Proportion
Thursday, December 16, 2004, 12:10 PM - Photo
Ha! So much for keeping a browser open at work - the Proportion piece was still there. This was posted December 3.

It's taken a while (about a year...) to consciously realize that the Canon DSLR captures a 1:1.5 image rather than the 1:1.33 image I'd become accustomed to with my previous digital cameras. I backed into the realization while cropping an image, wondering why, one more time, I was chopping off the sides of a picture. I try not to crop pictures; I ascribe to the tradition that one mark of a successful image is that it fills the frame of capture. I'm not a commercial photographer, so I can afford the luxury of notions such as integrity to the format chosen. I own only one format, so I don't have a lot of flexibility here, but it is a conceit to which I have tried to adhere.

Once conscious of the issue, I pursued it.

I started with the camera. I realized that it's an effort to see the full image in the viewfinder of the Canon. I compared the Canon with my old Nikkormat and I found that, with the Nikkormat, I can position the camera more squarely to my line of vision and I perceive the edges of the image through the viewfinder more brightly. And for some reason, I can see the details of lens distortion more clearly with the Nikkormat. The net is that the camera itself does not facilitate (for me, at least) full-aspect imaging.

Then I looked at my results. After studying some of my images, I came to the conclusion that I don't really cotton to the 1:1.5 aspect; it's either too oblong or not oblong enough. For a "normal" image, I prefer the 1:1.33 ratio as a maximum and for panoramas, I prefer ratios starting at 1:2.5.

This all leaves me trying to maintain an integrity to an aspect format I don't much like with a camera that hinders the effort.

That led to thinking about the nature of my images and why I take them. Along with not being commercial, my images also are not photojournalistic. There is no story to tell or support. My images, then, are by and large aesthetic objects.

I'm not sure entirely what that means, "aesthetic objects". Right now, it's more a definition of what they aren't intended to do; they aren't meant to convince nor are they meant to narrate. They are meant to be compelling visual objects in and of themselves.

I have decided that it is time to change notions. For the while, I'm going to abandon the idea of filling the frame and concentrate on this idea of object. The first step is to impose a new regime. What I want to do is create images in what I consider to be a non-photographic aspect and that, to me, is a square (hasselblad notwithstanding) format or crop.


Photos
Sunday, November 28, 2004, 04:51 PM - Photo
What are you hearing when the shutter snaps?
Salgado photographs people. Casual photographers photograph phantoms. ... Charity, vertical, humiliates. Solidarity, horizontal, helps. Salgado photographs from inside, in solidarity. ... Salgado's camera reaches in to reveal the light of human life with tragic intensity, with sad tenderness. here.
Is there poetry? What is the light? Where's the good of it, or the bad of it? Snapshot after snapshot after snapshot - what should compel a gaze to return, to become a look, to become a stare?

Are you hearing yourself? Are you becoming a part of the moment? Are you there, somewhere in the picture? Or are you standing back, too, watching your work?