photo-breezing

oh xps

Sorry. Only ever used my gf's Nikon with its old slow lenses.

nikon lenses are weird to price because they hold their value pretty well? since they never changed the mount. i dunno i could be talking out of my ass

i just walked past this:

http://butterfliesandbuffalo.com/theproject/camera/

would any of you guys have any idea why the buildings here are increasingly out of focus moving left to right? what would cause that? they're all the same distance away pretty much...

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2879/10028949374_0b6429e0ba_b.jpg

i really don't know the answer to this (& they don't look too-jarringly-different, to me), but is it the amount of ambient light, which is kinda abundant on the left & minimal on the right? i want to talk poetically about air purity like hearing joel meyerowitz talk about taking photographs of light in cape cod but i don't really have the stats to back this

tilt shift?

could be that they're actually not all the same distance away. with aperture at f/2 your DOF is gonna be fairly narrow, esp if the focus is not at infinity

there was a TOP post that mentioned stuff about air purity & c. here http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2013/09/leica-on-high.html

huh i guess yeah could just be that--aperture, etc. maybe ill test it out again. i noticed it and then the first person i showed it to noticed it and now i can't not notice, oh well

was for a few reasons (work stuff, friend stuff, a first date that didnt go very well, etc.) feeling really crappy on sunday. got myself out of bed and wandered around town. still feeling all bummed and sorry for myself when this happened. background is that domestic helpers, mostly from the philippines, work extremely hard, are separated from family for years at a time, are treated very unfairly under the law here in hk, and generally get only a few hours a week (on sunday) off. yet, they remain for the most part the warmest, most cheerful people. anyways, they all get together on sunday. walked through a big group. i just held up my camera and flash and shot off 3 pics quickly. this is the third one. just..this was the spontaneous response and captures the exact moment i felt better...best ppl ever:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7432/10119561994_095c6f51da_b.jpg

aw <3

that is fucking awesome

that's so great

i watched a bunch of jonas mekas films at a retro, here, having always felt like i kinda got JM & admiring him a bunch & liking the lithuania film without loving it, & i am really just knocked out, now, like by how much of a template he is for diaristic art, & then also just by his occasional - as in not constant, & not immediate - skill as a filmmaker. there are parts of walden that resemble the best of saul leiter's photography, i think, & parts of as i was moving ahead that are as good at recording & working with images as any of the like top shelf still photographers i can think of. brutally underserved by youtube's colour rendering here (& i'm trying to link directly to 1 hr 7 min & 49 seconds through, which it mightn't), but his recording & frenetic reediting of a snowball fight is such a powerful, reverberative glimpse into something that happened forever ago & still just pops from the screen,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XD1CfCV1rPw?t=1h7m49s

road surfaces and slide film, the dream combo

does anybody who has ever had a prolonged internal moral debate about the ethics of cropping feel like sharing their thoughts, here? i have never wanted to crop. or zoom. jesus christ. but I have a fridge full of photographs that I took with a lens I was too distracted & dilettantish to realise was pretty beat up, the photos which were taken through bearing the slight scars of. one edge, when i've shot toward light & focused a long way away, has a slight clustering of a few lines, eating into the sky & ruining its uniformity. it only occurred to me while i couldn't sleep last night, after being kinda bummed about this occasional distraction that: oh yeah, i could just crop. & robert frank cropped! & before that i'd been trying to find comfort in how beat up some peoples' photos are anyway. or thinking about jonas mekas' film work, which is usually pretty jagged-edged, sixteen mm camera frames not usually absent of some kind of interference.

cropping. what do you think about it. i play with the frame a lot i think. but also sometimes maybe it's more important to concentrate on serving the thing you took a photograph of?

99.5% of the time i don't crop

I crop a lot. I just checked the last 100 images I published out of Lightroom in some form, and 60 of them were cropped from the original 3:2 ratio. Some were product shots I had to crop square, other times I was going for some cinema-still effect, other times it's just sloppiness by me not getting close enough to my subject. I'm not remotely precious about it because I'm not good enough at composition.

When I've shot weddings I'm mindful of the fact that ppl may want 3:2 prints (6"x4" being yr standard high street lab print), so I lock the ratio and only crop in 3:2.

Cropping is fine don't let anybody tell you otherwise

Plenty of famous photogs cropped

Just don't let anybody see the uncrops

I think that HCB's 'puddle jumper' was in fact a crop but being HCB the original exists nowhere

As for film - no, I don't crop. For some weird reason I can't bring myself to crop a scanned frame. It is what it is.

http://i.imgur.com/xP2Qwaz.jpg

The original puddle jumper

THe part on the left was part of the fence he was shooting through

http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/derriere-la-gare-saint-lazare/

Apparently one of only two of his photos that were ever cropped

Like we could prove otherwise though

He probably burns all his contact sheets

And of course the version we all know now crops out the bottom 1/3 of the picture as well

http://i.imgur.com/gHIb5hd.jpg

Gordon Parks shoots the Invisible Man, Crops

the most reproduced portrait of all time was cropped

http://i.imgur.com/sHiyNhL.jpg

Cropping was arguably better in the film days

You'd just move the enlarger head closer

Bigger grain yeah sure but you could sometimes get more detail too

Cropping digital is okay if you have a large source file and you're gonna show at 1024x768 or some other web resolution

when i see something that visibly doesn't conform to a common ratio i am raising an eyebrow

bigger grain would actually probably be an argument for cropping for me

the same way deep overexposure + then scanning can get you something you can't get otherwise

Fucking hell, the original negative

http://i.imgur.com/8Ib5avK.jpg

I'm glad to see HCB underexposed too

You can think of anti-cropping people as being photography's rockists

But given all the other ways we manipulate images

Color balance curves printing big small whatever

Intentionally overexposing underexposing shooting expired film cross processing shooting movie film

Cropping is just one more tool in the kit

Nobody has to know

It can be your secret

Take it with you to the grave

Destroy your hard drive when you die

On my tombstone it will say

He was a cropper

I am not ashamed

Now with all that having been said

I have never cropped a single image in my life

yeah it just goes against my instinct. I've done it a few times and then later replaced the cropped with the uncropped.

honestly it just makes life easier too

ha ha 乒乓 you are pretty much the disappointed paternal voice in my head ruefully shaking his head at my first inclinations toward cropping. like you appreciate the arguments but also something will have changed if i do it. i just can't even look at the disfigured skies that my lack of care has wrought anymore. it's like the guy in the godfather's unbeautified daughter.

i feel like i am applying for one of those licenses that means you can smoke marijuana in public because you have ptsd & so should be exempted from having to comply with certain social mores. the idea of cropping to me is so awkward, like it is a lie. didn't alice notley say the wrong word in a story is a lie in the middle of the page. i can't even make myself crop the selvages.

you are allowed to crop, but it must be done on the negative, with scissors.
accept this ruling.

that's perfect

mentally consulting robert frank's career to create parameters for everyday life

alternately, now that you know about your lens deficiency, next time you use it you must tape a piece of cardboard to the offending side.

i feel like when i look at my photos i'm already disappointed by how much i missed getting in to the frame in the first place

i want to put the whole world in to every shot more or less

mentally consulting robert frank's career to create parameters for everyday life

― love mike love (ko komo) (schlump), Thursday, November 21, 2013 5:14 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

This is how I live tbh

If it helps you to be a uncropper while following robert frank

Remember that frank did not think the negative was sacrosanct

As evidenced by his later work in nova scotia

What you need to do I think is to take a roll that you have developed

And eat it

Or burn it

Then and maybe then can you start to crop

Tbh I remember reading that robert frank had arranged with Steidl

To publish a new edition of the americans

With all new crops

Probably the most disappointed I have ever felt with Frank

Not because of the cropping but because I did not think the new crops could bring anything to the images that we did not already know

I don't think I necessarily pre-visualise in 3:2. Sometimes I know I only want a sliver of what I can capture from where I am.

i want to put the whole world in to every shot more or less

i think more & more that the less you are taking a photograph of - "of" - the better. i just was at the library looking at eggleston & koenig's (lovely) double exposure, i have maybe a new favourite eggleston (no i don't), this 2004 shot of half a phonebox and just some yellow canvasing in madrid. like obviously with W E the deal about ~life continuing beyond the frame~ is popular wisdom but also he just so delicately unites everything that's happening, pinpoints the essence & needs little more.

i have replaced my lens fwiw. i have a 35mm now. i miss the kind of innate hyper closeness of my 50mm, like it has come to just represent the act of literally focusing on a thing to me. but i am figuring it out.

i think frank has fucked with the crops used in editions of the americans at least twice?? usually erring toward revealing the full frame iirc. there's a section in the THE AMERICANS: THE ~~RE-MIX~~ deluxe book about it

i think more & more that the less you are taking a photograph of - "of" - the better

don't tell that to friedlander

i think wrt anti-zoom sentiment i feel there is definitely some kind of poetic (don't say truth don't say truth) righteousness to just dealing with what you confront through your camera. to crop for the juice seems to deny some basic idea of what photography is, to strive for some other kind of image making practice.