My friend, Linda, came to celebrate our birthdays together yesterday evening. Again, despite using a tripod, many of the photos were blurry. I do best when I take the time to take the photos instead of doing them on the fly. I did get some nice photos. Serendipity rocks!
I still use Bridge and Photoshop from the CS3 suite and on my own learning the subtleties of using the programs. I didn't even know I could capture images from my camera memory card using Bridge until I used the CS4 version. DNG supposedly provides lossless compression. I can't tell the difference between the jpeg files I create from Canon's raw file and from Adobe's DNG.
My "ultimate" workflow is still a work in progress. I don't trust DNG to keep my files solely in that format so first download the Canon raw files then convert to DNG in Bridge. This doubles the storage space used for the capture. The good news is that I am deleting images from Bridge when I view the files. I like this feature although, of course, once deleted, the files are gone forever. But from the many images I capture I really only use a fraction of them. Most of the time I take several shoots of the same subject just so I'll have copies to choose from.
The shoot last night took all of two minutes. It reminded me how much fun shooting my friends can be. Long before I started shooting models I was intrigued by the photos of Nan Goldin and Terry Richardson. Goldin's oeuvre seems to largely consist of snapshots of her friends and lovers in colors I thought of and still think of as lurid. Richardson's photos are similar, loud, almost vulgar, certainly in-your-face images that redefined photographic art for me.
The shoot last night took all of two minutes. It reminded me how much fun shooting my friends can be. Long before I started shooting models I was intrigued by the photos of Nan Goldin and Terry Richardson. Goldin's oeuvre seems to largely consist of snapshots of her friends and lovers in colors I thought of and still think of as lurid. Richardson's photos are similar, loud, almost vulgar, certainly in-your-face images that redefined photographic art for me.This morning, in the December/January issue of Men's Vogue, I gaped at a blow-up of Marianne Müller's photograph in the living room of architects Mark Lee and Sharon Johnston in LA. It is beautiful but again not your run-of-the-mill arty photo. What makes photographer's images sell for thousands of dollars? Marketing. Our personal canons of what is beautiful is something we learn through accretion through the years. We "hone" our aesthetics from seeing what other people consider as beautiful. Is there truly innate beauty in our world of sensory experience? Beauty is a cognitive product, not a product of direct seeing.
At this point, my take is this: photographs are simply one person's view of the ordinary events in his or her life that the photographer on some golden-hued day finds inexplicably appealing or emotionally moving. There is a kind of aura around the sensori-cognitive experience that seems to me more than the accretion of our life's experiences. Maybe Jung was right. Maybe there is a collective "unconscious" that we inherit through our genes (or karma if you will) from all the consciousnesses that have lived and experienced life thousands of years before us.
At this point, my take is this: photographs are simply one person's view of the ordinary events in his or her life that the photographer on some golden-hued day finds inexplicably appealing or emotionally moving. There is a kind of aura around the sensori-cognitive experience that seems to me more than the accretion of our life's experiences. Maybe Jung was right. Maybe there is a collective "unconscious" that we inherit through our genes (or karma if you will) from all the consciousnesses that have lived and experienced life thousands of years before us.
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