Further thoughts on hobby photography
- Table of contents
- Introduction
- EDC
- Black and white
- Subject matter / subjects matter / subject matters
- Originality
- What if everyone just has poor taste
- Street photography
- Privileged eye, outsider eye
- Videography
- Money and recognition
- Zooming out
- Website, portfolio, gallery
- Instxgrxm
- how
- Fuji dial slip-ups
- Conclusion
Introduction (§)
It has been two years since I wrote down some early thoughts on hobby photography and I thought it would be worth following up as a separate article.
This article contains brand names and I'm sorry about that. While there's plenty to say about the philosophy and ideals of photography in the abstract, I also want to give a few thoughts about the specific items I'm using.
EDC (§)
I have not been able to convince myself to bring the Fuji camera everywhere. Although it is not humongous by any means, it is too large and conspicuous for me to go and do normal stuff without looking like I'm trying to be a "photographer" all the time, especially since it must be worn on a shoulder strap as I'm not in the habit of carrying a backpack, which seems to be a key factor amongst those who do carry these cameras daily. I want to increase the quality and quantity of life memories that I capture, but I don't want to feel like every day needs to be a photo shoot or like I'm playing a character. I want photography to be available to me whenever opportunity presents itself, but I don't want it to consume my entire personality and perception.
So, I bought a Ricoh GR III.
I told myself that even if I fail to EDC this one too, at least it can act as a B camera for when I've got the telephoto lens on my A camera, and indeed it has been a helpful addition there.
I tried a couple different ways of carrying the GR, and wound up making my own little bag for it. This became its own article.
I have been carrying it this way for a few months, even though I am constantly nervous that people will ask me "what is that you're wearing?". Surprisingly, this really has not happened. I wore it under my jacket back when the weather was cooler, and for some reason none of my coworkers, who would not be used to seeing this suspicious line of paracord, ever asked about it. Maybe they think it's a piece and if they ask too many questions I'll pop 'em.
One of the final big pushes that got me to buy the GR was this video by Clint of Lazy Game Reviews about an Intel pocket camera. Based on the pictures he shows here, it's clear he was in the habit of carrying this camera with him frequently, possibly every single day for some time.
Most of the scenes he took pictures of are just ordinary, but that's what makes them interesting. After 24 years, even "ordinary" is different. A picture of a retail store shelf will make you say "wow, they used to look like that?" or "wow, they still look like that!". It's a winner either way.
This video really made me feel like I've been missing out by not carrying a camera every day. A lot of times we think "I don't need to take this picture today, it can wait until tomorrow", but that will be a picture of tomorrow, not today. If you want a picture of today, this really is your only chance. By tomorrow you'll have missed it. So although I knew I would still deal with discomfort and embarrassment, I felt like I had to try.
So I've been practicing a little bit of this lifestyle photography thing with some of my coworkers. Like when a group of us goes for a walk to stretch or we have a Thursday pizza party, I've taken a few casual pictures then. I keep expecting people to ask me questions about this camera, but they don't. I keep telling myself how abnormal it is to carry any kind of camera at all these days, and especially how abnormal it is to wear it on a homemade sling. Yet no one questions it. That's a good thing and all, but wow does it make me feel like the autistic one.
Even still, I sometimes see pictures online of people working at their desk / cubicles in what seem to be candid or spontaneous circumstances, and I can't figure out how exactly those moments come about.
I can feel that my mindset is still lagging behind the physical act of EDC. It is not enough to carry the camera if you do not use it. Last weekend I went out to see a band, and unfortunately the show got cancelled. I got to hang out with the band for about an hour anyway, and yet I didn't take even a single picture of them. It would have been so great to have a "We tried!" photo, and I can't believe this thought didn't cross my mind at the time. I just completely missed it. I still feel like I need some kind of clear event or scene to grant me permission to take photos — I need to get better at realizing the value of the present moment even if it is not what I came looking for.
I said last time that I don't like PASM dials, but the GR is a PASM camera, so has my opinion changed? No. I still don't like PASM, and I consider it a downside of this purchase. This will spend most of its time in P anyway. In general, the shooting experience of the GR is a lot worse than that of a bigger camera. Even though it is simple, and it is a big step above a phone camera, I would not recommend it to photography beginners because it sacrifices a lot in the name of EDC. I miss my dials and focus ring. The on-screen preview always looks uglier than the photo, so you have to learn to ignore the preview and trust the camera. The blackout interval is so bad that in burst mode you literally don't know what you're getting after the first shot. The face-detection does not work in continuous autofocus, only single autofocus, which is weird since the face detection algorithm runs continuously during live view to present the white box in the first place. There are all around little touches to the firmware that could be improved — to give a hyper specific example, when the Fuji is in burst mode you can still chimp if you release the shutter button quickly enough, but if you keep it half-pressed it stays in live view mode, so you get the best of both single and burst shooting in a single mode. On the GR, it does not go back to live view when half-pressing the shutter in burst mode unless you turn off chimping entirely. I'd rather at least the chimp setting was stored separately across single and burst shooting.
Maybe I didn't do enough research before buying, because the Sony RX100 VII apparently slashes a lot of these concerns with better continuous AF, no blackout time, a zoom lens, and even a flip-out screen, though with a smaller sensor to compromise. I can't say for sure I would have picked that if starting fresh, but darn. Of course, if there was such a thing as a Fuji X-T Mini I probably would have bought that.
So far, I haven't addressed the elephant in the room, which is that my cell phone is already an everyday carry camera. Why not use that? I don't think I'll be able to give very convincing answers because it really is more of a psychological block than a practical one. I'll say first of all that I don't like the pictures my phone produces very much: they are simultaneously oversharpened and soupy despite what you'd think is a sufficient 12mp resolution.
I don't want to buy a new phone just to prioritize cameras, because I feel like that's what almost everybody is doing these days and it has led to the severe atrophy of other good qualities and features: the 3.5mm headphone jack, the SD card slot, removable batteries, lay-flat back design, overall software UI and UX, cloud dependencies, and the squandering of local processing power. It's not that these things can't coexist with good cameras. They're all completely unrelated, technically. But I feel that the top producers of cell phones are able to abuse their customer from every direction and the customers put up with it because "the cameras are better than last time". I don't want to be stuck in the same cattle line.
Hypocrisy alert: there are not many phones that still include a 3.5mm jack, so my next phone might be a Sony Xperia which happens to be definitively camera-centric. I don't want to get into the Chinese brands or Samsung so there aren't too many good choices.
Black and white (§)
I like black and white. There are many stereotypes about noobs / losers who think that black and white is a one-click cheat code to make any picture a masterpiece work of art. Am I one of those losers? It's possible. Personally, I think I actually like black and white, but of course that's exactly what one of the losers would say, wouldn't they.
The wife of a friend of mine decided one day that she was going to be a "professional photographer".
She bought a cheap digital SLR and then she ran around taking random pictures of everyday bullshit, then spent a few minutes de-saturating them in PS or applying sepia-tone filters to them.
She proudly displays them on her "professional photographer" website for all to see.
What a disgrace to the profession.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/gclsg/_/c1mnxwx/
Oops!
I like black and white artistically because it accentuates geometry and texture. I like that it places distance between the photo and reality, allowing it to act as fiction. Once you get used to looking at black and white, you start to forget that anything is even missing at all, it just seems normal. Black and white pictures give off what is perhaps an illusion that they are sharper and more defined, which makes them more fun to zoom in and pixel peep and be amazed at what's resolved — every time I zoom in on a picture and see the individual threads of a person's shirt I am amazed. But I also like black and white pragmatically because at maximum ISO, black and white pictures look acceptably grainy but color pictures look hellishly bad. So when I'm shooting in the dark without a flash, I'll get better results in black and white.
Oftentimes, I think I want to only shoot black and white forever. For the early decades of photography, that was the only option, and people got good results, so I probably could too. I feel like when I switch into color I am not being true to myself or my vision.
When I shoot pictures that are going out to other people, though, I know that everybody else wants and expects color. I'm the resident event photographer at my workplace and it would be pretty dumb of me to send out pictures of a corporate event in black and white. A couple bands have paid me for my photos, and of course they want them in color.
For a long time I was shooting both black and white and color, and trying to figure out how to mix them when I grouped photos together. It felt like two different photographers or maybe more like five different photographers.
I took a workshop with Alex Webb and his wife Rebecca. They looked at the pictures and moved them around and whispered to each other, and then they both turned to me and Rebecca said "yeah, you don't really ever need to shoot color again the rest of your life".
And I was like "thank you, so much". It was the greatest gift, I mean I still get chills when I think about it because it was such a defining moment. I became a black and white photographer in that moment and never looked back.
Frankly, black and white is very often easier than color. Color is hard because it adds an extra dimension for failure, another opportunity to make things look bad. Even in good conditions, the colors of your subject might look bad against those of the background, or there'll be someone wearing a distracting neon-yellow sweater that ruins your shot. And in poor conditions you're fighting with the white balance or low-CRI indoor lights to keep people's skin from looking pale or sickly green.
If color is hard, then black and white is a crutch, and to say "I will only shoot black and white forever" is to say "I'm not willing to take on a challenge and learn new skills". So it's probably important to do some portion of color photography pretty consistently, in order to be sure that the decision to use black and white is actually a decision and not a tar pit.
Likewise, of course, color can also be a crutch. It's a people-pleaser, because the majority of people are normies content with "ooh, look at the pretty colors!". Color is an easy source of praise, so it can be difficult to stick to a black and white vision when others are involved. But remember also the difference between taking a beautiful picture and taking a picture of a beautiful thing; I often think to myself that if a scene doesn't look good in black and white then it's not a good scene, so there's nothing to lose by always shooting B&W. But I've never actually said that out loud because I don't have these kinds of conversations with anyone. One thing I know for certain is that if I'm shooting black and white and I see something very colorful so I switch the camera back to color, that'll be my worst photo of the day. "Look at the pretty colors" is the least convincing reason to shoot color.
When I shoot color, am I betraying myself to satisfy others? Yes. Is it good for me to betray myself, to force myself to try new things and learn? Yes. What does it mean to stay true to yourself, then?
The fantasy of noble self-martyrdom tells me to reject everyone's expectation for color photos; to tell them that if they want color photos they'll have to take them themselves; to tell them that if they want to hire me they'd better be aware they're only getting black and white. The less-stupid side of me tells me that's stupid. If the people around me don't like the pictures I take or find it weird/uncomfortable that I insist on a black and white identity, then they won't want me around, and won't want me to take pictures of them, and then I'll just be alone with the camera, which defeats the point. It's only been two years, so it's too early to say I've found what I'm best at, yet. It's like a child watching the same movie on repeat dozens of times because they haven't discovered or can't process anything else yet.
I took pictures at a 4th of July party in 2023 in black and white, and I regret it. I never sent the pictures out to anyone because I am embarrassed and I do not want to be confronted with the question "why are they in black and white?", since I don't have a reason. Noble self-martyrdom? It would be nice if I was at least personally satisfied with them, but I'm not. When I look at those photos, the only feeling they give me is that I was sticking dogmatically to the identity of black and white photographer as if that was important somehow. In 2024 I shot the same party in color.
I think most of us assume that the general public doesn't like black and white, but for what it's worth, when I've shared my photos with strangers I've never gotten the sense that they were disappointed by it.
I'll be leaving the GR in color mode by default. The purpose of the EDC is to capture life memories and documentary, which simply makes more sense in color. B&W might look better artistically, but it is pretentious to insist that every waking moment of life be a piece of art. Sometimes you want to remember something as it actually appeared. I think this will help me keep my use of black and white deliberate.
I would be willing to buy a monochrome-only camera body, despite what I just said. My reasoning here has changed over time. I used to imagine myself buying a monochrome body to remove the option, temptation, and doubt to use color; to enforce the decision to shoot B&W at all times. So that when people ask me for the color copy of a photo I can tell them "ha, this camera can't even take color pictures". But after my experiences and reflections, I don't want that any more.
I still would buy a monochrome body because when it's time for some deliberate black and white, a true monochrome sensor would feel like the right tool for the job. I would like to fully embrace the black and white power when the situation calls for it. Now, monochrome sensors do have a technical advantage in sharpness and low-light performance since there's no bayer filter in front of the pixels, but I feel that's not actually a big enough point and only provides the guise of rationality to an otherwise lusty desire.
Despite being a reduction in featureset, monochrome sensors of course cost more because the consumer demand is smaller. There are people out there who do monochrome conversions of color cameras by physically destroying the bayer filter off the sensor, but because the camera's firmware is still programmed to be a color camera, this essentially breaks the in-camera jpeg engine and requires all shots to be done in raw and processed on the computer. That ain't for me. If Fuji released a monochrome X-T body with all the dials and switches to my satisfaction (see below), it would pretty much be an instabuy for me at a price up to about $2,000.
I must acknowledge the effect of gear on this so-called black and white identity, for a lot of things that we think are innate about ourselves are really just a product of circumstance. I think the fact that I did not start photography until the age of mirrorless cameras with EVFs is absolutely critical to my use of black and white. If I had started with a DSLR, looking through an optical viewfinder, I'm certain I would have taken all my pictures in color. And I mean that's exactly what happened when I borrowed my dad's DSLR at the rennaisance faire. And if I had grown up in the days of film, perhaps the time, effort, and cost would have kept me out of the hobby entirely.
Subject matter / subjects matter / subject matters (§)
I said last time that pictures of plants and flowers were not meaningful enough, and at this point I am staunchly against taking landscape and nature photos. I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm just saying I don't want to. When I go for a hike I'll bring my camera, but I'll only take a few pictures to represent the day. I feel that 99% of people can't possibly care about a photo, like truly care beyond its moment of eyecandy, if it doesn't have a person in it. And before you say I'm submitting to people-pleasing, yeah, I'm part of that 99%. Documentary photos of places are still important historical artifacts that our society should continue to produce. But as an individual, while I might find place photos interesting to look at, they rarely evoke any deeper feelings. When they do, those feelings are usually envy that I don't live in a more interesting and beautiful place. So the emotional range of place photos is typically neutral to negative. Instead, I really focus on taking pictures of people and giving them away.
For me there is the intrinsic satisfaction of creating art and memories that will last a long time, and the extrinsic satisfaction of giving people something they enjoy. To put it selfishly, I want people to like me? I use photography to get myself out of the house and into places I would not otherwise be, so that I can meet new people, have something with which to break the ice, and have a reason to keep them in my contacts. I do photography to socialize and connect. A lot of photographers say that they do it to "spread the love" or "tell our story" and... I don't really identify with this. When I talk about making connections, I don't mean it in the 1960s flower-power hippie looove, man kind of way, more like the 2020s computer-science major "I don't have enough friends" kind of way.
I no longer take photo walks through residential areas, either. It's just not interesting enough in a car-dependent place and the pictures do not mean anything to me. I do still take walks through the local colleges because at least the architecture and scenery is more interesting to look at. Still, the photos I take there usually aren't too great or meaningful. For me it is a chance to practice with different camera settings or styles I haven't tried before, so that I am more ready to use them in a real shoot. And every once in a while I come across something that might have lasting cultural value.
By chance, I have spent a great deal of time in the genre of music photography. I personally don't play any music, and I never considered myself to be that interested in live music. But music photography is available in a way that some other genres aren't. First of all, there's kind of a lot of people that play music. You can probably find at least one or a few people in your circle of family, friends, or acquaintances that play. Secondly, music provides a clear and obvious reason to take pictures of your subjects, whereas asking family, friends, or strangers to do posed studio or environmental portraits might feel embarrassing, fake, or forced. Music, like photography, intersects art and business — most people get into it for the love of the art, but also acknowledge the need to promote themselves in order to make the financials work out — so bands are glad to have pictures to use in their own promotion.
I feel I am indebted to the city of Claremont for putting on the Friday Nights Live series of free outdoor concerts. I stumbled upon them in early August 2023, just days after publicly ruminating over my lack of meaningful subjects to shoot. I decided to go for a walk through downtown after work, and heard the sound of music, and I've come back every concert since. I've met a lot of kind and encouraging people here, and it has brought me opportunities to shoot with some really great performers and receive positive feedback, not only from the bands but also from the regulars. On a few occasions, I have brought stacks of 4x6 prints of pictures I've taken of the dancers and given them to the dancers as gifts, and I've got some thank you cards in return.
I made it my goal to attend every single Friday in 2024, and I stuck to that, but I don't think I will do the same in 2025. These last few weeks, my motivation to cull, edit, and publish has dropped like a stone. I think I am burnt out on shooting music for a while. Most of the bands in the Friday rotation I have seen two, three, or four times at this point. I don't want to keep shooting the same thing over and over again, and I don't think the bands need hundreds of pictures of themselves, either. I think I have hit a ceiling where my photos are not improving week to week and I am not learning. Partly this is because I am just an ordinary guest at these concerts, though a regular, with no particular authority or control. So when the band seats themselves in a way that is difficult to photograph, it is not my place to ask them to rearrange themselves, or pose, or move their lights and speakers out of the way. It's not a controlled shoot and while it's great to "challenge myself" looking for creative solutions to these problems, and the skills should be transferable to shooting in the real, uncontrolled world of event and street photography, it does put a limit on how good my photos can be that week.
Furthermore, I want to spend more time in crowds a little closer to my own age, not to disparage the crowd here which has been so generous to me. I will have to look for a new way to use my Friday evenings, though I am not sure how to break the news to the dancers.
A lot of my photos are not great. When I look back at the older ones, even and especially the orchestra concert that I said I was "very proud of" two years ago, I think a lot of them are downright terrible. I'll still give myself the excuses that it was a dark room and not under my control. If I was exclusively publishing my pictures online for the satisfaction and praise of random internet strangers, this would be a bit of a travesty. But because I prioritize sharing my photos directly with the subjects, I've quickly learned that even if my photos aren't great, it's possible they're the best they've ever had of themselves, and they'll tell me they love it. With the vast proliferation of cameras in the world, one might naturally assume that every single person has already been photographed to death, but the reality is you might be giving someone the best non-selfie photo they've ever had, and especially so for men. Sometimes I think about this and I worry it will make me complacent with mediocrity, but when I do look back at older pictures and I can see reasons they're bad, I know that means I must still be improving at least in taste if not in execution.
It's okay to keep some bad photos, anyway, for a few reasons. First of all, and maybe this is just a coping mechanism, I'll say that it's exhausting when every single picture in an album is trying to be the crown jewel. Like if every photo looks like it's trying to wow you, it comes off as tryhard. In narrative media like books and film, the audience is given breaks between the setpieces, and a photo album needs that too.
I think most photographers will agree that the real "wow" photos are rare; maybe one in a thousand or one in ten thousand in the age of burst shooting. I tend to think that my albums are a mixture of artwork and document. Yes I want to get some wows when I can, but I also want to document a place and event so people can see what it was like to be there. It's just not possible for every single one of those to be a wow, and that's ok because they still serve a purpose. It would be silly to delete everything but the wows and say yep, that's what I got out of tonight's performance: one picture, or maybe zero.
I get some wide-angled establishing shots of the environment and key characters before going in for the closeups. I'm not very good yet at making these wides artistic (more on that later) but they too are critical to the album which would otherwise be heads floating in space. Some basic facts-of-the-matter boring pictures set the context for what comes. And finally, sometimes I keep a boring or bad picture because it might be all I got of a particular person and I feel it would be disrespectful to erase them entirely. When people look at the album, they'll say "oh hey there's Susan!" and it will make them happy even if it's not an expert photo. Obviously if it's really bad it might be worse than nothing, but that's a judgement call.
In a music shoot, your favorite type of picture might be the lead singer belting out a big note, but I swear that you must get some pictures of them with their mouth closed, too, or else you make them look like their jaw's stuck open. Even the pictures that aren't your favorite still play an important grounding role in the album.
Yes, rules are meant to be broken. All that about composition, exposure, and focus are really just suggestions and you don't have to obey any of it. But nobody is unique, and it turns out that nobody is really even that different, and after 200 years of people taking pictures it's not surprising that we mostly agree certain things look good and others look bad.
Of course it matters who you're taking pictures for. If it's just a job to pay the bills, then the client's opinion is all that matters. If it's just a hobby for yourself alone then it's the complete opposite. And in reality most of us will be somewhere in between, hoping to be liked and recognized but without selling our soul.
Anyway, I think I actually do a good job, at least some of the time. I've got photos that still impress myself. I never feel like I'm doing perfectly, and that's partly because I keep getting myself into new types of shoots I've never done before. In that sense I am glad to be eternally amateur — it means I am not stagnating.
When you read my blog articles, not only about photography but also about GPX recording and document archiving, for example, you'll see a recurring theme of recording and capturing things to be enjoyed in the future. The word "memories" comes up a lot in the discussion of photography, in particular. We're all out here capturing memories, aren't we.
I don't consider myself to be excessively nostalgic, and I really am not the type to earnestly use the phrase "the good old days", but if something is valuable and enjoyable today it'll probably be valuable and enjoyable in the future, too. I watch a lot of movies from the 70s and 80s not because I have nostalgia for a time I did not experience, but because the movies are well-made and still fun to watch — I'm sure there are just as many well-made movies happening today, they're just buried under a lot of junk and the great sieve of time needs to separate them out. But the fact of the matter is there are people I used to know and places I used to go that I cannot even picture anymore. I feel like I should do a better job capturing memories of these things.
Photography is a tool for timeless, high-quality art just as much as it is for personal/family memories. A studio portrait with dramatic pose and lighting might rank highly on the art scale, but not so high on the memory scale except insofar as you remember the creative process that inspired or brought you to it. A moment captured at a birthday party or baby shower might not be so artistic, but could be cherished as a family memory worth framing on the wall.
Other types of photography can fall elsewhere on these scales. When I shoot music I try to take photos that are good, artistically, but I also hope they evoke fun memories of a fun time, even if that means some technical misses. Street photography aims to be artistic while contributing to the history books of tomorrow with scenes of today. Contrast all this with product photography or promotional photography used in advertising, streamlined towards short-term financial interests, not carrying any emotional weight for anybody involved, except perhaps for the young fledgling model getting their first big break.
How much does this focus on "memories" or "the future" indicate a dissatisfaction with, or insecurity about the present? Is it the case that the time I spend now, capturing for the future, is not fully enjoyed in the present? I'll admit that when I'm shooting music, I'm not really listening to the music, and I might not be able to tell you which song was my favorite after the set ends. And in the nebulous future when I am looking back, will I be failing to enjoy that present for being too engrossed in the past? When exactly is the right time for all this? This is a lot of rhetorical exaggeration, of course — if we can waste a few hours today watching TV or scrolling the internet without an existential worry that we're failing to enjoy the present, then surely we can afford to spend a few minutes looking at an old photo. But as the stack of photos gets bigger, so too does the question.
We visited my grandfather in the hospital about thirty six hours before he passed away. I brought my camera knowing this could be the last chance for any pictures. My cousin gave him a shave using a disposable razor and a bowl of soapy water. At his wake, it came up: "did anyone take a picture of that?".
But I hadn't, and nobody else had either. I took a couple of pictures of the exterior of the hospital building on our way in, but I did not take a single picture inside the room for the two hours I was around. It's one thing to take a picture of someone with the thought of "you're going to die some day so I need to do this while I have the chance" echoing in my mind, but it's quite another when that person is literally about to die tomorrow and we both know it. He was still completely lucid and conversational, though struggling; he never did lose his mind. I imagined myself in his position: physically unable to perform a basic task and being made a photographic spectacle of so everybody can remember my moment of weakness for the rest of time, like a zoo animal for amusement.
I'm sure a lot of family members would have been happy to see that picture. I'm sure that if it had brought him any embarrassment, shame, or feelings of mortal fear, those feelings would have been erased the next day anyway. Funerals are for the living, as is everything. But I am one of those living and the feelings of that moment would have persisted through me. I didn't think it was a worthwhile exchange. By writing it here I am preserving that moment in another way.
In a lot of ways, photography is one of the "easy" arts. When an artist wants to make a picture in ink or paint, they have to sit down and actually make it appear on the page. Like, by hand. And the musicians I shoot demonstrate great skill with their instruments and voice, these skills acquired through many hours of practice and hard work. All I do is find a neat place to stand or crouch and press a button.
When I watch street photography videos I'll sometimes hear the phrase "making photographs", and I really dislike it. I know I'll sound like a jerk, but this phrase makes me think less of the person saying it. Especially in the context of street photography where most pictures are candid, and even the non-candid ones are only minimally posed from how they were found, pressing a button on a magic box for 1/250 of a second seems like an exceptionally low bar to be called "making" anything, and I feel it discounts the effort that goes into most other forms of making. I think the phrase "making a photograph" only sounds acceptable in a fully controlled environment where every element of the scene is deliberate. Otherwise, just admit the fact that you're taking what is given to you, and say "taking".
I put a tally on the bottom of my portfolio that adds up the exposure time from all my pictures according to the EXIF data. With over 3,000 published photos, I'm coming up on just 40 seconds, and 10 of that was light painting long exposure.
This tally serves two purposes. The first is the willful self-deprecation of photography as the easy art that doesn't take any effort, so that's out of the way. The second is a reflection on the strange feeling that I get when I think about the nature of photography, and how it locks in a particular millisecond out of the 86,400,000 milliseconds that occured that day to be preserved for all time. What made that one so special? The moments captured by a typical photograph are so brief that we truly have no other way to perceive them. When I am talking to someone face to face, I can see their gaze shift and their brow wrinkle and their mouth move and their hands gesture, but I never see the totality of their person at once because human vision is still limited by foveated rendering. When you look at a person, you never really see the whole person. But the camera captures the whole thing, all at once, for a level of scrutiny not available through any other means. It's pretty weird if you think about it.
Originality (§)
This section was drafted after I watched one of Paulie B's videos with Reuben Radding where they talked about how to be original in street photography. I thought I would publish this as its own article, but let's just lump it in here. I like when these articles get long.
There is a beautiful and illuminating irony in the act of submitting the question "how can I be original?" to a Q&A session like this. Surely once you're on the internet and you have a search bar under your fingertips, you're able to find hundreds of thousands of articles, youtube videos, think pieces, and motivational speeches on how to be original from people who think they're qualified to tell you. Instead, you choose to submit it into a Q&A for one particular artist to answer, forcing them to retread a territory so often trod before them, definitively unoriginal, not because their answer is the only one available to you, but because you respect that particular artist's opinion over the opinions of others, and hearing what they think is more important to you than hearing what just someone thinks. And now here I am being reached and influenced by it, instead of all the other opinions out there from other people that have never reached me. We've blown so far past full circle we're coming up on spherical.
Turn this around on yourself and you'll see what I mean. You want to hear Reuben's opinions because you like him. So if someone likes you, they'll want to see your work and hear your opinions, and they will not care if you're being "original". Ta-da, it's that easy.
The internet allows us instant access to many of the best works ever made in every category, and if you compare your work against the greatest of all time, of course you're going to feel like you're behind. But I'm going to keep hammering this same point over and over again: when you give the photos to the group of people that actually matters instead of trying to impress internet strangers, all that infinity of better works vanishes in a puff of smoke. The notion that Winnogrand took better pictures is preposterously irrelevant when you have the opportunity to give someone pictures of themselves and their friends, which no Winnogrand can do for them. How unoriginal!, they'll surely complain.
There are eight billion people in the world, and every second that passes in your life is eight billion seconds passing for everybody else. Everybody is missing out on 99.999% of everything that happens at all times. So even if you take a picture that you feel is trite and cliche, someone will say it's the first time they've seen anything like it.
I'd like to specifically comment on the originality of travel and architecture photos. There is a certain kind of light mocking people get when they take a picture of a famous place. "Could have saved yourself the effort and taken one from google images, and it would look better too".
The Camera Restricta is an art/tech project that encourages creative photography by physically disallowing you from taking a picture in places where too many pictures have already been taken.
The project is not only a piece about censorship in a political sense, but also questions our photographic practice. With digital photography displacing film, taking pictures has essentially become free, resulting in an infinite stream of imagery.
Camera Restricta introduces new limitations to prevent an overflow of digital imagery. As a byproduct, these limitations also bring about new sensations like the thrill of being the first or last person to photograph a certain place.
The Camera Restricta is itself a creative work, and I'm not here to criticize it. They're not saying every camera should behave this way, but it's a deliberate limitation you can give yourself by wielding the Restricta. Taking on deliberate limitations is an important part of being an artist. But the idea that "too many people have taken this picture" and "this has been done before" is what I'm scrutinizing.
Taking pictures of a place that has been "done before" is ok, because change over time is imperceptible. If you say that today is not different enough from yesterday to warrant a new picture; and tomorrow is not different enough from today, then you'll have to prescribe some minimum interval that you think is allowed — and I might disagree with you. If you wait for change to happen, you'll miss it.
This kind of rule only works because the person issuing the rule knows that people will break it. Where the heck do you think the pictures on google images came from? They're not mocking the idea of someone taking a place photo, they're just mocking the idea of you taking it. If everyone did follow the rule, and everyone diligently stopped taking pictures of the overdone place, there would come a day when the building is demolished and the most recent photos are decades old. For what benefit? Just a perception of originality, or not being a sheep.
You may have heard the phrase "if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns". The type of people who obey laws in general are probably more responsible, cooperative, social, and less likely to commit crime, but the type of people who commit crime don't care if guns are outlawed because they're already committing crime anyway. So then the responsible people are less able to defend themselves, is the point. I feel that the same kind of effect can apply to creativity as well. If there's a supposed rule about pictures you're not allowed to take, it is more likely that the thoughtful and considerate people will obey the rule while the self-centered "don't tell me what to do" types will ignore it. Which one would you rather see pictures from? As another example, if you convince all photographers that candid street photos are immoral and should be stopped, you'll be left with nothing but Bruce Gildens who don't care.
What if everyone just has poor taste (§)
Wizards With Guns made a sketch that gave me some long-lasting anxiety. "I seduce the dragon" is about a group of DnD friends having a laugh before their game. It's a feast of hyper-wholesome bro-love moments that'll make your friendships look pallid by comparison. On one hand, it's nothing but great that bros can get together and reinforce one another. But on the other hand, the backbone of the entire sketch is that they're obviously super lame. Too easily impressed, too exaggerated in praise ("that belongs in a museum", "you should write a book", "you should open a bakery", "you should be an actor"), too deep into their uncool hobby. The characters are played with, to put it indiscreetly, speech patterns and mannerisms associated with being mentally retarded. There's no other way to say it. Since this is fiction and everything in fiction is there because the authors wrote it on purpose, this suggests that Wizards With Guns believes positivity and uplifting compliments are correlated with being retarded. The characters in other WWG sketches don't talk like this, if that counts for anything. At the very least, we can be sure that positivity correlates with having poor taste.
One of them busts out some drawings that blows the others' minds:
Is that me? I hope that's not me.
The comments on the video are, rightfully, very positive themselves:
Need more sketches where it genuinely feels like the joke is on me. Watched 6 minutes of cringe goofballs and in the end was reminded that they don't care, they love each other, and they're happy. I'm the fool. 10/10
I'm almost glad there wasn't a punchline - these characters deserve to be happy
The whole time I had this sense of unease, "When are these harmless goofs gonna have the joke put on them?," but then it never came. Instead just humanity
20/10, I seriously expected a brutal dunking to occur, or for something to go wrong, but instead it’s bros being bros, and loving each other. It hits me right in my softest bones
These guys are true homies. They Gas each other up, rally, and encourage each others potential. This is beautiful.
This was the most stressful video I've seen in awhile, I just kept waiting for the punchline and it never came. So wholesome it hurts
Is it cringe if everything they said made me feel genuinely happy and nostlagic? thats the life man, thats the goal. Its a great phase in your life, being cringe is mandatory
Even if this is super cringe it's also peak friendship goals. So much positivity.
Because of course we all wish we could be so unabashedly happy with ourselves. But I find these comments inherently patronizing. These comments only exist because the commenters enjoy the perspective of an external observer, and comfortably perceive the characters as being more lame than themselves. If the characters in the skit were a bunch of sexy people having a good time, nobody would feel the need to congratulate them on "not caring", because of course what are you implying there is to care about? It is only by virtue of the fact that lame people having fun is considered not normal, and that we imagine we'd be unhappy with ourselves if we were that lame, that it is even worth mentioning. It's like looking at an ugly couple and saying "I'm so glad you found someone that thinks you're beautiful".
Then the video ends, and you go back to your own life, and you assume that you are not that lame, and when you receive a compliment on your work you assume the giver is not retarded. But what if you're on the inside of the joke, and the external observers are patting you on the back, congratulating you on "not caring" despite how lame you are.
The things I'm saying here are not very nice, so I hope you realize I'm writing this because I'm thinking about it and struggling with it, not because it's the right way to think.
By the way, WWG is great. Here's my favorite video by them.
Street photography (§)
I am still interested in the genre of street photography. But, like I said last time, the area around me is not good for it, so I don't even try at home. I've been making trips to Venice Beach, where I serendipitously discovered the Sunday drum circle, and that's been where I've got a lot of my favorites.
Throughout this article you'll see that I'm mentioning Paulie B's Walkie Talkie series a lot. On one hand you might say it's shallow or narrow-minded to rely so heavily on one source for influence, and I agree with that. There's more to street photography than the NYC Leica/Portra gang. But on the other hand, Walkie Talkie is probably the single best thing to happen to street photography in a long time and it deserves more recognition than I can give it.
Looking at the older videos on Paulie B's channel, you can see he was mostly doing POV snap-and-dash street photography. With all due respect, I'm glad he's moved away from that. Walkie Talkie, documenting the thoughts, motivations, and inspirations of a community of artists, is so much more important and meaningful than collecting yet another photo of a random dude smoking a cigar.
When we talk about the philosophy of street photography, we often say we are "finding beauty in the ordinary" or "capturing life's simple moments", or something like that. It sounds very pretty and noble, but I think it's worth asking if this is more than a bit disingenuous, considering that the hotspots for street photography as a genre are some of the most busy and exciting places in the world, NYC being the American epicenter, Tokyo another. In July 2023 I made a POV street photography parody video called YTSPPOVVLOG #49. It's pretty hilarious if I do say so myself, but the humor comes from a place of deep personal dissatisfaction. You can't convince me there is beauty in this ordinary.
Street photography is somewhere between art and documentary. Well, perhaps everything is. We're looking for compositions, expressions, and gestures that are artistically interesting to look at, but also capture the facts of the present that will distinguish the photo from future and past. The architecture, fashion, transportation, commerce, and public events of today will someday be studied as "the way things used to be".
But documentary isn't really documentary if it only captures the pretty parts, is it? If you want to show "what life was like" at this time and place, you'll have to capture the bad parts too in order to do the story justice. Homelessness, drug addiction, conflict, hate.
Everybody wants documentary to exist, but not everybody wants to experience it happening. We as the public want to be able to read about and see the hard times that happened in the past so that we can avoid them in the future, but nobody wants to personally be that face of homelessness or poverty or addiction; to be spotted at a low point in life, captured, and pasted up for everyone to see.
Respectful and empathetic street photographers recognize that even with the legal right to photograph anybody in a public place, it's just not polite to take advantage of struggling people for the benefit of your "portfolio". We can say the same about people struggling with obesity, disability, or other physical differences.
Does this lead to erasure? Erasure of homelessness, addiction, obesity, and the wheelchair-bound? Isn't it wrong to sweep under the rug everybody that may not enjoy being photographed, to preserve their fleeting feelings of shame at the expense of everlasting documentary authenticity, to falsely portray a world in which everybody is attractive and clean and well put together, instead of the real world?
...probably not. This line of thought is tempting, but before you are hooked and reeled in, you should ask yourself if you're really just being a slacktivist. These days (and in the past, but these days, too) a lot of us want to feel like we're doing something important, but don't actually want to put a lot of effort into it. There are actual documentarians out there dedicating their full-time careers to researching, interviewing, working with organizations for access, and spending substantial amounts of time with their subjects before publishing their faces. You can watch a lifetime supply of these on /r/documentaries or documentaryheaven.com and elsewhere. Pointing your Fuji in all directions and pressing the magic button is an awfully low bar to call yourself a documentarian, and it's not exactly a great oppression to say that you should leave the more sensitive subjects to the people who are willing to put in the work and do it right. Despite what I said in the Originality section about doing your thing in spite of a saturated genre, it might actually be a good thing to stay out of the genres that take advantage of others' hard times.
There are lots of arguments on the internet about whether a photo must be candid in order to be called "street photography". If you ever ask someone for permission to take their photo, it is no longer "street photography" and instead it is "street portraiture", or at least that's what people will tell you.
To me this is a lot of pearl clutching. It is like arguing whether the word "guitar" inherently refers to an acoustic or an electric, and forcing the other group to specify that theirs is the non-default. A power play over language rather than an actual benefit to the art. A fight between two groups over who gets to own the implicit adjective. This whole argument goes away if you just specify "candid street photography" when it matters, and also if you recognize that it doesn't usually matter.
When I do street, I like to be somewhere in between. I think some of my best pictures come from people that I was trying to get candid, but they noticed the camera and hammed it up.
Do you want to call these "street portraits" simply because they are technically not candid at that particular moment? I didn't give them any instructions and oftentimes I don't say anything at all — after I get the shot I put the camera down and smile, wave, or give a thumbs up, and usually that's the end of that unless they want to talk or exchange phone numbers to get a copy. They were already there doing their thing, and they shared a second of it with me. That counts as street photography as far as I'm concerned. All I'm saying is this terminology debate and dogmatic obsession with candidness is not helpful so let's just stop.
When we talk about street photography, we spend a lot of time talking about people who don't want to have their picture taken, and how to be respectful about that. I myself don't enjoy being on the wrong side of the lens very much. With all of these preconceived notions coming from discourse on the internet about unwanted photography, it is a genuine surprise when, out of nowhere, a stranger calls out to have their picture taken (shown below), or when the basketball players say "keep the pictures going, we like that". So if you're interested in doing street photography, but don't want to come across as predatory, creepy, or invasive, you should give it a try and you might find plenty of willing subjects. You just won't come home with quite as many photos as the ones who snap and dash.
Privileged eye, outsider eye (§)
Taking pictures of people is easier when everyone is comfortable with the photographer's presence, and that comes from trust. Trust that through choice of angle, lighting, and shot selection, you'll show everyone looking good. When you're capturing individual milliseconds of someone's facial expressions, even a supermodel can be made to look bad, but it's ok because I won't make you look bad.
I think it is worth reflecting on this privilege. I am the one that is allowed to see the derp faces, the sneezes, the unflattering angles of rear ends suspended in the motion of dance. I am the one with the magic box that I can point in any direction and freeze you doing whatever you're doing. I am allowed to spend as much time as I want looking at these moments, locked in time, that nobody else will ever see... And I delete them.
Perhaps this is not such a meaningful privilege, since everybody knows that if you pause a video of a person talking you'll almost certainly freeze them looking derpy. By publishing a video of themselves speaking, the host has already granted every viewer the ability to see their weird intermediate faces.
But I don't want to halt this train of thought just yet.
For this reason, I have difficulty photographing people that I think might not be happy to see themselves in pictures at all, even if they don't say it out loud. Bluntly, I'm talking about people who are overweight or have a physical deformity or maybe just don't look that great for some other reason. These are the kinds of things you're not supposed to say because it's not polite. It would be great if I could say that I'm just capturing reality and I'm not here to judge, but that isn't true. I have to judge. By mere virtue of the fact that I'm taking 500 pictures and delivering 50, it is inherently the case that I have to use my judgement to decide which of your smiles and facial expressions you'll be most satisfied with and which ones you won't. Sometimes my judgement tells me that you will not be satisfied with any of the pictures I've taken of you, so what do I do? Where is the line between projecting my standards onto someone else and thoughtfully applying the golden rule? My trustworthiness and privilege are on the line here.
One easy answer is that you should always get everybody's consent before taking their picture. We've been over street photography so I'll skip that kind of consent here. But even in an event photography setting, getting consent is not so clear. Either you're pre-surveying every attendee and memorizing their answers which I would say is quite infeasible, or you're asking them on the spot. And if you ask them on the spot then their answer is contaminated by peer pressure from those around them.
You can say I am way totally overthinking it, and that my implication that a person could possibly be ugly is itself the most inappropriate and offensive part of my thinking, but I don't have any way to exist that does not involve overthinking. Either I publish the photo or I don't, and I have to have a reason either way. It's either that, or you imply that the final selection of photos is made without reason. This is not an imaginary problem — I have specifically heard people say they don't like having their picture taken or don't like seeing themselves in pictures. And since we don't have all of our insecurities written on our sleeves, it must be the case that more people feel this way than will openly say it, and it has to be my judgement call.
Another easy answer is to say let's just stop taking pictures entirely, to avoid offending those who don't like it. But on the other hand, plenty of people absolutely love being in pictures, and we know definitively that people want to have these memories, so we're not going to let this be the death of photography, either. Can't be walking on eggshells all the time.
To some extent I have to operate on the assumption that since you wake up and see yourself in the mirror every day, you're already used to how you look even if you don't, per se, love it. It's not like the photo is going to be a surprise to you. It is altogether worse to be the subject of erasure — as if you were never there at all — than to be shown as less than perfect.
This is why I'm taken aback when I see street photographers publishing what I would say are unflattering pictures of strangers. I've been describing event photography where there is some level of obligation to include and represent everybody. But when photographing complete strangers on the street, I don't see a lot of artistic merit in getting people in unflattering positions, especially if the composition, framing, and background management are otherwise completely uninspired.
I think one of the reasons candid photography appeals to me, and perhaps other creative types, is that I've always been a behind-the-scenes kind of person. There's a reason movies come with special features, directors commentaries, and behind-the-scenes footage: people want to see what goes into the preparation and production of the main feature; they want to see the things that only the exclusive set of cast and crew got to see. Just as a boom operator does his best to move invisibly across a set, unseen and unknown but crucial to the production of a great work, I try to move invisibly through a crowd and produce great work of my own.
But there is a double edge here. Being behind the scenes and invisible is both a good and a bad thing. When I place myself in the center of a crowd of dancing people to take their picture, you know what I'm not doing? Dancing with them. I am certainly no good at dancing anyway — guilty feet have got no rhythm — but I still want to engage and socialize when I go out, and I'm finding that this doesn't work very well after I've established myself to the crowd as the candid photographer. Once you've trained them to let you get close without drawing their attention, it's hard to get their attention. Oops. And when I'm photographing my cousin's baby shower or my employer's Christmas party, I'm undoubtedly doing less socializing than most of the other attendees. I'm fine with that because I have more fun taking awesome photos than I do socializing, most of the time. But everybody knows that the photographer usually has the fewest appearances in the final album.
The camera has demonstrably brought me quite a lot of positive interactions with people I would otherwise not have met, and by sharing my photos with everyone my rolodex has quickly grown. But I have come to recognize that being the privileged eye often comes with being the outsider eye, and if I want to go out with the express purpose of meeting people or making friends, it probably has to be sans camera.
And don't tell me I'm artistic.
Videography (§)
Photography and videography seem pretty similar to most people outside of the hobby, but wow they are completely different skillsets. Some bands have asked me to shoot video for them, and of course I can't say no. Video is a lot harder because every little bump, wobble, or tilt of the camera is recorded permanently, and you can't just delete the bad milliseconds like you can with stills, so the stakes are a lot higher. The temporal element of video means you have to do the right things at the right time in the right order, whereas with stills you can play fast and loose with the presentation order if you so choose. Video is also more difficult for a few technical reasons. For example, your shutter speed can't be too fast or too slow, especially if you want to stick to the traditional 180 degree shutter, so you lose access to one third of your exposure triangle.
Shooting photo and video as a hybrid is kind of stressful for me because whenever I'm in video I feel like I'm missing out on good photo moments, and whenever I'm in photo I feel like I'm missing out on good video moments. And if I start a video even a few seconds too late and miss the beginning of a song, I feel like the whole thing is soiled, so I'm constantly on edge trying to figure out when to switch. And then the whole time I'm not sure if I'm getting the best angle or focusing on the best person.
One of my biggest sources of music videography inspiration is Naver Onstage which took (RIP) a very mobile approach to camerawork. The camera operator basically never stops moving, breaking into and out of the artists' personal space and sometimes eliciting their hammy reactions. Unfortunately this is REALLY HARD to do well when you're hand-holding the camera without any stabilization equipment. And it's also really hard to point the camera at the right person at the right time when you don't know how they're going to move and don't especially know when they're going to do a solo. I've come to appreciate the value of a wide, static vantage point which lets the viewer focus on whoever they want the whole time.
I am still learning what works and what doesn't. I try not to rule something out until I give it a shot. One thing that I have tried several times and almost always regretted is turning the camera away from the band to get the audience reaction. In my stills, the audience photos are often some of the best, because I think it's important to show the effect the band has on their crowd — that's the whole point of live performance. But I don't like the way it translates to video for a single-camera shot. In the moment, it always seems like an important thing to do, but when I watch the video back again I always feel like I missed out on seeing whatever the band did during those seconds, or else the whip-pan across the audience is so hurried as to not miss out that it winds up nauseating instead. I think audience reactions are better done with multiple camera operators. The exception to this is when you can get an angle from beside or behind the band so you get both at once.
Oh and the gigabytes. So many gigabytes.
Money and recognition (§)
One of the biggest reasons I do photography at all is because I want to make connections with people. Most of the photos I take are given away for free because it makes people feel good and doesn't cost me anything except some time.
The Friday night concerts have become my third place for what feels like the first time in my life. I know the names of maybe three dozen regulars now.
In July, I finally got cards made. Throughout the month of June I got more "do you have a card?"s than ever before. And I hesitated for a long time because I still don't really want photography to be a business or a hustle for me, and I don't want to give the impression that it is by handing out cards. But I finally went ahead for two main reasons:
First, because people are literally asking me for it. They want to see my photos and I want to show them. If I were handing out cards to strangers unprompted, it would be spam and solicitation, which I want to avoid. But if they're the ones asking me for it, and I tell them "I don't have any cards because I don't want to give the impression that I'm soliciting for business", that would really make the interaction more weird than just "yes, here you go". It really is so much faster to hand someone a card than to exchange phone numbers verbally or have them scan a QR code off of my phone screen, which they will lose in their browser history and ask for again next week. Ask me how I know.
Second, even though photography is not my hustle and I don't solicit for business, I'm not going to turn down cool opportunities that present themselves to me. If someone asks to hire me and it sounds fun, yeah I'll take them up on it. I keep telling myself this isn't what I came here to do, but if I stop pushing my boundaries, I'll stagnate. More outings, more new experiences, more connections with more new people. I'm not just gonna say no. One week before this publication date, I've just shot my first wedding — something I said from the beginning I would not do — and I think I did just fine.
One boundary I'd like to maintain is I don't want to take a job that prevents me from self-publishing the pictures to my website, unless it's something like a private party. For anything in the more public, performative, or documentative sphere, exclusivity and blackholing my work into somebody else's pockets are not in line with my ethos.
The fact of the matter is the money I get from paid shoots is not a big deal to me. My day job pays me well enough and I am not relying on photography for income the way categorical professionals do. I also don't want to charge too much because I'm not really confident I'll do a good job, especially in a difficult shooting environment like a dimly lit bar, or for a type of work I've never done before. I can barely trust myself to shoot street on a sunny day because dynamic range is hard. And finally, everybody knows that musicians are starving artists, probably not making tons of money from a gig in the first place. I have heard first-hand from bands that they're not getting paid by tonight's venue, or maybe it's only $100 a head. Without sounding too magnanimous, I don't feel like I need to take too much from them.
Does it hurt professional photographers when people like me are out there charging hobbyist prices? I can imagine the answer is yes. But part of the question is whether these bands would have sought a professional photographer in my absence. The reality I'm seeing so far is that a lot of local bands don't have many good pictures of themselves because they've never hired a photographer before. And I'm not soliciting them for business, they're the ones asking to hire me. What this tells me is they had a latent hunger for photos, and are willing to pay for them, but never reached out to hire a professional until I (an amateur) fell into their lap.
I am normally quite critical of any rhetoric that speaks of preserving jobs. The example I've used before is the telephone switchboard operator — sometimes jobs become obsolete, and although I'm sure the switchboard operators were unhappy to lose their job, life goes on. So if amateur photographers can run around doing shoots for free or cheap and professionals go out of business, that might be seen as the free market at work. The rebuttal is that professionals will deliver pictures of significantly higher quality in terms of lighting, posing, composition and blocking, and tasteful editing, and that this is all worth paying for. The counter-rebuttal is that the majority of the population are normies without taste, and they will be satisfied by amateur pictures just as they are satisfied by sloppy fast food, and they the market will not bear the cost of higher quality work. Sometimes I give people pictures that I think are lousy because that's all I had available, and they tell me they love them. As an agent in this market, I can accelerate this effect by doing a mediocre job for a mediocre price. But since I do have taste and can appreciate that professionals make better work than me, I'll stay out of their way and not massively undercut them all the time. This is how I defend that I'm not hypocritically giving a job-preservationist argument, but rather this is an argument for preservation of quality in craft. Maybe the same could have been said for the switchboards, but it would have been somebody else's position to take.
When I attend and shoot an event on my own accord, I'll give away all the photos for free, but when someone's specifically asking me to do it, it seems essential that I charge at least a bit. As much as I like giving things away, it has to be clear that it's my decision. I don't want people to think they can call me out for free work whenever they want.
Well, luckily, that hasn't been a problem so far. More commonly, people are handing me money that I never asked for. One of the bands I shot gave me the contents of their tip jar, unprompted, and another caught up with me on a later Friday to give me a hundred bucks. More than once, I've taken a candid picture of a dancer or audience member, and given it to them, and they've insisted on tipping me. My instinct is to decline — I want to tell them that art is better when it's free. But I also feel that if I decline the tip, I am denying them from expressing their side of the interaction, forcing things to always go my way. In a way, it is more selfish to deny the tip than to accept it, because it comes off as virtue signaling or magnanimous or like I'm the only one who's allowed to be generous.
The most surprising variation of this is when a complete stranger emerges from a crowd to start this exchange:
Them: Could you take a picture of us?
Me: Sure
Them: How much?
Me: ...Nothing?
These ones have been really surprising to me. The usual narrative from people online is that no one, not even, or perhaps especially not the ones who can afford it most, want to pay for the commodity that is photography when everybody has a camera in their pocket. So I never would have expected that random people would suggest paying me for a photo on the spot. It's not worth me taking your money for that, you can have it for free, guys.
Now, maybe there's actually nothing to this. Maybe if I had answered anything other than free they would have rescinded their request. Even for a dollar, five dollars?
Zooming out (§)
Telephoto makes everything look good. Too good, maybe. I'm trying to get better at embracing wider focal lengths so I can capture more of the subject's context and environment rather than a dramatic eye-candy closeup.
One of the reasons I struggle with zooming out more is my perception of the image size on the viewfinder or rear screen. Because these screens are physically small, I zoom into the subject more than I should so that they are nice and prominent on the little viewfinder. Then I get home and look at the image on my 27" monitor and WOAH that's too big. These pictures usually get deleted and I miss some good ones this way.
It's like I'm afraid that if I don't zoom in enough, the subject will be too small in the image, even though I already know from experience that 26mp is enough to capture individual eyelashes from a surprising distance and there is absolutely no reason to worry about this. I need to trust my equipment and my ability to judge focus without overfilling the frame.
Here's an example of my problem. This is a cool guy doing a cool thing; I'm happy with the timing of the shot and I like how the sunlight shows off his muscles but silhouettes his face. But the crop is too tight — without seeing his feet and the ground below, you can't get an appreciation for how high he is.
I came back a month later to try again. That's better.
The other reason I struggle with wide angles, especially in black and white, is that I feel like the picture just turns to noise. One reason I go for a wide angle is to capture a large crowd. I want the viewer to see how many people were at this event. So far I have not done a good job and I think these photos are pretty terrible to look at. But I keep a few of them because that's all I've got so far.
Website, portfolio, gallery (§)
Currently, my website is a simple chronology of albums and a few single photos, newest first. But sooner or later I'll have to come up with a redesign. Already there are so many pictures on the page that it can be problematic scrolling through.
Because I might have redesigned the page by the time you're reading this, here is an abbreviated snapshot of the homepage. Each album shows a couple large highlights, and then a bunch of tiny thumbnails. The highlights are direct links to the jpg file, but the tinies are linked to the album with an anchor to that photo. I came up with this design because I wanted every photo in the album to be immediately visible without clicking into the album, lest they be never seen at all. Maybe the highlights I chose don't speak to you, but something in the tinies catches your attention. And also because I want to give everybody representation even if their picture didn't make the highlights. Once you click into the album, every picture is big.
Most of the people I meet at the Friday concerts are, well, older than me. As the kind of person that writes my HTML by hand and encourages scraping/downloading, I am deliberate in using simple anchors and img tags instead of obscuring the tags behind lightboxes and other javascript dynamism. But now I have seen firsthand the way my page confuses people. They tap on a highlight to see it bigger, and it goes to the direct image file (16 megabytes, sorry data plan!) and they have to use their browser back button to get out. And when they tap on a tiny, it doesn't bring them to a direct image, but still they have to use their back button to get out of the album and back to the homepage so they can see the next album. And although I'm trying to show off a couple highlights and move on to the next album, they want to see every single picture so they pinch-zoom on the tinies which is not a good UX. Oh yeah, did you notice I'm only using phone verbs here (tap, pinch) because this is all happening on their phone and of course these pictures, especially being mostly horizontal, look a lot better on a computer monitor in the first place.
The design of an archive like this is challenging. If it were just a list of links with no pictures, there'd be nothing for the viewer to judge what they might be interested in clicking on. But if it's a complete dump of every single picture on one page (like I'm doing now), then it becomes difficult to scroll through. And if it's just one or a few highlights with a "click to see the rest" link, then I feel guilty for anyone who didn't make the highlights because it says they weren't important enough.
I have already made my case for keeping some bad photos as part of an album, but that doesn't mean they need to be front and center as the first thing a new visitor sees. I don't feel the need to play that off as some kind of rawness or authenticity. I think I should come up with a way to show off my bests or favorites, but I don't want those to become stale while new stuff is coming in, either. I am also thinking that there will come a day when I shoot a more significant project that deserves to stay at the top of the page for a while instead of immediately falling off the chronology under the next band shoot. No offense, bands.
If I redesign the front page to only show a smaller selection of photos, I will always provide some kind of index/archive page with a complete list of everything. If, for some reason, you want to scrape my site and download every photo I've published, I want it to be easy for you to do that. Because that's exactly what I do when I find something I like, too. This is in stark contrast to most other photographers' websites which deliberately obfuscate their archives, or make it difficult to download the photos, or only provide low-res copies. What's even the point of capturing history if you're not going to share it.
My portfolio site is statically generated from my photo database. I'm happy with that, but it's always been a barrier to adding any bespoke elements or sorting things in a non-chronological way. Now that I'm thinking through this out loud, what I'll probably do is use the generator to make the archive page, and handwrite the front page as its own HTML file. Then I'll have the freedom to adjust the front page as often as I want without disturbing the steadiness and reliability of the archive.
So far, I have taken pride in the fact that my photo gallery contains no text on the page except the album titles. No descriptions, no context, no genre tags, no apologies for the photos that aren't great because that would be way too many apologies. I just let the photos speak for themselves, the only editorialization being my selection of a few highlights from each album to be full-size over the rest of the thumbnails. But when I want to write something about it, I put it in /writing. But I think I will have to add genre categories in some way, because if someone (including my future self) just wants to see one genre it can be a nuisance to scroll past all the other stuff. The deliberate lack of categorization is an artistic stance that says "you can't label me" which is cool in a punk kind of way for a few minutes, but it stops being cool when it hinders the usability of the page. I mean, hindering usability for the sake of a message is exactly what an artist would do.
When people publish photobooks, they usually cover several months or even years with only a few dozen pictures. Meanwhile, on my site I publish a few dozen pictures from every single outing. I often get the feeling that I'm publishing way too much, and it makes it harder to find the good ones amongst the bad and middling ones. But my answer to this feeling is the same answer I've given so many times already — I want to publish albums that the subjects themselves would be glad to have, and I make the effort to share it with them directly. I don't want to cull everything down to the 0.1% greatest hits for the benefit of an imaginary, remote, anonymous internet audience.
Instxgrxm (§)
In the past year I've learned something that I really did not expect. It seems that for people under the age of about 40, instagram is by far the number one way they want to exchange contacts. Some older people have asked if I'm on Facebook, but besides that it has all been "what's your instagram?". Nobody has ever asked to connect on any other platform, and I mean never ever. It's really crazy how dominant it is. My answer is of course that I don't use instagram and we'll have to trade phone numbers instead. Or, nowadays, here's my card.
One time I asked a girl out to lunch, and she said no, but she offered that we could add each other on instagram. That had nothing to do with photography — that was just instagram being used as a phone number substitute.
On one hand I understand the desire for a phone number substitute because giving out your phone number feels like a sensitive thing, but on the other hand if you exchange instagram with everyone you meet then doesn't instagram become the most sensitive thing?
I already knew that people still use instagram in 2024, but I had assumed that between the aggressive prioritization of video reels, the rise of influencer culture, and the engagement-maximizing algorithmic changes, that instagram was just a place of consumption / doomscrolling at this point. I really had no idea that for so many people this was their primary way to communicate.
how (§)
I started drafting this article in May so that I would have plenty of time to think and write before publishing in October. Immediately, I wrote "I leave my camera in manual focus because I've given up on the X-T3's autofocus". But I realized it would be a much better use of these five months to challenge myself and learn how to use the autofocus better, instead of leaving that willfully ignorant stance just sitting on this page the whole time.
... so anyway, I leave my camera in manual focus because I've given up on the X-T3's autofocus.
My first assumption was that I don't need AF-S because I use M with a function button for focusing. I thought that M+FBF was equal to or better than AF-S because I can focus when I want to and let go of the shutter button without refocusing. But there were two things I hadn't considered: AF-S with face detect will also expose for the face which I'd have to do myself in M; and AF-S with focus priority will wait until the picture is in focus before firing, whereas in M I'd try my best and maybe get it wrong and not know it was blurry until later. So I gave AF-S a try for a while to see if I had just been narrowmindedly been stuck in M this whole time... and now I'm back already. Fuji's AF still misses a lot and it goes hunting for faces in the background. Believe me, my success rate with M+FBF is also less than 100%, but at least then I know it's my fault and not the camera's.
My second assumption was that I don't need AF-C because when the subject is moving quickly I won't be able to trust the camera to keep up, and if they're moving slowly then I'll be fine with M+FBF. And, yeah, I wasn't able to crack this one either. All I know is that even when I'm shooting what I'd consider an easy subject, the face/eye detect will jump all around, off into deep space, and it'll spend maybe 20-40% of its time not in correct focus. Then you throw sunglasses or hats into the mix and it gets harder, and then the person turns around so the camera finds something else to focus on, and by the time they face forward again now you're starting from scratch.
Keep in mind the X-T3 is now two generations behind, so I don't have experience with Fuji's AF of today. But everyone knows that Fuji is behind competitors in terms of AF, so if I was using one of the other leaders I might have the totally opposite stance here and use AF-C for everything.
I know very well that trying a tool for a few minutes and quickly giving up is not a good-faith evaluation of the tool. I know that there is a learning period, and you have to go all the way through it to the end. The problem is I don't feel like I have opportunities for low-stakes practice on real people long enough to get through it. What I mean is that if I try to shoot an entire Friday Night concert in AF-S or AF-C without falling back to M, I'm going to ruin or miss out on a bunch of shots and I'm going to disappoint that band by giving them my worst album of the season. Or if I try to do this at the beach I'll ruin all the shots there and feel like I wasted the day. And I don't have anyone that I feel comfortable asking to model for me for practice.
Excuses, excuses. I don't pretend any of this is justified. I am lazy, stubborn, and undisciplined and trying to rationalize it.
I listened to an audio recording I made last year and was genuinely surprised to hear the autofocus beep. It's been so long since I've heard it, I forgot it ever existed. I turned it off one night while shooting an orchestra concert and off it stayed.
I am still not very interested in editing. I only do basic levels adjustments to fix over/under exposure, and occasionally I'll crop to fix a bad composition or remove a distracting background figure. I don't like to crop, because it represents a failure to compose right the first time, and because it throws away hard-earned megapixels, but sometimes you just have to.
If I'm shooting something very important then I'll shoot raw+jpeg, because yes the raws will absolutely rescue an exposure that is unfixable in jpeg. I just prefer to not need rescuing.
Underexposed is better than blurry. When the sun is setting, crank the ISO and open the aperture and hold on to your shutter speed for as long as you can. A dark photo can be brightened in post, but a blurry photo is ruined forever. This works better in black and white than in color.
By the way guys raw is not an acronym.
Fuji dial slip-ups (§)
At some point, my camera will be old and battered enough to warrant replacing, and naturally I'll look for a new Fuji. But some of Fuji's recent changes have me worried that the X-T3 might wind up being the peak of their design, and they might be on a downtrend for a while.
In the transition from X-T3 to X-T4 they replaced the photometry/metering dial with the stills-movie switch. In the X-T3, movie mode is part of the drive dial.
I can't help but feel that this is an obviously poor decision and that movie mode belongs on the drive dial. The drive dial is the master switch that sets the context for every other feature on the camera. The drive modes are mutually exclusive with one another, not only because the switch cannot physically be in two positions at once, but because it is logical that you can take photos or videos but not both at once. By pulling movie mode out into its own dial, now there is a matrix of Drive/Movie dial positions that are all meaningless. What is Movie+CL? Nothing. What is Movie+Bracket? Nothing. What is Movie+Panorama? Nothing. If the movie mode is going to continue being mutually exclusive with all other modes, it should have stayed on the drive dial.
Then, in the X-T5 they kept it this way despite the marketing fluff about "coming back to our roots" and being "photography first", explicitly acknowledging that the X-H series are the hybrids, not the X-T series.
I have no problem saying that the photometry dial is the least used dial on my X-T3. But there is no point throwing away a seldom-used feature to make way for a switch that is mutually exclusive with all other choices on the drive dial, and especially not in the product line that claims to be photo-first.
And now, in the X-T50, they've replaced the ISO dial with a film simulation dial.
The X-T*0 line is meant to be more amateur than the X-T* line, but wow, I really do not think people need to change their film simulation more often than their ISO. I don't know what kind of psychedelic photo albums Fuji is expecting people to shoot, where every photo in the sequence is a completely different color tone. I'm not sure if that's low art or high art. Deprioritizing the exposure triangle like this is not cool, even in the amateur product line, because you're supposed to give the artist room to grow, not pad them in. Besides, most people probably have one or two favorite film sims, and the rest will never get used. Hey instead of a stills-movie switch can I get a Provia-Acros switch?
So, yeah, I'm not sure what my options will be when it's time for a new camera. To be honest I'd like to get into medium format, i.e. the GFX line, but the dials there are even less impressive. X-T3 peak?
Conclusion (§)
In the previous article I said I might look back on those opinions in three months and find them unrecognizable. Here we are at two years and that's not the case. Hooray! Seems like my core beliefs are pretty stable, and right now it's just a matter of improving my skills and seeking bigger, more important work.
That's all I've got to say for now.
Contact me: writing@voussoir.net
If you would like to subscribe for more, add this to your RSS reader: https://voussoir.net/writing/writing.atom