Norma Desmond

LOL. There's little chance of their being a "bad" photo everyone agrees is bad. Depends on context as well. Often, what I may think might be "good" for my own portfolio" is different from what I would choose for someone else's wedding album (with some overlap, of course). While a bride may very well not want, in her own album, a photo of herself passing out, I'd generally consider that a keeper for myself. Likewise for Crazy Ed trying to make time with a bridesmaid. That, to me, would be a very happy accident. Just goes to show that "bad" is a relative judgment, relative not only to who's making the judgment, but to the context in which the photo will be seen. What may be truly bad in a wedding album could be great in a photo exhibit or a photographer's portfolio. Recently saw a great exhibit at the Met in NY. All snapshots with very typical mistakes that most people would have thrown out—cut off heads, obvious out of focus subjects, limbs missing, one face blocking another, a tree looking like it's growing out of the top of someone's head, etc. The photographer in question found all these in junk shops and put them together in various series by type of mistakes. It actually made for a very interesting, amusing, and insightful exhibit. Lemonade from lemons!

The reason I cull photos and don't give away "bad" negs or files is because I don't know who may decide to use whatever negs or files in the future and a "bad" shot could wind up being seen out of context (in other words, not as a reject among a bunch of good wedding shots but as the sole shot people might see at some time in the future) and still be associated with my name. I would only want people to see my rejects (if at all) in the context of the full set of photos taken, but I could never be sure of that happening. To me, giving away all negs or files from a shoot, including mistakes or things that just don't work, would be like a painter including a video of the entire time he spent painting a canvas, painting over missteps, redoing and refining his work as he goes along, etc. Seeing a painter's or a photographer's process might be interesting as a study in itself, but the process is not the product and, to me, rejected negs are simply part of the process and not the product. The process may be, but often is not and certainly doesn't need to be, shown along with the product.

By the way, since we’ve addressed the substance of your question, I wanted to add just a few words about this. I understand that you don’t want a digital vs. film debate in the usual sense of “which is better,” etc. But, by taking on the screen name “analogphotog” and by talking about photoshop in terms that actually don’t show a good understanding of how similar a neg and a file can be, you kind of open yourself up, especially on the Internet, to at least some digital and film comparisons if not debates. What you said about photoshop compared to negs seems a simple honest misunderstanding, but you intentionally chose the name “analogphotog” which, if you prefer analog/digital not to impose itself onto your posts, might be a screen name to reconsider, because it immediately calls attention to the process.

If there’s a “should” here, it’s that you SHOULD do what you and your client agree on, preferably in a written contract. It would be reasonable for you to keep the negs, if that’s the agreement, in order to maintain control of all prints that get made. Many photographers make part of their living off selling prints to clients. The prints are of more value if the negs are in YOUR possession. If you provide a client the negs, you’re potentially taking away your ability to make money from future prints. If you do supply the negs to the client, it would be reasonable to charge accordingly because you’re giving up an original source that has value in itself. As a film photographer, you have the ability, and anyone in possession of the negs also has the ability, to post process the photos any way and to whatever degree you like. You may choose to do minimal post work beyond the developing, but a client may hand your negs off to someone that will take great liberties with those negs. Parting with your negatives means giving up control over what kinds of future prints are made and what they’ll look like. It’s reasonable to be compensated for giving up that control.

LOL. Good point. My guess is that Dylan Thomas saying, "Do no go gentle into that good night" and his "rage, rage, against the dying of the light" might have been thinking not just about continuing to take pictures but continuing to take pictures that matter, even about daring to take pictures that matter. Maybe he would have also been thinking about what gear to hold onto in order to do that . . . though that wouldn't be how I see the poem.

More concerning is that face in the crowd.

Well, you’re the one who introduced that characterization, so I’ll let you decide how extreme. I do . That’s why I said it. I’m not a binary choice kind of guy. Rarely is the world that black and white. There’s lots between “love it” and “leave it” though there seems to be a lot of appeal in such simplicity. No? Emoticons . . . the ultimate absolution. Here’s one I know you like. :rolleyes:

How many times has a POTW not been posted or has one been posted that the photographer has subsequently deleted because there's no mechanism in place to avoid this? How many times have weeks gone by and those in charge remained unresponsive to the community? How many times have glitches recurred at fairly regular intervals? How many times have some members tacitly supported the cause of the insanity by chastising those affected by it for calling it out?

Maybe the "change" will be that your feelings about photography won't rest on the feelings you have about your gear! :) I think it often happens, and maybe especially as we age, that letting go of some amount of material possessions (often required as we downsize in our elder years) brings a new kind of liberation even as we may miss some of the things we're giving up. Focus on the new pictures you still can make and I think you'll be just fine, no matter what gear you wind up with.

This is interesting and I can understand your desire here. I come at it from almost the opposite place. Because I feel the medium of print and backlit screen are so different, each unique in their own ways, I actually often don't try to match the image exactly for each medium. I frequently create a different file for print than I've used for screen display. Often, it's because I want different things from each. Sometimes, the medium is such a strong influence on the image that I'll want, for example, a softer and perhaps less saturated print and a little more sharp and saturated image for the screen. The kind of contrast that often works for me in print will not translate as well to screen so I will nuance it, not to get it to look similar to the print but to get it to bring the screen experience to life in a way of its own.

Same might be said of some of the anti-PC-police! :) Political correctness is a thing. And it's often silly and can be obnoxious. Negative reactions to political correctness can sometimes be very much deserved. But some reactions mistake caring and respect for political correctness. That leads to a breakdown of civility, or in some cases just a lack of basic manners. It's possible to recognize the silliness of the reaction to the term "blacktop", if what you relate is all that occurred, while understanding the difference between that and the way "spazz" has actually been used over many, many years as a specifically derogatory term. Anti-political-correctness makes a lot of sense, when it makes sense, but it doesn't provide an excuse to allow ALL unkind, disrespectful, and mean-spirited language to stand. As with so many human interactions, it helps to be discerning.

That's fine and I appreciate how caring you can be. So let me say what I said differently, avoiding the word "badly." You had said: Knowing the process may be important information, but I think what you're judging is substantially based on what you're seeing, which is the RESULT of whatever process was used to get there more than on your understanding of the process per se. If I said to someone, "Your photo is not to my taste because you used a digital instead of a film process," I'd consider that a somewhat shallow or irrelevant judgment. That would be me allowing their process to determine my aesthetic response. Instead, I'd be more inclined to tell them what's to my taste and what's not to my taste based on the results of their process. A photo might not be to my taste, usually because of the way it LOOKS to me, not because of my knowledge or understanding of the PROCESS the photographer used to get it to look that way. Additionally, another photographer's satisfaction with his own work may be every reason for a colleague or friend to push him or her beyond that satisfaction if one genuinely feels they can point the photographer in a direction of more refined and less naive taste. There are plenty of people satisfied with pushing slider bars way too far and saturating their work to an extreme. If they've asked for critique, I wouldn't hesitate to get them to reconsider or at least think about their satisfaction by telling them some specific things I see that they might not want to be satisfied with in order to further develop their own vision. Suggesting that someone might not be so satisfied is not telling them exactly what to do instead. There are plenty of times we're satisfied only until we realize doing a little less or a little more would be more satisfying. Colleagues nudging each other to mess around with that balance and find something that works and to NOT necessarily be satisfied is a great thing, as long as it's done constructively. The photographer in question is free to reject the nudge. Getting back specifically to the thread at hand, plenty of people are satisfied with the results of what comes directly out of a camera in jpg form. That may be just fine, but I will still continue to challenge that generic look among fellow photographers who are trying to take their own photography seriously and, perhaps, to a different place, maybe trying to develop their own personal style (as you so nicely put it). If they resist, so be it. But if I can alert them to an alternative aesthetic from what currently satisfies them they might just take even more satisfaction in such new awareness and vision. When my photos get critiqued, I want to be challenged as much as I also want satisfaction.

Right, I think we'd agree that knowledge (or understanding) and perception go hand in hand and each affects the other and each is a part of reality, and neither is the sole faculty by which we relate to reality. We agree on that. I do find myself, however, modulating how much influence knowledge and understanding will have relative to perception. Sometimes, I want to stay in as much a perception mode as possible, setting aside my understanding to whatever degree I can achieve. This allows me to experience even photography, art, and music I know a lot about in a sort of primal or innocent state. I can do that especially well with music, simply listen and appreciate Beethoven on a gut level and not allow my knowledge of him and his place in musical history to influence me terribly much. I don't believe we can completely rid ourselves of prior knowledge, but I do think we can experience art with varying degrees of that knowledge's influence. I will very often go to a museum exhibition or a theater, music, or dance performance and forego my more critical (in the sense of critical analysis rather than disapproval) side in favor of simply appreciating on as innocent a level as possible what's before me. Later, I may go back through the exhibit again or revisit the performance in my mind and do more critical analysis, which can also be important to me. So for me it's important to be as flexible as possible with the different ways I might approach viewing photographs, sometimes in a more critical and more knowledge-oriented space, sometimes much less so. Knowledge and perception go hand in hand and are often in different balances. In addition to your understanding of how the images arrived at their form and knowing you would not process them that way, I imagine some of it is also a matter of simply how badly they look to you, regardless of how they were made and for reasons of taste, which is subjective but which you've also refined.

Since most young couples I know have had parents and grandparents whose "groovy clothes" (in my parents' case their fashions from the forties that I loved seeing were long before "groovy" and much more art deco inspired, and some of the better stuff was Bobby Soxer fare) they reveled in when they looked through old scrapbooks and photo albums, I think you don't give young couples credit enough for being nostalgic and thinking about what they and their future kids may appreciate and react to, just as they did. Unmarried couples planning their weddings are often thinking well into the future, about having children and starting a family, about buying a home for the future, etc. It makes sense they would consider and want to have good quality, professional photos of a day they assume will stand out as a significant milestone throughout the rest of their lives. They know it will be an event where friends and family will be together IN ONE PLACE, which doesn't happen terribly often these days, so these aren't replacing typical facebook and instagram snapshots that are usually of individuals or small groups. It will be an opportunity to catch people TOGETHER, small groups often within the context of a larger whole group, that doesn't come along all that often since we tend to be more spread out. I think a good wedding photo album requires more than a few choice shots. It requires telling the story of the wedding, and that will include getting everyone in attendance in at least a couple of photos, capturing different sorts of moments and expressions from joy to fun to bittersweet to serious, capturing formal as well as more casual moments. A wedding album should feel full, not paired down to a few choice shots. A few choice shots is what, for at least the first year of marriage, may remain on display in the home. A wedding album should be more than that.

Not so fast . . . LOL! :) Knowledge plays a role in reality as well, probably an equal role to perception. So, the fact that we KNOW that the backlit screen we're currently looking at isn't the only perception possible, and that prints will be perceived somewhat differently, makes the perception a very significant but also temporary and transient experience. The REALITY is that perception changes based on viewing mechanism. Our PERCEPTION of the moon from here on Earth is only a specific kind of contextual reality. We know that it's bigger than we tend to think of it and that its bigness is relative to other things. Reading (by which we gain further knowledge) about the moon and its relative size to Earth and other planets and other bodies in the sky helps give us KNOWLEDGE of the moon's size that's every bit as key to the reality of the size of the moon as our individual perception of it is. The reality of the size of the moon is something different from what we typically see and perceive, or photograph.

Adults, too. :rolleyes:

Actually what's disingenuous is suggesting that I suggested admin should be spending all their time here and not having a little R&R. What I said was, "If they have better things to do with their lives than running the site, they should be doing them and not running the site." By that I meant, AS A JOB, if they're running the site they should run the site well. What I did not mean is that their entire lives should be devoted to running the site with no time for R&R. Yours is an eccentric, to say the least, read on what I said and meant. In terms of R&R, sick kids, vacations, etc. sites run smoother when there are several people able to respond and fix things so that one being absent doesn't mean there's no one around to maintain things. By the way, I think there's a limit of two hip trendy acronyms per comment, so you may get a demerit for your last post. :)

If they have better things to do with their lives than running this site, they should be doing them and not running the site. [And I’m not necessarily agreeing that those running the site think doing so is a nightmare or think in terms of having better things to do with their lives.]

It has to do with “spastic,” a more vulgar alternative in days gone by to “cripple,” as it isolated and denigrated people by their physical gestures and capabilities. I’m born and bred in the U.S. and grew up where “spazz” and “spazzing” were often used as denigrating words to belittle those who weren’t thought of as being as good in sports as others. I, too, looked it up and was surprised to learn it was considered more a derogatory term in Britain than here in the U.S. because I’ve always had negative feelings about the word. I was going to say something about it before this but didn’t want to make the poster who used it self conscious, since it was clearly not meant to deride or offend people or put them down. But, as long as it’s been mentioned, it is nice when language evolves in a way where our use of it shows more and more respect for others. Unfortunately, a word can be said without the speaker meaning to offend and yet still make someone feel bad. As I have a nephew, and many good friends that I’ve met through him, with autism and other developmental and physical challenges, who’s been called a “retard” and a “spazz” more often than I’d care to remember, I’d simply request coming up with alternative ways to describe the focus point on a camera. Words matter and they can communicate things even unintended by an innocent speaker. One of the greatest things about language is that it’s alive and can change and in some respects can reflect the values of a culture. This is unnecessarily dismissive and unkind in the context of the word being talked about.

That was then. They could be leaving for just that reason now. And even if not, someone speculating that people are leaving because a multitude of features on a website are broken doesn’t seem that beyond the pale to me. That may be true, but dysfunctional features, even if not as popular as they used to be, don’t present a very good overall picture of the site. It’s especially unfortunate, not to mention ironic, when one of the broken features is the main personal photo presentation mechanism, the photo galleries. Giving up on and almost seeming actively to turn off long-time members with an established allegiance to the site, even ones who use its less popular features, in favor of inviting new members to a glitch-riddled site where response time to questions is as bad as it is here and NO instructions are provided to the features that do work but are not programmed to be user-intuitive, seems like a poor business model. Even if on a given day, there are a few new members logged on, what are the chances they’ll stay when they realize what the site is actually offering, how difficult it is to navigate and figure out functionality, and how MIA is site support and customer relations?

What this has to do with why people are leaving now or why people are upset with features of the site not being attended to I don’t quite get. But, yes, Norman, you were there when. Bully for you. :rolleyes:

Because as the couple ages, many of those in all the other shots from the wedding will have passed away and others’ faces will have changed over the years. Though the one on the mantle may be the “money shot,” the ones in the scrapbook will provide hours of bittersweet memories for the couple and their children, visual memories of people gone but still remembered and relatives their kids may want to put a face to who they never got to meet, of fashions the kids will get a kick out of, as visual accompaniments to stories that will convey a personal past to later generations, and a multitude of other very human reasons photos are so cherished.

One of the downsides of subjectivity is that it can become an impediment to improving one’s eye which, to me, is one of the benefits of photography. Typically seen jpgs of landscapes, at least a lot of them, are often too saturated, Disney-esque, and many are downright false and ugly. But we get so used to them that they become accepted as a norm or even a standard. Subjectivity might keep the naive view in tact, especially if it’s used as an excuse for one’s taste. On the other hand, a thoughtful viewer will not simply accept the subjective, but will try to deepen it and develop more sophisticated tastes. That takes recognizing both the personal and human side of subjectivity but also it’s ability to limit. An authentic and meaningful kind of subjectivity, IMO, requires always questioning it, and often moving beyond its present incarnation. “Taste is the enemy of creativeness” —Picasso

Google “photo presentation box.” You’ll get an eyeful.

Maybe they’re replacing “Street” with “Waterfront.” :cool: