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Effort and Value
Recently I heard a comment attributed to Todd Rundgren about the direct relationship between effort and value.1 Something to the effect: “Effort increases value.” The people talking understood Rundgren’s point to be: the harder you work at making a [piece of art] and the more effectively you convey that effort to the audience, the more […]
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Flora
Robert Mapplethorpe Flora is a lovely book that highlights the subtle and varied beauty of flowers. And while we can read all sorts of meaning into his photos, meaning most often it seems shaped by what somebody thinks of Mapplethorpe the photographer, in the end they are just beautiful photographs. I don’t think every photograph […]
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Study of Flowers
Everybody takes photos of flowers. Snapshots. Artsy black-and-whites. Bold colors against dark backgrounds. Everybody. They are a photographic cliché, though I confess I don’t know quite what the original meaning or significance was in taking photos of flowers and so I don’t know what the practice has lost. I suspect part of the draw is: […]
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Square Format
In the bygone days of film photographers with the resources and energy to print their own photographs weren’t constrained by anything but the size of paper they could purchase and their ingenuity for rigging up a system to project light onto that paper. But for most people who took their film down to the local […]
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Postcard Archive: November 2021
With the new month comes a new postcard. Leaves always fascinate me. Not in their collective but in their individuality (a collection of portraits of leaves is in my recent 52/4 journal). This one caught my eye. Let me know if you want to get a postcard of it. A warm fall deprived us the season’s flaming […]
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52 / 4
I just sent the files of the latest issue of 52 to the local printer, Fireball Printing. This issue is a collection of photos of leaves, usually just a single leaf though a few pairs of leaves. They reflect quiet fall moments before a breeze or a car disturbs them. The printed photograph encourages a […]
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Silhouette of a Horse
A chance to spend another hour or so at Ashford Farms, a local stable, gave me the chance to take some more photos of the horses. Many of the horses were in their stables, so I tried to make the best of the strong lighting contrast. Silhouettes seemed like a good way to go. A […]
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Rule of Thirds
Photographic rules and guidelines are everywhere: golden spiral, golden triangles, avoid placing a subject dead center, center the dominate eye, don’t divide the frame in half, strive for symmetry, avoid symmetry, create dynamic symmetry, in portraits don’t crop limbs, in headshots you need not include the top of the person’s head, steady the camera so […]
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Can’t See the Forest
Standing here looking west, it’s easy to lose yourself in thick forest of trees. There is no path leading forward. No obvious way to the far side, if indeed there is a far side. Although the sun shines somewhere overhead, here under the canopy of branches and leaves a diffuse light seems to permeate the […]
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Detritus
Detritus (noun): waste or debris of any kind. Cf., discarded matter, refuse, litter, flotsam & jetsam, dross, chaff. Maybe sediment (noun): matter that settles to the bottom (usually of a liquid). Cf., dregs, lees, residue, alluvium. The difference, to me, is we can’t help but produce sediment. Just our being generates a trail of sediment everywhere we go. Detritus, however, is often a willful […]