p.6 #2 · Thinking out loud: thoughts on cropping, zooms & primes
Yah the intro to THE book is pretty strongly opinioned.
A lot of what he said seems to have aged well, some of it seems a bit “get off my lawn” by today’s standards.
If we’re giving opinions we have to talk about what’s changed.
It’s so personal. I don’t think there’s a huge amount of PHOTOGRAPHY talent involved in shooting 10+ fps with 100mp on a wide angle then scouring captures to see if something interesting turned out. But there may be some great art as a result, once the post processing is finished. And that’s just the measure for me against myself. Cropping a bit I get, it’s hard to be “perfect”. Shooting without real intent at the time to make art later is, to me, something different than photography. Though I don’t judge it as worse, it’s not what I consider photography.
Now then, everyone please proceed to tell me how wrong I am
Everyone who is right for them is wrong for someone else about something. gdanmitchell wrote:
It is certainly a characteristic of his approach to avoid cropping. If I recall correctly his notion (related to his background in art) was that the miracle of the camera was that it could instantly capture fleeting moments in ways that painting could not.
But the fact that he cropped even one image in post in order to exclude distractions or produce a better composition argues pretty strongly against the sometimes-religious belief that cropping the original image is bad or a compromise or a shortcoming.
In any case, I’ll go back to what I wrote earlier: Cropping is an integral part of photography, and almost all photographers do it. If someone prefers to not crop, that’s fine by me. But when they start questioning the integrity of photographers who disagree, I’m not going along with that, nor would most photographers. (If they excluded all photographers who were open to cropping in post, they’d have to write off a whole lot of very fine photographers)...Show more →
p.6 #3 · Thinking out loud: thoughts on cropping, zooms & primes
h00ligan wrote:
It’s so personal. I don’t think there’s a huge amount of PHOTOGRAPHY talent involved in shooting 10+ fps with 100mp on a wide angle then scouring captures to see if something interesting turned out. But there may be some great art as a result, once the post processing is finished. And that’s just the measure for me against myself. Cropping a bit I get, it’s hard to be “perfect”. Shooting without real intent at the time to make art later is, to me, something different than photography. Though I don’t judge it as worse, it’s not what I consider photography....Show more →
Of course it is personal, just like every other art form. It does not matter what you or I consider to be photography. At what point do the think the image on your sensor or film no longer becomes a photograph?
As long as you own the images and are not breaking any laws, you can do whatever manipulations you want to them and call them photographs or whatever you want.
. I don’t think there’s a huge amount of PHOTOGRAPHY talent involved in shooting 10+ fps with 100mp on a wide angle then scouring captures to see if something interesting turned out.
If someone does that and comes out with better photographs than you get doing it your way, who cares? I could care less how much time and effort a photographer spends on capturing an image if I don't like the image. Simply from a visual point of view, what makes a portrait of a tiger taken at a zoo any less appealing than one that someone spent a month tracking in a jungle?
p.6 #4 · Thinking out loud: thoughts on cropping, zooms & primes
h00ligan wrote:
Yah the intro to THE book is pretty strongly opinioned.
A lot of what he said seems to have aged well, some of it seems a bit “get off my lawn” by today’s standards.
If we’re giving opinions we have to talk about what’s changed.
It’s so personal. I don’t think there’s a huge amount of PHOTOGRAPHY talent involved in shooting 10+ fps with 100mp on a wide angle then scouring captures to see if something interesting turned out. But there may be some great art as a result, once the post processing is finished. And that’s just the measure for me against myself. Cropping a bit I get, it’s hard to be “perfect”. Shooting without real intent at the time to make art later is, to me, something different than photography. Though I don’t judge it as worse, it’s not what I consider photography.
Now then, everyone please proceed to tell me how wrong I am
Everyone who is right for them is wrong for someone else about something.
p.6 #5 · Thinking out loud: thoughts on cropping, zooms & primes
I mostly use zoom lenses.
Lets say I have a 24-105 lens on a camera.
I take a photo at 24mm, but while I'm reviewing the photo on the back of the camera, I notice something that I want a closer shot of.
So I zoom out to 105mm, position it to fill the frame with whatever I saw.
Did I just crop that first photo?
As for real cropping, I crop the hell out of my photos. I mostly have them at a 3 x 2 ratio, but I'm not ashamed to say that I'll crop to what I feel it should be.
When I used an ultra wide monitor, I would crop some photos to a 21 x 9 ratio to use as a background desktop.
I say do what you want, it's your photo.
p.6 #6 · Thinking out loud: thoughts on cropping, zooms & primes
I am exhausted from reading this thread. People take photography too seriously....IMO. I want
my hobby to be fun. I don't care what someone else buys or how they use it.
p.6 #7 · Thinking out loud: thoughts on cropping, zooms & primes
davev wrote:
I mostly use zoom lenses.
Lets say I have a 24-105 lens on a camera.
I take a photo at 24mm, but while I'm reviewing the photo on the back of the camera, I notice something that I want a closer shot of.
So I zoom out to 105mm, position it to fill the frame with whatever I saw.
Did I just crop that first photo?
I'd suggest that's zooming, or like a lens swap with primes. Perhaps a subtle difference but had you cropped and enlarged, it would still have been a 24mm image, so potentially, depending on subject, the surrounding image elements, etc, might differ, perhaps showing in depth of field or "perspective" differences.
As for real cropping, I crop the hell out of my photos. I mostly have them at a 3 x 2 ratio, but I'm not ashamed to say that I'll crop to what I feel it should be.
When I used an ultra wide monitor, I would crop some photos to a 21 x 9 ratio to use as a background desktop.
I say do what you want, it's your photo.
I crop all the time. Mostly to get to 16:9 for "sharing," use as a screen background or screen saver rotating image, etc. sometimes to fit a straightened horizon, etc.
As to appropriate jargon or not, assisting or crimping communication, I don't recall "pedagogy" (or related forms) used in any of my credential classes, outside perhaps catalog course descriptions. Which may reflect poorly on the program in some ways. The discussion did lead me to wonder what might have occurred if I'd used a term like "masterful pedagogue" outside the faculty lounge/workroom in a K12 environment.
HCB's photographs are widely regarded as important and powerful. I've seen them exhibited "in person" and I love some of them a great deal. (A personal favorite is this one, about which a chapter or maybe a short book could e written.)
It is well worth it to understand his thinking and his approach. His observations about the temporal nature of photographs are often spot on. But there are parts of it that conflict with the approaches of other highly regarded and successful photographers. Here's a small quote from the book at the link above — how many of us fully agree with this?
"We must neither try to manipulate reality while we are shooting, nor manipulate the results in a darkroom."
He had a perspective and the successes to back it up. His points of view and his approach are well worth understanding and considering and even, to varying degrees, worth adopting. But they aren't gospel, nor are they laws, and they don't apply equally well to all types of photography.
Thank you.
My copy of the book is from July 1952 and called Images a la sauvette. I managed to get through that preface once, a long time ago, with considerable effort. Now I'm going to read it again and maybe understand it better!
p.6 #12 · Thinking out loud: thoughts on cropping, zooms & primes
gdanmitchell wrote:
Thanks for the link.
HCB's photographs are widely regarded as important and powerful. I've seen them exhibited "in person" and I love some of them a great deal. (A personal favorite is this one, about which a chapter or maybe a short book could e written.)
It is well worth it to understand his thinking and his approach. His observations about the temporal nature of photographs are often spot on. But there are parts of it that conflict with the approaches of other highly regarded and successful photographers. Here's a small quote from the book at the link above — how many of us fully agree with this?
"We must neither try to manipulate reality while we are shooting, nor manipulate the results in a darkroom."
He had a perspective and the successes to back it up. His points of view and his approach are well worth understanding and considering and even, to varying degrees, worth adopting. But they aren't gospel, nor are they laws, and they don't apply equally well to all types of photography.
How about "The slow speed of color film reduces the depth of focus in the field of vision in relatively close shots; and this cramping often makes for dull composition. On top of that, blurred backgrounds in color photographs are distinctly displeasing."
p.6 #13 · Thinking out loud: thoughts on cropping, zooms & primes
ruthenium wrote:
How about "The slow speed of color film reduces the depth of focus in the field of vision in relatively close shots; and this cramping often makes for dull composition. On top of that, blurred backgrounds in color photographs are distinctly displeasing."
Completely agree. I yawn every time I see the same close-up "bokeh test images."
p.6 #14 · Thinking out loud: thoughts on cropping, zooms & primes
ruthenium wrote:
How about "The slow speed of color film reduces the depth of focus in the field of vision in relatively close shots; and this cramping often makes for dull composition. On top of that, blurred backgrounds in color photographs are distinctly displeasing."
He certainly had a perspective, and he was a hell of a photographer. But so have been (and are) a lot of others with different perspectives and much different but equally effective photography.
If you look closely, Ribaud cuts several photos from a single large frame and still keeps them together in the end. I find this fascinating time and time again.
