don_e

<p>"Don, I thought we settled the quid pro quo business a while back."</p>

<p>So? I was asked a question: what does intimate/intimacy refer to, and I replied.</p>

<p>"[This looks like Don E's take: "A shared relationship among at least two sensisble entities who freely and wholly participate".]"</p>

<p>I've made a distinction between "intimate knowledge of" and "intimate relationship with". You and Lannie may want to shoehorn 'nature' into an intimate (of the "with" kind) relationship with you. I'll stay out of it. But I think it is the inappropriate language for it.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>"Now, as for the word "intimate" (or "intimacy)," what is its referent?"</p>

<p>A shared relationship among at least two sensisble entities who freely and wholly participate. Freely participate implies consciousness, volition, choice, no duress. Shared relationship should not be thought of as involving exchange of value for value.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>No strawman. You wrote: "I would not dare call it fantasy. I can feel it. It is real, intimately real, whatever it is--and what I am feeling is not the rock or the wind, but what they are "saying" to me. (The scare quotes are deliberate.)" And I write that this "nature" is a concept in your thinking, not something in front of your nose (or your lens). It is a concept. Can you have an intimate relationship with a concept in your mind?</p>

<p>"Which is more substantial and less fantastic: that which I can see or feel with my senses, or that which I can feel and know with my soul? Is love itself a fantasy? Is the sense of intimacy a fantasy?"</p>

<p>Intimacy and love are not fantasies. You can feel them with your senses. You have nothing else to feel with.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>"I enjoy travel photography and like to work slow and methodically with a handheld meter and sometimes a tripod."</p>

<p>Then, the lenses. If you were working quickly, handheld, I'd say the body is more important.</p>

<p>The romantics, if they did not invent 'nature', propagated the concept into the popular imagination.</p>

<p>"I think that intimacy is about oneness."</p>

<p>'Nature' is a concept in your mind. It has neither body nor soul. 'Nature' cannot share, 'nature' has no volition, no behavior, no intention, no presence -- except what you imbue it with.</p>

<p>Finally, 'nature' doesn't care.</p>

<p>The major prophets, if they were with us, would recognize it as your idol.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>I'll accept John's "fantasies" comment in regard to 'nature', according to my distinction between 'intimate knowledge of' and 'intimate relationship with'. I do not think one can have an intimate relationship with 'nature', -- nature with single quotes to indicate it is a concept, not a thing, and a rather contemporary one. Most casual (i.e., not science) ecology/environmental-think is about a fantasy 'nature'. It is likely a substitute for religion, an immanentist-pantheistic religious variant. The intimate relationship assumed is not with 'nature', but with oneself, or rather oneself projected onto the world as the imaginary entity 'nature'. Whether this goes to actually existing things, not concepts, this telephone pole or this tree, this vine or this telephone line, I am not certain.</p>

<p>Some will object as I may have dissed their belief and said their god does not exist. That's ok.</p>

<p> </p>

<p><em>""Spelling errors can be overcome by..." - - - </em> using www.dictionary.com, too."</p>

<p>Dictionary doesn't help if you don't know how to spell the word. Horses for courses and dictionaries for definitions.</p>

<p>"I'm fortunate in that I have a screen on the back of my camera that enables me to see if my settings are adequate or not ;o)"</p>

<p>That's swell. So do I. What is the point?</p>

<p>I have a camera that only shoots raw with jpeg -- raw+jpeg. The jpegs are the same resolution as the raw. If you have one, shoot the day, morning, noon, night, indoors, outdoors, just snap thru the day. Don't change the ip settings from whatever is set up. Convert the raw files according to some default preset (this amounts to downloading, in LR with a selected preset, no more work than downloading the jpeg), and jpeg with no preset. Compare the raw and the jpeg. Easy.</p>

<p>Sometimes it is worth it to shoot jpeg only, sometimes not. Depends on the pace and flow of the work. Given time, I can shoot jpegs that can go right to the printer from the camera.</p>

<p> </p>

<p> The moderator should remove this duplication. Some weirdness in db?</p>

<p>"I wasn't thinking of pregnancy, vd, or even AIDS."</p>

<p>The comment of mine refered to began "In the day", meaning 'in former times', not 'today'. Your reply seems along the lines of my "Is the risk a blow to the ego? A disturbance of lifestyle?" I can see the potential for such risk in photography that occurs in a 'session', but I don't do that kind of photography. Mine occurs in public or off-trail. I assisted in a studio 35 or so years ago and haven't entered one since. This may explain why I needed to get some clarity on the risk being discussed.</p>

<p>"I wasn't thinking of pregnancy, vd, or even AIDS."</p>

<p>The comment of mine refered to began "In the day", meaning 'in former times', not 'today'. Your reply seems along the lines of my "Is the risk a blow to the ego? A disturbance of lifestyle?" I can see the potential for such risk in photography that occurs in a 'session', but I don't do that kind of photography. Mine occurs in public or off-trail. I assisted in a studio 35 or so years ago and haven't entered one since. This may explain why I needed to get some clarity on the risk being discussed.</p>

<p>Fred:<br>

It is not clear to me what the risks are that are commonly referred to in this thread. In the day, the risk of intimacy was vd, pregnancy, a bad reputation -- "intimate", a euphemism for sex. Is the risk a blow to the ego? A disturbance of lifestyle? Street photography may risk anything from being shot dead on the spot to a passionate romance, but experience informs me the odds are nothing will happen and there is no risk worth measuring. merriam-webster.com's definition of the noun matches my comment that risk is an element of the human interaction of exchange, and as a verb "to expose to hazard or danger", which is how it seems to be used in this thread. <br /> </p>

<p>Lannie:</p>

<p>I agree with you about the quality of this thread. I've learned somethings here and have much food for thought. I too photograph off-trail and wonder how to convey the intimacy of the experience of being in nature. This thread has got me to review a stack of my prints and consider them from the perspective of intimacy. Some I think express solitude, stillness, yet seem intimate to me. Can we speak of the intimacy of solitude? How to convey that? If the photos of nature are expressing its awesomeness or grandeur, they are unlikely to express intimacy as well. Ansel's mountains convey the sense of why the ancients placed the home of the gods on mountains, but not intimacy, for example. Perhaps part of the problem is the absence of the human in most nature photography. </p>

<p><br /> </p>

<p><br /> </p>

<p>"There seems to be an assumption of running away from what's difficult or challenging."</p>

<p>The quotation from my post refers to the evidence that our society evinces difficulty with intimacy, so much so that it is a common element in the plots of movies, sitcoms, plays, and soaps, and some like "making a commitment" have become joke writer material (my favorite being the first episode of Married With Children, the airline stewardess saying I want a guy who'll make a commitment. Someone who will stay the night), and in the context of conveying intimacy to the viewer from this culture.</p>

<p>"I assumed you were ringing a bell of sarcasm by using the word "spirit" since you were referring to me and you know of my anti-religious bent."</p>

<p>Nope. It was actually a compliment. We're not intimate enough for me to gauge my language with you that way.</p>

<p>The photo is from a family album, a resource, perhaps the best, for intimate photos.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>"What have I said about spirits?"</p>

<p>"virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc" -- and intimacy -- are not concrete, material, objective things like bootlaces.</p>

<p>If your anti-religion alarm is clanging, just substitute another term. Heck, I included a quotation from a reknowned atheist, too. Diversity, rulz.</p>

<p>Ok, from the classics: Among friends there is no need of Justice -- Aristotle.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>LR has had memory management issues, at least on Windows, since I started with the first beta. If you add more memory, it'll just chew that up, too. </p>

<p>"you got all that from <em>that</em> image? imagine what a sharp pic with a well-defined sense of composition would have inspired you to write...obviously you've been to art school."</p>

<p>It's the difference between viewing a photograph, and measuring it against a gearhead standard and rating it.</p>

<p>You may want to contribute to this thread:</p>

<p><a href="http://theonlinephotographer.blogspot.com/2006/06/great-photographers-on-internet.html">link</a></p>

<p> </p>

<p>I don't think shooting raw adds extra work. The raw data has to be converted to an image format. One can do it in-camera or in post. Running a raw through conversion takes maybe a second. Actually, if the shooting situation has complex or often changing lighting , if you have to shoot indoors and outdoors, if one set of contrast and saturation is adequate or not for every shot, it is a lot more convenient to shoot raw than to manipulate the camera's ip for every change of circumstance.</p>

<p>"I am beginning to think that intimacy between two subjects is less important than intimacy between the photographer and the subject--the person/scene that is photographed."</p>

<p>That's my understanding.</p>

<p>"Sometimes I wonder if the word "intimacy" is quite up to the burden that we are placing upon it"</p>

<p>There is no way to convey intimacy (or anything else) to a viewer unless they either share the intimacy of the photo through familiarity or are discerning enough to relate to it by analogy to their own experiences. I have not encountered many viewers who are capable of -- to use an expression from the Jesuits -- the discerment of spirits, as are, for example, Fred and Luis. Thus, we get photos *of* intimacy that are not intimate photos themselves. Intimacy has to have the obviousness of blunt force trauma to register (one can hear the tinkly piano music in the background). It is obvious that intimacy is difficult or incomprehensible for many...risky, even dangerous. The vicissitudes of 'making a commitment' involves intimacy. These are all common tropes in our culture and they do not indicate we are comfortable with intimacy. It seems instead to make us squirm and want to be elsewhere.</p>

<p>"Finally, there came a time when everything that men had<br /> considered as inalienable became an object of exchange, of<br /> traffic and could be alienated. This is the time when the very<br /> things which till then had been communicated, but never<br /> exchanged; given, but never sold; acquired, but never bought -<br /> virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc. - when<br /> everything, in short, passed into commerce."<br>

-- Karl Marx, Grundrisse</p>

<p> </p><div></div>

<p>In English the regular way to form a plural noun is to append an 's' to it, but a singular that ends in an 's', such as 'lens', presents complications, so the 'es' ending may be used for the plural. Then the 'error' of 'lense' is possible because the regular way to indicate the plural is to append an 's' to the singular which leaves the singular quite logically 'lense'. English is heaven for a spelling-Nazi.</p>

<p>What is far more important than standard spelling is grammar and punctuation especially with pnet's international membership -- and we native English speakers ought to be grateful to those here whose first or even second language is not English, and perhaps nothing close to it, for putting up with the slacker txt msg babbling of some posts as they ask or answer questions or offer advice.</p>

<p>Spelling errors can be overcome by the reader using commonsense, but chaotic grammar and punctuation turns it into a babble of baby-talk.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>"On a related question, I'm always puzzled as to what photographers do when they're out together. It seems odd when there are so many people photographing the same thing."</p>

<p>My wife and I often go out together for photography. We see different things and are interested in different kinds of photography. Even if we shoot the same subject from the same spot, there's a foot height difference between us and the photos are from different perspectives (back we we shared a camera, the perspective was how we could tell who shot what). I guess we wander off, close but not in each others way or in each others frame.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>The photograph is not the photographed.</p>

<p>Reading the list of NW threads and seeing one with the subject "intimacy", one can almost hear the readers as a collective consciousness thinking 'Well, hello young lovers!' And so it is when you open the thread. So, we have lots of photos of people in circumstances that are intimate...</p>

<p>...but are the photos themselves intimate? The photograph has subjects who are commiting an act of intimacy, but the photographer isn't, and so the photos themselves aren't intimate.</p>

<p>Anders, I'd like to read a response from you on the above.</p>

<p>Do I need to produce my own profiles for these films if I want to scan them?"</p>

<p>No. I don't recall any discussion of Vuescan here about workflow with c41 where anything but using the generic color print film setting was used, except sometimes the film types were used as 'presets' regardless of how they are labeled in Vuescan and the film being scanned. Hope that makes sense.</p>

<p>" does it really matter which film I use for capture?"</p>

<p>Scan two print films with frames of the same subject, with one of them being Reala, the other anything you want. I defy anyone to make them look alike 8-)</p>

<p>Using Vuescan, I suggest reading about the advanced workflow in the manual.</p>

<p> </p>