civilized ku # 496 ~ Holga/Diana?
Wednesday, May 12, 2010 at 09:35AM 
Onion on plate • click to embiggenEvery once in a while you just have to genuflect and give thanks to the photography gods for delivering a juicy morsel to your doorstep at precisely the time that you need it.
Take yesterday as an example - no sooner had I posted the civilized ku # 495 ~ eye see it entry regarding arbiters with opinions, informed or not, when, bada bing, bada boom, there appeared a comment on the entry that was a genuine gold-plated example of a truly uninformed arbiter offering up a truly uniformed opinion. Soooo, in addition to offering my thanks to the photography gods, I would also like to express my appreciation to tom frost for this piece of totally incorrect and way-off-the-the-mark drivel ...
.... why not just go ahead and be truthful and use and accept the limitations of a Holga/Diana, rather than use post-processing to control and emulate their effects?
The first and most obvious totally incorrect assumption - at least so to anyone who is not half blind or completely ignorant - that mr. frost has made is to state that I am trying to emulate the visual effects that are the byproduct of using a Holga/Diana/Lomo/cheap plastic camera. If I had been trying to do so, I have failed miserably - in my pictures there is no evidence whatsoever of the across-the-complete-frame lack of sharpness or definition that is the hallmark of the cheap plastic camera genre. Nor is there any evidence of the distorted color rendition or the often truncated or extreme tonal range typical of such cameras and their uncorrected plastic lenses.
Cheap plastic-camera-like, my pictures are not - not by a long shot.
However, if mr. frost needs to insist that I am trying to emulate the visuals effects created by the use of a particular piece of picture making hardware, he might do so by displaying a greater awareness / knowledge of the medium and it apparatus than he did with his way-off-the-mark cheap plastic camera remark - if my pictures resemble the look created by the use of a particular type of picture making hardware, it would have to be described as that created by the use of relatively inexpensive TLR cameras (Rolleiflex clones) such as the Yashicamat 124.
The visual characteristics of pictures made with those type of cameras is relatively close to the visual characteristics of my pictures - a large(ish) central field of sharp, in-focus, highly detailed imagery that fades to a soft vignette at the extreme corners of the image. TLR cmaeras, unlike the Holga genre, allowed for focusing, aperture, and shutter speed control and the lenses were color / optically corrected and tended to make very nice quality film images that printed to relatively high quality standards.
However, all of that said and even if mr. frost got that right, he would still be operating under the erroneous assumption that my corner vignette technique is in anyway an attempt to emulate the visual look and feel of pictures made by the use of any particular type of camera. Simply stated, that is not nor has it ever been my intention.
My intent was and continues to be to "emulate", explore, and employ for creative / expressive reasons the visual characteristics of the human eye and human vision, which, by nature of its physical construction, is sharpest at the center of the field of vision and much less so at the edges.
An astute and informed arbiter who is familiar with the history of the medium would most likely know that my vignette technique is also a tip of the historic hat to P.H. Emerson, a British picture maker who published (in 1889) the book, Naturalistic Photography for Students of Art. In his book, Emerson advocated for his belief that ...
... the photograph should be a true representation of that which the eye saw. Following contemporary optical theories, he produced photographs with one area of sharp focus while the remainder was unsharp. This argument about the nature of seeing and its representation in photography he pursued vehemently and to the discomfort of the photographic establishment. ~ From Wikipedia
It is rather apparent that my pictures and picture making endeavors, which, in part, are about the nature of seeing and its representation in photography, have created a bit of discomfort in tom frost. I have no problem with that whatsoever - everyone is entitled to an opinion. Unfortunately, so many opinions are not worth the time and energy it takes to form and/or read them.
So, note to Don and John H - while they are many wannabe arbiters out there, you must understand that many are called but few are chosen. Or, in other words, many are uniformed and few are informed. You will know the informed by the depth and relevance of their knowledge and presentation to the topic at hand.
Reader Comments (5)
First off, one must be careful to realize that the "i" and the "u" reside next to one another on the keyboard and make the necessary allowances when meaning to type the word "shutter" :)) [even though the subject is a Holga.]
Onward to more serious "seeing" topics. You seem to use the square format exclusively. Your decision and choice of course, but when I try to "visualize" the scope of coverage with my actual eyesight, I have to conclude that the human field of vision (and attention) seems to be wider than it is high, so it would seem at first that something more like your 4:3 ratio, or 3:2 or 6x7 might be more "natural" than a perfectly square format.
So do you yourself tend to "see", or have you trained / convinced yourself to see "square?" This also begs questions regarding cropping, which section of the image to choose, and so forth. Do you "see the square" at the time the photo is taken, or later during post processing? More Chautauqua questions.
As regards the vignetting, can / could you agree that some images "respond" better to this technique than others? More discussion here too. This would also possibly correspond to one's stete of mind (and state of vision) at any particular moment.
I've been slowly drawn into following your site, led by the photographs (but trapped sometimes by the prose). I infer from recent comments that your shots *resemble* Yashicamat photos. But I also infer that you must use digital. Otherwise much scanning, and you seem a busy man. So my question: what camera do you use? And if it is a 3x2 format, how do see so reliably in squares? I'd like to work in squares, but my tools are rectangles...
I knew you'd take the bait,
Mark missing in action, hope he didn't get into that hockey brawl in Montreal.
If anyone cares, when I changed my blog name I screwed up the address, this is the new one http://cooperscavephotography-scoop.blogspot.com/