john_sevigny2

Your dad is alright in my book :D

I've noticed that over on IG I have a pretty good idea of which photographs will get a lot of likes. It's an uncomfortable feeling because out of vanity or neediness or whatever human defect I have, it gives me a tendency to think "liked" photographs are better photographs, which is not true. The "like" deal is really a dumbing down of everyone's visual literacy. You flip through 20, 50, or 100 photos in some brief period of time and click "like" on the ones you like. It doesn't allow for much in the way of informed observation. And as the OP said, it is totally devoid of meaningful interaction. That said, I think these kinds of conversations can be very meaningful.

The "input" side of this conversation might be (a bit of) a red herring. I know, garbage in garbage out. Still, it might be better to look at resolution from the point of view of output. I know photographers who use digital leicas with the best lenses in the world and their only form of output is jpgs on Instagram. Seems like overkill but if you can afford it and don't care, that's cool too. And isn't digital printing at labs limited to 260 dpi, anyway? Back on the input side, we now have lenses that can out-resolve sensors and vice versa. But unless you're making very fine prints, how much does it even matter? Going past that, ISO is going to have some impact on detail for a lot of reasons including noise and dynamic range. I don't mean to sound dismissive of a very interesting subject but isn't photography about making pictures? It's fascinating to think about what's going on under the hood but I suspect most of us are staring at Porsche engines trying to understand why they are better performers than VW beetle engines, which share a similar design. Just my two cents.

There's a case to be made that digital can also make you a better film photographer. Freedom to experiment with long exposures, strange framing and the rest is a lot easier when you can see what works and doesn't work without sending your film off to a lab. And simple repetition - taking a few hundred pictures a day vs 36 or 72 - can't make anyone a worse shooter :D

I see what you're saying. I know photo teachers working today who insist that students set everything on their cameras to manual. I understand the logic. But they're doing it because when "we" were starting we used Pentax K100s and other cameras that forced you to work that way. I don't even teach film photography that way, but that's another post. My point is that manual focus is very hard to get right with small sensor digital cameras and kit lenses. The viewfinders tend to be tunnels, you've got nothing like a split finder to help and the focus rings are terribly loose. Sunny/16 doesn't work as well if you're shooting jpgs, either. There's no going back, it's true. What I know about myself is that having taken 36 pictures in an entire outing, having worked slow, learned about hyperfocal lengths and the rest has contributed to how I use and more importantly understand digital cameras. And I agree entirely. Photography, as Cartier Bresson said, is about the eye, mind and heart, not shutter speeds, apertures and iso. I guess we bring what we have to new technologies. I certainly did not mean to imply that NOT having worked with film is any sort of handicap.

A lot of this is about context. When I see the pyramids at Giza on the cover of National Geographic I expect to see them as they appear (I know, appearances change). I don't want some photoshopper to have moved the pyramids closer together to make them both fit on a vertical cover. That's journalism. I would never manipulate the "facts" of an image taken for a newspaper. In my own work, which I show in galleries, etc., I'm not beyond cloning out that critical, stupid, distraction I didn't spot but I tread lightly there, too. If I'm looking at a CD cover for a band I don't particularly care if they convert a photograph to all red tones or whatever. I come to that image with the idea that it's a CD cover, not journalism.

Yeah funny thing about women, particularly nudes ;). I teach composition, among other photo-related things, and I'm not sure I buy into the idea of leading the eye around the frame, either. If you look at another painter, Degas, his work very much reflects the photographic era in which he worked. He cuts things off along the edges, crops things oddly, etc. Composition either works or it doesn't. Trying to predict where an individual's eye might go seems vain and as you say manipulative.

Good point. And it's interesting to think about what we bring, individually, as viewers, to the experience of viewing photos in different formats. For many people, square formats look more like "art." My grandfather, on the other hand, would just connect them to the family photographs he took as a young man. I didn't mean to dismiss the importance of format to the viewer. I meant to say that for photographers it shouldn't make that much of a difference.

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Interesting thought. I feel the same way about legacy glass on mirrorless cameras. It replicates, to a degree, a quality we remember from film photography.

I traveled to Guatemala twice during the winter (I live in Buffalo, NY). Winter is a horrible time of year to be a photographer IMO and every Spring it feels like I'm starting over. This winter I photographed still lives on my kitchen table and I volunteered to photograph Golden Gloves boxing. Regarding the creative block, you have to work through it. I've found that if you force it, the first things you produce are usually garbage but with time it gets better.

Ditto the previous votes for the A7 or A9, but if you want to spend a little less, a Sony a6000 with a crop sensor would be a lot of fun. IMO, there is nothing quite like the combination of legacy glass in front of a state-of-the-art sensor. You won't be disappointed. Here's something I took on my a6000 with a Yashica ML 50mm 1.9 lens on the front.

Monterrey, Mexico

I agree entirely with Wouter - but I would add that the 10-20mm and 17-35mm Nikkors are both comparable (in a loose sense) to the Rokiyang 14mm. The first is variable aperture and the second costs between $1k and $2k so they're only theoretically comparable. And it's true. Third party lenses can be just as good as Nikon-Canon stuff. Sigma is making great glass nowadays, and even 20 years ago, the Tokina 28-70 was comparable to Nikon's version. IMO Sigma and Tokina both make optically great lenses but they're not going to last a lifetime.

I shoot Sony mirrorless cameras. They are expensive. That's why I'm still using an a6000 rather than an a6300, 6500 or one of the A7s. I'm putting money away and figure I'll upgrade in about a year.

I think I'm better at digital photography because I started with film. Regarding the debate between film and digital, I just took a walk in the snow with a mirrorless digital on one arm and a Holga in my pocket. I love that film has not died, digital has improved, and I can work with both.

The Japo-German Zeiss Contax lenses are excellent and Rollei didn't make a lot of junk either. Pretty much all the Yashica 50s from the "C/Y era" are as good as anything else (I have both here in front of me) As a general rule, the sweet spot for a lens is about two shots from wide open. A lot of people buy 1.4 and other fast lenses so they can shoot at 2.8 without horrible vignetting, etc. I would only add that 50mm lenses have been in production for so long, and were popular for such a long time, that you rarely find a bad one. And the character of a lens, which can't be quantified, will impact whether you like it or not far more than anything anyone here can tell you. Maybe find a way to try both? I tend to look at flickr and see what other people have done with lenses I'm thinking about buying.

You're absolutely right.

I wasn't being facetious but the entire idea is silly, you're right. Which makes a "more valuable" photograph? The parade or the crowd? And how to you measure value, anyway? Which is the point a number of people have made here. One (wo)man's trash is another (wo)man's treasure. Photography is here to be enjoyed. People will swim at different depths and in different currents. Re my Niagara Falls selfie-taker pictures, thanks for looking at my work and for the kind words. I do think a creative eye can make even the most overplayed subject into a good photo. I don't think I've quite done that at Niagara but with all sincerity, after about ten minutes looking at the falls I get bored and start looking at people. Everything you said about maybe assuming that's somehow better than just photographing the falls is dead on. On a side note, I know someone who got a HUGE grant to photograph people photographing the wonders of the world. He flew to Egypt, France, Asia and everywhere else on somebody else's dime to take pictures of people taking pictures of the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wall, etc. I hope to be reborn as a grant-writer. :D

This shouldn't be an impediment to your progress. Once you know a heavily manipulated image or composite image, you decide which framework is best for you to work within. If you want to do what's commonly called "straight photography" you're not going to produce images of things that don't exist. And if you go with "illustration-enhanced photo design" you'll never get the immediacy of fast street photography. There are different kinds of image making and they are not necessarily competing on the same playing fields.

"You have to ask yourself do you see shapes and forms when you look through any aspect ratio formed viewfinder or do you just see a subject to shoot?" This is dead on. Without getting too obtuse, the eye sees shapes and forms and the mind gives them meanings and names (Whether the word for a thing or the idea of a thing comes first is a subject that's been debated almost forever but they certainly both exist). Obviously you pick a subject for a reason or reasons and that decision is based on the idea of the thing. Eg., a pitchfork against a barn wall is one thing and a bottle of wine on a table is another. In both cases, once you've chosen the subject, 90 percent of the work is seeing, understanding and using the shapes, lines, textures and other formal elements. Eventually, if you have a clear idea about what you're shooting and some practice, the framing and composition can become second nature. The format doesn't even matter.

I travel a lot and I rarely go where tourists go. That said my photography serves the same social function as the billionth photo of the Empire State Building: to remind me of something I saw that I felt was important. Is it annoying that everyone takes a picture of a Starbucks cup, their own legs, their meal? Yeah. But you can't outlaw it or even say it's below what anyone else photographs. The trick as I see it is to make the old new again. For example at Niagara Falls, I don't photograph my family or the falls. I take pictures of tourists with selfie sticks taking selfies of themselves :D

I think the worst of the "digital photo art," the selectively colored black and white photo; the Eiffel Tower sticking out of a volcano with an apple stuck on top; is behind us already. As a teacher, photographer and lover of photographs here are a few trends I see. Full frame digital is now within reach of anyone with $1,000. Not so long ago that number was $5,000. Legacy lenses that used to go cheap are now going up in price because of people seeking to get distinct "character" out of their digital cameras. Some photographers have realized that it's going to be expensive to get medium format quality out of a piece of silicon and are shifting to medium and large format. And finally there's lomography and everything connected to it. All of those trends go against the idea that photography has become only manipulated digital reproduction. The good news is you can do whatever you want. Shoot with a Holga, a Sony AR or a pinhole camera. And if you want to use PS to make pictures of cathedrals floating in the sea, have at it. There are far more options now regarding "how" to practice photography than there were 20 years ago. Does anyone else remember the camera store debates on autofocus, transparency film vs negative film, etc?