What’s not to miss?

The author’s alter ego, searching out picture opportunities as ever. In Carmel. G3, Oly 9-18 lens.

I expect 2012 to be a great year for picture taking, which means I’ll be sharing my opinions, experiences and prejudices with you in this journal as much as ever.

But there are some topics which will continue to be absent from these pages, and they include:

Politics: Any field which attracts the least able, provides no return on time invested and wastes hundreds of hours of the average citizen’s time is most certainly not one for me. I’ll leave the US system of ‘One dollar, one vote’ for debate by those less able.

Religion: Life is too short to debate how many angels fit on the head of a pin. I like the tax exempt aspects of the religion business, but I’m strictly a deathbed-conversion type. Just in case. When there’s a 50/50 shot and there’s no downside to losing, take the bet, like Blase Pascal did.

Economics: Technology and the sciences fascinate me. This is neither, and makes love a relatively logical and predictable field by comparison.

While these three fields of endeavor provide a decent living for many, I have never known any to help me take a good picture.

Thus this journal will stick to its three primary dictates. Photographs – mine and those of others. Lots of both. Photographers, through the mention of books I have enjoyed and by the publication of the work of fellow enthusiasts, movies included. And Photography which spans the gamut of gear talk, technological change and computers as they relate to the topic.

It has never been cheaper, easier or faster to take and disseminate pictures. When this blog started you still had to wait for Kodak to return your slides by USPS (can you think of a more inept pairing?), a costly, slow process fraught with risk. Now you use a three ounce cell phone and upload your snaps to a web service for the whole world to see at negligible cost. Unsurprisingly, Kodak and the USPS are both going out of business.

A new year beckons, so it’s prediction time and my list of worthless guesses follows:

• I will cease publishing exposure data with my snaps. I mean, c’mon, who cares? It’s an auto-everything world in any case.
• The point-and-shoot camera is doomed. Bread and butter for the likes of Canon and Nikon who had both better wake up fast. Superior lens, sensor and processing technology in newer cell phones obsolete the need to carry yet another gadget. And the cell phone camera is ‘free’, plus it can upload to the web.
• I will make $5 million, a new auction record, by taking a picture of my garbage can and retaining Andreas Gursky’s agent to flog it for me. I hope to net $100,000 after commissions and taxes. The underlying storyline will focus on “…. the artist’s deepening conflicts on the meaning of recycling in a post modern age”. The first sale will actually be for no less than $7mm, but the buyer, a hedge fund manager, will bounce the check claiming he needs the loot to pay his lawyers to keep him out of the slammer on insider trading charges.
• The Lytro camera will fail. Only bad pictures have more than one main subject, and Lytro’s technology caters exactly to that issue. Plus the design looks plain silly and the definition is probably poor.
• Apple will make a real camera with a Siri command interface and no dumb brick LCD menu system. Offering fewer options than any $200 point-and-shoot it will retail for $500, will take crackerjack snaps in the right hands, and will be sold out for months. Oh! yes, and it will make phone calls and toast on the side.
• Panasonic will make a pro-grade Micro Four-Thirds camera and you will start seeing it used by pros at sports events. Annual greasing ‘commissions’ from Panny to have pros convince the world that MFT is the Real Thing will run into the $millions. Chiropractors will fight with offsetting bribes to Nikon and Canon pro-DSLRs users in an effort to retain their annuity incomes derived from treating these users for spinal problems.
• I will narrowly avoid death several times from competing bikers on the streets of San Francisco on BikeCamâ„¢. My latest crappy bike will be stolen, again, but unknown to the thief, this one will have a hidden GPS tracking chip, the frame will be loaded with a pound of C4 and my iPhone will be the remote triggering device.

The dining experience will be increasingly featured as your intrepid snapper-gourmand searches out diverse, and mostly cheap, eating places, which you will find under the Dining category. Don’t look for wine advice here, a good brew being the order of the day.

Carmel. G3, Oly 9-18 @9mm with distortion correction.

Times they are a’ changin’

Back on September 16, 2008, I wrote:

The last reference was to an iOS app which allowed any snapper to upload newsworthy pictures.

Well, look at this from the Gannett Blog:

Anyone, it seems can take a picture, but few can write. That has long been the mindset in newspaper circles, and while the likes of Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith and Robert Doisneau might disagree, it’s very much the way of the world.

There’s one born every minute.

Hard to know where to begin when writing about this scam:

Click the picture for the article.

It’s unclear whether the ‘artist’ shared in the spoils – let’s hope so as that makes the whole thing just funnier to contemplate, but I can’t help but quote him:

He said he “carried this idea for a picture around with me for a year-and-a-half”.

I usually trash my losers right after loading the files into Lightroom, but this one wouldn’t even have lasted that long, as I can’t see why anyone would waste time taking it in the first place.

Scummy ‘art dealers’ like Larry Gagosian get away with this sort of thing, selling crap to insecure hedge fund managers desperate to show their wealth on the walls, but that sort of sum could get you a few decent Degas sketches as a minimum.

A fool and his money ….

Sales pitch from Christie’s:

Be sure to listen to the sales pitch linked by Arun Gupta in his Comment, below. For sheer chutzpah, it rivals the picture.

A subtle and powerful ad.

I love good advertising but it’s not something seen too often, so it was a particular pleasure to spot this in the December, 2011 issue of American Vogue:

There is not one iota of reality here. The chap would be freezing with no coat on, his beloved flat on her rear owing to those ridiculous heels and I suppose they flew to their location given the absence of footprints in the fresh snow.

But the message is powerful – the upward view to some mythic destination, the intense effect of the famous cyan Tiffany box, the vicarious thrill the viewer shares at the moment that is about to be. Wonderfully well done, even if he overpaid by 40% ….