Hiro Antagonist

Versus



"...I don’t believe that school can teach you something like prop and costume making to its fullest extent. A “hobby” like this really requires field experience and just going out there and making stuff at your own skill and pace."
-Izy Cheung

An interesting dichotomy that's come up every now and then is the value of university education versus field training for various disciplines. Some things are best learned in a university setting, where an expert in the field lectures and you take notes and replicate the work of other leaders in the field. Other things are best learned in the field, where hands on experience is the only useful teacher.

I've spent a fair amount of time doing both for different pursuits, math, fine art and philosophy, contrasted with photography, fencing and building things. Some of these things really benefit from being at a good university with excellent professors. Other things would only make you worse off for having an excellent professor try to teach you about it.

Having friends who are proponents of both styles of learning, the academics on one side, the grunts on the other, I've heard the argument back and forth more times than I care to count, one side discounting the other completely.


And they're right. For the things each system excels at teaching, the other system is terrible.


Take photography. It's something I've learned on my own from the beginning, but decided it wouldn't hurt to take a class in, as I was already at a nice university. What did I learn? Honestly, the nuts and bolts of printing were the only useful things I took away from the course. The rest of it was literally worthless - I could have learned the same things faster on my own. I did, actually.

Academic photography is shitty photography on the whole. But photography is often confused with fine art, where sculpture and anatomy professors are actually useful things. Sans the nuts and bolts of photography (printing, darkroom, basic photoshop), a university professor in photography is useless. Everything that makes photography something more than snapshots - vision, technique, etc - are things that are best learned hands on in the field, from doing it time and time again.


A professor could lecture about shooting, you could read about the history of guns, look at diagrams, learn physics as it applies to ballistics, and you'd be a shitty marksman by the time you'd finished. Put in the same amount of time down on the range, or out in the field on active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, you'll be able to put university training to shame.

Things like philosophy, and math theory, on the other hand - those are things you won't do well at on your own, unless your name is Issac Newton or Georg Cantor. They depend on vast systems of previously discovered and analyzed information, rather than things that are particular to the individual.

And that's where it breaks down, really. Things that are dependent on the individual more than they are human knowledge as a whole are ones that are best learned in the field. There may be a thousand marksmen out there, but each one of them learned in relation to how they shoot, not how everyone else happens to shoot. The same goes for photography. Things that are dependent on the group more than the individual are the ones that benefit the most from a university setting - math, philosophy, fine art, etc.

pro⋅sa⋅ic
–adjective
1. commonplace or dull; matter-of-fact or unimaginative

In many ways, photography is like writing - you can write about anything, you can do it to inform, amuse, scare, trigger emotions - and you can do it with varying degrees of skill. Anyone can write.

There is a lot of bad writing out there - unskilled, that is. Even Dan Brown has skill. However, people can say when writing is shit. Or just mediocre. They can say it a lot easier than the same can be said about photography.

There's photographers who don't think of themselves as such - your average Joe and Jane that take a quick snap of a friend doing something silly, or a kid's birthday party.

Then there's everyone else with a camera. People who have a purpose in mind for photographs, something more than as a solution to a problem.


God damn, a lot of them suck.

In lieu of a post with actual content, here's a new headshot shot taken with a new softbox:


f/4, ISO 250, 1/125th sec.
Softbox above, reflector below


This is what happens when you're bored at 2am, waiting for a game to finish installing and have no one else to test your ideas on. Still, the softbox works nicely!

50mm, 1/20th @ f/2
Photo taken last weekend after dinner in Dallas - 5 internet points if you can figure out where

So I graduated last weekend. It feels a bit weird. I've been in college for about eight years now - five years at my first university doing CS and pure math then sculpture, working for a dotcom for a year, then transferring to another university for 3 years and getting a degree in video game development.

I've worked full time before, so that's not weird. What is weird is the feeling that I don't have to eventually start taking classes ever again. That I actually did finish college. I'm very good at the academic side of things, just not very good at sticking to one thing and finishing it.

I'm going to shoot for a job doing level design, hopefully I'll find a good one, as there are quite a few big video game development companies around here, and even more in Austin. If not Texas, there's always California. I like Texas, but I wouldn't be against moving, especially if it's a good company.

It's actually a fairly good time to be a video game development-type person fresh out of college - the industry is laying off a fair amount of senior dev people, but they're hiring far more fresh out of college types on average than they have been the last five years or so. People seek entertainment in a depression, apparently.

It would certainly be nice not to have to be hobbled by living on only a single income - money is always tight, and I miss when both of us worked for the dotcom and we had boatloads of it for that one short year. Lesson learned though, don't put all your eggs in one basket and don't work for dotcoms. And a college degree is actually pretty mandatory for getting a decent job. There's almost a glass ceiling if you don't have one.

Anyway, enough rambling. We'll see what the future brings. Hopefully not Skynet heh.

From Pixsylated:
"Lessons I Didn’t Learn In Photo School 22–27

22. There is nothing more interesting to us than photographs of other people.
We are voyeurs at heart. We are curious about each other. When it comes to photography, there is nothing more interesting to us that photographs of people. If you want to increase your chances of earning a living as a photographer, you have to learn to photograph people. For many, this is an obstacle that drives them towards landscape, nature or still life photography. On the journey to becoming a people photographer, you may start off making candids because you’re shy. If you don’t push through, your photographs will shout that you are timid. The people pix that viewers connect with are the ones where the sitter connected with the photographer through the lens. In this way, photography is just like life. It ultimately gets down to connections."


I've learned this the hard way. I didn't start off as a portraiture or fashion oriented photographer. I took pictures of things that weren't people. In fact, until very recently, one might say that the artistic view I showed was 'A world without people in it'.

While I'm no longer suffering from an acute existential crisis, or as great a dislike for humanity in general as I once did, some times it makes me bitter that I switched from photographing what I enjoyed the most to photographing people because my pictures of people were ridiculously more popular than ones of things that weren't people.

To be honest, I don't know if my desire to photograph anything but people was based mostly on depression, existentialism, or the fact that it's hard to find good human subjects when you're first starting out as a photographer because you're a n00b in terms of skill. In other words, you can take five hours to photograph a still life and get it right, but people are far less patient.

Megan Cump - Feral


Lexi of Subjectify recently made a rather insightful post about something that's always bothered me.

"i am both compelled and troubled by Megan Cump's project Feral, which i saw on Flak Photo. in the project, Cump goes on solo hiking and kayaking trips and photographs herself going back to nature in some surprising tableaux. the images themselves are compelling enough: beautiful landscapes; contemplations of nature and man's role; a naked, young photographer interested in her ability to lose her humanity and have a feral immersion."

"secondly, i am troubled a bit by something else, which is not Cump's fault, nor is it limited to her: self-portrait projects from a visually-privileged position of young, white, nude beauty. i have been thinking about the "trouble" with beauty in art photography for some time. i can see an alternate world in which i would earnestly feel that female photographers' naked self-portraits were brave, theoretically rigorous, challenging, honest, etc...etc... except i rarely do feel that way, because lately i notice that mainly thin, beautiful women engage in these projects in the first place. or at least, their projects are the ones that gain recognition in the art world (which is why i see them?). of course, such projects might have something thought-provoking and honest to offer, but overall, it still troubles me."


As a photographer, I have taken a fair number of self portraits, and from what I can see, I'm not alone in this as a photographer. While I'm not Quasimodo in appearance, what I strive for is technical and aesthetic competence above all else when shooting a self portrait. Something akin to a benchmark, showing the best of what I'm currently capable of. Some self portraits are quite popular in terms of how many hits they garner, and usually the most popular are popular because they're very well executed photographs.

Something that puzzled me at first was how amazingly popular some photographer's self portraits were. I'd look at the photo and internally think something along the lines of "Well, it's a nice photo but not *that* nice..." I.e., it was done well enough to be popular, but how popular it was seemed to be leaps and bounds beyond how popular it should have been, given the technical and aesthetic merits of the portrait.

Every time this contradiction arose, it was a "hot chick". I didn't want to admit at first that the reason for the amazing popularity was "It's just because they look good, not because they have any particular skill as a photographer." But as time went on, and example after example raised the same troubling specter, the truth became undeniable and I became a bit more bitter with every example I saw.

It seems a bit harsh to say that anyone who's female and reasonably good looking can never take a self portrait that can be viewed and praised honestly on the merits of their skill as a photographer, but at this point? It seems a forgone conclusion.

I feel bitter every time I see photographs like that, and sometimes I feel bad for feeling bitter about it, but less and less with every example I see.

What is true? What is real?

Reality is a vast and complex thing. People ignore the unimportant bits and highlight the parts that matter to them. Photography is the same thing, only in a more formal manner.

In photography, you choose what to highlight and what to ignore, rendering a more pronounced version of human reality. In doing so deliberately, you can create an image that argues that the truth is a certain way. Look at a photo of a McDonald's hamburger in their advertising. Compare it to the actual burger you receive at the drive-through. What the McDonald's advertising photographer said was the truth, and what the truth actually turned out to be are slightly different, no?

When I was apprenticed to a fashion / beauty photographer last year, I enjoyed parts of it. But the subject was something I became dissatisfied with. Take a photo of a pretty person holding something, rinse, repeat. In these photos, we were trying to say "Hey, see this pretty person? They like this - so should you!" It was a lie however. The pretty person had absolutely no relation to the item they were holding, did not know it or even care about it, most likely. Advertising is a lie.

To quote Stephen Eastwood, one of the photographers at the top of the entire industry on what the purpose of beauty photography is;

"It is to sell product. We are not trying to help the world sadly, we are trying to create a need and desire in others to want to be like the models we portray, and that needs should manifest as a desire within the viewer to be like them, and hopefully that will lead them to the false conclusion that to use the product being shown/sold will help them achieve that in some way. WE SELL PRODUCT! Our product is hope, its the hope that by using what we are pushing will help them become what they see. They usually won't, and they will often just see another image selling another product and buy that hoping for the same thing." -Stephen Eastwood's bio


What I've come to find myself interested in is the truth more than the lie. Photographs can highlight the truth of something, allowing what otherwise might be lost among millions of mundane daily details to be seen.

People, buildings, anything in between, I just want to capture the soul of what is there.

So a while back, the poster boy for digital photography, yours truly, was given a medium format film camera (this one).

After a bit of 'haha, lulz, film', 'ooo, film, not as bad as I remember it being' and 'wow, that's kind of annoying, can't see what I'm taking a picture of', I purchased another, much nicer MF TLR (this one).

I ran a few rolls of film through it, and a few of those shots came out absolutely stellar:







So, your average roll of 35mm film is $2.50 to develop at a local drug store lab. Medium format film? Color?? How much you say?

$15 a roll?! Are you on crack????


I live in the Dallas area, one of the very few cities that is large enough to still have a local lab that develops medium format film. NYC and a few cities in California, and there's not much outside that. Theoretically, rates are fairly competitive. But $15 a roll?

I'm a soon-to-be-graduated-looking-for-a-job-making-video-games-in-todays-economy college student, working part time as an architectural photographer. I can't afford to pay $15 a roll and shoot enough film to get better at it.

Hell, 90% of the reason I'm at a point where I have actual clients that pay me money for pictures is because I shot an insane amount of digital frames until I got something right on a daily basis for a year straight. Shoot, look, fix, shoot, repeat. That'd be $250 to do the same in MF film, and I wouldn't be able to see the results for 24 hours.

It's a hell of a handicap.

$15 @@#$ %*#%$%@ mutter-mutter mutter.

So I recently got one of these for Christmas:

(this picture taken with the new set of grids for my strobes, another Christmas present)

It can produce some pretty nice results:

(taken at a recent art exhibit of this guy's work, while I originally intended to sneak behind the security guard so he couldn't see me taking pictures, he made such an excellent Hitchcock-style silhouette that I just couldn't resist)

And another from that same night:

(the guy looking up at the light was just pure luck, but it made the photo)

I've wanted a rangefinder for quite some time now, and this one made the top of the list due to it being inexpensive and having a good built-in meter and full manual control over all the settings. It's a nice change from my giant honking D200, as it's much lighter and smaller. While it is stuck with a fixed focal length lens and it lacks a lot of useful features found on the D200, it has enough to cover 90% of the things I want to shoot. And the weight reduction means that I end up taking it with me a lot more than I did the D200, or at least I don't regret taking it everywhere with me.

Back when I was a fine arts major, shortly after two and a half years of math and CS, I rarely paid much attention to what my art professors said because it was in ArtSpeak, which is a dialect that seems to meander between 'profound' and 'inane', neither state readily detected by any outside observer.

Out of all of the jibber-jabber, one of the two things that have borne the test of time was a professors distinction on what made a work 'artistic'. My view at the time was that it was fairly obvious if something was artistic - you just looked at it.

He said that it wasn't enough to just be well made, or executed with skill, but that it had to have some sort of idea behind it.

In other words, it wasn't enough just to be pretty.

As I've come to learn that the commercial side of photography sucks the soul out and gleefully destroys whatever artistic talent you have, I've moved back to 'photography as art' rather than 'photography to pay some bills'.

What I haven't been good about lately is putting large amounts of thinking into what I'm doing and why. Trying to change that now...

So if you frequent any forum where photographers hang out, you'll usually see some level of snobbery before too long. It seems like if it isn't 'a 35mm Leica M5 makes the best pictures in existence', it's the response to the n00b question 'do I need a meter for photography?'.

You'll suddenly find people saying things like this:
"I like taking the time to think about each image before I release the shutter. A big part of that is figuring out the appropriate exposures. Even if I'm working in digital, I'm still thinking Zone System. For me, it's a critical part of my artistic process." (hint: if they mention 'the zone system' and don't currently have work on display in a world-class gallery, you're listening to someone who's not only ignorant but moronic [in the classic 'sub 70 IQ' sense])

For those non-photo geeks out there, a light meter is a tool used to determine how bright the light around you is and given that, what the exposure settings should be for a camera. More or less, a meter goes 'ah! it's X bright, so at ISO/ASA 100 with the lens set to f/4, you should expose the frame for 1/30th of a second'

Now, back in the "good" old days of film, the problem was that you couldn't see the resulting picture until it was developed, and unless you were lucky enough to have a polaroid back for your camera, so meters were used to determine the proper exposure setting.

Fast-forward to the evil digital revolution, and you find that digital cameras all have meters built in. Meters with fancy histogram readouts even! They'll give you a near perfect approximation of what the proper exposure should be, and that coupled with putting the camera in manual mode and adjusting it based on the resulting picture ends up with a perfectly exposed shot.

The problem of not knowing what the picture looks like no longer exists. You can look at it right away and tell if it's too dark or too bright, and by checking the histogram, you can be absolutely sure that nothing is over or under exposed.

99.98% of working professional photographers today don't use a meter. .01% use a meter out of habit more than anything else. And then you've got that other .01% that just don't trust this newfangled devil technology.


If the cover of Vogue and the latest Versace ad were all shot without the photographer in question bothering with a meter?

You don't need a meter^*.




^*Unless you're stuck with film and there's not a single digital camera around now or in the foreseeable future. In which case you should work on moving out of proto-post-apocalypse living situation you've found yourself in before bothering with taking pictures.

Following my previous post on making your own camera lenses, here's how Canon makes theirs:

In an entry a while back, I mentioned buying a Mamiya C330 twin-lens reflex camera. One of my presents this Christmas was a scanner, so I started scanning in some of the slide film pictures I'd taken over this summer / fall and this one seemed to be worth sharing:


Mamiya C330 TLR, ISO/ASA 100, f/11 @ 1 sec.

Because there's nothing like swigging an expensive Belgian beer straight from the bottle:

I swear, you know you're obsessed when even your *dreams* involve photography.

I dreamed that I was looking for some film for a rangefinder, and I asked my dad if he had any. He said 'Yeah, but it's long expired' and I said something to the effect of 'Even better!' heh.

Add this to the dream I had earlier this week about being a war photographer in the first nuclear conflict since WWII (exhilarating and horrifying at the same time!) and it definitely adds up to a certain conclusion.

Apparently there are a few fairly rare versions of certain cameras with a transparent body, apparently intended for dealer and exhibition use, and they happen to be in fully working order. I'd love to get one of these, just to see the kind of looks it'd draw shooting in public :D

See for yourself!

After looking at camera lenses for low light shooting - 50mm f1.0's, etc, I've been pondering how hard it would be to just make your own camera lens with a fixed aperture.

Multi-coating is out, obviously, and I'd need access to a machine shop to begin with, and actually hunting down raw glass blanks of the right sort of glass would certainly be difficult...

I've seen a few similar posts on the internets, and the common response seems to be 'It's so labor intensive, why bother?'

Obviously missing the point that if you're considering making your own lenses and have the faintest idea of the amount of work involved, you don't care about it being labor intensive any more than Michael Jordan cares that basketball practice is labor intensive heh.

All said and done, the materials and the tools seem to be difficult to come by, but I haven't given up yet, and frankly would settle for even the simplest lens imaginable, so hopefully I'll end up building one before too long.

So freaking hilarious I had to share:



Ken Rockwell BWUAHAAH! Most perfect bit ever!

Which picture was shot with the DSLR and which was shot with a simple Point and Shoot compact camera?



(click here to view at full size)

Due to the confusion of a friend who's starting out in photography and is attached to a silly idea that shallow DoF is limited to SLR cameras, I made this to illustrate a point about depth of field and how point and shoot cameras can get a perfectly good shallow DoF to the point where you'll be unable to tell the difference between a P&S and a DSLR at the same effective aperture size (f/2.8, for example). Of course, you *can* get lenses for a DSLR that will have a much larger maximum aperture than you'll ever find on a P&S - when is the last time you saw a f/1.2 on a compact digital camera? - but under normal circumstances, you can achieve that same nicely blurred background with a P&S.

Comment with your guess as to which side was shot with the DSLR camera and which was shot with the Point and Shoot camera!

Photography, the art - rather than the act of taking a picture - is often said to be 'showing people something that has been seen before in a way they have never seen it.'

Art, with a capital A, is communication. All art is the product of the artist's attempt to express something. Much like writing, it can be anything from a single vulgar expletive to the equivalent of Dante's Inferno.

Whether or not art is good Art should be determined on how well the message was expressed, more than any particular subjective assessment or feeling. Skill always has a role in this, and often the greater the skill, the more eloquently the message is conveyed.

Take 'The Scream' by Edvard Munch. On paper, it's not the most accurately rendered thing in existence. However, it manages to express the message (anxiety) better than just about any image in existence.

A lot of geeks will rag on art in a fairly ignorant fashion because they may not be very sensitive to art in general (much like color blind people have trouble with certain shades of color, there seem to be art blind people as well) or lack a decent education in the matter.

However, unless one is a master at the same craft they are judging, they should not take any haste in dismissing something. If you're a extremely experienced civil engineer, you can take a look at the plans for a bridge and realize 'good god, this thing is a piece of crap!' and be confident in the accuracy of your judgment.

Someone can say 'well, this piece doesn't do much for me', but saying 'this piece is nothing but crap' requires authority in the matter. If you're a extremely experienced civil engineer and a chemist tells you that your bridge is a piece of crap, you wouldn't take their word with as much authority, right?