Not too fond of starbursts, especially ones not visible to the eye that the lens sees. Yet many lens reviews comment on starburst rendition and some people want them accentuated.
M10 | Summilux-50 pre-ASPH | ISO 3200 | f/5.6 | 1/180 sec Paris
This is the 17th photo of a 24-image series, titled EXPOSED; and was the point of departure for this series, which itself is a distillation of my next book, a thick, 700-page tome with some 360 images of which you can see a brief flip-through video by clicking on my Instagram icon at the left of this post.
Conceptually, the shopping cart image emanated from looking at Daido Moriyama’s book Light and Shadow, published in 1982, ten years after his previous book and three years after he had stopped photographing altogether. Moriyama got back to photography after studying the first photograph ever made, the one by Niépce, an eight hour exposure of the view out of a window: it had a building and showed just light and shadow. Moriyama’s book was based on a narrative between light and shadow. At that time, Moriyama was taken with photographing objects and textures. Rather than trying to illustrate an idea or concept with objects he was concerned with the objects themselves, an approach that took his photography as far as possible from the realm of words. That is also the underlying idea of Roland Barthes’ book about Japan, Empire of Signs — that meaning in photography can be transmitted without words, without description, without explication. Barthes connected this idea with Zen, which, after much exercise, strives for a moment when language ceases — “the end of language” — generating, in a mental flash, the truth and emptiness of Zen. In this sense, my shopping cart image can evoke a sub-linguistic reality — though to some people it might be another meaningless street photograph.
If you look at my Instagram you can also see my EXPOSED series. On Instagram no one has commented on the series: there are only a few comments on individual images. Comments on the series itself would be greatly appreciated.
M10 | DR SUMMICRON 50 | ISO 200 | f/4.0 | 1/1500 SEC Chiang Mai
RSSmith wrote:
And I'm home - 4 days post triple-bypass.
Might be a week or two before I'm out taking photos again.
Thanks for the good wishes.
Continue to heal well!
