leo_papandreou1

I bought an FE2 two years ago. Trashed it after it fell 4 ft on the lawn. Base crumpled like a tin can. Been abusing my F100 for going on 10 yrs, still looks beautiful and works flawlessly.

Why? The electronic rangefinder on my F100 (and F6) is excellent, better than my eyes. I enjoy using old-timey cameras, and if I could have only one SLR it'd be a plain prism F2, but the F5, F100 & F6 are more capable than all of them.

No one remembers the ozone hole but the Montreal Protocol is why everyone won't be dying of melanoma in 30 years.

yeah, well, they don't, and you've wasted another opportunity to explain why moriyama isn't what he claims to be. fortunately look inside! has extended excerpts and google has reviews, not that anything will stop you from being clueless reply guy (precious edition), that much is true.

??? Sad to see vacuous blather abandon you like this, Fred, but I suppose I should be glad we agree.

Too bad I read How I Take Photographs and know you're full of vacuous fluff like usual.

Don't laugh at snapshots. See them.

Indexicality has its problems (especially nowadays) but engaging a photograph's content isn't one of them. Juliet and the male gaze. Capulets and capitalists. Whatever. The photograph is a document -- read it. If you're gormless, tick off 10 Ways to Make Better[*] Photographs: rule of thirds, histogram, etc. Congratulations. What I hope you understand eventually about indexicality is its (or maybe my) suggestion that the photographs broadly accepted as the most successful are the ones that attempt to subvert GBS's aphorism the least. It can be done, right? A little ("say cheese") or a lot (an elaborate movie set). Because of cinema's structure the movie R & J can succeed in a way photographs taken during its production cannot. That's not Juliet in the still. It's without doubt a teenage girl in costume, the thing itself, a simpler, flatter, more clearly visible version of Patience Wilkins born March 3, 2001: indexicality. The "best" photographs (broadly again), the ones that reproduce themselves in other photographs and vision-speak, exploit photography's terrible truthfulness. Look at this girl: ♀. Her love is thwarted. Unless you want a picture of a sad girl smiling don't tell her to say cheese. Moriyama took the streets of Tokyo as he found them. His only entitlement the selection of a point of view. [*] Nope.

A photo of X is reliably a representation of X regardless of the image processing algorithm ("camera"), which may produce bizarre even unrecognizable results as far you're concerned. Indexicality does not refer to how well, say, you, can visually interpret some data but rather the direct physical relationship between that data and its subject. If that direct physical relationship did not exist, we couldn't design and build the camera. Trustworthy here just means reliably truthful. The camera is objective; it cannot be dishonest. Its state is never undecided or uncertain and its output is wholly determined by antecdent causes; thus it is reliable. If you think a photo of X might be Y then maybe your training is ordinary, maybe you trusted a liar, maybe the information in the photo is not specific/sufficient for your purposes. All these things are regrettable but independent of indexicality. I dunno, Tom, this is seminal stuff. Add them to the pile! Take more interesting photos! Do NOT make me King of the World!

ok

Photos have a direct physical relationship with their subject, period. This is what makes them "trustworthy" -- physics. They are quite literally data. Exoplanetary scientists would kill to obtain information from their cameras at the granularity of your bokeh balls. Read more books! Trust me, I'm not original. I hate replies like this. I would be very surprised to learn some set of words corresponded perfectly with reality, but if there are plenty of cases, then you should have no trouble identifying 1 (one) of them. That would be helpful. Yes, I am interested in and talking about photography. Not "image making". Selection, not synthesis. Presentation effects in post processing (cropping, levels, etc.) Look at my avatar. It says "Impure spirits begone!" I'm just trying to make the world a better place.

No one said you can't lie with photos. (I mean -- ads.) I thought we already determined that photos are bad at narrative.

Tom, all these adjustments you describe are made before you take the photo. We can stipulate that everyone uses IR film, or opens up the lens, or uses a particular sensor, algorithm, whatever. Let's do that. Wow, photos look different. But they still index the world. They still correspond to it directly, through the deterministic way its photons are collected. This is what makes them trustworthy.

lol. That is to say, "lol". ok, Kant, but here's the thing, see, it looks like its photo. Note the key word subject, which is always present. Oh, convey. Well, if you want convey emotion in a photograph, you should first aim your camera at something that conveys photons.

oh no i've begun emitting photons, good bye friends, this is surely the end