carstenw
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
|
 p.176 #5 · Leica M/X/T/S/Q/CL/SL Picture Thread | |
Argh, I had written very long and carefully considered answer, and then my daughter stuck my headphone jack into the mini Display port or USB port and crashed my laptop. I thought she had killed it. Anyway, take two:
carstenw wrote:
It's funny, in your writing, I can see that your current way of thinking about images is so deeply embedded in you that you can't even reason clearly about it  Before you feel insulted, let me elaborate: you wrote about what the ideal image is for you, in response to my project-oriented post. The thing is that in a project, the individual (even ideal) image is not important, it is the whole which is important.
denoir wrote:
I don't feel insulted but I can't say that you've clarified what you mean. My point was that I'm not doing themes or projects so the focus is on the individual image and not on the collection as a whole. For me the end unit is the image for you it's a collection of images. Different targets, which was my point.
Yeah, I think I misunderstood the intention of what you had written and answered wrong. I should have re-read more often, especially because I was quite tired last night when I posted. Sorry about that.
In the case of the really famous photographers it's about individual images for me. Again here the unit that I experience is the image, not the collection.
In a trivial sense, all photos are seen as individual units, but imagine going to the photo exhibition, and there was just a single photo on the wall. Or, there were a bunch of shots, none related to each other: one river, one B&W sock on the sidewalk, one tree with shallow depth of field, one duck, one mechanical detail, and one gravestone. You have just imagined this forum Not very satisfying as a whole, just a bunch of individual images. There is a power in projects that doesn't exist for individual images.
Now imagine that HCB puts 5 lenses in his pockets, 21, 28, 35, 50 and 90, and walks out the door. Along his route, he takes a shot of a flower with the 90, a 21 shot of the Eiffel Tower, a bit of graffiti on the wall with the 35, a funky cloud formation with the 28, and then the shot of a boy carrying two bottles of wine with the 50. Ridiculous, of course. He got the sorts of shots he got only due to his single-minded dedication. He was interested in people, and used only the 50mm lens, almost his entire career. One camera, one lens, one subject.
I used to go to cemeteries with my Contax 645, 35/3.5 Distagon, 120/4 Makro-Planar, Adox CHS 25, spot meter, and my Gitzo GT3541XLS. That's it. If I saw something else nice on the way, I made a mental note, and continued on. I only shot what my project needed. Working this way, I could focus much more, and cut distractions. I was after only one thing. Later on, when I was more familiar with the subject matter, I experimented with 4x5, the D3 and the SLR/n. I am not sure if I will use those images in the end. I might also split the images into B&W film and colour digital, using each for their strengths, and end up with a two-component portfolio. Mal sehen.
I hope you'll post them on the web as well - it would be very interesting to see. That's really a small number of photos you are aiming for though.
I will. Some are already on my website, although I will cull the weaker shots and replace them with other, stronger shots. Ultimately, I want a set which is small enough to take in at one sitting (or enough for one small exhibition), without feeling overwhelmed. I have some experience with too-large exhibitions, which tells me that it is about the worst thing you can do, just like all you can eat. You really want to choose a good, small number, and make the show perfect, like a pearl or a diamond. I figure 12-20 is good, up to perhaps 30 is acceptable. Personally, I find 100 too much. To digest all that information, you need to sit down several times, and look over it again and again. That is valid, but not what I am after. A few strong images can have an impact which is diffused by having too many.
I have actually been toying with the idea of doing something thematic. Not because of an interest in making a coherent collection but more to have a longer project to work on. [...] So I thought perhaps that I'd make a photo book with photos of castle ruins in Sweden. I love ruins and it would be something I could do for a while.
Sounds like a plan. To have it be a full-on project, you of course need to have continuous access to the subject matter, not just one time. In other words, you might shoot the first three or five ruins, and then have a change of mind or a realization, and then return to the first two.
That's interesting as the images on my websites are organized in a much more thematic way than the ones I post here. What I post here is really random from a collection point of view. I often post a photo that is only interesting because of its look and without any real content. On my website I have at least tried to group things by general themes and selected images that are palatable by a more general public.
Be that as it may, I prefer your images here. I find that the processing is more interesting, possibly because you take more time with them, and your colour work is stronger. I even prefer the subjects. I would find a project based on your river through Stockholm interesting, for example. Btw, if Zenfolio systematically ruins your images, move somewhere else.
I don't think trying to force a theme a posteriori would be a good idea.
It depends what the intention is. If you take all your strongest shots of the river, for example, and put them together in one gallery, probably it immediately becomes obvious that some are stronger, others weaker, and some are strong yet just don't fit. This is a starting point, and that is how I got started with my cemetery project. I took what I had, culled it, sorted it and looked at it. Then I went out to make more. I don't think I have any of the original images in my project any longer, but they got me to where I am.
I didn't shoot cemeteries exclusively, but continued to shoot other stuff in between, but that was my one project. I have worked on it for about two years now, and am ready to wrap it up, I think. I need to develop the rest of the film, scan all the negatives, and play with B&W conversions of my digital shots. Then I will print and mount them all, and close that project. I can of course add to the project any time I want, but for all practical purposes, I am moving on.
Mechanical details are next. I have posted some in the ZF/ZE/ZM thread (and cemetery shots in the ZF/ZE/ZM and Kodak SLR threads) already, but I have not shot them long enough to know where this is taking me or which types of shots I want to focus on. I do love old steam locomotives though, so that will almost certainly be a part of it. Maybe I will even restrict my shots to those. It makes it easier to search for subjects too, when you know exactly what you want. When I think of mechanical details, I don't know what to look for. When I look for locomotives, I know exactly where to search.
---
Sorry, I wanted to make this shorter, but I ran out of time. My daughter is waking up from her noon nap.
|
I'd be up all night shooting an m9.. pictures of everything!
You guys are stripping the color out of my photos. I have to decide how I feel about that! 
