I went to a camera show run by
Nikon which purported to be for professional photographers (I am not one, but, you know, when you know the right people....). However I had the feeling that professional photographers would more likely be outside being professional photographers rather than attending a show.
I was not entirely wrong, and you can follow my way of thinking by looking
here! Look, it's scantily-clad women wielding industrial welding equipment! It looks like it - anyway they certainly make a lot of sparks! Wow, that looks exciting. Evidently it is supposed to be exciting anyway! And we can imagine that Nikon have pitched this about right, if a lot of the people who buy camera equipment are the same people who buy camera magazines and car magazines and so on. They always have women in, posing in a rather demeaning way (it demeans lots of people!). Oh well, they get paid for it I suppose. You probably get paid more for being an astronaut though....they could try that instead.
So anyway, there were similar types of females featured in a so-called "catwalk opportunity". Also one man, much to everyone's disappointment I am sure. Indeed, nearly everyone attending in the guise of photographer was a man, many many many of whom found it necessary to carry their cameras around their necks so as to show off what they've got, how much it cost, and how many megapixels it has. A lot of them were funny grey men...rather odd, it was.
I would have thought a camera show was not necessarily a good place to learn about photography. For example, it must be a similar type of thing to wanting to learn about music at a piano show, or about painting at a paintbrush show (I've never heard of a paintbrush show, this is entirely fictional), which is to say, it's possible but unlikely.
However the technical side of photography is sufficiently important (important if you want to get it right without guessing, as
Ansel Adams wanted to teach us to - though guessing is possible, just time-consuming) that some of the presentations must have been useful.
I did learn a few things. I learned about the history of digital photography - e.g. the first digital camera had less then 2 megapixels of resolution and cost around £20, 000! Also I heard someone from Nikon saying that megapixels were not everything - other factors define a good camera. Interesting to hear that from the top of the camera production tree.
Also, contrary to what you might have been expecting from the above, there was A PHOTOGRAPHER! Yes, a professional photographer (so there was at least one!) called Bruno Barbey, showing many of his pictures and saying a little bit about them. It was quite exciting because I had recently seen some of his pictures in a book called
Magnum Ireland so now I caould see that he was a real person! He was officially there for the purpose of telling us that he now uses a computer and a printer to make exhibition prints (rather than developing them the okd way) and has been satisfied with the results. Also he appeared to endorse digital photography -he laughed when he said this though, probably because it's what everyone seems to talk about. My identification test for people who say they are interested in photography is: what is the first thing they say when I mention the subject. Often, in fact nearly always, they say "What camera do you use?" - indeed, this is an interesting topic, and I often wonder what camera people use, however it is probably somewhere down at the bottom of the list of interesting topics, because, as
Ken Rockwell says on his
completely useful website, it's not the camera that takes the pictures. Yes, it is your brain! When Edward Steichen took a portrait of Isadora Duncan at the Parthenon in 1921, he borrowed a Kodak camera from the head waiter at his hotel. Looking at his
amazing photographs, I can only assume that he knew what he was doing!
Bruno Barbey seemed a bit embarrassed (did you know there is a place called
Embarrass, Wisconsin? Also one in Minnesota) to be talking about digital, I don't really know why. He said it was very good for shooting in the dark. Perhaps that is the only time he would use one? Ha ha, actually night photography is good, you just have to hang around a bit while the camera gets enough light in it so you can see something. He probably meant digital photography sees into the darkness very well. This is true since the manufacturers has concentrated on optimising for the dark areas in an image - they decided they wanted dark patches to have more visible detail, The result of this is that they have been successful, and consequently digital images burn out to white in the highlights very easily - analogue film took bright light more gracefully.
Howeveritmaybeso, M. Barbey showed us his pictures shot on film (some using
Kodachrome, which was developed by Godowsky's son
Leo (who married Gershwin's sister) and his school friend
Leopold Mannes (who was a president of the
Mannes College of Music, founded by his parents)), and very good they were too. This is the one I remember first:
(See a bigger one
here) It's interesting because it has little colour yet in the scale of colours it has, there is great variation (the red umbrellas - and the red hat! - in the middle are very exciting, I think). It shows an excellent control of proportions and colours, and is a very resonant image. Things that are good make me feel calm or give me a sense of wonder or make me feel I am part of them, and that's what I feel with this image. That he could achieve this as a photojournalist is something we can be amazed at. Nobody sets these pictures up, you know - good photographers have to be good improvisers.
He talked about painters a little bit (e.g. Matisse) so you can see he was interested in the image more than the hardware. Actually that is a little bit of a redundant statement - we can see he was interested in the image from his images!
So that, my friends, was what I learned from the Nikon show. It was a while ago but still newsworthy, I hope?
Labels: countries, painters, people, photography, weather, work
The butterfly is still going well. Here it is feeding nicely.
