The Steve McCurry Tempest in a Teapot.

You have probably all seen Steve McCurry's most famous photograph. It's the photograph of the Afghani woman with the haunting green eyes. It graced the cover of National Geographic and has been reprinted endlessly, everywhere.

For most of his career McCurry made his living as a magazine editorial photographer. From all indications he performed well, followed the rules and made a living traveling the world. In the last decade he transitioned from magazine editorial work into the art world and has been using the skill set and vision he honed in his previous career to make work that many, many people find truly evocative.

Recently he has been taken to task, sometimes harshly, for apparently PhotoShopping some distracting elements out of his work. The important thing to remember here is that he is not enlisting this work into the world of hard news or breaking news. Rather, it is being sold as "art" in galleries and on the web.

The knee jerk argument, if I can sum it up, is basically: "Once a starving photojournalist always a starving photojournalist!!!" His critics would hold him to journalistic ethics and standards even though he is no longer working in that field or having his work used to directly illustrate news.

To me this smacks of indentured servitude to a cause.

I say, that at this point, all bets are off. The once free press is now settled into the hands of about seven major holding companies and they all have agendas put in place to serve a tiny elite of plutocrats and their pet causes. Photojournalists are being discarded like old VHS tapes. The contract calling for a lifetime of service to the ideals of the free press is null and void by those who no longer work in that niche.

Here's what I wrote in the comments at theOnlinePhotographer.com in response to Michael's thoughtful article, and the reason and unreasonable comments that followed:

Steve McCurry is a very, very good photographer. He may have been a photojournalist at one time and should, then, have hewed to the rules of that industry. For many years now he has worked outside that field and just creates art. His manipulations have no more or less merit than the contrived set ups of Crewdson or Skoglund. The art is the art. He is not working in breaking news. He is not manipulating images in the service of some political agenda. He is creating art. No different than the legion of photographers who routinely edit out teen acne, double chins and wrinkles in images of graduating seniors or mid-level corporate managers. His vision now includes the ability to hone or distill an image for our enjoyment. If he was shooting for the NYTime, hard news, to illustrate a news story then he was out of line. If he was showing us his impression of a place and time and people then screw the critics and go for it. Tell me that every landscape photographer whose work has ever graced a gallery wall didn't burn in some sky, take out a piece of trash in the foreground or pretty up the colors. Should we dig up Ansel Adams and burn him at the stake for his egregious over-darkening of the sky in Moonrise over Hernandez, NM.? Photojournalism is one of those jobs that's been beaten to a pulp by the economy and cast aside by media moguls. McCurry left the fold to do what he does best and make a bit of money for a decent retirement ---- and now a bunch of fat and sassy armchair quarterbacks, who've never risked dysentery and war are going to deny the guy his chance to be an aging artist with some sort of financial safety net under his feet? Get real. Put your Hush Puppies on, button up your cardigan and go out for a walk. Contemplate your misplaced outrage and then direct it somewhere meaningful.

If you disagree I'd like to know the reasons why. Not "how I feel" but what rational and logical belief causes you to champion your cause. We are no longer living in the age where the news is anything but un-tinted by the interjection of corporate holding company self-interests; why then should photographers be the symbolic surrogates that help give credibility to an already fixed system?

Give McCurry a break. His art appeals to a broad cross section of our culture. His work is good and visually satisfying. What he did for a living before becoming an artist should not be part of our assessment of the value of his work. 

As I sat editing in still photographs to my recent video project I had new thoughts about what aspect ratios to shoot...

When I shoot portraits I sure like working in a square format. This will come as no revelation to people who have followed the blog for a while...

For most commercial stuff I've been shooting whatever the actual, full format of the sensor is. The reason, no doubt developed in earlier times (the era of insufficient resolution), it to take full advantage of the total number of pixels available.

But as I sat editing video and trying to add still photographs to it I discovered that it might be a better idea, going forward, to shoot the routine documentary work and corporate advertising work in a skinnier format; something like 16:9.

We now have ample resolution at our disposal and shooting with an aspect ratio like 16:9 means we're not losing much quality but we might be gaining a library of images with more flexibility for multi-media work.

Now I know that someone out there will tell me that they have a series of sub-routines hardwired in their massive brains that can immediately identify the intended future use of every image they create which then informs them exactly how much space to leave in their 3:2 composition for future cropping. The rest of us mere mortals would do better with a formal guideline.

The issue in video is that every 35mm, m4:3 and square frame will have to be chopped, top and bottom, to work in the much more horizontal video format. If we start by setting our cameras to the video crop (16:9) we can compose a shot that we know will work for both still and video. With a 24, 36, or 42 megapixel camera we can easily cropped off the ends of the frame without a visible reduction in quality.

For me frame lines in a finder are NOT enough. I want to see the frame, sitting in a field of black, that shows me the exact edges without my mind having to remember to stay "within the lines."

After my time in video editing this week I think I am about to become a photographer of extremes, with my Sony cameras set to 16:9 for general shooting and then set to 1:1 for portrait work and art that will never grace the moving screens. Can't think of a more practical way to do it.

While the a6300 and the A7R2 don't give me 1:1 they do both give me 16:9 and that's a good start. Both the RX10s provide a wider range of aspect ratios that also includes 1:1. I wonder if the RX10iii would also make a good portrait camera? Next experiment?

Just something I fell asleep thinking about last night...

Shooting squares in 2009. I thought this would make a perfect book cover for my best photography book.

 I wrote a book back in 2009 that was published by Amherst Media in 2010. It was called Commercial Photograpy Handbook: Business Techniques for Professional Digital Photographers.

 I like the photograph because I seem to like beautiful women and I know I like beautiful cameras. I shot this with a Hasselblad 500 CM and actual, real Neopan 100 black and white film. It was one of those weeks when I was feeling decidedly retro.

The publisher chose a different cover design and that's their prerogative; but I think they left a lot of business on the table since beautiful women trumps still life and commercial photography collage any day of the week.

I re-read that book today over a tuna sandwich at Thundercloud's sandwich shop. It stands up well. Of all the technical books I've written I have to say that the writing, the information and the images are the very best of my endeavors.

There were some photos in the book that put me back in the mindset of shooting to the square; something I think it well leveraged by the EVF finder cameras. One can set the aspect ratio to 1:1 and the finder shows the exact crop with no extraneous distraction. Very nice.

And I'm sure you know where I am going with this..... yes, the Sony RX10iii has a wide range of settable aspect ratios, at your vision's service. Just cue them up and shoot. "Yes!" He said, "I will."

The video rough cut is out the door. Time to play for a while......

Oh yeah, and buy the book! Commercial Photography Handbook.  Read it like a novel....

Mr. Friedman. Gosh I wish he was our state's governor.

Renae G. Printed and then later copied from the print into a file.

Just resting my eyes and brain for a while today. Too much work done in too short a time span. A mental recalibration reminds me of what I like and why I like it. 

Every "big picture" person needs a "fine-tuner" to make stuff really work. At least I do...

Oh goodness. You learn so much about a craft when you drop yourself into a big project and get close to the end. I've been shooting video for the last two weeks and I'm learning more than I want to by having to edit my own work. God, I can get sloppy! A couple of times in the last few days I wanted to either put myself in "time out" or "dock my allowance" for some of the goof-ups I made in the video capture part of the job. Some of my missteps were clearly a result of hubris while others were caused by making the decision to go ahead and shoot in less than optimum environmental conditions. My biggest errors were in trusting the gear too much and not monitoring it enough.

None of the kinds of mistakes I've been making are really obvious in the field but they become very obvious once you sit down at a monitor and start going through footage over and over again. On the flip side, I think I partially redeemed myself by overshooting. My videographer friend, James, always says, "You can never have too much B-roll." And he's right.

But one thing I am learning is that when you are shooting corporate stories you can make incredibly good use of still imaging inside your moving program. My one lesson for next time is to force the client, at light stand point, if necessary, to give me every shred of historical photography then have hoarded away as a starting point for any project. Then I will remind myself to take stills all day long as I shoot video. Being able to start with a good video interview shot and then cut to a still shot that's been enhanced by some Ken Burn's "pan and scan" can make all the difference in the world.

So, by the end of the day yesterday I had edited down to a seven minute timeline. That's right inside our target zone. In the seven minutes I'm using something like 358 discreet clips and, in places, five or six audio tracks deep. But here's the issue I've always been aware of: I am a big picture editor. By that I mean I see the grand arc of the project and I understand where I want to go. But I am not detail oriented or methodical. It's just not part of my nature. I know I want to go from interview "A" to interview "B" and I know I need good transitional material but the intricacies of cobbling it all together are more or less lost on me. I have an intellectual understanding of the process but I'm like a guy who has read a lot about dancing but rarely tried it to actual music; with a partner.

When I review what I've edited it gets the message across but feels a little .... kludgy. Truthfully, it's rife with almost invisible or inaudible glitches that stem from (metaphoric) fat fingers and not enough discernment. Agile fingers (metaphorically) and sophisticated discernment come at the end of the 10,000 hours of editing, not near the beginning.

But self-knowledge can be grand power. I know all these things about myself and I have work-arounds that help to offset my weaknesses. My son, Ben, is the Mozart of Final Cut Pro X performers. I watched him last Summer as he cobbled together a clean and very watchable corporate branding video with nothing but a supply of so-so stock images, some logos and a deft hand at using keyframes; as well as an uncanny ability to quickly illustrate icons. His real power in video comes from his attention to video and audio detail; spacing, pacing and structure.

So, after I'd done the best I could, I hired him for eight hours to sit in the ersatz editing bay and "sweeten" my project for me. We're in the rough cut stage but I've found (from my tenure as an advertising agency creative director) that the more polished the rough cut is, the better it looks, the less the end clients complain and the less they mess with the final product. In the first hour he made the project 50% better overall than it had been. At two hours it was a different presentation altogether. We are heading into hour five and the cumulative power of lots of little changes and fixes has become enormous.

I am now looking forward to sending my client a rough cut instead of having the typical anxiety that comes from approval stages. After all, it's hard to remove every trace of one's own ego when you've concepted, written the script, directed, shot and also done the audio on a project. We'll get this up on a private Vimeo channel later today and see what the client has to say.

Once we have final edit changes I'll hand the project over to Ben or James to finish and polish. Keeping me "out of the kitchen" from this point on seems like a smart thing to do. I may use my "big picture" skills to get the work and shoot the big arcs but, if I want the projects to sing  I'm a lot better off calling in people who have different talents and strengths from mine. I guess this video stuff really does work better with a team...

Sharp enough? Too sharp? Not sharp at all? Maybe it's all an illusion.

Another series of handheld shots with my current favorite point-n-shoot camera. 

Of course we are limited in our photographic capabilities by the one inch sensor.......