On Sat, October 11, 2008 17:51, Lea Murphy wrote: > > On Oct 10, 2008, at 11:51 PM, Mark Blackwell wrote: > >> So it brings us back to how much of a great photo is tool, and how >> much is between the ears of the person running it? > > I believe a true artist can make beautiful, meaningful images given > the most rudimentary of tools. Witness some of the fabulous work being > done with homemade pinhole cameras, Dianas and Holgas. Even some cell > phones are the means with which some pretty spectacular images have > been created. And remember the guy who, years ago, did an entire > portrait series using a flat-bed scanner mounted on a stand...this was > back when digital cameras were cost prohibitive. Talk about a work- > around! I think this is true in some general sense, and yet I don't like your examples. If your artistic vision imagines sharp images with good contrast, you're going to be pretty unhappy with its realization through a pinhole, Diana, or Holga. People whose visions run that way are lucky in that the tools are cheap. And I'm sure most visual artists have considerable range in what they can envision, once they get a feel for the limits of the tools they have, and they'd tend to make images their tools let them really make. And many photographers (present company excepted of course; at least any who want to be) are not 'true artists'; many of them are making commercial images, many of them are making scientific images, many of them are documenting the world around them (journalistic and related areas). In many of those areas, you simply can't get a satisfactory image with a pinhole camera. > A great photo is, I believe, made by someone who knows how to make the > tools work. Yes indeed; the tools at the most enable the artist. > A great photo has, as part of its makeup, great light, great > composition, interesting or unique subject matter, a valid message. "Valid" being a point of some contention now and then :-). > These things come together as the result of the photographer knowing > what he/she is doing and manipulating the tools to achieve the desired > results. > > What's between the ears makes all the difference in the world because > with that you can make almost any tool sing. And that's true even beyond the artistic photo areas. (It's always complicated, because of course the very best journalistic photos have excellent composition and so forth too.) -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
