While reading On Being a Photographer by David Hurn and Bill Jay the following passage by Bill struck me as having particular merit with respect to the way I react to images:
The best pictures, for me, are those which go straight into the heart and the blood, and take some time to reach the brain.
This statement is just another way, I guess, of admitting that there is a disconnection between the way one subconsciously processes, evaluates and appreciates an image and the way that evaluation and appreciation is expressed.
It’s one of the reasons why I often find the critiquing of images a difficult process, sometimes to the point of failing utterly in the expression of that critique.
Sometimes it’s necessary to simply say, great image….love it and leave it at that, though it must be said that a great deal of work should be done before saying it.
I’ve added a new image titled Moon Tree to the digital galery which can be viewed here.
A composite image. The tree is a Walnut photographed in my garden. The moon is a blending of a number of different images, one a purely digital orb which helps with the halo effect.
Titled Moon Tree in recognition of the Apollo 14 mission and its Moon Tree legacy which you can read about here.
I think I’ve just seen my favorite Leica camera:
Featured in this auction will be an original Leica Gun with 400mm Telyt, with Leica code RIFLE
Now that would make street photography extremely interesting.
For those of you who do not lend your hand to the business of stock photography it will likely have gone unnoticed that the stock photography business is going through some significant changes. One of those changes is the explosion of microstock sites and the effect they are having on the stock landscape. For those that do not know, microstock is an image sales model where customers can download and use Royalty Free images for very small amounts of money, often as low as $1. The agency gets a percentage of the fee and the photographer usually gets a smaller percentage. Anyhow, it’s causing agitation between photographers selling images for higher amounts and the microstock shooters. Now that you have a veneer understanding of the battlefield it would be a good time to get to the point of this posting which is to direct you to this article on EPUK which had me laughing out loud:
There is, to put it mildly, little love lost between the microshooters and traditional stock photographers, and in particular microshooters and Getty stock photographers. The former disparagingly refer to the latter as Trads, while the latter, who prefer to describe themselves as artists, respond by calling the microshooters Laughing Stock. While the iStockers were celebrating the Getty deal in February, their new colleagues didn’t exactly welcome them into the family. Some of Getty’s artistes have an extraordinarily high opinion of themselves, and their reaction to the Getty-iStock nuptials was largely that of Lord Muck learning that his daughter had decided to elope with a Millwall fan.
Entertaining.