So, we're all just a bit bored right now but I sparked up when I saw one of my favorite camera makers was doing a live video presentation about black and white with a 'famous' photojournalist. Biographical fallacy is a vicious thing. When I heard the "experienced pro" speak it was all the hoary stuff you hear from every know it all duffer who shot in the film days and is now fascinated with how easily they can now produce work with a digital camera. Dismissive of anyone who has never touched film...
"He just sets his camera to black and white and shoots. He loves Seattle because the light is always so flat.... People get too wrapped up in technical stuff (generally translated into: I haven't kept up with lighting or post production = I love shooting Jpegs!) Look at how easily I can silhouette two people sitting next to a window!!!"
I watched and listened until I just couldn't bear it anymore. Do any photojournalists from the film days ever learn to light? Do they ever make interesting images in these modern times or are they just enamored of the fact that they don't have to go into the darkroom anymore to produce a flat and lifeless monotone print? I guess I learned my lesson = any light is good light, as long as there is enough of it.
Frame after frame was flat, boring, lifeless, hackneyed. And so was the brittle and smug attitude of the interviewee. I give the interviewer a pass; he was trying his best to squeeze something; anything! interesting out of the interview. He just needed some programming with.......real content.
Now I see why so few people are willing to pay for "professional" photography. The pros keep doing stuff the way they did it with Tri-X and number two contrast paper in 1986. They conflate "no color" with "virtuous art." The rest of photography has moved on. Someone forgot to invite them to 2020.
A bit mean-spirited on my part? You didn't just lose ten minutes of your day to ..... snore....zzzzz..... oh, sorry. I thought I was still learning how to take flat, B&W snapshots with my digital camera. I must have nodded off...
Somehow I thought the program could have been more enlightening than, "I just turn the dial to monochrome, ignore the prevailing light and aim it at boring shit."
Youtube can suck. People need speaker training. Companies need to better vet interviewees and do a better job matching programming to their brand, and to the sophistication of their markets.
I'd rather watch Jared Polin...(kidding, just kidding....).
17 comments:
People think YouTube is as easy as setting up a camera and recording themselves sitting somewhere pontificating with NO regard for sound quality, lighting, or content. It's not.
Like you, I thought I could use some of this down time to learn, to perhaps watch the longer photography-related videos I don't usually have the time to watch. Wrong! I'm being reminded that time wasn't always the main reason I didn't those videos. Some of them are just awful. NO ONE should watch them except for the people who made them, so they can learn what NOT to do moving forward.
Terry, I am sure that at one point in time the photographer I saw on YouTube (sponsored by a major camera maker) was interesting and fun but now just another person pontificating without direction or purpose. It was so painful that I wrote a post about it. That painful. Being relatively "famous" in a local market in the 1990's doesn't seem to translate well into the new century...
Brutal!
I immediately thought of Albert Watson who's old AND delightful to listen to and delighted to be delightfully working at the edge.
After that build up I want to watch it!
The funniest YouTube video I've seen was a guy explaining how to adjust the drive wheels on a Honda mower. He liberally used both f*ck and motherf*ck as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. His expository talents might have enlivened that photography video.
Kirk -
I’m not sure that the “famous photojournalist” that you mentioning the 5/7/20 piece is typical, certainly not of a lot of the folks I worked with, some of them quite exceptional. I’m one of those ancient (85) once upon a time film shooting photojournalists. My assignments, a lot of them out of the country, nonetheless came from American newsmagazines all trying to outdo themselves in the use of color. After all, the advertisers wanted color for their ads. You’re right’. We loved black-and-white. (Two of the photographers that really helped me when I started out were Gene Smith and David Vestal, very different in style but both super black-and-white photographers who considered an interpretive print part and parcel of taking pictures.) But a lot of us working for the mags had to shoot color anyway, not color neg with its possibility of interpretation, but transparency film which could be edited more quickly. Nothing like bracketing exposures on slow Kodachrome of fast action and then trying to get the film back to the U.S. relatively quickly, especially if you were in a particularly remote land or one where there was conflict.
What you missed as a color shooter (and treasured as a black-and-white shooter) was the ability to, at some point, easily and affordably make prints, hopefully somewhat interpretive and rather good ones. Digital gave us the ability to do that in color. Had Gene lived forever, I have no doubt he would be the master of Photoshop. And since the interpretive print would be very important to him, he would shoot raw. David did live long enough to shoot digitally and print inkjet and to do it exceptionally well in a way that absolutely paralleled his film work.
Not every elderly photographer is an ex darkroom, where’s the print? nut, but a lot of us are. After all we grew up in a world where there were only prints and printed reproductions. Light - dark - harsh - soft - cold - warm - and, yes, black-and-white or color, our decision; it’s part of our photography. So, obviously we shoot raw and print. It’s not very flattering but we are probably snobs that think of jpegs as “drugstore prints” and only use them to email images of our dog to our grandchildren even though jpegs are pretty good these days. And on our behalf I have to say that when the magnetic signal on our hard discs dissipates or the discs get thrown away because there is nothing about their appearance that says important memories, those stacks of inkjet prints will say it. I think there is a large contingent of elderly ex news photographers that shoot raw.
Dear Mr. Pierce, I once again painted with too broad a brush in trying to make my point while rushing my fingers across the keyboard. The photographer I was referring to is my age or younger and not of the generation who routinely used to go into the darkroom themselves and craft beautiful images in black and white.
While not quite as "experienced" as you I too remember shooting with Kodachrome 25 but most of my early assignments were done in black and white with a 4x5 view camera; although sometimes I dragged out an 8x10 camera when clients demanded it. I spent literally years in the darkroom trying to coax film and prints to do my bidding and, when it came to personal work, black and white was all I could afford.
No, the person I watched seemed to represent that crew who shot slides, dropped them off to the in-house lab and then went out for a beer. His understanding of black and white certainly didn't come from the same experiences and teachers that you and I must have had because he feared having anything purely black in this prints and nothing purely white; only the telltale gray mush that matches up with a person who has never made a good, rich and well contrasted print. A person who probably started his black and white journey during the digital age and is about one step removed from just turning down the saturation on a color file to make it black and white.
If you look at the work on my website you'll immediately see that I love black and white and would never shoot color if clients would accept everything as a black and white images. (kirktuck.com)
I think of Gene Smith when I print and I think of him when I do post production. I love a print with bite and good contrast.
As I said at the beginning of this comment I should apologize for painting with far too broad a brush. My own mentors were fabulous printers who would laugh and then cry at most of the dreck we see passing for black and white imagery on the web today. I was schooled with Ilfobrom graded, double-weight paper and the idea that you were only successful if you were able to translate your negative into a wide range of tones, but also taught that a black floor and a white ceiling were critical to informing and showing off the tones in the middle.
Thanks for correcting my over exaggeration. I'll get it right on the next one.
With kindest regards, Kirk
“I'll get it right on the next one.”
But you got all the important things right. You started out with a 4x5 view. I started out with a 4x5 Speed Graphic. It took me years to comprehend the importance of, and upgrade to, a 4x5 view.
“I'll get it right on the next one.”
But you got all the important things right. You started out with a 4x5 view. I started out with a 4x5 Speed Graphic. It took me years to comprehend the importance of, and upgrade to, a 4x5 view.
There really is a lot of guff on YouTube about cameras and photography. Mostly trying to make trivialities into more then just that.
Much enjoyed this one. While there are are some great things on Youtube there are far too many of the kind you write about -- bad information poorly presented. I recently tried to watch a video from a guy trying to sell his video editing course. Apparently he did not believe in editing (or scripting) his own videos. No sale.
Always good to hear from Bill Pierce. Back in the day I used to read his magazine columns as faithfully as I read your blog today. In age I'm about halfway between you and Pierce and have known a great many photojournalists. Most of my friends could make a very nice black and white print -- whether for the gallery wall or the newspaper production department. And when newspapers switched to color most of them built up at least a basic competence in lighting -- at least the ones who wanted to keep their jobs. Some of them got really good. But there were also more than a few of the kind you write about.
As an aside, many years ago I had the privilege of sitting around with a group of photojournalists listening to Pierce tell Gene Smith stories. A great evening.
Really good to hear from Bill Pierce. I've been reading his writing as long as I've been in photography -- since 1968.
i totally agree Kirk. BtW, love the pix u shared from the big rock... thanx
"he feared having anything purely black in this prints and nothing purely white;"
So it wasn't David Bailey then?
Hehheheh
Mark
I lost a good chunk of yesterday evening watch a well-known landscape photographer expound on his expertise in Capture One. The person in question is indisputably a respected and talented photographer, but the more the video went on, the clearer it became that anything usable he extracted from Capture One was down to pure luck. The amount of misunderstanding, misinformation and naivety on show was just staggering. The guy has not got the first clue on how Capture One works, and some of the "advice" he was given was truly destructive.
He's a fantastic photographer, but he's no guru. And that applies in one way or another to 95% of this "free tutorial" stuff from self-appointed "educators" on the interwebs (and pretty much to the non-free stuff as well)
I watched a video a couple of days ago on how to use a light box and camera with a macro lens to copy color negatives. He started off showing a strip of negatives and saying this isn't the film (insert a photo of a 35mm film canister) and you'd have to have the film redeveloped to get that. I didn't watch the rest.
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