what do you see like: 2012

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inwAc-ZBpx0&ob=av2e

would like my entire life to be shaded in colors made pastel by fluorescent lights

lol try again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7yez4lXjBI

dayo have you ever heard of patrick mimran? i hadnt till my little brother gave me a book of his photographs for my birthday:

http://mimran.com/

no I haven't! he has a lot of obsessions

this is the first time ive looked @ his site, its kind of a letdown compared to this book i have

maybe one day I'll get a chance to look at his book! btw looked at all three aloha fridays, great stuff!

thank you, dayo. i am pleased to hear you finally looked at them.

I never ordered mine :(

sb'd u for that.

lol. I have like 10 photography books still in the wrapper ;(

I find that like, 10-20 pictures in 'serious' mode are the most I can do at a time without needing a break.

are they still available? xp

i've been basically defying zine convention and just endlessly reprinting them so its ok

sb'd you for decreasing the collector's value of my copies

oh man my attending just took me on a tour of an awesome spot to shoot on the way home from a home visit. totally know what i'm doing with my saturday morning

you guys are all super nice.

while printing photographs is like, yeah i wish i could afford to do it more often, still its nice to think of it the other way, like what do you get from showing it on the screen. i remember seeing some agnes martin paintings in a slideshow at a talk by an art historian and realising that they made more sense seen that way than in a book because there you can't see that inner luminescence but the slide was able to approximate something of it. i realise this is a different example, but still, photographs are all about light, except when they're y'know, about shadows. but like cigarette smoke curling through morning light, or the pattern from a venetian blind spreading out across the floor. melanie schiff is a photographer i like, i'm pretty sure i've mentioned her on this before. she does these still lifes that are all about light in this way. i like the way they burn on the screen.

http://kavigupta.com/images/KaviGuptaGallery000182.jpg

k, really went for my best Eggleston with this one:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7147/6728677191_179b56be03_z.jpg

^^^really like that. also superior WI is just teeming with egglestonian potential

this is duluth, via iphone

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7016/6737662557_8d40117b08_o.jpg

btw judith yr photos are really gorgeous!

I like mooching around churches, especially when I have a legitimate non-spiritual reason for being there... Anyway, more objects in low light innit*...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7020/6737984699_eb1cf6e6b8_z.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7175/6737954761_2ac6cdec77_z.jpg

(* - just can't bring myself to post photos of friends in here... )

Such ego! It had to be principal, huh?
Out of curiosity, have you been touching film much at all lately?

That's daughter #2's hand!

Film? Not much lately. Ran a roll of Velvia through the EOS 10 Jun-Aug last year, last used the IX7 APS in September, haven't shot any medium format since last spring and no B&W (Neopan 400CN) since last summer. They're just sitting there, gathering dust at the moment. Keep telling myself that once it's light in the evenings again I'll get out in the garden with the Bronica...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7144/6785097071_13ac0b6abf_z.jpg

hey

omg

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x18/gr8080/62636c26.jpg
http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x18/gr8080/c1a7119e.jpg
http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x18/gr8080/7876ac64.jpg

china that's awesome, it's like you perfected your aesthetic! it is the chinavision ur-text

what did you take those shots w, grady? they're so luminous and granular

thanks!

they're shot with vivitar ultra wide & slim i got at the thrift shop for $4.
http://i.imgur.com/FfQZb.jpg

cross-processed provia 400x

first 2 are Zagreb, the 3rd is Budapest

china that's awesome, it's like you perfected your aesthetic! it is the chinavision ur-text

lol I was thinking something very similar

it'd be like a dayo picture of a middle aged man in HK looking at his open wallet, reflected in a banks storefront window

it's funny cuz it's an old picture from last summer that I think at the time I thought was "too obvious" but now I have no more hangups about obvious. obvious is good.
going through old pictures is surprising sometimes.

that is a cool camera. is provia slide film?? i've used it in the past & can't remember. lovely anyway.

it'd be like a dayo picture of a middle aged man in HK looking at his open wallet, reflected in a banks storefront window

loool

i think i have got a couple of things back that wandered into dayo territory recently, this is my big city at night shot

it's funny cuz it's an old picture from last summer that I think at the time I thought was "too obvious" but now I have no more hangups about obvious. obvious is good.

i am sorta agreeing w/this but based on totally different standards; going back to that thing about what-to-take-a-photo-of, there are things i shoot that feel like they're in over-familiar photographic territory. & i don't think yr textural ny building-material 21c streetsprawl pics qualify! i got this back recently, & know i've shot similar pictures whenever i've walked past a picturesque bird on a lamppost, but i kinda nailed it (thank you cloud), & that sorta beats the other feelings i have about what the picture even is.

going through old pictures is surprising sometimes.

for sure. there might be some stretch of time in the future when i'm back at my folks' place, where all of my regrettable teenage negatives are, & i'd sorta be interested to scan a lot of them, just to see how they come out. sometimes things are v different just out of the context, either of the film/of memory/or of whatever expectations you had at the time that encroach on seeing a picture. i took this a couple of years ago & never really liked it because it's too grey, but it looks okay to me now, as a pic at least.

is provia slide film??

yes. its pretty reliable for shooting in low light and pushing it to 1600. personally, i like shooting it w/ a flash and cross processing:

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

oh nice. i am on pretty rocky ground w/pushing film, though i feel a lil safer w/b&w. i actually just googled the camera you mentioned, i know i was asking for tips a while ago, but i should really buy something little with a flash to carry around.

^^ great/confusing photo, btw; painted bgrnds in your pics at the gift that keeps on giving

btw the vivitar ultra wide & slim isn't made anymore and they go for stupid amounts of money on eBay, but these are supposed to be identiacal:

http://www.fourcornerstore.com/collections/superheadz-cameras/products/black-slim-devil

all the b&w stuff i posted last week i shot on a weird no-name knock-off i found on eBay. it has the same lens but it has a small flash in it-- i cant shoot daytime w/ it tho because the exposure is too long

"obvious is good" is meant mostly as an admonishment to myself btw. I have a habit of talking myself out of pictures with pretty upfront 'hooks' sometimes and it's good to be reminded that, yes, it's not a bad thing to actually shoot the big obvious thing in the scene, put it front and center, make it look nice, etc.
like sometimes there's a 'big thing' happening or present, and I can convince myself that the skillful thing to do is to take pictures of anything but that. which is just stupid. take the picture of the 'big thing'. too much second guessing and talking myself out of a picture because I'm worried someone else would take it.

http://i.imgur.com/W5gXy.jpg

whoa

warning: picture of a dead body

quite a picture to follow that post

yeah i didnt take that, i was posting it in response to your post, sorry.

fyi: http://www.petapixel.com/2011/03/29/debate-over-fabienne-cherisma-photo-rekindled-after-award-given/

my post leaves a lot of room for amendments and second guessing, and the situation in the picture initiates a lot of that. there are a lot of degrees of the 'big thing' or the obvious subject or the thing that everyone else if photographing, and they don't all need to be treated the same way. my anecdote refers more to the way that I'm trying to cut back on the critical impulse that actually prevents me from taking a picture because some spectacle seems just too clear and has to be resisted. I don't really think that any potential picture is so apparent that it shouldn't be taken; that's an issue for editing.

editing, judgement, whether or not it provokes a feeling of queesiness etc.

no i totally get what you meant and i already regret my cheap and tasteless post in reply

boy tbh I just don't understand the photojournalism world AT ALL. I know from all my reading that, like a good photographer, I should regard all kinds of pictures as part of the same grand effort (art photos, snapshots, news photos, technical photos, etc.) but honestly, it's the journalism ones that I just have no feeling for at all, almost always.

xpost
no! adversarial is good!

the problem i've been having lately isnt so much trying to "not take the obvious photo everyone else would take" but more "don't take the photo i've already taken 100 times with diminishing returns"

lately i've been leaving my camera in my bag thinking "fuck this i already have a million photos of people dancing in this same club"

maybe i just need a new life

that's like how I finally trained myself out of taking pictures of rooftops as I walked around. and other subjects I can't even remember right now where when I see them now I say to myself "no, you always take pictures of this and it NEVER looks good." finally sinking in though. too many pictures of shadows on the ground to count.
I've got a lot of nightlife photos too, but they sort of live in a different world (the social media world) than a lot of others. best thing that ever happened to me was just getting $3 developing.

lately i've been leaving my camera in my bag thinking "fuck this i already have a million photos of people dancing in this same club"

otm. also, a more recent feeling when out and about is "what extra can I bring to this? if I go on Flickr it will already have been covered in every way possible". Portraits are about the only thing left that don't make me feel that.

a more recent feeling when out and about is "what extra can I bring to this? if I go on Flickr it will already have been covered in every way possible"

hm, this is frustrating to me, i'm not sure i totally feel it anymore. i remember a time, probably after signing up for flickr & finding out that so much photo activity was going on, being just swamped by the sets of well-composed, correctly exposed photos people had shot, feeling that there was much less point to continuing to try to chronicle the world, because it was quantifiably being done elsewhere, and in a much glossier, more accessible way. but, i know i posted some emmet gowin interview in the other thread, in which he said one of the paradoxes of working post-robert-frank was that people had been stripped of the authority to go out and discover the world, to go and photograph as an exploration and a document; but had simultaneously been compelled to rely on locality, and their own world, and put aside grandiose documentary urges in favour of finding those truthful or well represented angles that existed in their day to day, cf gowin's beautiful portraits of his wife. & that is def what the argument is, to me, now; i mean there's still "i've taken this picture of the yellow gate next to the green hedge" more than once, but whenever i see a cluster of shots online that have some cumulative narrative - someone's life, someone's neighbourhood, someone's relationship (am referring p specifically to some things that have been in the famous people thread recently), i'm hugely encouraged by how powerful someone else's local detail can be, and so presumably how interesting the texture of my surroundings has the potential to be for someone distant to them. i know there's still 'other people have taken the bird-on-a-lamppost shot', which is true, & maybe i'm getting invested in sets, or gradually amassed context relieving the burden of individual shots being markedly individual. but i still think the point now is to do your own thing rather than to chip away at cataloguing, the way that's collectively being done as everyone puts their stuff online.

Portraits are about the only thing left that don't make me feel that.

yes, for sure, & having got the gesture of a friend or someone on the street is the clearest instance of having got something no-one quite can, or that you would have to have your camera on you to catch

boy tbh I just don't understand the photojournalism world AT ALL. I know from all my reading that, like a good photographer, I should regard all kinds of pictures as part of the same grand effort (art photos, snapshots, news photos, technical photos, etc.) but honestly, it's the journalism ones that I just have no feeling for at all, almost always.

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Monday, January 30, 2012 11:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

there was a book published in the 70s or early 80s, of journalistic photos taken out of context and just presented as if they were, uh, 'art' photos. can't remember the name of the book though!

Sounds a little like Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's "Evidence" which I actually love:
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/10/theory-evidence-larry-sultan-and-mike.html

the pictures tend towards the technical and (duh) evidentiary, and are taken by sort of uninterested professionals, which is something I enjoy. Technical photographs I can get down with any day.