what do you see like: 2013

funny cuz I can never remotely figure out which pictures people will like. I thought no one would dig that picture out of my recent ones, but instead it's gotten more attention than some "people photos" that I thought would have been popular and have just kinda sat there.

I often feel pretty clueless about editing. think I've got a killer photograph that is ignored, or that I've got a marginal or boring one that is then favorited by strangers.

does anyone actually edit with confidence, and get expected results?

there is room for both, I think; publish what you like & then just have Michael Almereyda root through your archives in thirty years. I definitely think it's true that you can't really have a personal & accurate gauge of what will be popular, in that I know I've really often preferred friends' work that they consider p benign, & friends have more often been complimentary about things I'm not excited by than the things I feel like got right (it would sorta make sense for this to correlate with our differing relationships to the actual subject matter, the photographer having actually been there & all, but I don't really think that's it). I wonder if Flickr itself is a weird way to gauge this kinda thing? like navigating that quantity of photos means certain types of photographs stick out, poppier/brighter shots. really I think your own edit is what matters & really shouldn't be perceived as skewed or off if it isn't jiving with others' perceptions, just because it's what you're trying to say. a body of work probably forms more cohesively if you're following a thread rather than compiling a best of, anyway.

as an aside I really did like all of those. I mention the last because it's just such a perfect arrangement & catch, & because I spent the last couple of days occasionally considering kicking stray objects into the path of the golden-hour sun just so they'd align more photogenically.

oh flickr is a totally bizarre venue for displaying photographs and evaluating reactions. I'm trying to get myself to rely on it less, but still... there are stats! and I can't help but notice them! I have no self control.
and sometimes it is really easy to ID what makes a popular photo tick, like a couple of mine that I can recognize as fitting in pretty easily with sorta "lifestyle" kinda photos (the picture of my girlfriend pointing out of an airplane window at NYC is a little bit of a tumblr memey sort of thing, which makes sense because it's in an airplane, it's nyc, and it's sort of gauzy orangey hazy and has vibes - I get it).
people's reactions are sometimes reassuring, as in, "nice, someone likes this!" but also a little worrying, as in "ah, people are identifying structure or subtext that I *completely didn't notice* in the whole process of shooting, editing, and uploading."
all of this would probably be a lot healthier if I just, say, worked on taking and editing pictures for a couple years, and then put them online on my own terms and at my own pace. or put them in a book, for crying out loud! but then also without flickr I probably wouldn't have gotten so into photography, so there you go. and of course I guess everyone's convinced that their work merits a book too.

ha ha. yeah that's interesting. I have been taking photos for I guess eleven years or something but it's only really since scanning them & seeing them better & maybe talking here that I have understood them better & figured out what I was doing. I can see how being enmeshed in flickr & getting some kind of yield from an otherwise personal production is pretty useful. it's nice that photographs have portability that way, that they can be traded, commodified. I don't think you have to work in a vacuum, necessarily, but I sorta think the personal-development thing should probably happen in tandem with rather than being too responsive to the feedback you get. there are those theories about any sort of revolutionary or progressive art being inherently unpopular at first, because of it disobeying or not conforming to the standards of what's popular, & while I'm not suggesting that photography is one bold thinker away from another Frank-esque breakthrough school of thought, I feel like being overwhelmed by the success of the stuff that jives well & yeah comforms to certain formulae risks overshadowing the less obvious work. I just scanned a shot of a cauliflower in a woman in a red coat's red shopping basket & it's not quite in focus & so doesn't quite come across right, but I probably like it better than a couple of the other shots I have of like fire hydrants, &c. would buy a CV book, btw; your stuff is v singular, like a sorta formal Gill-ed out take on some of the classic busy-Asian-streets guys.

I'm gonna have a glass of whiskey at home tonight and think a bit and try to respond at length a little later, but for now will just say that I definitely FEEL THE DANGER in knowing which formula brings easy results on a website like flickr, or tumblr. when one spends all the time in the world swimming in the flickr pool, it just gets to easy to figure out how to maneuver in that environment, and possibly be totally screwed when trying to jump into a larger river (yep I'm trying my hand at metaphors today).
I can't believe that I can devote this much brainspace to something called flickr! I also can't believe that I replied so quickly to your post. I'm not really refreshing this page all day, just swung by for a sec.

I wonder if there should be a new thread for working out some of the thoughts going on here and on the 'famous people' thread. I feel like there's some kind of unifying theory that involves flickr, tumblr, the grand traditions of photography, and the more performative or derived-from-the-art-world strains, and the way that maybe they're growing together a bit. like I feel like there has been a bit of a gulf between some strains of photography that declared allegiance to different traditions (whether journalistic, or "artistic" [i.e. staged, collaged, or "conceptual"]) but that the gulf is narrowing. more 'straight photography' types are engaging with manipulated/staged etc. photography, or art using photography, and I feel like a bit more 'straight photography' is creeping into the art world. this is an impression I have, but I don't really have enough confidence to say that it's not just something that I'm imagining.

...and I would love to sell you a CV book btw

really wanna respond both to this & to the (man, beautiful) posts in the famous people thread but i just can't right now

also i have some bootleg uta barth shots i took by spinning the focus wheel that i don't have time to edit into jpgs right now

they're pretty though

I don't know that I have much to add but would totally encourage a new thread for these kind of thoughts that have been spread over the two threads.

XP -I wonder if there should be a new thread for working out some of the thoughts going on here and on the 'famous people' thread.

Would love to read more thoughts, this is all super interesting to me.

Colleague lent me his Sigma 10-20mm. I don't think I really know what to do with it, but my commute this morning looked like this:

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8104/8535648534_3354ebdac4_z.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8100/8535649862_f8f2f2f199_z.jpg

Vertical wides...

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8522/8539830907_f7cf72acb0_z.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8111/8537185625_4b524fbb1d_z.jpg

That seems like a really nice lens. Are you using it on full frame?

No, it's a DC lens (I only remember the Sigma nomenclature cos some wag once said this meant "digitally crippled") - so vignettes badly on full-frame. I did take a few shots on film though, just for fun. My impressions are that this isn't nearly as good as the (full-frame) Sigma 12-24mm, even within the crop frame boundaries - lots of corner aberration/smearing that I couldn't seem to fix in Lightroom. But, yeah, it's pretty good for the money, I think.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8376/8545151127_96ab36dcb4_z.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8524/8546344478_284fa43ba3_z.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8373/8546377544_8245b96b69_z.jpg

Playing about with the new DBLCAM app on the iPhone (processed in VSCO Cam)

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8379/8555452018_789c3880ca_c.jpg

Not the biggest fan of seeing my own face so the novelty is likely to be short lived.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8365/8561071404_04954554c8_z.jpg

Really going to miss the 300 preset when I finally move to Lightroom 4...

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8247/8566200034_02fb6f72c1_z.jpg

Children's playground, bleak afternoon...

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8371/8565099171_e87353520a_z.jpg

i've been taking babby pictures :-)

They're the best.

here's one i particularly like

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44557375@N00/8571820131/in/photostream

and here's one i took of mark mcguire that i really like ... f 2.0 for the win

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8383/8578384559_a60f835cd4_c.jpg

oops, here's babby pictures

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8089/8571820131_c3122ff30a.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8523/8572909496_14dc50c705.jpg

that's my niece not my babby

that is an inquisitive babby

Getting an iPhone 4S (with the Camera+ app) has shaken up the way I shoot recently. Very beguiling. But...they still look merely adequate on a PC so I'm not linking to them here (yet). Instead, here are some merely adequate shots on the 40D...

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8370/8575285639_014311611a_z.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8525/8575127091_9e30c871f1_z.jpg

The 'Trance' one is very nice.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8125/8611243716_d6fc8e6d86_z.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8259/8610066191_a8093da236_z.jpg

neat, where is that?

They were taken at the Tanks at the Tate Modern in London.

http://www.tate.org.uk/about/projects/tate-modern-project/performance-and-installation-spaces

Nice to meet you, MaresNest!

And you! & I hope I didn't spook you! I realised I've probably seen you at the UC before, I'm there most Saturdays recording the performances for the podcast and helping with the stage tech.

Had a roll needing developed for a while, nothing exciting but was a film (Lucky SHD100), developer (Kodak D76) and camera (an Olympus Trip 35 given to me by a colleague) that I hadn't used before so I'm pleased it all worked.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8243/8616968087_0dbcd9e544_c.jpg
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8241/8618074960_715a4d1518_c.jpg
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8243/8618074674_a50fcf501d_c.jpg

Love that first pic.

Thanks, I was pretty happy with it!

Took this on phone today. I've hundreds of photos to go through from a memorial football tournament this morning, but my hard drive is full (coincidentally i bought a new one in preparation this afternoon but didn't expect it to happen so soon) and I can't do anything in Lightroom while 287GB of photos (i shoot RAW...) transfer. 4hrs.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8119/8624631223_9c48b41d3b_c.jpg

Nice work, liking that!

I'm in the middle of Lightroom chimping the 2500 Holiday snaps from Japan that I took with my little Lumix two years ago, it's an epic adventure, not RAW files mind you, but it's still pretty decent what you pull out of a Jpeg.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8527/8597112918_f37718ff36_c.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8109/8593393299_c8a91aec16_c.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8375/8540965786_4f8664ef38_c.jpg

is that DC?

last one is sick.

it's all NYC.
I don't get out of town much :/

Brb making the shipping containers my desktop wallpaper.

Love the second image there. Great stuff.

Here's a few from the last couple of weeks:

http://i1247.photobucket.com/albums/gg622/bizarrogazzara/2013-04-10_zps01e794fb.jpg
http://i1247.photobucket.com/albums/gg622/bizarrogazzara/2013-03-28_zpsa5c8c47f.jpg
http://i1247.photobucket.com/albums/gg622/bizarrogazzara/2013-04-01_zps1a9bafb3.jpg

In the hope that someone is reading this thread on their mobile device, here are some iPhone 4S snaps from recently (which are really only look good on the phone itself)...

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8546/8644890823_c5e177e2a0_z.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8262/8644887811_b4d8300170_z.jpg

Wow, what are we looking at in the top one?

reflection of a tree in wet paving stones?

Tree reflected in wet flagstones in Leicester Sq Gardens, flipped upside down and otherwise jazzed up in Camera+.

Ah...xp!

It's a bit of a revelation to me, having a semi-decent camera in my phone and a quite powerful and very speedy associated app. Obviously you can only push a JPEG snapped with a 15.5mm2 sensor so far before it starts to look hideous, but I'm amazed at how good the one-click treatments are on Camera+ (steering away from the vintagey nonsense).

This was snapped above my head through the window of the footbridge over the train tracks, two-click treatment, on FB ten seconds later. Sorry, I'm old, this sort of thing amazes me.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8534/8647004076_79c3f7fd9e_z.jpg

this is totally not the thread for this, but i ended up sitting at the bar tonite next to two best friends who accidentally dressed alike:

http://i.imgur.com/D9MpNVQ.png

More phone phun:

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8103/8652356918_67073384cc_z.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8116/8659683488_5911808733_c.jpg

love it.