Don’t forget to “like” the new Facebook page for Avian Bone Syndrome!

Links of interest mentioned in the episode:

• My photos of both lunar and solar eclipses
• Large format photography
• Ansel Adams’ zone systems
• Eli Pariser’s TED talk about the filter bubble
• The Filter Bubble book: Amazon.com – Amazon.co.uk – Amazon.it

This episode is about photography and ethics: what is the line between photo editing and fraud?

There are no links mentioned in the episode, however you may find these interesting:

• My portfolio on Flickr
• My Facebook page dedicated to my photography
• Prints of my photos for sale

It contains photos of times past: people dressed in the style of their time, billboards with traditional advertising, cities shaped in ways now alien. It’s mesmerizing, and in a different way from sites collecting pictures of actors and actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood, such as the appropriately named Old Hollywood. Vintage Everyday is different because it collects images of everyday people and everyday places, not famous movie stars, and in a sense it shows the human side of history. A similar feeling can be had by browsing one’s own family photo albums, but in that case the familiarity of the faces prevents from observing the surrounding elements: when a photo depicts someone you know, you notice them and don’t pay much attention to what’s around them, or even to the details about themselves. Oftentimes people have pointed out things about my own photos of models that I had completely missed, despite having taken and worked on the image for a while.

A few pages into Vintage Everyday, I had an epiphany that I want to share with you. I noticed that at the time these photos were taken, they probably weren’t that special. Certainly in the 1940s having a camera was not an ordinary thing as it is now, as they were harder and more expensive to operate: I have this romantic idea of a photographer being seen if not as a full-fledged artist, at least as someone with a special ability, so to speak: you couldn’t just pick up a camera and start shooting. A posed portrait, as many of our own family albums clearly show, was a big deal. However, I’m quite confident that all these pictures at the time were just that, pictures. “Oh look, there’s a photo of a lady walking down a New York street.” “Ah, these kids are playing with a make-believe car.” These images, at the time, must have been relatively uninteresting except to the parties involved.

Fast forward a few decades, and they become treasure troves. History gets in the way and gives these photos a whole new meaning. That lady isn’t just walking in New York City, she is walking confidently in New York City; and the workers in the background, blurred in distance to the point that maybe nobody had noticed them before, are stealing a glance at her while unloading crates of fruit from a truck. Is it the first time they see a woman being that confident? It may very well be: times were a-changing. And those kids playing are blissfully enjoying their own fantasy world, oblivious to the fact that their fathers are fighting a war on the other side of the Atlantic; perhaps that’s why their mothers look at them from the kitchen window, undecided between hope and concern.

At the center — or rather at the side — of everything, always the same thing: a camera and a photographer. That’s how everyday history is documented, with rolls of film by unnamed photographers preserving reality for posterity. Every single photo that was ever taken and that will ever be taken is by its very own definition unique, because at any given moment in time and at any given place in space there is room for only one camera. Every time a shutter fires, life as it is right there and right then is immortalized. Time stops as the image becomes a frail and irreplaceable time capsule.

Even a photo that looks plain or boring at first sight may acquire significance over time. Just look around you: how many things have changed in the last ten years? How many benches have been added or removed, how many shops have changed names, how many buildings have been repainted? And how many times have you seen photos from other countries and felt that even seemingly familiar landscapes were not that familiar after all?

The ubiquity of cameras today means that we can effectively document the changes brought by history, virtually without any effort. That doesn’t mean that it’s become a useless process; on the contrary, it means that we are all empowered and we all should use this ability more often and with more dedication, once we grasp how far-reaching this may be.

Perhaps it’s finally time to stop taking useless selfies and turn the lens towards the world, so that the generations to come will be able to feel the same nostalgia for a time we never lived in as we do when we look at photos from a century ago.

(Image on top: Front Street, Marquette, Michigan, ca. 1909 — From Vintage Everyday)

It’s a very subjective matter, of course. For instance I personally don’t like most of Picasso’s works, but I do find his Guernica quite unsettling. It affects me, so to me it is art.

Some say that you have to be “trained” before you can appreciate some kinds of art. I disagree with that: while it is true that some people may learn to “get” it after being exposed to some theory (I still don’t “like” most of Picasso’s works, but I understand them better now), it’s also true that real art should trigger responses so ancestral not to require any training. But does this make it any easier to produce real art? No, not at all; au contraire, mes amis.

It is extremely difficult to come up with something that makes something happen in the recipient’s soul. Whether it’s a piece of music, or a photograph, or a painting, or  a sculpture, or a theatrical act, or a film, or even a comic book, it is hard, extremely hard, to leave a mark.

My favorite painter of all times, Salvador Dalí, was a master at it. He blended perfect technical skills with deep thoughts that reach anybody. You will have a hard time finding someone who says that Dalí wasn’t that good. You may not like surrealism, or you may not like his subjects, but his works… work. Of course, having some training will make it even more amazing, yet it will be accessible to anybody. You don’t need to know the meaning of the melting watches in The Persistence of Memory to appreciate it, and certainly you don’t need to understand every detail of The Temptation of Anthony to be spooked by it.

Was he trying to leave a mark on people? Most likely. Was he trying to be an artist? No. You cannot decide to be an artist. If you refer to yourself as an artist, take a deep breath and think about it logically: can anybody call themselves an artist? It’s others’ response to one’s work that can potentially turn the author into an artist.

This is why I reject the idea of an “artistic manifesto.” It’s difficult enough to get rid of labels gotten by someone else; why would I want to label myself, and lock myself into such a cage?

When I have an idea for a photo, I ask myself: what kind of feeling do I want to convey with it? What is the best way to approach it, technically and emotionally? More often than not, it’s entirely unrelated to my previous images. I do have my temporary obsessions, no doubt; but I easily go from “industrial” macrophotography to astrophotography to landscapes to portraits to whatever else I feel like working with. All the photos I linked to in the previous sentence have undergone some amount of post-processing, too. If I had locked myself within a “no post-processing” movement, I wouldn’t have managed to publish any of those.

However, many people seem to think that, by merely adhering to an artistic movement or manifesto, or even by simply getting hold of a compact digicam, they become artists. Photography is arguably the most accessible of arts: cameras are cheap nowadays, not much thinking is necessarily required, and the Internet allows for worldwide instant exposure. They start taking pictures, uploading them, sprinkle some allegedly soul-deep titles and descriptions. Is that art? I don’t think so.

I am not saying that one needs an expensive camera to produce photographic art, and indeed I have taken many of my most appreciated photos with a tiny, old Canon A70. Limited equipment certainly introduces forced constraints that may not be worked around, which may actually stimulate creativity: it wasn’t until early 2014 that I got hold of my first stabilized lens, and not having such luxury forced me to learn how to use what I had more effectively. The equipment itself does not define an artist, for better or worse: a big camera won’t make you a real photographer any more than using filters on Instagram will. Would you ever think that a painter is better than another because she has a bigger brush?

For instance, many people ask me for advice about which lens to buy. They will normally have had their basic kit lens for a while and feel ready to expand their gear. That’s perfectly reasonable, but they should already have an idea of what they want to do. They should be asking me: “which lens among these do you think is the most appropriate for what I want to do?” Yet they expect me to give them a direct answer, and when I ask what kind of photography they have in mind, they shrug.

To me that just means one thing: they haven’t reached the point where their craft hits the limit imposed by their equipment, let alone try to overcome it; they just want a new toy, which is absolutely fine as long as they’re being honest with themselves. Most of them simply aren’t. And how can you impress others with what you’re trying to say through a medium like photography if you’re not being honest with yourself about the very approach you take with it? To put it in perspective: what’s the use of an expensive guitar if you’re only playing three chords and can’t be bothered to learn how to replace the strings? How can you expect me to get goosebumps if you’re disguising the sheer desire for a new toy with artistic claims that you don’t even truly endeavor to fulfill?

Too many people focus on the end result, on dreams of fame. The internet is a worldwide stage, and it makes seem easy. But why do we do this? Do we take photos, compose music, paint drawings, write stories for the fame? For the honor? For the money that might or might not come? What is our one, true goal? I would like to hope that we do this because we enjoy the process. The biggest reward should be knowing that someone, somewhere, was moved by what we made. If money and fame come, good. If they don’t, then it’s not the end of the world: we didn’t do it for that. As long as at least one person will tell me they appreciated my images, I’ll keep doing them; not every day, not every week, not every month, for bills ought to be paid and work ought to be done. But I will not quit until I’m sure that nobody ever looks at them anymore: only then I will feel like I’ve failed. I don’t need to be called an artist, in fact that makes me a little uneasy when someone ventures out and does so: it’s such a big word, and I honestly don’t feel like I’m worthy of it. I just want to share what’s on my mind, whether through words or light, with anyone who may be interested.

That is my one, true goal: I want to communicate.

When you “favorite” or “like” something, you’re essentially telling the author that you’d like more of that. Yet, when it comes to creative endeavors, it’s money that makes the difference: not only it helps cover the costs of production, but it also frees up time to produce more. That’s why many of us resort to selling prints, crowdfunding and other ways of raising money.

One of such other ways is Flattr. And it’s G-R-E-A-T.

The idea behind the Sweden-based company is both simple and genius: instead of actively sending money to an author, which can be complex and, in some cases, awkward, you can prepay your Flattr account using pretty much any credit card (in addition to Paypal) and the system does the rest. All you have to do is “connect” your Flattr account to your social network accounts, which usually only takes a couple of clicks for each. This allows Flattr to track your likes and pay creators.

The only slightly more complicated one is Twitter, but it takes just a couple clicks more: since the chirping network changed its terms and conditions, Flattr cannot directly track your favorites. The problem is easily worked around by using SuperFav: just connect it to both Flattr and Twitter, and you’re good to go.

Afterwards, when you favorite or like something on any of the connected social networks, that thing is said to be “flattr’d” by you and the author gets some money from your balance. You don’t have to do anything else, just top up your Flattr funds once in a while and then simply use your social networks as before. Neat, eh?

But it gets better. You can support as many artists as you like, and you don’t pay a cent more than what you want to. You can top up your Flattr funds as much as you want, and then set a monthly budget. At the end of the month, your monthly budget is equally divided between all the artists whose items you favorited or liked. You always know exactly how much you spend.

To make it even clearer: let’s say that you top up €15 and set your monthly balance to €5. During the first month, you “flattr” 5 authors, by liking their contents: each one gets €1. The next month you “flattr” 2 authors: each one gets €2.50. The next month you “flattr” 8 authors: each one gets €0.62. It doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up; and a little is better than nothing.
(Technically speaking there is a 10% fee that Flattr rightfully retains when paying credit out; but that’s of concern only to creators, not supporters.)

Why sign up as a supporter, you ask? Because you like what authors make and feel that their productions are worth a few cents. It’s great to get thousands of views or dozens of favorites on a photo, or 110,000 views on a video. But if you like those things so much, why not take a step further and buy prints, buy books or, even more simply, Flattr? And of course, you can sign up as a contributor too, so you can both give and receive.

And while you’re at it, give it a try by using the Flattr this button right on this post.

Thanks!

Taking photos of people is something I had wanted to do for a long time, but I never managed to convince anyone to pose for me before. My origins as a photographer, in any case, are in the field of landscapes and macrophotography.

There is something about macrophotography that always fascinated and attracted me. I don’t have specific high-end equipment for that kind of images: I use basic extension tubes that allow my Sigma 18-200 zoom to focus much closer than normal. This way, I can be as a close as I want to my subject, at the expense of doing everything manually, including forcing the lens to be stopped down; the only help I can count on is assisted metering, which needs to be manually biased anyway.

The whole process is tedious, frustrating, annoying; and yet, it is also exceedingly pleasant at the same time. I have been meaning to write about this for a while, but for the longest time I felt that something eluded me. Then I realized what it was.

Some photographers find comfort into setting everything up; they can create exactly the scene that they want to shoot. In a way they work like abstract painters: they create something that’s not there. It’s their way of telling a story: they are fable tellers, they conjure up a tale and make it real in front of the lens, then play with it in post-process until it’s exactly what they had in mind. There is nothing wrong with it, and it’s an approach that eventually all photographers tinker with. There is indeed a fine line between a setting up staged picture and giving an existing scene a little help.

But staging an image is time-consuming, requires perfection that can only be achieved through long attempts at trial and error, and can be expensive: good equipment certainly is, as I was recently reminded by cheaper alternatives that broke down on me on day one.
Some people build their careers on staging shots. Fashion photographers, for instance, literally do that for a living. Many amateurs also enjoy fiddling with props until they get the shot just right, just for the sheer pleasure of creation.

I am a little different. While I have my own share of fun helping scenes “pop” in my pictures — for instance through the use of off-camera flashes or the like — I am more of an observer.
When I first started playing with digital cameras, over a decade ago, I was strongly against post-processing. You must forgive me here: I was young and, let’s say it, quite stupid. Being against something on the pretense that “straight out of camera” pictures are inherently better is, to say the least, preposterous. When I switched to reflex cameras, and especially to shooting RAW, I realized that post-processing is as important as exposing the scene in the first place. Still, I’m one of those people who would rather spend more time with a camera firing the shutter than with a mouse applying layer masks.

That is it: I am an observer.

When I set out to do macro work, for instance, I spend what to others must seem like an eternity on the same flower, taking countless images of the bugs hovering around it. I don’t even take my eye off the camera’s viewfinder. Everything around me is blackened out, and I am concentrated exclusively on the scene I watch through the lens, forgetful of any awkward position I may be in (I am usually reminded of that by muscle pain that arises a few hours later.)
I take hundreds of pictures. Many will be out of focus or blurry; that’s the price to pay for using cheap equipment: no autofocus, limited depth of field that can’t be easily changed, and so on. Some of the photos will be good to publish, with some little help in post-process, mostly to tweak colors and exposure. I like the challenge.
But that is not the reason I go through all of this. I could get a €400 dedicated macro lens and make it all easier, and eventually I will.

I do it this way because it lets me observe. After a few minutes of looking through the lens and seeing bees dancing over petals, bugs crawling on leaves, caterpillars embracing stems, spiders meticulously knitting webs; after a few minutes of this, I am part of that small, huge universe. I start seeing things that I wouldn’t see otherwise. I’ll notice the patterns, the rhythms, the details, and sometimes even the creatures, that are so small that upon first glance they appeared invisible.
Sometimes I don’t even immediately take the pictures off the memory card. The experience alone is worth it, regardless of whether any image is usable or not.

I recently realized that I do the same thing with landscape photography. In truth, I tend to do this with any kind of photography I am working on. Instead of setting up the scene, I observe it and document it without changing it. My strongest urge is to retain the purity of what’s before my eyes, so that I can capture it as fully as possible. I don’t try to make up a story to tell; rather, I record the story that’s already there. It is not always easy, and indeed at times I think it would be easier to just go ahead and set things up.

This is not to say that I will not try to optimize the results of my work: I often add light as I need, though the ultimate goal of that, for instance, is using the extra light to enhance what’s already there. You need specific light to make whirling puffs of smoke or falling droplets of water show on an image, but that’s where I’ll stop most of the time. Even my post-processing is fairly conservative: I will enhance the imageto match the feelings I was having when I shot it, but I never go too far with changes. Even with people, I’d rather have my models use props at the time of shooting than waste hours in Photoshop. More simply, I’d rather tinker with lenses and equipment to capture the scene than to change it beyond recognition.

I think that my approach to photography matches my personality. I was never the one who wanted to be in the spotlight; I’ve always rather enjoyed being on the sides, looking towards the stage instead of being on it. I feel that my role, as a photographer — and why not, as an all-around reporter — is to describe what’s there instead of making it up. It is just who I am, and what I like to do. I like to provide my viewers with the reality I see, enhanced in a way that I see fit, and have them derive their own version of the story that I wanted to tell. I am not as presumptuous as to think that I will always be able to convey my own emotions into an image, nor that the feelings I have about a scene are the same as those of any of my viewers.

This is, I believe, the beauty of photography. There is no good or wrong way of doing any single thing. Everything is open to choices across all the steps that go from the original emotion to the final image. No two photographers will take the same picture, and that’s what makes this art truly magic.

All I know is that I will keep observing reality and occasionally fiddling with it, to achieve what my ultimate goal is: to bring you stories to enjoy.

Let me go back in time a little: as many of you probably know, I’m an amateur photographer and in 2012 I started photographing people in what I like to call my studio, which is really my laboratory, which is really a room in my house where I work and hack things. I have had 7 models so far: Valeria (who posed for me twice), Francesca, Federica, Maila, Daniel, and Ylenia.
Lack of cash couples with a passion for tinkering led me to research ways to get things done without spending too much. Over the course of the years I managed to get extreme closeups (here is a self-portrait in a drop of water, and here is how I did it) without a dedicated macro lens, images of eclipses including sun spots without dedicated equipment (other than a few filters) and of course, I’m part of the strobist movement using off-camera flashes, and sometimes I just mix it all in.
When photographing models, I used what I had and applied what I knew: I have two flash units (a Sigma EF-500 DG Super and an ancient Agfatronic CS222) and a Cactus wireless kit with one transmitter and two receivers. Life’s beautiful. However it doesn’t quite work when taking photos of people: shadows get in the way, the light is harsh, and so on.
In late 2012 I purchased a softbox kit. I was actually undecided between whether I wanted softboxes or umbrellas, but I knew I wanted continous light. It would have made it easier to set things up, I thought, so I got that kit: three light stands (one with an extesion arm) with three 40×40 cm soft boxes, each containing a huuuuge CFL rated at 100 W, with a common E27 connector. Is it better than flashes? Eh. Not so much. The light it gives is definitely softer, and very nice to work with. However even when using two of them (or all three of them), the light is still not so powerful. With my new Canon 60D I can push the ISO up to 1000 or more without much of a problem, especially compared to my old 350D, but it’s still not optimal. I also got a small 60 cm silver/gold reflector, which isn’t getting much use so far.

In the light of all of this, and yes that was a very crafty pun, I jumped in. The price tag for the course isn’t hefty at all: a mere $47, which at the time of writing is €36 for us in Europe (and £31 for you Brits.) Subscription is painless and activation is immediate. Logging in is a breeze and you get a list of the “episodes”, allowing you to jump into any one of them and possibly resume whence you left off. In reality, the course is very engaging — Phil’s a good teacher — and you will discover you spent two hours watching it only when you’re done.

If you are a complete beginner, you will appreciate the fact that he lists his equipment and shows you how he uses it (including very detailed explanations of how to set up flash units, which may or may not apply to what you have), and talks you through the end results. I wish I had seen this before starting out, and before purchasing the softboxes: while I still retain the light stands out of the kit (here in Italy they are hard to find on their own for less than €50 each), I would have definitely gone with umbrellas and flash brackets.
Phil actually goes beyond showing what he uses: the first few episodes of the course, that is the ones dedicated to the equipment, are accompanied by lists of alternative items you could get, and even links to the actual stores where you can buy each single item.
Unfortunately, for those of us living in the Province of the Empire, and with that I mean outside the US, things are a little more complicated because we need to check what we can buy locally or not, and possibly factor in extra costs for importing items from abroad. In any case, these lists are a great starting point for your own research.

The videos are well done and the atmosphere is cozy, including during the shoots. It gives a good idea of what a photo shoot should be like, especially if you’re starting out. Too many of us think of high-end sets and a bunch of people working together for hours to get six pictures out of a model (ever watched America’s Next Top Model?), but in his course Phil shows that you can take great photos in your living room. Sure, living on the 18th floor of a building and having floor-to-ceiling windows helps a little bit, but that’s not strictly necessary at all. Many people have turned garages into complete studios, after all.
Phil’s also very clear in his speech and reiterates the main concepts, making sure you get the point across.

So, are you buying a “high-end” course? It depends on what you mean. Are there special effects? No, unless you mean the models’ eyes. But is the course effective in teaching you stuff? Most definitely and absolutely.

Personally, I knew a lot of this stuff and as I said I had most of the equipment already; I mostly wanted to see how a pro gets it done, yet not only I learned what I’d better buy if I want to improve my studio portraits, but I was made aware of a few things that I had never really thought about, such as how shutter speed and aperture take on different roles when using off-camera flashes.

I had encountered this behavior before in my tests, but it had never occurred to me to think about it (and I admit that a bit shamefully, being the nerd I am); when Phil pointed it out in one episode of the course and elaborated on it in the next one, a huge light bulb went off in my head (umbrella and reflector included; that’s another crafty pun for you) and it suddenly all my failed tests made sense.

One thing I particularly appreciated is that every time a shot is shown in the video, the main EXIF data are listed beside it, such as lens, focal length, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc.. This is great for newbies and pros alike. The only minor issue is that sometimes the photo don’t stay on screen long enough to hunt for that one value you’re curious about, but it’s not a big deal as the videos can be paused, rewound, fast forwarded and replied at will.

Speaking of which: someone may be not-so-thrilled about the videos being streaming only. There’s no option for downloading them, and as an IT guy I understand the reasoning: what if the site goes down? what if he decides to revoke my access to it? Well, that makes sense, but it’s very unlikely to happen. On the other hand, streaming videos allow Phil to expand the course over time, and he did indeed add one extra episode to explain how he sets the flash power. You’ll also find the freshest links to get the equipment, possibly saving you money if you buy stuff a piece at a time over a longer period, in addition to the money you save by buying the right things in the first place (anyone wants three virtually unused softboxes…?)

There are also two extra bonus episodes included at no extra cost: one about using reflectors as the sole source of light outdoors, and one about the “glamour blur” editing technique in Photoshop.

To sum up, “How to Shoot Professional-Looking Headshots and Portraits on a Budget with Small Flashes” is very well worth the (low) price tag of $47, I can personally vouch for it. The course is well thought out and well made, touching on the theory but getting you deep into practice. It makes you want to get some basic equipment and ask someone to pose for you. And if you can’t find anyone, Phil gives a suggestion that will make you laugh out loud, but like anything else in the course, it makes perfect sense.

Want to jump in? Here’s a handy link to the course, where you’ll find screenshots and more information and, of course, the “purchase” button if you’re interested:

(One question remains: where are the trained moose?)

However, ever since the introduction of cheap compact cameras (and, god forbid, cheap reflex cameras), photography became mainstream. There is nothing inherently wrong with it – the more the merrier, right? – yet there are some trends in photography that I simply do not understand, and some that are just plain bad. Needless to say, these annoyances are most often perpetrated by hipsters or (gasp!) wannabe hipsters. Now, it has to be clarified that my concept of hipster includes not just the traditional, American-ish hipster, but more generally all those “subcultures” – trust me, quotes were never more appropriate – that strive to be alternative and ultimately fail to be unique. This includes, admittedly due to my cultural vantage point, the decadent leit-motif that seems to permeate the life of Italian teenage girls and young women. I may write specifically about this matter, as it’s not specific to photography.

So, without further ado, let me present a roundup of the most annoying trends in photography today. It goes without saying that this is merely my personal opinion.

Straight out of camera (SOOC)

Try running a search for SOOC on Flickr. At the time of writing, it yields over 500,000 results. Are the all ugly pictures? No, not at all. That would be most unfair to say. However, I just do not understand why anyone would want to show off that the picture was entirely unedited, as if it were demanding credit for their ability.

While I can guess their reasoning – “I don’t need to photoshop my photos to make them look good” – it comes with a side effect that apparently they fail to see: it’s like saying “I have a good camera”; but my point is: you just purchased that camera and lens, you didn’t engineer it. You have nothing to brag about.

I am not deliberately bashing SOOC-ists here, for many years ago I used to think that post-production was evil too. I tried to get the best out of my then compact cameras, and it did pay off in the end, because it made me learn many things about imaging systems and optics that I probably would have never cared about if I had just run to tweak the levels to compensate for horrid exposure choices.

I love reflex

This is somewhat linked to the equipment show-off of SOOC-ists. With the ever dropping prices of digital single lens reflex cameras, or dSLR for short, more and more people are purchasing them. Again, this is not inherently bad: I have a dSLR too. My gripe is that these people get a cheap camera – before anybody complains: mine is a cheap camera too, and it’s over six years old – and think they are the artistic heir of Ansel Adams, Annie Leibovitz or, for the most decadent of the group, Diane Arbus.

It’s simply ridiculous. A reflex camera doesn’t make you a true photographer any more than standing in a bike shed makes you a bicycle. Moreover, most of these new artists only ever use the infamous 18-55 mm kit lens, simply because they have absolutely no idea what focal length or aperture is. They also shoot in auto mode, only venturing towards traditional priority modes when they are bored and start wondering what they are, but fail to grasp the mathematical correlation between variables they are simply unaware of. Manual mode appears complicated to a few of them; to the others, the random results raise a silent doubt that their toy may be broken.

Of course, this is often not a concern as the camera is usually paid for by parents. If they were purchased by the photographers themselves, there would at least be more knowledge of how they work. We all tend to make the best out of what we worked hard to afford.

The Seventies are the new sepia

It is said that one can tell when a generation reaches its failure point when its members start being nostalgic about an epoch they never lived. If that’s true, we’re doomed.

Instagram may be seen as some as a refreshing novelty, but the truth is that it’s so overdone and artificial that it’s long gotten out of hand. It takes more than a “pretty” old-style filter to turn the picture of a teacup into a piece of art, yet more and more people are willing to pay for the thrill of sharing the same uniqueness as a few million other people. And just like sepia, all of these photos look dull.

Moreover, what makes more sense than spending hundreds of euros or dollars on a camera or smartphone and topping up a few more coins on an app like that, in order to simulate old and/or broken equipment? But wait, it gets better: here comes…

“Analog” is the way to go

We just don’t get it, they tell us: how can we not understand how much more beautiful analog photos are? And indeed, I cannot understand what that’s even supposed to mean. This irks me on more than one level, because it borders with linguistics.

First of all, I think that calling it “analog” is incorrect. While film certainly is a continuous system rather than a discrete one, I find it surprising that the same wannabe artists who claim to have found the holy grail that finally lets them express themselves will reduce it to a matter of analog vs. digital. What makes “analog” photography so much better, according to them? Film. So why not call it “film photography?” It also sounds more poetic.

Indeed, film has a much wider exposure latitude – and, consequently dynamic range – than even the best digital imaging sensor, or at least negative film does; slides are another story. But do they know any of this? Most of the “analog” photos touted by these people are improperly exposed (admittedly, quite a feat with negative film!), developed and printed by cheap automated minilabs, and digitized at low resolution using scanners that are little more than toys. What’s the point of all of this?

Again, the problem here is that these photographers are oftentimes just teenagers who are not paying for their hobby out of their own pocket. One of the reasons most photographers I know – myself included, obviously – shoot digital is that it’s much more cost-effective. You buy the camera, the lenses, the accessories, the memory cards and you’re good to go for a few years. And you get much more mileage, waste zero cents on tossed pictures, retain detailed information on each shot (EXIF was an invaluable tool to me when I was learning the theory of photography.) Conversely, “analog” photography requires you to buy film beforehand, spend time loading it up, only offers at most 36 pictures per roll – though you can stretch that to 37 or 38 if your camera has a good winding system – and you have to pay to have it developed and printed, then you have to scan it back to post it online. All of this takes time and leaves you at the mercy of the minilab.

Now, I want to point out something important here. I am not bashing film photography at all. Once a year or so I whimsically get a roll of film and take out my father’s Pentax ME Super for a ride; I even bought two more lenses for it a few years back. But I am simply not going to ever claim that digital is fake, because I simply cannot afford to work with film all the time and even if I could, I wouldn’t. The kind of photography I do is often impulsive, in a “seize the moment” style; for that, and especially for macrophotography, I need to be able to take a long stream of pictures in a short period of time, and see results immediately. And I need the highest quality I can get, which means 16-bit RAW files. Even for those with lower requirements, it makes absolutely no sense to use a medium that theoretically provides better results (negative film) and have it crippled by mediocre development and printing services and hideous scanners, especially as negatives are unique, whereas files can be duplicated, restored and worked on all over again as many times as needed.

Still, I know some fellow photographers who know how to deal with negative film, understand its strengths and shortcomings, and either develop and print them on their own, or go to (expensive) labs where the procedure is supervised by people who know what they’re doing. They also use film specifically for what they need – this wonderful dusk landscape by my friend Daniele Faieta was shot on the highly praised Velvia 50, craftfully using its ability to record warm light to obtain such cozy mood – and at times even doing unconventional things such as overexposing and underdeveloping.

But promoting “analog” at all costs gets even worse…

Lomography, or the art of randomness

I just don’t understand lomography. I just don’t. It makes no sense to me. For those who don’t know, Lomography is a “global community” (though it’s actually a trademark by Lomographische AG) whose motto is “Don’t think, just shoot” and promotes “ten golden rules” about how to do it. It’s the ultimate hipster manifesto. Be fast, try the shot from the hip, you don’t have to know what’s in the frame before you shoot, and the unmissable one: don’t worry about rules. Sounds fun, right? I guess it is. We all experiment with our cameras, especially digital ones: it’s free, fun, and delivers immediate satisfaction.

The problem is that this is done on film cameras – sorry, “analog” cameras – with two peculiar details: first of all, it doesn’t use 135 film (the typical little rolls we all know and love), but 120 or 220 film (the kind used in Medium Format cameras), which is somewhat more expensive and difficult to find, and possibly more expensive to develop because minilabs don’t normally work with them. But the most amazing thing about this whole thing is that the camera are deliberately defective: the build quality is poor, they have low-quality plastic lenses that create heavy vignetting and aberrations of all kinds, the bodies leak light. The shutter is often mechanic and its speed fixed, the aperture cannot be changed, and all of this is compensated by on-camera flashes, though it generally falls short of providing even illumination. This is because the “original” Russian-made LOMO camera, the LC-A, was pretty much like that (but without a built-in flash), but western clones are definitely more expensive. It’s an enormous, worldwide niche market.

The results are pretty much horrid, yet followers of this movement swear that it’s what photography should truly be like, because it’s instinctive. It is not just the looks they go after – admittedly, in some (rare) cases lomo-like effects can be a nice addition to a properly taken picture – but also and especially the experience. That’s exactly what Instagram is about, and we have come full circle.

Yet, I can’t help but wonder: what would Ansel Adams think of this? He who walked miles across mountains with thirty pounds worth of equipment together with a burro that carried another hundred, and needed half an hour just to set his glass plate 6-1/2 x 8-1/2 camera up? His shutter was a piece of wood he physically removed to let the light reach the plate. Oh, how the concept of “artist” changes…

Making a website from scratch was a no-go: too much work, too little motivation.

A CMS, such as Coppermine? Not really, I have used several in the past and they felt clunkier. Plus, a personal website is very slow to gain any traction, if it ever does.

I considered going back to my first love, Pbase, only to feel as if I were walking through Pripyat.

Two options remained: DeviantArt and Flickr. I wasn’t too keen on either, given the previous impressions I had had from both. In any case, since I already had basic accounts on both, I went ahead.

DeviantArt

DeviantArt didn’t leave a positive mark on me. It’s clunky, complex, slow, unintuitive and hard to navigate. Its main problem is what some consider its strength: it’s multimedial, allowing all sorts of artistic contents on it. Whether you write poetry, take photos, paint, draw or sketch, you can upload it. For this reason, items are generally called “deviations”, in tune with the almost gothic-looking color scheme.

It does however provide immediate exposure as its homepage shows the most recent “deviations” uploaded by members, regardless of their status. I inevitably got my photos favorited within seconds from the upload, which I admit was nice… but didn’t do much in terms of actual networking. In fact, I often wondered whether there was something else about favoriting that I wasn’t familiar with, because most of the times my work was being favorited by people who did so for all sorts of different photos, and often it just felt random. There’s also a very heavy “hipster/poser” feeling to the community, something with which I’m personally not at ease.

In any case, the immediate exposure wasn’t enough for me to get over what I can undoubtedly call the most hideous upload process I have seen. You essentially have to upload one “deviation” at a time, and you must, in this order: select a category, type a title, fill in a description, disable downloading the full version (it’s on by default, and there’s no way to change that default), check a couple of checkboxes to take responsibility and ownership of contents, finally upload. Then you’re presented with a page that allows you to put up prints for sale and lets you choose in great detail which sizes should be made available; only after you follow through, you’re done. And you have to repeat this for every single image. (In truth, you can pre-upload several files at once even though it’s not intuitive at all — I found out by accident — but you still have to create deviations out of them one by one.)

Browsing the site is also fairly confusing: it’s not clear what constitutes your gallery, how albums are arranged, and what goes where. When I moved to Flickr, I deleted all my pictures on DeviantArt… or so I thought, because two months later I discovered by accident that I had only removed them from my profile page, and that they were still happily available somewhere in the gallery.

Now, I’m not saying that learning how the website works is impossible, as many people have done that and swear that it’s the greatest way to share your work. However, I greatly prefer something that is intuitive by default, and that’s flexible enough to take as little time as possible to use. I want to spend as much time as possible taking pictures, not posting them. Which leads me to why I prefer Flickr.

Flickr

Flickr is owned by Yahoo!, so if you have a Yahoo! account you don’t even have to register; you just log in. You’re already saving time. Now, let’s say you want to upload 15 pictures. You go to the upload page, click the Choose photos and videos link, and you can select your files, all 15 of them. You review the list if you want to, and click upload. The photos are uploaded sequentially, one after the other, and they start appearing in your photostream (Flickr’s name for all your photos) immediately. After that, and only if you want to, you are offered the possibility of quickly setting titles, descriptions and tags for all of them. In fact, you can apply the same tags to all the pictures with literally one click. You can also put them all into a set (Flickr’s name for an album) with a single click, and also create a new set if you want to.

And, since beauty lies in the details, Flickr does one very simple thing that DeviantArt is unable to do: the photo titles default to the file name, minus the extension. In other words, if the file name is “Lonely boat.jpg”, the photo will automatically be entitled “Lonely boat”. Why DeviantArt is unable to do this is unknown, but the result is obvious: you have to waste time typing it.

Adding metadata to the photos is also very quick: the “Organizr” uses a nifty drag and drop interface to do almost everything. Want to move a few pictures to a set? Select them and drag them into the set. Want to post them to groups? Same paradigm. Want to quickly geotag them? Drop them onto the map. And once you’re done, want to share a photo on Twitter? Set it as a blog once, and then just click on “Share”. One click and it’s done, with a nice bonus: if the photo is geotagged, so will the tweet. And that’s a great way to gain exposure, as more and more people search for local tweets.

However the great power of Flickr, and the thing that amazes me not just as a photographer but also — and especially — as a computer guy — is something else. I’m talking about the almost infinite ways to discover new contents. Let’s take a step back.

One of the biggest hurdles in computing, and generally in handling data, is creating powerful relations between pieces of information. This is both a technical challenge and a human need: too much data is as useful as no data at all. Does a map retain any usefulness if it’s cluttered with labels?

The worst mistake that can be done when it comes to handling huge amounts of information is not providing enough ways, or ways smart enough, to make the data accessible. Not only I want to be able to find what I’m interested in, but I also want to be able to find similar contents. The key word here is context.

Context, a human’s best friend

Flickr gets it just right, and goes as far as pushing context as optional URL parameters. For instance, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jollino/5164107794/in/set-72157625085730718/ will open one of my photos and provide its position within one of my sets as a context. In practical terms, it provides a very cool thing: on the right side, you see a list of sets and groups that the photo appears in. In this case my “Macro” group is previewed, with four other thumbnails in addition to the current photo. This makes it a breeze to get an idea of what I put in that set immediately before and immediately after the photo in question. Of course, context is optional and you can access the same picture without it: if you go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/jollino/5164107794/, the context will default to my photostream.

While quickly accessing people’s sets this way is nice, it’s even better to navigate groups with it. In that same page, after the sets, there is a list of groups to which that photo was added. As soon as you hover over one of them, the total number of photos within that group is downloaded and shown. This is actually a great way to reduce load and give a smoother experience: why download something that you may not even be interested in? Clicking on the group name reveals, once again, the context-aware strip that we are familiar with. That’s an important point: familiarity. The pages are very similar, and that’s by design. You are more efficient when you know where to find what you’ll looking for. The white background and the abundant white space also makes it very easy on the eyes.

The gem here is that the context is retained when clicking on any of these names, be it a set, a group or the photostream. If you click on the “Nature” group, for instance, you are not taken to the homepage of the group, but rather to the group’s photo pool; even better, you are taken to the page where the current photo is located. This has two direct consequences: 1) the context is not lost, but is actually expanded; 2) you do not have to dig through hundreds or thousands of pictures to find where you were. Once again, the context is clearly shown in the URL: http://www.flickr.com/groups/naturegroup/pool/with/5164107794/ (at the time of writing, that’s page 498!)

The consequence is obvious: it is very easy to find interesting contents, simply because everything is connected in a stream. You even forget that your browser has a back button.

To make the experience even more pleasant, there are several keyboard shortcuts that can be used to access the most common functions: pressing the left or right arrow keys will load the previous or next picturee, respectively; pressing the < or > keys will move the film strip on the right backwards or forwards; pressing L will show the photo on black (it stands for “lightbox”), with the Escape key allowing to go back; pressing F will add the photo to the favorites (or remove it.)

If this weren’t enough, the Actions drop-down menu allows quick access to more than one would even need. It’s a breeze to quickly add the photo you’re watching, if it belongs to you, to sets or groups; or, if it belongs to someone else, to invite it to groups of whom you’re administrator. And if the need arises to change the description or the title, it’s enough to click on it right on the page, and the text will immediately become editable. And for small retouches, it takes two clicks to get to Picnik, which — despite its ridiculous name — is a nice in-browser photo editor. It’s not Photoshop, but for minor edits it can be a lifesaver.

It’s also very easy to get access to the complete EXIF information (it’s only takes one click on the camera name on the right side). DeviantArt, on the other hand, only grants access to a small subset of EXIF data, which is a shame. I learned a great deal of what I know about photography by studying those on Pbase, and I wholeheartedly recommend any new photographers to get into the habit of reading them, both on their photos and on those by others.

To summarize, this is why I love Flickr and why I recommend it to anybody interested in sharing their photographic work. They even make it a breeze to actually license photos for commercial purposes through Getty Images. For those who’ve been living under a rock, that’s one of the biggest stock photography agencies. Speaking of which, I know from first-hand information that most magazine editors seek pictures have stopped looking on Pbase and DeviantArt for fresh images to license; the former because it’s dying, the latter because the signal-to-noise ratio is going down very quickly. Flickr, on the other hand, seems to attract many talented photographers — some of whom routinely get published on big magazines — and many editors — who get them published.

And before you ask, I have no coupon for you. There is no affiliate program for Flickr. You can use most of its functions for free, with a few limitations. Once you hit them, it’s $25 per year. But trust me, it’s money well spent. Very well spent.

You can see my portfolio at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jollino/. I update it daily and there’s a nice RSS feed, so feel free to stalk me there!