Darin,
Enjoyed your thoughts about PF. I miss a few others of the ol' gang too - even the cranks. Weekly web photo galleries can be an incentive to do new work as long as their quality stays fairly high. There are those who look for stuff in the shoebox under the bed to post and those who go out and challenge themselves to explore an idea or technique to submit.
RE PhotoShop, I believe it is a delightful entertainment as well an illustration tool. The topic of what's a photo and what's an illustration has been beaten to death here and elsewhere. Seems to me that "photo" galleries should stick to "real" photos or hang the PS illustrations in another room. Don't want to start a war here.
AZ
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Winds of change (was Posting)
From: Darin Heinz <spacecoastphoto@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, November 16, 2006 3:07 pm
To: List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students
<photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Kostas, et al.,
I think I was referring to the drifting from the "good old days" in my
rant/post about a month or so ago, when the gallery was full every week, and
with such a wide range of images. I sometimes wonder what has happened to
the active members of those days, including (but in no way limited to)
Reverend Sidney Flack... although I don't miss the flames ignited and fanned
by Jan Faul and Bob Rosen...
I am sure I am not alone in saying I would like to see the exhibitions
reattain the levels of participation and creativity it once had.
Often, I think that so me people are too busy Photoshopping their images --
spawning dozens of versions from a single capture -- to go out and create,
to "shoot and post what ya got"... Masterpieces and millionaires were once
in short supply. These days, though, they have become commonplace, and it
has become too easy to follow tangents from an original visual idea, too
easy to become distracted from the original creative process, too easy to
lose one's own sense of visual style and technique. How many people could
look at one of your photographs (or mine) and correctly identify the
photographer?
As the new year approaches, always a good opportunity to shift gears and
steer a new course, I will be concentrating more on the previsualized image
and fine-tuning my personal style and in-camera technique, maybe even going
so far as to uninstall Photoshop and save money by acquiring a more-or-less
rudimentary scanner, and handling brightness/contrast tweaks in ACDSee...
but making final prints from the original 4x5s.
Darin Heinz
Melbourne, Florida USA
