But Wait, There's More!

Another commentary on the William Egglestone image. Apparently I am missing something.

Digital Coming of Age

Recently some of William Egglestone's photographs sold at auction for a record $5.7 million. See the details here. The significance of these prices lies in the fact that these were all digital inkjet prints.

Egglestone is someone whose images were traditionally printed with the dye transfer process, one of the most elegant and permanent color processes. If digital inkjet is good enough for Egglestone, there is no need for those of us who have been toiling in the digital world for years to apologize for digital technology that we use today.

Today we are blessed with both traditional and digital technologies. May both live long and prosper!

The Theater of the Absurd

I know that I am out of touch with many of the realities of today's high-end photography art market. However, the recent sale of Andreas Gursky's "Rhine II" for $4.3 million (http://artfixdaily.com/news_feed/2011/11/14/9513-photographer-andreas-gursky-unseats-cindy-sherman-in-record-setti) leaves me thinking.

Picasso is said to have said that the difference between a good artist and a great artist is that good artists only steal from good artists, but great artists steal from great artists.s

I am so inspired that I have taken one of my images, shown above (the first one in case you can't figure it out), and "edited out all extraneous factors."

During the holidays I'll be offering this at a mere $ 1.0 million for an edition of one image. If no one is interested in the "single image" offer, I will offer it at my normal prices.

iphone photography

Just returned from several weeks of seeing the deer and the antelope play out in Jackson Hole and Yellowstone. I took the usual assortment of high-end photographic equipment and took about 850 photographs over a couple of weeks.

I also had my iphone4 along with an app called 360. Lots of times when I was photographing with the other equipment I'd just whip out my iphone and take a panorama. Results of a couple of the iphone images are above.

Gigapan

The Gigapan is a device developed by Carnegie-Mellon University for NASA to take multiple pictures in a very controlled manner and then stitch them together into a single high-resolution image. The grayscale image is about 580MB after flattening.

The above picture was shot several weeks ago at Great Falls on the Potomac River. This single image was stitched together from 22 separate exposures using a Canon 5D Mark II with the 24-105 L lens set at 105mm.


For those of you who are techno-geeks, the above crop shows the detail if the original image was enlarged to 11' wide.

The Evolution of Technology and Crow

Several years ago, long before the development of current technology, I was at Great Sand Dunes National Park. A woman was out on the dunes snapping pictures with her cell phone. I laughed and said to myself, give me a break! I thought this was about the stupidest thing I had ever seen.

Having seen the emergence of cell phone technology and what can be done when this technology is place in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, I am now eating a large portion of crow. (Tastes just like chicken in case you are curious!)

I recently got an iPhone and have been experimenting with the imaging software available. I am blown away by what is possible and what I now choose to photograph that I would never photograph with a conventional camera. I don't know whether I am growing as an artist or returning to my childhood. Maybe these are not mutually exclusive.

On the other end of the technology spectrum, I just got a Gigapan. Stay tuned.

The Portrait

Richard Avedon said, "A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening, and he as a certain real power over the result."

I've often thought that portraiture was one of the most interesting parts of photography. I once made the statement that I only wanted to photograph people who were willing to let me photograph them the way I wanted to photograph them, not the way that they wanted to be photographed. Talk about arrogance; this is not about you but about me.

I also think that great portraits make you want to know more about the person. You shouldn't have to know them to make the picture interesting.

An interesting question has always been why are we doing to portrait? Whose itch needs to be scratched? I frequently see people that I think would be interesting to photograph. They have interesting faces. However, a great portrait takes participation by the subject. I think this may have been what Avedon was suggesting.

I'm not sure that portraits ever lie. What is recorded is open to interpretation by the viewer, but what was in front of the camera is what is recorded. The spin that we place on the image is a product of our own baggage.