# 5869-71 / around the house ~ this way and that way

July 7, 2021

BEING A CREATURE OF HABIT, I ALMOST ALWAYS HOLD my iPhone in a vertical orientation when making pictures. That's cuz, since I primarily make square pictures, it doesn't matter which orientation I use. So, I use the orientation that I normally use when holding / viewing my iPhone.

Now that I am frequently playing with the Portrait setting for it narrow-er DOF quality, + the fact that there is no square setting-although I can crop to square in processing-in the Portrait Mode, + the fact of my use of (habitual) vertical iPhone orientation, all of the recent full frame pictures I have made are in the vertical format. This relationship of habitual practices and their result just dawned on me. Duh and more duh.

Time to break old habits and hold my iPhone in a horizontal orientation.

#5768-70 / (ku) landscape•kitchen life ~ on discursive promiscuity

May 15, 2021

I TRULY BELIEVE THAT VARIETY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE, picture making wise:

"Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere...One might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. It must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others." ~ John Szarkowski

Which is why I am a practitioner of what I call discursive promiscuity. Consequently, my picture making contest, as Szarkowski suggests, can be held anywhere. And, it can be the focus of any given referent. That is cuz my eye and sensibilities can be pricked by, seemingly, the most unconventionable referents. That is, referents outside of the box of what is considered to be referents appropriate for the making of a picture. However, no matter the referent, my pictures are most always about form. In a way, kinda like Robert Adams:

"By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet....Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil.... What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos."~ Robert Adams

All of the above written, coming back to Scarkowski's idea of "more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations", it took a comment from a gallery director who said, upon the viewing of my porfolio-which at the time was not divided into separate bodies of work-that no matter the diverse subject matter seen in my work, he would have no trouble identifying any of the pictures (when viewed as a stand-alone picture) as a product of my vision, which caused me to understand that the manner in which I pictured the world-that is, the identifiable configuration seen in all of my pictures-was the link which held all of the diverse referents together as a unified body of work. (My thanks to Hemingway for introducing the idea of run-on sentences as a writing divice)

That realization caused me to understand that promiscuous picture making was the way to go. After all, it would always be possible, long after the picture making fact, to harvest like-minded referent pictures from my total body of work and organize them, by specific referents, into separate bodies of work.

I recognize that this manner of picture making flies in the face of the conventional wisdom about picking a single subject / referent and concentrate on it, and it alone, for a protracted period of time in order to create a unified body of work. However, for me, when attempted, that mode of picturing leads me to a kind of picture making boredom which leads to a premature end of what I might have wanted to accomplish. What I have found from pursuing discursive promiscuity picture making is that I can add pictures, ad infinitum, to any number of separate bodies of work over a very long period of time.

In any event, I guess what I am suggesting in this entry is for giving it a try for a couple of months. Just picture anything and every thing and see what happens.

# 5765-67 / flora•civilized ku ~ a picture is not a helicopter

May 14, 2021

Photoshop composite ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone — ***Photoshop composite*** ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

EXACTLY MY THOUGHTS ON THE Academic Lunatic Fringe crowd (wherein content is more important than the visual)

"The funny and sad thing is that photography is an art, but these guys have such an inferiority complex about it that all they do is tag on gold-plate words where they aren’t needed. If they’d only let it talk for itself." ~ Gordon Parks

# 5762-64 / kitchen life•civilized ku ~ on tinkering and fiddling

May 13, 2021

(embiggenable) • iPhone / PORTRAIT mode*

* Listening to music on the ferry ride across Lake Champlain to Vermont.

I MUST ADMIT THAT I HAVE A FAIR AMOUNT of pity-but no sympathy-for those picture makers who whine about "real" camera menu complexity.

That state of mind springs from the fact that, iMo, if one is fiddling with a camera's menus during the picture making process, he/she is an idiot. And, I most always have pity on idiots cuz they just can't help themselves.

To wit, the age-old adage which advises again thinking when making a picture is a very valuable one, especially so involving gear. Inasmuch as, iMo (any many others), a significant component in the making of good pictures is for the picture maker to respond, with as little interference as possible, to the visual and emotional aspect(s) of what he/she sees, letting a camera's operational procedures "get in the way of" that response is counter-productive to good picture making.

In fact (and in practice), what a picture maker should do is to learn, gear / technique wise, what his/her picture making requires. Master it and then, "forget it" so, that at the moment of having one's eye and sensibilities pricked, it is, at most, a simple matter of adjusting the picture making triangle-aperture, shutter speed, focus-and clicking the shutter release. In other words, to act instinctually / intuitively, AKA: the ability to apply knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning.

AN ASIDE...In the digital picture making world, much of the adjusting can be eliminated by the use of "auto" settings-something I use to avoid like the plague-as in auto exposure, auto focus, auto White Balance, and the like. Today's in-camera AI is incredibly capable of getting it right. END OF ASIDE

Of course, I understand that many who come to the sport of picture making find the act of tinkering and fiddling with gear and technique its most endearing and involving characteristic. Which only goes to prove Julian's grandmother's statement that, "For every pot, there's a lid." Or, in other words...to each his own. Or, whatever floats your boat.

All of that written, here's a fact; the overwhelming number of successful and admired picture makers-those whose pictures are judged to be Art-keep their picture making simple...1 camera, 1 lens, l film / digital senor, and even in some cases, 1 aperture (f64 group). And, of course, one singular vision. They don't think about it, they just "set it and forget it."

More is the pity, in the digital domain, that more picture makers do not follow that proscription.