NikonGear'23
Images => Life, the Universe & Everything Else => Topic started by: ArthurDent on August 01, 2019, 17:02:11
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I like this one, but there are so many from which to choose:
"Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."
Your favorite?
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I like this one, but there are so many from which to choose:
"Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."
Great one!
It reinforces my belief that composition/message within a picture is way more important than technical aspects.
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"They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important." - Henri Cartier-Bresson
This one is maybe the one I like most ! 8)
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"They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important." - Henri Cartier-Bresson
This one is maybe the one I like most ! 8)
From what I've read, he didn't like darkroom work and would not allow his photographs to be cropped, always wanting a little unexposed film left on the edges to act as a black frame. Also, he shot almost all of his photographs in black and white. The mechanics of development were uninteresting to him and he did not want to do it himself or to engage in any darkroom enhancing of any of the elements of his work, or to have anyone else do it for him.
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From what I've read, he didn't like darkroom work and would not allow his photographs to be cropped, always wanting a little unexposed film left on the edges to act as a black frame. Also, he shot almost all of his photographs in black and white. The mechanics of development were uninteresting to him and he did not want to do it himself or to engage in any darkroom enhancing of any of the elements of his work, or to have anyone else do it for him.
He was a bit worse then that ! With a very "Beaux-Arts" spirit (meaning jokes and such, making fun of interviewers...). Burning what he loved and vice-versa. He didn't really like people, for him they were props in his geometrical composition. Great man but a bit weird :o
He did bring us to file our negatives trays of our enlargers to have the black limits of the negative, to show that we didn't crop... Spoiled a whole generation ;) My daughter made a thesis on his work 8)
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Here is another I like- “A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.”
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"You just have to live and life will give you pictures" - Henri Cartier-Bresson “Of course it’s all luck.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
He was famous for not cropping his pictures. But his most famous photograph was heavily cropped. It is an interesting paradox?
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"You just have to live and life will give you pictures" - Henri Cartier-Bresson “Of course it’s all luck.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
He was famous for not cropping his pictures. But his most famous photograph was heavily cropped. It is an interesting paradox?
The photo world is full of people that for reasons known only to them, they put restrictions on themselves, and many of them want to put those restrictions on other photographers.
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The photo world is full of people that for reasons known only to them, they put restrictions on themselves, and many of them want to put those restrictions on other photographers.
The similar behaviour, unfortunately, is seen in many other areas of life.
While I strive to complete the image *in* camera (mainly out of laziness because there will be less post processing required), I realise many images need further work later on. Thus it's about securing *raw* material for the final image.
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The similar behaviour, unfortunately, is seen in many other areas of life.
While I strive to complete the image *in* camera (mainly out of laziness because there will be less post processing required), I realise many images need further work later on. Thus it's about securing *raw* material for the final image.
His view was quite different from yours. He said, “The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.”
Your view is more akin to that of Ansel Adams-“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
I'm more in line with your and Ansel's view, I think post processing has a profound influence on the impact of the final image. HCB was a wonderful photographer, but I wonder if his legacy might be far greater if he had become as much of a virtuoso in the darkroom as he was behind the camera.
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Actually I agree with HCB as well. No amount of later tweaking will save something not being of interest at the moment the shutter was tripped. In that sense images are "taken" not "made". However, what the camera can deliver might not be what we really want for the occasion thus the need to "make" the raw material into a final image.
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Actually I agree with HCB as well. No amount of later tweaking will save something not being of interest at the moment the shutter was tripped. In that sense images are "taken" not "made". However, what the camera can deliver might not be what we really want for the occasion thus the need to "make" the raw material into a final image.
I think we will have to agree to disagree, I’ve seen many otherwise unexceptional images become quite interesting when innovative post processing is applied.
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Disagreement is fine with me. No problem at all.
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Bresson the Decisive Moment is more the Decisive Con
The guy is a fake and a fraud who did not realize that few years later something called photo forensics has been developed to catch people like him and others namely Steve Maccurry - Robert Capa - Robert Doisneau and tons of others.
Decisive moment my .... When you shoot rapid fire to pick up the best shot as this famous HCB shot....
This ain't decisive but spray and pray!
(https://i.imgur.com/Y1LFt7Y.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/KR95qzH.jpg)
But hey. HCB does not stop here but copies situations made famous by other photographer introducing a so called twist namely the false Decisive Moment Con.
I appreciate some of you might be revolted but let your own eyes do the analysis and look deep into the details of Derriere la Gare St. Lazare.
A train station made famous by the paintings of Manet and Monet......
(https://i.imgur.com/BEbIHVm.jpg)
Manipulation in deleting elements and of course processing and CROPPING.
Original picture made by MM followed by HCB followed by Avedon.
Now who is copying from whom?
(https://i.imgur.com/POdR1sA.jpg)
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Bresson the Decisive Moment is more the Decisive Con
The guy is a fake and a fraud who did not realize that few years later something called photo forensics has been developed to catch people like him and others namely Steve Maccurry - Robert Capa - Robert Doisneau and tons of others.
Decisive moment my .... When you shoot rapid fire to pick up the best shot as this famous HCB shot....
This ain't decisive but spray and pray!
But hey. HCB does not stop here but copies situations made famous by other photographer introducing a so called twist namely the false Decisive Moment Con.
I appreciate some of you might be revolted but let your own eyes do the analysis and look deep into the details of Derriere la Gare St. Lazare.
A train station made famous by the paintings of Manet and Monet......
Manipulation in deleting elements and of course processing and CROPPING.
Original picture made by MM followed by HCB followed by Avedon.
Now who is copying from whom?
I cannot help thinking the green eyed monster seems to be clouding your thoughts Ethan.
And "spray and pray" with a Leica III, how does that work? Your contact sheet example just shows a photographer working the scene.
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It's seldom a Decisive Moment — it's more a question of Decisive Forethought: you sense a moment is about to unfold and you react accordingly. At least I do — or I try to do.
Modern cameras which can shoot a burst just make it easier to capture the peak of the action than we could with earlier equipment.
As for Processing: I have always considered that the camera work was only the first part of making a photograph and that the photographer had to be mindful at the time he took the shots of the way that film was to be developed and printed.
In the days of Film, I never considered those who did not develop and print their own photographs to be real Photographers — and I still feel that way about people who won't make the effort to learn to use today's wonderful software to complete their vision!
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I'm not convinced that taking more than one shot in a row makes a decisive moment not decisive, or that doing something someone else sort of did reduces a shot to mere imitation. No doubt HCB was less pure than some would like to think, and perhaps less than he'd like us to think, but I do notice, for example, that of the three pictures shown of people jumping, only one shows a person at the very precise moment he is about to drop into a puddle of unspecified depth. Some might also consider that there's a difference between what one suspects are models jumping on command and a person caught jumping by necessity. Whether that makes the image good or not, you can argue, but it does suggest that the image is different.
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“Your first ten thousand photographs are your worst.”
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I think that if a quiet, small, mechanically powered 9 FPS Leica camera was available in the 1930s, HCB would have used it.
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I bet that he would have Keith.
Rapidly winding film on with those knurled knobs that the old Leicas used to have must have been a right royal pain in the neck!
I think that if a quiet, small, mechanically powered 9 FPS Leica camera was available in the 1930s, HCB would have used it.
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I think that if a quiet, small, mechanically powered 9 FPS Leica camera was available in the 1930s, HCB would have used it.
I’d emphasize the “quiet” aspect. He did not want to be noticed while taking photographs, even going so far as to put black tape over the shiny parts of his camera so people wouldn’t notice it.
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“As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It’s a trace.”- HCB
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HCB didn't need a motor-driven camera, he was able to capture the moment invisible with a 24 fps movie camera... :)
https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/exposing-of-a-gestapo-informer/
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Noct:
HCB's split second response in that Hearing was exactly what I meant by my comment: "It's seldom a Decisive Moment — it's more a question of Decisive Forethought: you sense a moment is about to unfold and you react accordingly.
I am fairly certain that I don't actually "see" the moment but I sense it building and react: if you wait until you actually "see' the peak action, you will react too late.
With human emotions it is fairly easy to sense what is happening and react and a single shot is all that you need.
It is the same with many animal shots: once you have learned by watching them for a while, it becomes quite easy to predict what they are about to do and you can often capture the defining moment in a single shot.
Hummingbirds in flight, and similar fast action happenings, are a different matter; you can't see the wing-positions of a humming bird but a high-speed burst at 1/8000 sec will enable one to choose either wings-down or wings-up after the event.
In my case, I think that any ability that I have to predict and re-act was helped by long years of shooting with medium format film in cameras which had only manual film-advance (and no auto anything!) so you had to catch the moment and get it right with a single shot.
It would probably be a useful exercise to work in single-exposure mode from time to time?
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“As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It’s a trace.”- HCB
In the mind of the viewer, photographs of people, whether recent or from the deep past, can be morbid, elegaic, or both at the same time.
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I think that if a quiet, small, mechanically powered 9 FPS Leica camera was available in the 1930s, HCB would have used it.
Keith, I thought you said "HCB would NOT have used it" and agreed with it.
He would have wanted a camera with an even more responsive shutter release than a Leica, rather than FPS, I guess?
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Keith, I thought you said "HCB would NOT have used it" and agreed with it.
He would have wanted a camera with an even more responsive shutter release than a Leica, rather than FPS, I guess?
It's clear that being discreet was of utmost importance to HCB, so any camera that generated any appreciable amount of noise would have been rejected. I'll modify my idea to '...he would have tried it' instead of 'he would have used it.'