Category: Op-Ed

Opinion and Editorial

Gear is amazing rn

Nicolai Grossman Leave a comment

Having not followed gear much for a few years, this is an amazing time to pop your head out from under a rock…

Streaming video is standard on DSLRs. Sensors are amazing. Low-light performance is amazing. Noise reduction is amazing. Lightroom… ok, can’t win ’em all. Image stabilization is amazing. Lenses are amazing. Amazing lenses designed for digital on amazing sensors are amazing. Memory cards and bus speeds are amazing. Li-ion battery capacities are amazing. Autofocus speeds are amazing. More than enough megapixels for almost all work.

Holy cow.

Photon Detector launches photography podcast

Nicolai Grossman Leave a comment

Most of the blog here was easy to publish because it was just links to exhibitions and news about equipment. Huge, tedious time suck, but not difficult.

The more interesting stuff was hard. Exploration, non-facts, obstacles… the actual art-as-verb parts. I never finished or published most of what I started writing about that. It’s hard and it never seems to come out quite right and the lexicon we have to talk about it feels clunky, inadequate, and annoying. I let the perfect become the enemy of the hopefully-better-than-nothing and didn’t do much with it.

I’m disinterested in expending more of my life being a human RSS filter for show & equipment news but the artmaking stuff is still compelling to me. I didn’t make perfectionist writing about this nebulous, messy shit work so I’ll flap my face-hole in front of a microphone instead. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll be something.

I’d like this to be a conversation. Comments, questions, thoughts, topic requests, whatever, please get in touch: nicolai at photon detector dot com.

Check out the Photon Detector podcast

Thanks to the just-launched Photograper Stories podcast for inspiring me to finally get off my ass and do it.

Security expert Bruce Schneier: are photographers really a threat?

Nicolai Grossman 2 Comments

Bruce Schneier answers the question:

… Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Continue reading at The Guardian

Shut the fuck about about battery-independent cameras

Nicolai Grossman 1 Comment

If I hear one more person bang on about how fully manual cameras are so superior because you can shoot without batteries, I’m going to puke. This is one of the most bullshit arguments I’ve ever heard, and is usually trotted out as a preemptive defense of paying too much for a camera that does too little.

It’s true that if you run out of batteries with a battery-powered camera, you have to stop shooting. No batteries, no picture. But … this just in … no film, no pictures! You have to carry film anyway. Batteries are small and light, and you can fit several in the space of a single roll of 35mm or medium format film. If saving such a negligible amount of space were really the paramount concern, you’d be shooting a compact digicam with as big a memory card as it would take, so stick a few extra batteries in your bag and shut the fuck up already.

This argument is normally accompanied by people working themselves into a fetishistic lather about what "precision photographic instruments" these cameras are. This is also a load of shit: well-adjusted mechanical shutters can be off by 1/3 to 1/2 a stop and still be considered perfectly in-spec, which is enough to blow an exposure on slide film. Battery-driven electromagnetic shutters are far more accurate. I’d think that anyone who pays that much for "precision" equipment and wanks to MTF charts would (and should) be aware of this, but apparently this is not the case—at least not among the people I’ve seen discuss Leica and Hasselblad online. (You think 1/500 on your Hasselblad V-series lens is really 1/500? Not likely.)

None of this is to say that they’re bad cameras or that people are stupid for using them. What I am saying is that every camera is a trade-off, and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging the areas in which a given one comes up short. And there’s certainly no reason to lie to yourself and others just because you paid a lot for something: stay with us in reality, no camera system is perfect. Your Leica M [6 or earlier] is great in many areas, but it’s lacking the exposure precision most people claim. Your Hasselblad sucks for unobtrusive candids and animals because it sounds like a fucking shotgun. Just admit it. Doing so doesn’t take away from its strengths or mean you wasted your money.

I have and use many all-manual, battery-free cameras (including a Hasselblad 501C/M, lest anyone be tempted to write this off as sour grapes). They each have their virtues (or I’d get rid of them), but the ability to shoot without batteries is not among them.

Feinman’s Conceptual Photography: An Artistic Manifesto

Nicolai Grossman 2 Comments

Check out Robert D Feinman‘s Conceptual Photography: An Artistic Manifesto:

As this was a first attempt at this unprecedented creative approach, three classic subjects were used to see how the interactions of the scene before the camera and the psychological manifestations as I approached the subject would commingle. The images and their descriptions follow…

The photography is nothing short of stunning.

Via Auspicious Dragon Photostream

Interesting discussion about print size

Nicolai Grossman 3 Comments

There’s some interesting discussion in the comments on this post, Since when is bigger better? about ever-increasing print size and cost on Conscientious.

My reply to the question is this:

Since when is bigger automatically more expensive/valuable?

Different images work better in different sizes. Yes, there is a difference in material cost, but with archival inkjet printing, it’s not that much. Why charge someone more for a huge print of an image that works better at 7×7? That’s a bit of a rip-off, no? Why charge less because a particular photo happens to work best at a smaller size? I have images that are best at wallet size, but I’m not going to sell them for $5 just because they’re small.

I think we collectively need to be careful about confusing cost and value.

Film is digital and digital is analog

Nicolai Grossman 9 Comments

Think you’re cutting edge and cool because you lead an up-to-the-minute digital lifestyle and shoot digital because film is old? Fuck you! Think you’re more virtuous than the unwashed infidel masses because you shoot film and only listen to music on vinyl? Fuck you, too! Of course if you’re in either of these groups, you’re probably unperturbed by facts anyway, but you both can suck on this:

Film is a binary medium. Either enough photons hit a particular grain of silver halide to alter its charge—after which it will turn into a grain in the developed image—or not. There or not, on or off, 1 or 0, with nothing in between. Film is binary.

Sensors in digital cameras are inherently analog devices. Each sensor site responds to light by producing a continuously variable ("analog") voltage which is then converted to a numeric value by an analog to digital converter.

So use the right tool for the job—whatever that is for you at a given time and task—and shut the fuck up already.

Photos I’ve learned from: The Subconscious Art Of Graffiti Removal III by Ektopia

Nicolai Grossman 1 Comment

The Subconscious Art Of Graffiti Removal - III by Ektopia

This is The Subconscious Art Of Graffiti Removal – III by Ektopia, and is part of his beautiful The Subconscious Art Of Graffiti Removal project. When I first saw it on Flickr, I wrote:

This is one of those great opportunities to see through someone else’s eyes. I never would have shot this this way because I probably wouldn’t have seen the scene as you did. I’d probably have been inclined to go tighter and would have missed out on this. I’m glad you shot it and not me.

In the seven months since, this photo hasn’t been far from my mind when shooting. It’s become one of those things to check in with, popping up along with many of the other basics. (Film loaded? Lens cap off? Exposure set? Focus?) It reminds me to look harder for the sweet spot of balance of subject and context, and that if all goes really well, it’s possible to make the context part of the subject itself, as he’s done here.

Thanks for the lesson!

Susie Linfield on "this treacherous medium called photography"

Nicolai Grossman Leave a comment

Put most bluntly, for the past century most photography critics haven’t really liked photographs, or the experience of looking at them, at all. They approach photography—not specific photographs, or specific practitioners, or specific genres, but photography itself—with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear.

…

It is precisely because photos are so confusing—such utter failures at providing answers—that they are so valuable: by refusing to tell us what to feel, and allowing us to feel things we don’t quite understand, they make us dig, and even think, a little deeper.

Read article at Boston Review

Via éclectique