7/31/2005
7/30/2005
Scraping By
Print orders have been coming in fairly regularly, (more for this time period than any previous year) many from repeat customers - but when I go over my books - I'm still just keeping my fiscal nose above water. I'm going to raise the prices about 20% this weekend.
Of course I'm living a bit better these days - not cooking my own beans and rice staple anymore. In fact not cooking at all. Food is from the great Mexican bodega on the corner. And I did buy a lot of supplies going into digital land which I'm still paying off.
And speaking of money - I just ordered another Maxtor II (250 GB). The one I have is now working flawlessly thanks to the firewire connection. I've been shuffling large amounts of data to it this morning and she's working fine.
Craig had asked a while back what the speed of the old Maxtor II 120 GB was. I don't know. I usually get my stuff from CDW - and they don't list the speed. They do list the speed for the 250 GB as 7200.
Of course I'm living a bit better these days - not cooking my own beans and rice staple anymore. In fact not cooking at all. Food is from the great Mexican bodega on the corner. And I did buy a lot of supplies going into digital land which I'm still paying off.
And speaking of money - I just ordered another Maxtor II (250 GB). The one I have is now working flawlessly thanks to the firewire connection. I've been shuffling large amounts of data to it this morning and she's working fine.
Craig had asked a while back what the speed of the old Maxtor II 120 GB was. I don't know. I usually get my stuff from CDW - and they don't list the speed. They do list the speed for the 250 GB as 7200.
7/29/2005
Street Photography
"street photography is anything shot that you did not expect to find... no matter where or what it is..... your article about it is wrong. Please consider removing it.... "
Posted by Anonymous to Dave Beckerman Photography at 7/29/2005 02:25:31 PM
Actually, I couldn't remember what I wrote or where about street photography - but now that I've read it - I'll let it stand.
What is street photography? Let's define it by it's intentions: to capture some sense of contemporary life, usually in cities, and always non-commerical.
Some sense of contemporary life is an interesting phrase because it can include things that mankind has created, anything from a smashed soda can to a skyscraper. How we live. What we feel. What we think. What makes us laugh. This is the attempt. It has nothing to do with the street and it has nothing to do with what tools are used to create it. But it is always non-commerical in nature.
Non-commercial: the attempt is not to sell a product; not to beautify a bride; not to pounce on a profit for somebody selling hamburgers.
But then what is the difference, if any between documentary photography and street photography?
The line is blurry, but in street photography, the photographer often searches for connections beyond the mere documentation or anthropoligical. At it's best, it can find humor or pathos in ordinary situations by a process of combining subjects in ways that we might not ordinarily see. The street photograph is as much a portrait of the photographer's thoughts as of his subjects.
The long lens photograph of a baseball pitcher releasing the ball that struck out the criticial hitter, is not street photography. It is taken to document a certain moment in time; not to find personal expression. The background is blurred and you can't find two or more elements in the shot. And it usually serves a commercial purpose.
However, if you were standing on the field during the game, or the sidelines, with a wide angle lens, and the third baseman, trying to make a catch fell into the stands, and knocked the hotdog vendor down, and if you were lucky enough to catch the hotdogs flying all over. That would be a good "catch."
And just because a shot is taken in the street doesn't make it street photography either. Fashion shoots are routinely done "in the street." Snapshots of friends and family are taken by the millions in the streets around the world.
The motives of the street photographer are as important as the results. The sensibility is one of the hunter. Hunting without searching. Stealth, as well as a willingness to confront danger come into play. Techniques about how to be there and not be there at the same time obsess you. Like the hunter, you may need to put the equivalent of branches on your cap. It may not be the danger of a wild beast charging at you, but it may be as simple as the fear involved in photographing strangers doing normal things.
It is also involves a willingness to be unappreciated financially. No matter how good you are at it, you are intrinsically not making images that are going to make a money for someone else. If you want to make a better profit, make models look beautiful, or their clothes, or their teeth.
Take beautiful pictures of beaches, landscapes, or famous people.
My print of Promenade, for example - which is the best selling print I have - is not street photography. It doesn't mean that I went out to make a commercially viable print, I didn't. But it is not street photography. It is landscape photography. It is almost documentary photography. Ten years from now there's a good chance that you could go out and recreate Promenade (Poet's Walk) and that it will look the same.
And the idea that street photography is dead is silly. It will fall in and out of favor. Street photographs taken today will age well. They will become more important in fifty years because they will show us things about how we lived that we don't care about today. The clothes people are wearing will change (I hope). Buildings will come and go down. Cell phones, which are so much the rage today will become smaller and more difficult to photograph. In that sense, it has something in common with documentary photography. But on top of that, it will show something unique, that comes from the mind of the individual photographer who was working at the time.
It really doesn't matter whether the photographer is working in digital, or whatever comes after digital super-digital. It doesn't matter if every human being in the world has a camera and is constantly snapping away. Everyone has a pencil today but I don't see an improvement in the literature of the times.
Spelling (my own included) has gotten worse because of spell checkers. The majority of photographs will get more banal. But this will only make the unique photographers of the times, more valuable.
I am not a "pure" street photographer. I enjoy creating fiction. I don't care that much whether a shot has been posed or not. I don't see anything wrong with paying models to stand and kiss on steps surrounded by real passersby. I haven't done this, but I don't see anything wrong with trying to photograph something that you see via imagination rather than fact. I often have an idea and I want to see it happen. If I can get it spontaneously, great. If I need to cojole someone to look a certain way - I will do that. Believe me, I am not a purist.
So hold on to your intentions and let the excitement, the experiment, and ultimately the loss - because you are almost always doomed to failure when you photograph prey that only exists for a split-second - let these intentions be your companions during your urban quest. And as they used to say, good hunting.
Posted by Anonymous to Dave Beckerman Photography at 7/29/2005 02:25:31 PM
Actually, I couldn't remember what I wrote or where about street photography - but now that I've read it - I'll let it stand.
What is street photography? Let's define it by it's intentions: to capture some sense of contemporary life, usually in cities, and always non-commerical.
Some sense of contemporary life is an interesting phrase because it can include things that mankind has created, anything from a smashed soda can to a skyscraper. How we live. What we feel. What we think. What makes us laugh. This is the attempt. It has nothing to do with the street and it has nothing to do with what tools are used to create it. But it is always non-commerical in nature.
Non-commercial: the attempt is not to sell a product; not to beautify a bride; not to pounce on a profit for somebody selling hamburgers.
But then what is the difference, if any between documentary photography and street photography?
The line is blurry, but in street photography, the photographer often searches for connections beyond the mere documentation or anthropoligical. At it's best, it can find humor or pathos in ordinary situations by a process of combining subjects in ways that we might not ordinarily see. The street photograph is as much a portrait of the photographer's thoughts as of his subjects.
The long lens photograph of a baseball pitcher releasing the ball that struck out the criticial hitter, is not street photography. It is taken to document a certain moment in time; not to find personal expression. The background is blurred and you can't find two or more elements in the shot. And it usually serves a commercial purpose.
However, if you were standing on the field during the game, or the sidelines, with a wide angle lens, and the third baseman, trying to make a catch fell into the stands, and knocked the hotdog vendor down, and if you were lucky enough to catch the hotdogs flying all over. That would be a good "catch."
And just because a shot is taken in the street doesn't make it street photography either. Fashion shoots are routinely done "in the street." Snapshots of friends and family are taken by the millions in the streets around the world.
The motives of the street photographer are as important as the results. The sensibility is one of the hunter. Hunting without searching. Stealth, as well as a willingness to confront danger come into play. Techniques about how to be there and not be there at the same time obsess you. Like the hunter, you may need to put the equivalent of branches on your cap. It may not be the danger of a wild beast charging at you, but it may be as simple as the fear involved in photographing strangers doing normal things.
It is also involves a willingness to be unappreciated financially. No matter how good you are at it, you are intrinsically not making images that are going to make a money for someone else. If you want to make a better profit, make models look beautiful, or their clothes, or their teeth.
Take beautiful pictures of beaches, landscapes, or famous people.
My print of Promenade, for example - which is the best selling print I have - is not street photography. It doesn't mean that I went out to make a commercially viable print, I didn't. But it is not street photography. It is landscape photography. It is almost documentary photography. Ten years from now there's a good chance that you could go out and recreate Promenade (Poet's Walk) and that it will look the same.
And the idea that street photography is dead is silly. It will fall in and out of favor. Street photographs taken today will age well. They will become more important in fifty years because they will show us things about how we lived that we don't care about today. The clothes people are wearing will change (I hope). Buildings will come and go down. Cell phones, which are so much the rage today will become smaller and more difficult to photograph. In that sense, it has something in common with documentary photography. But on top of that, it will show something unique, that comes from the mind of the individual photographer who was working at the time.
It really doesn't matter whether the photographer is working in digital, or whatever comes after digital super-digital. It doesn't matter if every human being in the world has a camera and is constantly snapping away. Everyone has a pencil today but I don't see an improvement in the literature of the times.
Spelling (my own included) has gotten worse because of spell checkers. The majority of photographs will get more banal. But this will only make the unique photographers of the times, more valuable.
I am not a "pure" street photographer. I enjoy creating fiction. I don't care that much whether a shot has been posed or not. I don't see anything wrong with paying models to stand and kiss on steps surrounded by real passersby. I haven't done this, but I don't see anything wrong with trying to photograph something that you see via imagination rather than fact. I often have an idea and I want to see it happen. If I can get it spontaneously, great. If I need to cojole someone to look a certain way - I will do that. Believe me, I am not a purist.
So hold on to your intentions and let the excitement, the experiment, and ultimately the loss - because you are almost always doomed to failure when you photograph prey that only exists for a split-second - let these intentions be your companions during your urban quest. And as they used to say, good hunting.
7/28/2005
Blending Modes
There were a couple of comments about "soft light" blending.
Briefly - all the "blending modes" are useful - depending on what look you are trying to achieve. After you've made a dupe layer, change the blend mode to "soft light." What this does is make the blacks richer (darker) and the light areas lighter.
Adjust the opacity of the blend to taste.
Add a curve or level layer as needed.
There are a million ways to skin a cat (sorry Buddy) in Photoshop. Perhaps a carefully tweaked curve can achieve the same look - I don't know.
Sometimes I might use several layers blended together. Depends on what I'm starting from and where I'm going with the image.
The reason I even mention the "soft light" layer is that it seems especially useful with scanned negatives. Almost every print that began life as a black and white negative - gets a soft-light treatment - at least to begin with.
Sometimes I use it for special effects. The shot of the carriage horse below - it is actually three captures sandwiched together and blended (yes - shot on a tripod).
The only caveat - I would - as usual - do sharpening etc. before you start doing your layers and as always at the correct image size for printing.
And you can get trickier. You can copy out a piece of the sky and blended it back with whatever blending mode you need. You can even blend your "curve" adjustment layer... On and on it goes.
Reference: Adobe Photoshop for Photographers, Marin Evening (Chapter on Montage Techniques).
I've been loathe to write much about Photoshop techniques because there is already so much information out there and I tell you - I am no expert. Also, I know there are a lot of readers that just skip this stuff hoping I'll write something funny or put up an exceptional photograph. One thing I notice is that Blogger lets you manage more than one blog; so what I might do is just create a separate space for the technical stuff.
ONE OTHER TECH NOTE:
The Blogger / Google search bar wasn't working. It wasn't generating the correct URL for the search. I wrote Blogger about it and they told me there wasn't anything they could do about it. That the problem was with the Google search. The truth was, whoever was responsible for generating the search code from Blogger made a mistake.
The "forward" slash between the website and the blog directory was missing. Their widget wasn't putting it in. I ended up doing a kludge for this by letting them generate the code, then taking that code and fixing it, and placing it in the blog template and then removing their search widget. Works okay now.
I checked a few other sites that were hosted via FTP as opposed to Blogspot and the FTP sites were having the same problem so it is pretty widespread.
Briefly - all the "blending modes" are useful - depending on what look you are trying to achieve. After you've made a dupe layer, change the blend mode to "soft light." What this does is make the blacks richer (darker) and the light areas lighter.
Adjust the opacity of the blend to taste.
Add a curve or level layer as needed.
There are a million ways to skin a cat (sorry Buddy) in Photoshop. Perhaps a carefully tweaked curve can achieve the same look - I don't know.
Sometimes I might use several layers blended together. Depends on what I'm starting from and where I'm going with the image.
The reason I even mention the "soft light" layer is that it seems especially useful with scanned negatives. Almost every print that began life as a black and white negative - gets a soft-light treatment - at least to begin with.
Sometimes I use it for special effects. The shot of the carriage horse below - it is actually three captures sandwiched together and blended (yes - shot on a tripod).
The only caveat - I would - as usual - do sharpening etc. before you start doing your layers and as always at the correct image size for printing.
And you can get trickier. You can copy out a piece of the sky and blended it back with whatever blending mode you need. You can even blend your "curve" adjustment layer... On and on it goes.
Reference: Adobe Photoshop for Photographers, Marin Evening (Chapter on Montage Techniques).
I've been loathe to write much about Photoshop techniques because there is already so much information out there and I tell you - I am no expert. Also, I know there are a lot of readers that just skip this stuff hoping I'll write something funny or put up an exceptional photograph. One thing I notice is that Blogger lets you manage more than one blog; so what I might do is just create a separate space for the technical stuff.
ONE OTHER TECH NOTE:
The Blogger / Google search bar wasn't working. It wasn't generating the correct URL for the search. I wrote Blogger about it and they told me there wasn't anything they could do about it. That the problem was with the Google search. The truth was, whoever was responsible for generating the search code from Blogger made a mistake.
The "forward" slash between the website and the blog directory was missing. Their widget wasn't putting it in. I ended up doing a kludge for this by letting them generate the code, then taking that code and fixing it, and placing it in the blog template and then removing their search widget. Works okay now.
I checked a few other sites that were hosted via FTP as opposed to Blogspot and the FTP sites were having the same problem so it is pretty widespread.
7/27/2005
Self-Analysis
I've wondered why I gravitated towards photography. A few ideas:
My mother was at one point a concert pianist. She's dead nearly 20 years now. Last night I dreamed that I had written a new tune and was playing it for her on the piano. She ignored it. Much too simple I guess for her taste. But it reminded me of the days when I was a teenager playing rock and roll on the piano.
My mother would be going around the house cleaning things up and every once in a while she'd shout over: Quit banging on the piano! Do you have to bang!
Her father was a musician. He taught me to play the piano. His method involved smacking my hands with a ruler until they were shaped properly to strike the keys.
My father (very much alive) was something of an intellectual. The house was filled with his books and journals. He had definite ideas about writing but never gave much praise for my own attempts. (Later this was to change - but not when I was younger).
So one of the things - early on - I wanted some means of expression that could be free of parental criticism. Something that neither of them knew anything about - that could be mine alone.
Later on - as I waded through the mundane drudgery of work - photography resurfaced again - but with an inverse relationship to how routine the rest of my life was.
Taking a camera to work everyday eased the boredom of the subway ride. Instead of burying my head in a book, or pretending to sleep - I became wide awake and what would otherwise have been a boring trip became exciting. I became more - not less - aware of what was going on around me.
Photography was something you could do to make the ordinary - extra-ordinary.
Other things - technique - enjoying shapes and light for their own sake - this all comes later. The driving force was not "art" - but a safe place to express my own identity by what I put in the frame.
There were other instincts which eventually came into play: the idea of the hunt was as crucial as whether you actually bagged anything. That, I think - must be inborn and go back to our early ancestors who lived or died by the hunt. But as I say - that all emerged later on.
My mother was at one point a concert pianist. She's dead nearly 20 years now. Last night I dreamed that I had written a new tune and was playing it for her on the piano. She ignored it. Much too simple I guess for her taste. But it reminded me of the days when I was a teenager playing rock and roll on the piano.
My mother would be going around the house cleaning things up and every once in a while she'd shout over: Quit banging on the piano! Do you have to bang!
Her father was a musician. He taught me to play the piano. His method involved smacking my hands with a ruler until they were shaped properly to strike the keys.
My father (very much alive) was something of an intellectual. The house was filled with his books and journals. He had definite ideas about writing but never gave much praise for my own attempts. (Later this was to change - but not when I was younger).
So one of the things - early on - I wanted some means of expression that could be free of parental criticism. Something that neither of them knew anything about - that could be mine alone.
Later on - as I waded through the mundane drudgery of work - photography resurfaced again - but with an inverse relationship to how routine the rest of my life was.
Taking a camera to work everyday eased the boredom of the subway ride. Instead of burying my head in a book, or pretending to sleep - I became wide awake and what would otherwise have been a boring trip became exciting. I became more - not less - aware of what was going on around me.
Photography was something you could do to make the ordinary - extra-ordinary.
Other things - technique - enjoying shapes and light for their own sake - this all comes later. The driving force was not "art" - but a safe place to express my own identity by what I put in the frame.
There were other instincts which eventually came into play: the idea of the hunt was as crucial as whether you actually bagged anything. That, I think - must be inborn and go back to our early ancestors who lived or died by the hunt. But as I say - that all emerged later on.
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