Artmaking Category

I found an exposed roll of film in my freezer yesterday mixed in with my stash of unexposed 120 slide film. I’m 99% sure it’s stuff I shot for the Spacetime series I’ve been working on for a few years (that’s the only thing I shoot chromes for), but I have no idea when or […]

To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting.

— Dorothea Lange (via Blurry Thinking)

I think it would be interesting to be dropped off someplace completely foreign (not knowing where I’m going ahead of time), shoot all day, have my memory of it wiped, and then look at what I shot. Kind of like Winogrand—who waited a few years before processing and printing his exposures so he’d have no […]

Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer just posted a characteristically insightful piece on becoming a "successful" photographer. (I put that in quotes because he’s talking about more than one kind of success.)
The real gold is in the last section, How to know. The significant idea is this: "If you use the 1-2-3 method of editing, […]

I’ve got some relatively set preferences for lens lengths, but as I shoot more formats, I’m discovering that I have sometimes very different tastes for them.
For straight 35mm and 6×6, I don’t like anything longer than "normal": 80mm on 6×6 and 45mm on 35mm. (I actually find 50mm a bit long on 135 and prefer […]

I’ve participated in comment-driven photo community sites for about three years now, a year or so on fotolog when some friends put me onto it, and then a bit over two on Flickr. This was before I’d Gotten More Serious About Photography and both my picture-taking and my commenting were more social in nature. I […]

I picked up an Olympus Pen FT 35mm SLR at the end of February [2007]. Because it’s half frame, the viewfinder is vertical rather than horizontal, and I was really curious to see if it would affect how I see through it. I’ve been using it as my primary normal-lensed camera for a few […]

I’ve noticed an odd trend lately: most of the people I know who aren’t geeky in any way (aren’t technically inclined, aren’t particularly curious about how things work, and, not wanting to be bothered with technical details, tend to favour point-and-shoot or fully automatic cameras) seem to be really into classifying things. When my not-so-geeky […]

It’s here at the Large Format Photography Forum. And it’s long. But it’s really interesting.
Big ups to Katie Cooke for the tip.

I was just reading the current (May 2007) issue of EQ magazine when I came across an interview with high-end microphone designer Klaus Heyne. In it, he very nicely summed up what I’ve been trying to verbalize about photography, image manipulation (be it chemical, optical, or digital), and good "straight" lens rendering in general (sharpness, […]