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.

While I love my F100(and my F6, which basically feels like an update/improved F100 with a more intuitive custom function menu) I don't think it's a great choice for use with MF lenses.

 

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.

The two photos I linked to were meant to show how much more went into Moriyama’s photography than entitling himself to a perspective.

 

 

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.

 

 

I do more than look. I see.

 

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.

 

It's still a poor description whether it was you, some playwright, or a plumber that came up with it.

 

I dunno, Tom, this is seminal stuff.

 

All these images are indexes of the world?

 

Add them to the pile!

 

Only in a very useless sense.

 

Take more interesting photos!

 

You're placing a constraint on photography that's an artificial one.

 

Do NOT make me King of the World!

But the same is true of a painting.

 

ok

Photos can be trustworthy or not. They can look real or not. A somewhat cheesy example from diyphotography.net, - the bokehnator

 

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.

 

"index the world" is an odd way to describe photography

 

Read more books! Trust me, I'm not original.

 

there are plenty of cases where the phrase is inadequate if not completely inaccurate.

 

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.

 

And again, you choose to ignore that part of photography that happens after the shutter button is pressed, either in the darkroom or on a computer.

 

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.

“The chair is red” is a fact (if the chair, in fact, is red). While you can take a picture of a red chair, you cannot take a picture of “the chair is red.” I guess you could write “the chair is red” and take a picture of that, but you’d be taking a picture of someone’s writing, not a fact. You can’t take a picture of facts.

 

lol. That is to say, "lol".

 

Yes, things have various appearances simultaneously. The same thing can appear one way to you and another way to me at the very same time.

 

ok, Kant, but here's the thing, see, it looks like its photo.

 

(Note the key words “some” and “often.”)

 

Note the key word subject, which is always present.

 

Good pictures are as often about the expression and conveyance of emotion as they are about things/objects. Good pictures are as often metaphorical as they are literal.

 

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

hyelp i'm afflicted with thingness

A fact is something that is known and/or stated. Cameras take pictures of things, not facts. Facts are not embodied.

 

my facts of the world, details of the world, subjects in the world = your things, except my facts are consistent with reality, in case by "thing" you mean something else, which of course you do, something especially profound, of course it is

 

Things have various appearances,

 

Not simultaneously they don't.

 

The picture of the thing should not be mistaken for the thing.

 

Good to know coach.

 

More importantly, only some pictures are pictures of things. Very often, the photo is the thing, not its subject.

 

Sentence 1 contradicts sentence 2, to the extent either is sensible.

 

Thingness is a hangup. It’s certainly not what photography is limited to or all about.

 

I'm sure that made a pleasant sound between your ears when you wrote it.

Your purpose in taking a photo doesn't change the way cameras work. You can write anything but you can only take photos of facts. Therefore, fundamentally, pictures of facts represents the whole of photography. Maybe you're thinking of someone toiling at the margins who lies about the painted lead in his photos ("it's gold") and Mrs Winterbottom ("it's Miss Wilkins") but he's the liar not the camera and who in the whole wide world who's used a camera or been in a picture is confused by these "exceptions"?

"Obviously": 100s of articles written analyzing the photo and quoting forensic specialists for and against. 10 years later, same. Also, Ghislaine still not found.

But you can certainly photograph a model, - or an actress playing Juliet, helpfully put a caption underneath the framed photo, - and she will be Juliet to the viewer.

 

You should accept your own challenge! I'd bet anything 100 photographers selected at random to take a picture of Juliet will produce 98 interchangeable pictures of Miss Wilkins and two ads for Juliet. GBS' claim is a truism in the books I've read but, whatever, internet. We're just going to have to agree to disagree. Of course a good photo of Juliet is possible. But when I think what that might look like I imagine a photo essay of actually existing star-crossed lovers. That would be ideal (if unfortunate.) Other approaches are certainly possible (an ironic take on paintings of Juliet?) but I'm never going to be fooled by an ad for Juliet. Photography's strength is the ability to capture details about the real world (think of the iconic photos you've seen); that's what it's singularly good at; that's what's expected of it; and that's what it does. It's challenge is to impose one's hand, or vision, on those immaterial photons; that's the hard part.

Me: Shows painting of Jeffrey Epstein holding today's NYT.

Everyone: LOL.

 

Me: Shows photo of Jeffrey Epstein holding today's NYT.

Everyone: holy cow i knew it.

 

Granted JE didn't kill himself, but that's the point here ...

Spoiler: it happens because a photo is evidence of its subject. You wouldn't be able to fool people with photographs if photography wasn't mechanically objective.

You can lie with photographs. For example you can take a picture of a partially submerged inner tube AND CALL IT Nessie. Show it to enough people and pretty soon there's a scientific expedition trawling Loch Ness.

 

It's a mystery how something like that could happen.

empathize with photographic transformations? myopia of mere representation? Sure. Fred, the photographer's life coach guy.

The idea that a painting could properly capture Juliet while a photograph could not doesn't make any sense given that Juliet was meant to be portrayed by a real person.

 

No one said Juliet can't be photographed, only that GBS's Miss Wilkins fails as Juliet (where she succeeded in the same pose as a painting.) I don't understand why you dragged theater into this, the part of Juliet is presumably more persuasive than her standing absolutely still before an audience for however many hours, which would be the more apt comparison.

 

Here's the quote again.

 

"There is a terrible truthfulness about photography."

 

This is the thesis. GBS is putting this statement forward as a premise to support. His support will consist of a comparison between two portraits.

 

"The ordinary academician gets hold of a pretty model, paints her as well as he can, calls her Juliet, and puts a nice verse from Shakespeare underneath, and the picture is admired beyond measure."

 

In case you weren't aware how painting can obscure tangible reality with layer upon layer of artistic pretense and bullsh*t, GBS helpfully stipulates an academic painter and even a verse underneath.

 

"The photographer finds the same pretty girl, he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her Juliet, but somehow it is no good — it is still Miss Wilkins, the model."

 

Here GBS is appealing to our faith in the impartiality of photons to record Miss Wilkins as she is.

 

"It is too true to be Juliet."

 

Indeed, because her photons are broadly accepted as a substitute of herself, whatever the f she looks like. Affirms the thesis.