If you’ve ever attempted a workout routine, stuck with it for a while, and then stopped (injury, bad weather, loss of motivation), you know how hard it is to get started again. You also know, as you start to get back into the swing of things, that you start to ache in places you never knew could ache. While photography doesn’t have that many aches and pains to go with it (though with heavy gear, that’s also a possibility), you still need to keep your skills sharp through plenty of practice.
This is especially true when you’re trying something new, like a different compositional technique or a camera setting that you don’t use very often. The first time or two, you may have to take mental — or literal — notes, or even refer back to the camera manual. Do it often enough, and it becomes second nature.
But if it’s something you may only be doing every so often, it’s easy to forget what you’ve learned. Yes, I know, some smartass is probably going to say that it’s just like riding a bike. If that’s the case, I’ll have to be extra careful not to fall off my tripod. But I digress. If you haven’t used a skill in a long time, it’s easy to forget how to do it, or even not to do it quite as well as you would have if you’d been in practice.
I was reminded of this comparing some recent shots to an older series taken in the same place. The more recent batch was better in a number of ways (I hadn’t been shooting that long the first time I’d gone), but I noticed in that earlier batch that some of my shots used things that I liked (and still do) but that I’d let fall by the wayside, like using frames within my shots.
Now, that’s a pretty minor thing, all things considered. With that being said, the skills and little tricks that we bring to bear on our craft are a language unto themselves. They have their own vocabulary, their own syntax. As with your spoken/written vocabulary, the more you’ve got, the more options you also have to express yourself. Imagine yourself trying to express something, but you’ve forgotten the word or words that go with it. Your photography’s like that, as well… it becomes just a little bit harder to express the things you’d like to express without the right “stuff” with which to do it.
So. If you’ve picked up some new skill, be sure to dust it off every so often. Leave yourself a reminder, or go back over some of your older work. In either case, it’s a good way to ensure that your skills stay sharp (or at least don’t get too severely blunted) for when you need them later.
Expressive Photography: The Shutter Sisters' Guide to Shooting from the Heart
First, a disclaimer: I realize that I’m probably not the Shutter Sisters’ usual demographic, what with being a guy (albeit a married one) with no kids. Indeed, some have taken issue with the reception that the bloggers’ book, Expressive Photography: The Shutter Sisters’ Guide to Shooting from the Heart has received, with some people catching what they perceive as a whiff of sexism from the old guard (with the emphasis, presumably, on “old”) of male photographers. I’ve seen quite a few complaints, especially over the last year or so, from female writers, artists and photographers, about appending “mom” or “mommy” to something in order to dismiss it or write it off as lightweight. Mommy bloggers. Momtographers. The complaint is a valid one; you don’t just go writing something, or someone, off just ’cause there’s a mom attached to it somewhere.
With that part out of the way, let’s be equally clear on something else: I think that women, often as not, have a built-in advantage over men as photographers. They tend to focus on the image, rather than the gear, while if you’ve spent any amount of time on a photography forum, you’ve probably seen at least one discussion among the (mostly male) denizens degrade into a genital measuring contest, expressed via prime lenses. You won’t, thankfully, find any of that here. The photographers are highly competent, as are the lion’s share of the images here. Yes, you can nitpick over some of the choices, but that’s the case with any and every photography book I’ve ever read (and thanks to this blog, I’ve read far more of them than I ever planned to). The point is, I don’t think there’s anything to take issue with in the images.
I can’t say the same for the writing. And I hate to say that, because I genuinely like the Shutter Sisters blog. The problem is that what sustains a blog — brief flashes of insight, meant to be read and digested in one sitting — doesn’t always sustain a book. And often as not, this feels less like a book than a blog between covers, a sense of disorganization lurking underneath the structure, and a lot of fragments that hint at something promising but stop frustratingly short of ideas in full bloom.
I get the impression that this is a book with an identity crisis. On one hand, it reads as though it’s meant for a novice audience, or people who may have owned cameras for a while but have only recently given much thought to this whole photography thing. on the other hand, a lot of what a novice would look for* — the specifics on getting shots like these — either isn’t spelled out, or has to be pieced together over several chapters. To give just one example, bokeh is mentioned a few times throughout the book, but it’s not ’til page 132 that someone decides to explain how you go about getting good bokeh. Sure, settings are listed with a number of photos, but absent the reasoning behind them, a novice is often left adrift as to why you’d shoot at one setting versus another. The why of the settings is as important as the settings themselves, but getting to that balance of “how” and “why” can be an exercise in frustration.
Yes, vision matters. It matters quite a lot, especially if you’re trying to communicate yours to someone else. The thing is, it’s not just the vision. We’re photographers. We don’t draw about this stuff, or sing about it, or dance about it (though some of us are lucky enough to be able to do those things too). We photograph it. And because we’re relying on the help of one or more pieces of equipment to capture what we see, those experiences and visions are being mediated by a little black box with a chunk of glass at one end.
I wrestle with the same thing, both in these “pages” that I scrawl, and in the photos I make; sometimes I wrestle with the gear, trying to get not only the scene but also the possibilities I see into a single simple photo. It’s why I study this stuff, why I use the controls my cameras give me, and why my writing on this blog doesn’t just cover the ideas. Yes, emotion is vital in photography. I neither want to look at, nor (really importantly) do I want to create, images that evoke nothing. But that goes beyond composition, beyond the Rule of Thirds, beyond chasing the light. Yes, your photography might involve corralling everything from kids to kittens. But like it or not, we all also play the part of photon wrangler. Vision matters, but technique and gear also matter, even if it’s only to learn how to tell that gear how to stay the hell out of your way so you can get the shot you want, and to make the photo you envisioned when you pressed the shutter button.
So yes, by all means, speak to the importance of emotional connections and resonance in images. If you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you’ve figured out by now that in that respect, the Sisters are preaching to the choir. But please, don’t just stop at the joys of getting that perfect, resonant shot; don’t just stop at the why. The how is an important part of the equation, and in this book, the how is missing, or fragmented, or assumed to be understood. That’s not always a valid assumption. The authors have the skills, and inspiration, to spare, but they’ve done a better job at sharing the latter than the former. And that, to my mind at least, is a problem; because of it, what could’ve been a great book ends up feeling instead like a missed opportunity.
*At least, what I looked for when I was starting out
Joseph Mitchell, courtesy Alex Belth's bronxbanterblog.com
Some great art and literature has come from a sense of place. Marco Polo’s memoirs, Jack Kerouac’s writing, the painting of Wood or Kahlo, and the photography of Adams, Rowell and dozens of others each have a depth and richness that comes from being exposed to new and unfamiliar places. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, when photographers look with envy on our traveling peers, whether they’re shooting war journalism in Kabul, a Nat Geo spread in Bangkok, or just vacation snaps in Cabo San Lucas.
I’m reminded of this reading the work of Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell’s name has, in large part, faded from memory, which is a shame. Over the course of nearly four decades spent shuttling back and forth between Manhattan and North Carolina, Mitchell made his name documenting New York’s more eccentric denizens (his Joe Gould stories would’ve been enough of a template for New Journalism, even if he’d never written anything else) and everyday folks (fishermen at the Fulton Fish Market, a Trinidadian rent party). And while the writer never made the connection explicit, the heartbeat under the story was just as much the city’s as the subject’s. That’s probably due, in no small part, in Mitchell’s interest in this motley cast of characters not as stories, but as people. Reading his anthologies (My Ears are Bent, which anthologizes his earlier journalism, and Up In the Old Hotel, which collects his writing for the New Yorker) you never get the sense of an agenda beyond just getting to know someone, and letting them tell their own story. In some ways, for as carefully as he wrote, Mitchell seemed almost incidental to the stories he told.
”]Unlike Joseph Mitchell, Henri Cartier-Bresson is something close to a household name, at least if your household’s big on photography. Cartier-Bresson was well-traveled. His work would take him to Africa, Spain, India, the United States and elsewhere, and would find him photographing the likes of Picasso, Pound and Giacometti. But like Mitchell, HCB’s work is built on a sense of place, and built mostly on his depictions of everyday people. He’s practically synonymous with France, but most of all with Paris… Parisian kids, workers, students and lovers, through war, peace, protests and drudgery. Cartier-Bresson emphasized “the decisive moment,” but never found a moment any less decisive because the people or events in it were so ordinary; if anything, like Mitchell, he reveled in it.
In their own ways, each man didn’t just chronicle their cities, they were their cities. They were, in some sense, intensely local, but by no means provinical. Both men’s travels aside, Mitchell’s New York had already become, and Bresson’s Paris was becoming, a global city, drawing their identities and their culture from all corners of the earth. While we remember them both now for other reasons (Mitchell for his influence on a generation of writers and journalists, Cartier-Bresson for practically defining street photography), I’d argue that in their time, maybe without intending to or realizing it, both men were on the leading edge of making sense of exactly where life was going in the latter half of the last century. They introduced their cities anew to the world, not as sprawl but as intensely detailed specificity. It might be exaggerating to say that either man shaped the places they called home, but both had, and continue to have, no equals in communicating a perception and feel of those cities to the world. And both men’s work found itself informed by a generousity of spirit, a willingness to take the denizens of their cities on their own terms. This isn’t the clinical work of sociologists; it’s suffused with the warmth of someone who’s taken the time to get to know the neighbors, and decides that he likes ’em, warts and all.
While a bit of travel can be a great thing — the chance to experience new things, places and people — we can’t have blinders on when it comes to all there is to experience closer to home. That’s not to advocate for some kind of blinkered provincialism; rather, it’s advocacy for, or just a simple acknowledgement of, the riches on our own doorsteps, and the wealth of stories waiting for us to see, hear, and tell them.
FURTHER READING:
Joseph Mitchell on the Web:
The best starting point for anything related to Joseph Mitchell is his writing. I’d suggest reading the books chronologically (My Ears Are Bent*, followed by Up in the Old Hotel*), since it gives a good idea of the writer’s evolution. The obligatory Wikipedia entry will give you the bare facts of his life, but I’d also suggest two tributes written to him, one by the New Yorker’sMark Singer, and the other by the Chicago Tribune’sChristopher Borrelli. There’s also an interesting bit on Mitchell’s eccentric collections of things here, and Charlie Rose chatting about Joseph Mitchell with Roger Angell and David Remnick here.
Henri Cartier-Bresson on the Web:
The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson conserves the photographer’s legacy, but you can also find out more about him on Wikipedia, on Magnum Photos (the agency he co-founded). There’s also an interview with Charlie Rose that’s well worth the time. And while countless gallons of ink have been spilled over Cartier-Bresson’s work, if you’d like a good (if slightly pricey) introduction to his work, there’s Peter Galassi’s excellent Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century,* which was published in conjunction with a major HCB retrospective at the MoMA in 2010.
*Links followed by an asterisk are Amazon affilite links.
A lot of artists understand the importance of keeping a childlike spirit. With that in mind, here’s your official permission to call the occasional “Do over!” It’s not quite the same as when you’ve lost your 874th Rock, Paper, Scissors or hit a wiffle ball over the neighbor’s fence, but every once in a while, you just need to go back to something that didn’t go the way you planned the first time (or even one that may have gone perfectly well), and give it another go.
Things change all the time. I was reminded of this on a visit to the Grounds for Sculpture this past weekend. Several of the pieces on exhibit were still there from my first visit a couple of years back, but (as with any other museum) several had also been changed. So, while I had the chance to revisit some of my previous “subjects,” as with the photos at left of Seward Johnson’s King Lear, some old friends had gone, and some new ones had been put in their places. That’s often true of our subject matter, whether it’s human, animal, vegetable or mineral. Those changes, incidentally, are an opportunity to revisit those subjects over time, to note and document those changes.
Seward Johnson, King Lear
The technology we use “evolves,” too. Sometimes it’s the difference in a camera body — we’ve moved from point-and-shoots to SLR’s, changed the software with which we edit (and how we use it; I’m not as heavy-handed with the edits as I once was), discovered speedlights or tripods or wide-angle lenses… and each of these things allows us to do something we couldn’t do before, or at least to do what we’d done earlier a bit differently.
But, of course, it’s not just the subjects and the gear that change. We’re changing and evolving all the time as well. We pick up new skills and new ideas, while some other things fall by the wayside. I’m not the same photographer that I was two years ago, for reasons that have nothing to do with which camera was around my neck when I made these photos. I would hope that my skills now are a bit sharper than they were then, my eye perhaps a bit more receptive to what’s going on in front of it. As that happens, it can be a good idea to go back to something you’ve shot earlier, not just to see how you’d do it differently, but also hopefully to shoot it better than you did the first time around.
Seward Johnson, King Lear
Subjects, gear, skills… it’s all changing and evolving daily. And it matters, all of it. We can’t, or at least shouldn’t, shoot as though nothing’s changed if and when something does. So revisit your subjects from time to time, since all of them make a difference in how, what, and sometimes even why we shoot what we do, the way we do.
Your turn (no tagbacks)!
A few words about the shots that accompany this post: All three are of the same subject, in the same place. The first was shot in November, 2010 on a Kodak compact; the second shot on a D7000; and the third on a Fuji X10. The odd color cast on the Fuji shot actually isn’t post-processing, but rather a happy accident owing to a quirk in how Picasa reads Fuji RAW files.
Tell me if this has ever happened to you: let’s say you tell a story about someone you came across in your travels. It’s funny, totally random, and if you weren’t there when it happened, you’re not altogether sure you’d believe it yourself. And at the end of the story, the person to whom you’re telling it tells you you’re “lucky,” or that things like that would “only happen to you.”
Well, no… Things like that happen every day, and could happen probably to everybody. It isn’t like it takes all that much. It’s being present to the experience; taking the time to listen to someone, or see something, that someone else would just pass up. It’s that one extra detail you took a few seconds to zoom in on, or the person you chose to hear out when someone else would’ve walked away or just passed judgment.
Here’s the thing, though. Some people have an experience or two like that and they get to thinking they’re somehow special. If you’re one of those people, let me clue you in on something that’s likely to be disappointing: the universe didn’t conspire to give you that shot or that experience. Your wishing about it didn’t make it so; your doing it did. Odds are better than even that all that stuff would’ve been there whether you’d been or not. The point is, you got your ass up off the sofa, went out, met it, and got its photo. Cause and effect is a matter, much of the time, of being there. Whether we’re creating the circumstances or just happening across them, the point is the preparedness and the action.
I bring this up because a few days ago while working on an unrelated thing, I came across a truly miraculous system that’s just guaranteed to make you thousands of dollars on your photography, with practically no effort. </sarcasm> All you have to do, with this and other, similar, “systems” is plunk down an untold (well, it’s probably told, but I was too cynical to click through) sum of money, sit back in your pajamas, and watch the money roll in. The same faulty reasoning, in short, that underpins everything from The Secret to the Prosperity Gospel.
I’m calling bullshit.
There is no system, no secret. You want a foolproof system? Learn hard, then work hard, then when you think you’re done, work and learn some more. Luck? You make your own. Karma? Neither good nor bad. It’s simple cause and effect. Things happen — you get, or miss, the shot, have an awesome conversation, run into someone you haven’t seen in a decade or two — because your actions set in motion the things that made them possible. Act, and things happen based on those actions. Take no action, get no results. It’s that simple.
Nobody’s going to tell you everything they know. On one hand, it’s impossible. Unless it’s something that’s really simple (how to do one very small thing with a discrete number of steps), the process itself doesn’t lend itself to teaching every last little thing. You’re always forgetting things, leaving things out. And there’s that pesky habit most of us have, if we’re any good, of always learning, always pusing back at the boundries of our ignorance; we know we don’t know everything, but we’re damned if we’re not going to know just a bit more today than we did yesterday. It’s the difference between teaching someone how to make rice pudding and teaching them how to be a chef; those cookbooks and culinary classes leave out a hell of a lot more than they include.
On the other hand, some people wouldn’t tell you all they knew even if they could; to them, knowledge is not only power but also profit. if they told you everything you needed to know all at once, what would they possibly sell you later? (never mind that if they were really that good, they wouldn’t worry, ’cause they’d know that in a year’s time they’d have added enough to their knowledge and skill set that they’d have new shit to sell anyway).
But both of those things end up obscuring a larger point: not for nothing is it said that experience is the best teacher. Anything that anyone can tell you, whether it’s Joe McNally, or Thom Hogan, or even little ol’ me, is just so many words. They’re starting points, signposts along the way. They’re pointing a way forward, but they’re the map, not even a vehicle and certainly not the destination. Our practice is the vehicle, and the destination’s always changing; we don’t always know it, and it’s not always what we think it is, either. Honor that process, and the work that goes with it. It may take longer than you expected, but if anyone asks, you’re taking the scenic route, and you’ll have some awesome photos to show from along the way.
The first time I heard Soda Stereo was around the time that their last studio album, Sueño Stereo, came out. Though the band would soon go their separate ways, I continued to follow the solo career of the band’s frontman, Gustavo Cerati, through a series of albums that dug deep into ambient, electronica, guitar-driven rock, and even a full-blown orchestral album. Cerati’s work always made for interesting, and sometimes even challenging, listening. This was not least because he sings in Spanish, but also because the musical style itself was constantly changing, slipping in and out of genres even over the course of a single song.
The language barrier, in my case, meant that bits of half-remembered high school Spanish, things understood in passing and in context, rendered the lyrics are as slippery as the music itself… acertijos bajo el agua, to borrow a lyric. The funny thing is, the lyrics still tend toward the cryptic even in translation; between that, and the music, the whole experience reminded me a bit at first of Radiohead minus the alienation and paranoia, but over time, it’s become something else: a reminder that the things we create sometimes resonate with people in ways that they might not understand themselves at first.
Man Ray, Violon d'Ingres
Which brings us, in typically circuital fashion, to Man Ray. Over the course of his lifetime would cross paths with all manner of artists (Duchamp, Stieglitz, Ernst and Arp, among others) and have a hand in Dada, Surrealism, photography, film, and conceptual art. In nearly every case, whether it was the eye-on-metronome Object to Be Destroyed/Indestructable Object (1923), the memorable portrait Violon d’Ingres (shown at left), or his Rayographs (objects developed directly onto photographic paper), familiar objects, and familiar artistic conventions, were repurposed or turned inside-out by the artist.
They’re different enough to provoke a double-take, maybe even a touch of unease; at the same time, though (as we might expect from an artist who’d been classically trained, and who also worked in graphic arts), they’re grounded in forms we know, and have seen countless times before. Like Cerati, Ray’s “language”, his visual syntax, isn’t always immediately apparent, so the work reveals itself in layers, and leaves itself open to interpretation.
Both these artists’ efforts work in much the same way. There’s a strangeness there, among the musical textures, lyrics, repurposed irons, and photographic prints, but in each case, it’s also anchored in something familiar, whether it’s a four-on-the-floor rhythm or the conventions of portraiture, even as it subverts what we’ve come to recognize or take for granted.
Quiero hacer cosas imposibles… If you’re going to attempt something new and different, therefore, it helps to remember that the things that have the power to surprise us aren’t always those that are radically different. Instead, that little “poke” is just as likely to come from something we know, speaking to us in a language or a syntax that teases just at the edge of our consciousness. Venture off into the strange, but keep one foot in the familiar…
We photographers are a notorious lot when it comes to having serious GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome). For your reading pleasure, here are a few items you can safely avoid:
1. Brand New Anything: It can be VERY tempting, especially when you’ve heard about a product months in advance, to get it the day it’s released. Assuming that’s even possible (there will, after all, be hundreds, if not thousands, of people who’ve read the same speculation and leaked specs), you should actually be thankful if you can’t get your sweaty palms on a product in its early stages. It’s one thing to get a lousy sample; it’s something else altogether when that hotly anticipated product ends up being a dud, or has critical issues that impede its performance (hot pixels, dead pixels, overheating issues, distortion issues, et cetera.
2. Limited Use Anything: This can be true of bodies, lenses (how many people buy a fisheye lens only to have it gather more dust than photos?), and lots of other doodads that OEM and aftermarket manufacturers are always so eager to foist upon us. If it’s going to be absolutely vital once or twice, or if you’re not altogether sure how much use you’ll get out of it, rent or borrow it. If you’re not sure whether you need it, wait ’til it becomes necessary, and see the previous step.
3. Cheap Anything: Not that much comes cheap when it comes to photography. And there are some cheap pieces of kit that I’d argue you really ought to have in your bag (air blower, wireless remote, microfiber cleaning cloths). But some purchases are easy, and tempting, just ’cause they’re so inexpensive relative to most of the rest of your kit that they’re pretty easy to rationalize. Just bear in mind that those $19.95 purchases add up quickly if you’re making them often.
4. Really Expensive Anything:* Sometimes, good enough really is good enough. There are reasons that companies make lenses that run into the tens of thousands of dollars; a professional buying one can reasonably expect to recoup the price of the lens by using it. However, there are also reasons that lower-cost (and usually lower-specced) alternatives exist. Some of us are just shooting for the joy of it. If you’re one of those somebodies, bear in mind that if you’re willing to take the tradeoffs between one piece of equipment and another (lack of a built-in focus motor, for instance), that’s money that could be spent on other things, whether it’s other gear, or a nice dinner out with your long-suffering non-photographer significant other.
5. A Photography Degree: I’ll probably get flamed for this, and will have more to say on it another time. In the meantime, speaking of expensive… This is not to say you shouldn’t take the time and care to learn the fundamentals of the craft, and always work to improve them. With that said, the same calculus of cost versus ROI comes very much into play here as it would with a body or lens. Given that a degree currently comes at a cost that makes a Sigma 200-500mm 2.8 lens seem like a bargain, think twice before enrolling in a photography degree program. There are several other ways to learn the craft that don’t involve mortgaging the house, donating every organ you have two of, and signing a promissory note that puts your offspring in hock to a lender. Explore those first.
That’s just my top five. What are yours? In the comments, let me know the kinds of photography-related swag you habitually avoid.
*There’s a hidden corollary to this rule, however. Anything that’s so insanely expensive that you’d never once consider buying it — like a Sigma 200-500, or one of the hundreds of special edition Leica M9s that the company puts out on a regular basis for people who don’t take photos — automatically stops being expensive, ’cause you weren’t going to buy it anyway. Talk about cheap gear!
Just ask this guy about the other 574 that got away
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. — Samuel Beckett
I hope you’re not afraid of photography, or of failing at photography. Let’s be real about this for a minute. Think of all the things you can screw up in your life: dinners, relationships, work projects… we could, between us both, probably come up with a list that ran into the hundreds of items, and that’s just the things we’ve already screwed up, not to even mention that which we haven’t yet gotten our hands on and turned to shit. A good many of them, if not most or all of them, have consequences a lot more weighty than your picture of a swan having blown highlights. Why is it, then, when we often wouldn’t give up on those more important things, we’re willing to bag it all when we’re faced with something relatively trivial?
And it’s not like you’re going to screw up once and be done with it. Even — no, especially — if you say, “Well, I’m never going to do that again,” you’re going to. And you’re going to screw it up. Not even the same way. With our wonderful creativity comes a propensity for finding new, and ever more creative, ways to fuck up. Life’s like that, and photography isn’t exempt from it, either.
Be encouraged.
There’s an adage in public speaking, but I think it holds true elsewhere as well: your audience is rooting for you. They want you to succeed, and will be with you no matter how far short your efforts fall. People talk all the time, but it’s not the same as putting yourself out there publicly; for that reason, many people can’t imagine speaking in public. Similarly, people take photos all the time, but I don’t know that many of them do it as though it matters, or as if there’s anything at stake. Granted, it’s not something of earth-shaking importance if we’re going to be honest about it. But if it matters to you — matters enough that you want to do it well, matters enough that you want it to matter beyond just a simple image on a screen or a piece of paper — that fear of failure is always an ingredient in the process.
Taken by itself, there’s nothing wrong with that fear. Like anything else, it’s what you do with it that makes it a good or bad thing. If you let it paralyze you, then, yeah, it’s not a great thing to have around. If, on the other hand, you allow it to motivate you to do something more than you did the day before… well, now you’re onto something. That’s also when your art really begins to resonate with other people beyond the level of being something pretty that goes on your wall or in your stereo. We may not understand color theory, or the how and why of a chord change that turns your heart to jelly, but all of us, on some level, recognize what it is to try, and to fail… and to get back up again, to try and keep trying, ’til what’s left is still far short of perfection, but just as far from those earlier, worse failures.
The best part (even though it often doesn’t feel that way at the time) is that those failures are a good thing. The only way not to fail, after all, is to do nothing. To risk nothing, and therefore to gain nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. The upshot of all this failure, on the other hand, is that we keep getting closer — sometimes frustratingly so, with the goal just as frustratingly just out of reach — to what we wanted, needed, or just intended to do. What you see now as failure isn’t; it’s just part of the process, a point on your learning curve. Learn from it, grow in it, and see it as a beginning or a continuing rather than an end. Once you’ve stopped — stopped learning, doing, growning, trying — then, and only then, have you failed.
It occurred to me tonight, as I was looking through my Favorites in my browser for something to write about, that I’ve got a lot of little odds and ends worth sharing that wouldn’t necessarily sustain a post on their own. I’ve decided to just lump them in one place and let ’em simmer for a bit.
Allen Murabayashi’s Rant: I Love Photography might just be the best thing you read on photography this year.
Grover, portrait photographer:
Hopefully Grover doesn’t take the “professional” photography advice from 27b/6seriously (warning: do not drink anything while reading this post)
Dorothy Brown gives photographers a reminder that once in a while, we really should step in front of the lens instead of spening all our time behind it.
Sure Beats Putting Posters on Telephone Poles: check out ifoundyourcamera.net, a repository of lost cameras…
A bit of photography humor from the reliably awesome xkcd:
Now you, too, can look like a supermodel, thanks to Fotoshop by Adobé:
And, finally, The New York Times’ “Lens” blog has a photo essaymade up of contest entries from Kodak’s early days.
I know that I probably sound like a broken record about cultural literacy and the intersection of photography and other arts, but I happen to think it’s an important thing. No art exists in a vacuum; photography, especially in its earliest days, owed quite a debt to things that happened outside of photography, and really, that will likely always be the case. For as much as the arts have to say to us, they’ve generally had quite a bit to say to each other as well.
I have quite a few art books on my bookshelf, most of them dating from before I took up photography. I bring these two up because they’re good if you want, or need, a quick reference or a brushup. The Art Book is a sprawling affair that covers art from the Renaissance all the way to the present day, while The 20th Century Art Book confines its sprawl to the last century. You won’t find any photographers here (that territory is ably covered by The Photography Book, another Phaidon title of similar layout and breadth), but if you’re interested in seeing some of what influenced photography, existed contemporaneously with certain photographers, or just what else’s gone on in the art world in years past, that’s all here in abundance.
Both books are laid out from A to Z, encompassing artists from several countries and movements. While I can understand the appeal of ordering the artists alphabetically — it’s easy if you’re looking for Miro, Chagall, or Klimt, and it’s also a browser’s delight — it’s simultaneously a frustration. There’s no context to speak of, as there’d be if the artists, and their works, were arranged chronologically so you can see how styles progressed over time, how artists influenced one another, and even how individual artists found themselves equally at home in multiple media and styles. The cross-referencing system settled on by the editors represents only a half-assed solution, since you lose the visual clues and it’s harder to draw comparisons when you’re flipping among half a dozen different pages. This doesn’t represent a fatal flaw; it’s balanced quite well by the variety of artists on display, as well as a willingness on the part of the editors to occasionally use a lesser-known work to represent an artist.
The books are available in two sizes, one of which is very nearly pocket-sized, and the other of which wouldn’t look out of place on your coffee table. I picked up the pocket-sized works (they cost half their larger counterparts), but would caution that you’re losing quite a bit of detail when a piece is reproduced at something close to 4×6″. For all its flaws, the one thing this book does very well is to encourage you to delve deeper into art, and different artists, on your own… especially those you might not have heard of otherwise.
How about you? What non-photography books or art inform your art and craft?
*, followed by 
*), since it gives a good idea of the writer’s evolution. The obligatory 
,* which was published in conjunction with a major HCB retrospective at the MoMA in 2010.
