# 5901-04 / around the house • kitchen life • kitchen sink ~ easy does it

note from a gallery director to staff ~ (embiggenable)

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ON A RECENT POST ON ANOTHER SITE THE IDEA OF EDITING one’s work came up. The general response to the post was that editing one’s own work is hard / difficult work and there were suggestions by commenters, re: how to make editing easier.

In my little corner of the picture making world, editing my work has never been hard or difficult. That is so for a number of reasons. One important reason is the fact that, even though I make a lot of pictures (nearly 13,000 pictures in my “finished” picture folder, all made over the past 20 years), those pictures are the result of making very considered single POV selections for making a picture. I rarely “work” a scene other than an exposure bracketing so in most cases it’s one-and-done. The result? There are not a lot of frames to sort through.

Add to that situation, the fact that I have a very high good picture success rate (feel free to call this a conceit), I do not spend much time having to decide whether a picture is a “keeper” or not. That written, some of my keepers are better than others.

How I determine which pictures are merely good, which are better, or which are best, aka: editing, is based upon the same premise I employ in my picture making…that is, trusting my vision-both literal (what my eyes perceive) and figuratively (perceiving forms that are recognizably derived from real life). Or, to put in in other words, I picture whatever pricks my eye and sensibilities and I determine whether my pictures are good / better / best based upon how they prick my eye and sensibilities.

That is, when a picture hits my eye like a big pizza pie and then shakes my nerves and rattles my brain, it slides into my “best of” folder and usually ends up on a wall (my home, in a galley) or in a photo book.

# 5899-5900 / kitchen life • kitchen sink • around the house ~ imagination deficit disorder?

some pictures on the walls ~ (embiggenable)

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OVER MY YEARS OF INVOLVEMENT WITH THE MEDIUM of photography and its apparatus (more than half a century), I have been confounded by many of the activities that fall under the heading of the word, photography. As a matter of fact, I have always been hesitant to use the word photographer to describe myself, re: my picture making activities. I have always been a picture maker although albeit in my professional life I labeled myself as a commercial photographer, emphasis on the qualifier commercial.

In any event, one of the many continually confounding-it could also be called a depressing disappointment-items that rattles around in my head is the fact of the never-ending adherence to picture making conventions by the picture making throngs. That is, the unimaginative conformation to the “rules” of a given picture making genre.

An example…I once went on a spree of making pictures of flowers with the use of my flatbed scanner. I started posting them on the FLORA forum of a nature photography site. The moderators of that forum went bat-sh*t crazy cuz, you know, what I was doing was (they actually stated this) insulting to “real” flora picture makers. Picture makers who had specialized equipment-lenses, reflectors, scrims, diffusers, lighting (flash), tripods, et al-that they hauled around in their pursuit of a “proper” flora picture. The matter got very heated and the outcome was not in their favor, so they picked up their marbles and left that site to form their own site. You know, what better way is there to protect and define the rules of proper flora picture making than by walling off verboten thought?

That written, it was Brooks Jensen who wrote…

“Real photography begins when we let go of what we have been told is a good photograph and start photographing what we see.”

…and it was Robert Adams who wrote that we don’t need more of:

“the cliché, the ten thousandth camera-club imitation of a picture by Ansel Adams.”

So, all of the above written, my question is, why are so many picture makers unable to break out of the box of proscribed / convention-bound picture making?

And, BTW, why is it that so many picture makers don’t make prints / put pictures on their walls? If, indeed, that is true or is that a myth?

# 5897-98 / around the house ~ who cares about the mechanics?

the heat don’t work cuz the vandals took the handle ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

window needs cleaned ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

I AM GIVING THOUGHT TO NO LONGER TAGGING MY pictures with iPhone nomenclature. I started doing so shortly after I began pictures almost exclusively with an iPhone. Doing so was instigated by the desire to be a kinda poke-a-stick-in-the-eye of the idiots who were, and many cases still are, denigrating the iPhone as unsuitable use as a “serious” picture making device.

What has got me to thinking about ending this nomenclature practice is the fact that I have become increasingly sick to death, re: camera fanboys/girls who are forever telling us what a marvelous-the best camera ever made-camera they use…I’m especially addressing-but not exclusively-the Leicophiles-like the guy out there who wrote, “Seeking the wisdom of generations of Leicophiles”-out there who think their pictures are something special cuz they use the Leica system. Although, in my experience, all that bragging usually means that the pictures are actually nothing to write home about.

In any event, I have no desire to be considered / viewed as an iPhone fanboy. So, I think the solution is to have a single all pictures made with an iPhone unless otherwise noted statement on my blog and WORK page. That is, unless, of course, Apple decides to underwrite my picture making with a $100K grant.

# 5895-96 / around the house ~ inertia

New Years Day morning ~ on and on it goes (embiggenable) • iPhone

the rooster doesn’t crow at dawn ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

I NEVER MAKE NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS. IT SEEMED foolhardy that, if there was something that needed resolving, why wait for one specific day to do so.

In any event, I do have some goals as I enter the end of my 75th year on the planet. A few of those involve photography but nothing earth-shattering…maybe starting a new body of work-made with the ultra-wide angle iPhone lens-and updating my existing bodies of work with the possibility of adding of few new pictures to some of them.

The other item on my non-resolution list is to figure out what I am doing on/with this blog. With 1.5K visits / 2K page views a month, it ain’t dead yet but I feel as though I am just making it up as I go along. That written, there is a voice in my head that keeps telling me that I need a more specific focus on the blog. I keep telling the voice to shut up the f**k up but it refuses to accept that directive..