Whatever you can get away with

Filed under: Musings, Typecast — olivander September 27, 2008 @ 9:46 pm

Typecast 9/26/2008

Brought to you by a 1939 Royal KMM.

3 Comments »

  1. I call this time the “baby fog.” My youngest just turned one, and I’m finally starting to feel like myself again. Like you, I’m digging out the camera equipment and film and remembering what life was like before my name became my role (“Dad.”)

    As for what you are/are not “allowed” to do to a photo, I’m not sure I buy into Fokos’ opinion (pick one.) I don’t think sprocket holes enhance a bad photo per se, but I do see them as part of the Process-capital-P of taking different photos. I’m personally fascinated by the recent(?) Lomography trend. If I knew lo-tech photos were suddenly going to be all the rage, I would never have pitched out all those blurry shots I took as a kid with my Instamatic or my Disc cameras.

    Comment by mpclemens — September 30, 2008 @ 11:41 am

  2. I think what Fokos is saying in the first part is, “don’t confuse gimmicks with composition, or use gimmicks as an alternative to improving your skills”. My takeaway from his piece (and I really suggest people pick up a copy of Lenswork and read the whole article) is that there has to be boundary where experimentation ceases to be disassociated from the subject and becomes integrated into the composition itself. Otherwise, you’re just plastering effects on top of random images without any context.

    I know this is going to miff a lot of my friends who are avid toy-camera enthusiasts, but the Lomo/Holga trend bugs me. The lure of it as far as I can tell is that they produce high-contrast, hypersaturated images with sharp vignetting. That’s all fine and good as long as you’re shooting that way with intent–a Holga can be a nice shortcut to the same effects that would be time-consuming in post-production–but I see so many people who are just blindly shooting whatever with no intent, believing that because they simply looks “different”, their photos are good.

    (The fact of the matter is, their photos are not different; 90% look like every other Holga/Lomo picture out there.)

    And that is the other reason these trends bug me: it is the antithesis of creativity. “I want to shoot full-frame 35mm photos. I must use a Holga, because that’s what everyone else uses.” Or, “I like these vivid, high-contrast pictures I’m seeing. I must use a Lomo.” Or, “TTV looks really cool. I have a Duaflex II, but I must get a Duaflex IV because that’s what everyone else is using. And I must get the Urban Acid Photoshop plug-in, because that’s what everyone else uses.”

    Now, none of this is to say that one shouldn’t try to emulate different styles that one likes. After all, that’s how we learn and grow as photographers. I have a lot of toy camera and TTV shots in my own archives, mostly playing around and seeing how far I can push the medium. (In fact, I have a Brownie Hawkeye Flash with me right now that I plan to take out later because I have some ideas for something new to do with it.) But I see so many people getting stuck in this rut of shooting the same things over and over that are stylistically indistinguishable from almost everyone else who’s shooting in the same format.

    Well, once again I’ve turned my elaboration into a whole new spiel that probably ought to be a blog post of its own.

    Comment by olivander — September 30, 2008 @ 12:25 pm

  3. Well, if Lomo is truly a trend (vs. a “movement”) then it will fade away over time. In fairness, though, my dad has fond memories of the “$5 camera club” at his college, which (you guessed it) emphasized the use of Holgas and their brethren over fancy equipment well out of student beer budgets.

    Going low-tech doesn’t excuse you from fussing with composition, but it does free you from a lot of the effort of “real” photography, noodling with apetureshutterspeeddepthoffieldfilmspeedetc. Randomly snapping pictures does not Art make, but it doesn’t hurt to get away from the technology ever now and then. (much like typewriters, actually, hrm.) The gamble is the exciting part, I suppose. You may not get the best image, but you’re going to get something from it, and that something may be interesting on its own. I’m very pleased with my half-frame shots, for example, with what is maybe a step up a from “true” toy camera. The best shots that came out of it, though, were those where I didn’t overthink it.

    I will say that I don’t like the over-use of Photoshop filters for random effect. I saw one on flickr the other day that featured random lens flares and some kind of rainbow-swirling-vortex-thing superimposed over what I would consider an average snapshot. (And I take a lot of average snapshots, so I know of what I speak.) Ick.

    Comment by mpclemens — October 1, 2008 @ 11:51 am

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