and Zelma probably recognizable.<br><br>

<i>"The format of the negative or technology choice, really only matters to photographers, <b>not the people that buy prints</b>."</i>

 

I agree with that - but I think it makes a difference to the people who <i>exhibit</i> prints. I base this off the caption and accompanying information I've seen at exhibits, but I'm sure I don't get the 10,000 foot view as I don't travel as much as I'd like.

 

And my point really is, if thats the case - then it would stand to reason that as the majority of street photography is done with 35mm and digital cameras, that thats why you see the genre mainly online and in esoteric magazines aimed at the same folks making the art. So the bourgeois art purchasers see more landscapes and surreal studio stuff (and I'm talking about art in the say 2 thousand dollar range and up), as its much more condusive to the larger formats - but its only a hypothesis, definitely not an assertion.

 

Cheers.

"Furthermore, the format doesn't mean anything."

 

Is that true? I mean, I'm just not sure that digital is going to be on level with chemical in the next 20 years in some minds. Maybe its the stuff I'm seeing and my city is behind the times, but I just don't see it commanding the respect in practice that chemical does. And for the wall, medium and large format sure makes better enlargements than 35mm no?

 

I just think curators respect medium and large format chemical process more, maybe I'm totally off base.

Well I asked this same question Dan privately to a member here who runs a gallery, and to a painter friend who shows a lot and keeps his eye on photography. All the names I got from them, none of them were street photos - in fact both gave me the name Richard Misrach (http://www.edelmangallery.com/misrach.htm) , which, to my eye is some boring stuff that tells me the critics are a step or two behind the times. Just my opinion, but it seems like fine arts photography is so tied to the hip to large/medium format photography that street stuff (with its fast nature) doesn't get much of a space.

 

Makes a person want to go try out large format photography and haul the big thing around the streets.

The Moreira is interesting to me - though I do wonder that it seems like a negative, or gloomy feel has been so strong for so long. Then in the last 30 years or so, what with Warhol thumbing his nose at society and all the rest of it - I wish for some newly positive view to turn the page a bit more. To relay a positive outlook, without smiling faces, children, blue skies, imitating either Ansel or Monet, and avoiding the cliches of the day. Tough stuff it seems like and still maintain the gravitas people expect in a museum maybe.

Anyone up on some of the contemporary exhibits in street photography? I'm

interested to see the direction of what museums and the like are buying from

stuff shot in the last few years, whether it be dubbed "documentary" or whatever

- but street work. 9/11 pieces aside.

 

Anyone got their eye on a particular artist? I believe a couple of the folks at

http://www.in-public.com/ have been in shows.

 

Cheers.

Speed. For photojournalism you can store a whole lot more than 36 exposures on a large flash card. You can get your photos to your editor much faster, especially if you are in a different city.

In the US, basically anything in a public place is up for grabs from what I understand. Now, if you are on private property - they can make you leave...physical access is what they control. Keep in mind I'm not an attorney =)

 

Most museums I've been to won't let you use a tripod unless you either pay a premium or set something up with them. But thats just a tax on pros really, doesn't really have anything to do with copyright as much as dipping their beak.

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Brian - use photo.net differently. 1st, forget ratings. 2nd - browse photos till you find one you like better than the others. Then click on it, look at the author of it and click on the link in their profile that says "You can browse some of the photos rated highest by this member." Then click on some of the photos in this list you enjoy and do the same thing with the authors of those photographs. Keep following this chain and mark people as interesting when their gallery is particularly inspiring.

 

Then narrow down to 2-3 of your favorites that have intersecting styles, and try to emulate their photographs. Work on matching the way they compose images, their sharpness, their contrast, etc.

 

Thats the good stuff about photo.net, especially if the photographers you identify are active as you can correspond with them and pick their brain while you come up with your own unique style.

 

Keep shooting mate.

Just blow off the ratings. Between the "I only give 6/6s across the board" types and the "machine gun" sort of rating recent photos, they don't ever tell ya much. I state it like this because if lets say there were a cutoff at 3/3 to force a comment, people would just rate 4/4 as their lowest, etc. And really, photos that are rated 6/6 and 7/7 need just as much of a comment to divine why they like it, if you tie much more than a passing importance to the ratings.

 

I've tried removing an image that got a a slew of 3s and 4s, resubmitted it a couple months later and it got 6s instead (I put borders on a segment of photos), and saw it go the opposite way.

 

But I will say this - the recent photos you've submitted for critique would probably score higher if they had more contrast, saturation, and unsharp mask applied. Flowers especially score better if they have as much of all three of those as they will stand before losing detail or going grainy, they catch the eye better that way for one. Whether or not they are as pleasing to you as to the whim of ratings is another thing =)

 

Cheers.

Wikipedia's zone system entry has more than one:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_system

 

Cheers.

You could set up a tunnel with PPTP on a server outside the UAE. If you have a friend willing to set up a box on their cable/dsl somewhere who understands it, you could then point your web browser to their "proxy" box and browse from it - or set up a VPN. It will take a bit of knowhow and probably be slow, but works to punch out of corporate firewalls. Just depends on how much brute force you are looking to apply to the problem.

 

Check out Squid if you are linux saavy and have a remote host: http://www.squid-cache.org/

 

Good luck mate.

Woops, writing in between meetings and alt tabbing - "occidental" should read "oriental".

No, its because sites like securecomputing.com picked up gallery.photo.net as nudity, and a bunch of state actors use services like these right along with the corporate entities they were originally designed for. No new clamp downs by the occidental countries, the change is the addition of photo.net to US based filtering groups.

<i>"Seems like it would be doable to seperate the different sections into nature.gallery.photo.net and finearts.gallery.photo.net, etc etc that way it would be doable to ask groups like the one mentioned in this thread to localize their filter to the pertinent subject matter."</i>

 

It would take a coder some work to both redo the main website scripts and the navigation, but it would get around having the entire site effectively blocked from large corporations during the day and billions of people across the world 24/7 - so probably worth doing. Don't know what the guts of the site look like, but guessing at C++ what with the Tcl form handling, and assuming pretty code is in place, some hotshot could prolly make it happen without it being too bad.

Jac: =)

 

Not sure when this age of revisionism you refer to began, but etymology of professional is latin and doesn't really limit it to that in the texts I've seen. Through Roman times and certainly around the Age of Reason and after I think you'd have to include dentists, school masters, engineers, architects, accountants, military officers and clergy. The line would be drawn at ship pilots/masters, surgeons (sawbones, as opposed to physicians), scriveners, stenographers and the like but career bureaucratic types (linguists/lower diplomats, etc) would have certainly been accepted as within the professional class - that is, socially above a tradesman (laborer) but not part of the gentry.

 

But I'm no linguist or historian, just peruse some primary sources here and there. The artisian classes have always been somewhat suspended between trades and professional careers from what I see - the shining stars afforded gentry status, the starving artists somewhat below a successful tradesman......but anyhow, off topic. Professional today generally means getting paid for just about any chosen activity.

I think Bill is smack on, "pro" means primary source of income imo. The "semi-pro" group is the big wide one in my view. For instance, I've sold some prints to friends of friends, and I often use my own photographs as stock in websites I or others I work with and pass the fees onto the consumer. Am I a "semi-pro"? Maybe, just barely. A pro? Very far from it, in my view.

BTW, to add to this - I'd bet a beer that photo.net's photos are no longer viewable in Iran. A while back it was reported they were illictly using securecomputing's software:

 

http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2005/06/how_iran_blocks.html

 

If you use your imagination, I'm sure you can think of some other states that likely will be excluded because of this issue.

Thats because a bunch of states use sites like securecomputing.com to establish their policies, either directly or buy aquiring their lists. I'd imagine we'll see folks in Indonesia and South America chiming in soon.

 

I do think I mentioned a programatic solution to the problem, but I'd hate to sound as if I'm harping on it =)

Falkag.net, intellitxt.com, google analystics, etc (ads) - hit enough disparate servers in each fetch, and you'll feel it. Put netstat on an interval and watch the connections as ya cruise photo.net nowadays.

 

Uploads now, that can only be bad hops, bottlnecked router or server, etc.

I think one POW per year is a good middle of the road myself. If every year a handful of folks are previous winners, thats still 40-45 newly recognized photographers. Even POW winners can use motivation, after all.

Well - I've worked in and around large corporations most of my career, and in the US. In my experience (working in IT as a manager and dealing with this from a personnel side), its not that its illegal to display nudity. Witness the sculptures and paintings present in many public and corporate offices. Rather, its that sexual harassment cases are rapant and as the last poster said, the "culture of harsassment" card can and is played here and there. Sometimes, its founded - more often its a manifestation of general dissatisfaction. But large corporations react to it the same way they do to RSS, with a big hammer so as to mitigate HR and law costs. Most larger corporations I know now have some form of program running which every 15 minutes or so locks up the user's desktop and takes the user through a series of stretches (some of which are quite comical). This has mitigated the *flood* of lawsuits that are a dime a dozen about injured arms and wrists, and cost companies silly money on the margin.

 

But US corporate culture aside, this could all be fixed if the administrators attend to my advice and seperate the sections out programatically. As others have mentioned, there are alternatives to photo.net now and gravity will set in if it isn't dealt with. I won't renew my subscription if it isn't, sadly.

 

Cheers.