Whenever I get together with my friend Paul, and even when we talk on the phone, although not so much nowadays, he likes to ask me, who are your influences. My answer has always been, I don’t have any photographic influences (other than the million images I see a day of course); I would instead look to painters, especially the Impressionists, and more recently also Constable, as well as Vermeer. When I got home from this latest visit, I looked once again at the postcard above our fireplace, and thought, yes, that would qualify. It’s “Chez Mondrian” by André Kertész. »
Sketches from my photographic life
I wanted to see how much detail my Voigtlander 20mm lens could pick up when focused at infinity. I went into the field next to our house and pointed up the road, thinking the “neighbor’s” garden would be far enough away for such a wide lens. I tried focusing first on the large tree, middle left. Then I exposed again, this time simply turning the lens to infinity. To my surprise, the focused shot is much sharper, all the way through the scene. It may be that the distance still wasn’t great enough, or just a peculiarity of (my copy of) this lens, but it certainly says to always focus the lens, and never assume. Of course, it is probably also reminding me that DOF goes in front and beyond the plane of focus, and I might need to give thought to exactly what might be found beyond infinity!
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Just finished reading Disappearing Witness: Change in Twentieth-Century American Photography by Gretchen Garner, in which she describes how photography (and not just in America) in the first half of the century was defined by what she calls ‘spontaneous witness’ (think Cartier-Bresson and the ‘decisive moment’), outward-looking, documentary, and in the second half became much more personal, inward-looking. It is a very easy read, her ‘story’ never drags and it is always informative. »
Of course, I knew the name Cartier-Bresson, and I could recognize (some of) his more famous photographs, but it seemed he was concerned with street photography, and I was not, and so he did not have much relevance, or interest, to me. Some time back I happened upon a link to a video of an interview Charlie Rose did with him in 2000 and last month I got to watch it. What stood out for me was his personality, his approach to life, and photography, and that made his photography so much more interesting.
I managed to work out which book Charlie Rose had been using in the interview, reviewed it at the local library, saw it was a good selection of his (early) work and well-reproduced, and bought myself a (used) copy. The library also had a DVD on Cartier-Bresson, so I took a look at that, and then looked to see what else was available and found Henri Cartier-Bresson (Two-Disc Collector and it came today. It really has a lot of material on it. It will take me a while to watch all of this. »
If you ever visit a forum where the subject is post-processing and/or printing, you will have seen a subject line like “my prints are too dark” many times; alternatively expressed as ‘my print doesn’t match my screen’. So many times in fact, that the experts now will instantly swoop »
This week we got a couple of days out of Ann Arbor and met with an author in St Joseph. We had hoped to meet with another author in Saugatuck, but schedules never meshed. We had to content ourselves with a hike through the Saugatuck State Park to the »
We’re in Palo Alto for the holidays, staying with Jill’s folks. On the big day, with everyone gathered for the exchanging of gifts, I thought I would get my camera out. At that moment, I could visualize my battery in the charger back home. Unfortunately I couldn’t visualize where »
Today was the day of the open house at the new C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. Wow, there were a lot of people there! You could get to see most floors but not everywhere on any floor. There was a lot o waiting at elevators. We left after looking round »
