Technical and Artistic Approaches

In preschool, kids are happy to do fingerpainting, make stuff with modeling clay, color with crayons, etc. They're inventive and they don't seem to follow any rules. They take the stuff home and their parents think it's great, but it's not treated with the same seriousness as the three R's. Then as the years go by, the teachers start telling the kids they're doing some things wrong. A few kids get over those hurdles, but most decide that art is not for them and they stop doing it.

This is very true. I worked in the public education system for 25 years. With the exception of a few gifted/talented schools and a handful of elementary schools that endorse an arts-centric curriculum, art is usually confined to the elective choices in the upper grades. The blame for some of this is the emphasis on standardized testing in core subjects. Interestingly, the school with the highest test scores in my state - in math, reading, and science - is the only school that has an entirely arts-based curriculum.

Long before standardized test scores became a Thing, though, arts were overlooked in regular schooling. Art was never mentioned in my 12 years of schooling back in dinosaur days. I was fortunate to be introduced to the arts by my family, who were a bunch of musicians, traditional artists, writers, and photographers. You were expected to create something. My grandchildren are growing up in a different world, where many pastimes are passive and decidedly uncreative. One of my jobs as grandmother is to make sure each of them connects with art in some way that is meaningful to them. It's a good job for grandparents, I recommend it highly.

While you were attracted to photography due to the technology, others, like me, were attracted to photography in spite of the technology. Kicking and screaming, we made ourselves learn enough of the science, enough about our cameras, enough about computers, to accomplish what we wanted with the tools of the trade. We "came up" through art side. We don't pay much attention to gear, past what we own and how to use it. We seldom jump into tech arguments.

Of course both routes end up in kind of the same place, to a certain point, neither being a better or worse route. One of the interesting features of DPRev is that you have the tech people and the art people mingling more. There are threads that appeal to each group but there's more room here for chance encounters with the other species.

I don't consider myself to be one at the exclusion of the other. From the answers to the poll, there may be many others like me.

I certainly agree- you strike me as a full featured hybrid (i.e. da Vinci) though I don't know whether you embraced art or science first, or both simultaneously. I suspect many of us (including myself) have features of the "other route" to photography besides our own but most of us lean one way or another, even if we are headed to the same place, and we all started somewhere in order to get to our destination.

So I guess you are the one and only who indicated they came from an artistic approach.

There's more of us. I'm not an anomaly. But you won't find us much on the tech-centric threads or sections. We don't know the science nearly as deeply as the tech specialists and we don't much like to debate anyway. I'm just the random one that wandered into this thread.

I'm also the only female in this thread, I think. There's probably a correlation there to explore too. How many women are deep into the discussions about exposure and equivalence? (I do know a number of male photographers who came into photography through the art side though, so gender may be a factor but not a decisive one).

IMHO Evariste Galois was an artist.

My #1 passion is music. I was born into a family of musicians. My father was a photographer but I never messed with a camera until I was about 16. At that time I wanted to start shooting motocross races that my friends had become involved with. I learned the basics from my father and the rest from trial and error. Today, I don't think I've learned that much more than those days. The images I take (my favorite work) is almost tech-regressive...maybe a little anti-tech. It isn't that important to me.

Artistic for me. Near 100%.

Edit: In the late 1980s I worked for Olan Mills and started doing their color and B&W processing. I really liked that work. I left there and started working for a pro lab doing custom B&W prints and enlargements. I changed over to running the lab's E-6 processing, becoming a Kodak Q-LAB tech. THAT WAS TECHNICAL!!! Kodak only wanted the best of labs for Q-LAB status. I ran a Refrema DT-100 dip and dunk. The DT stood for "Double Time", which meant I could push/pull anything to a second! Q-LAB meant special test strips, special plotting graphs with much tighter tolerances, special specific gravity tests, ph tests, other chemical tests. Changing oxygen and nitrogen plentums, filters, replenishment popit valves, solenoids, calculating/replacing for chemical evaporation compensation, etc and etc. THAT was the technical stuff that I dearly loved so much, not so much cameras.

My sister was a professional photographer, she shot some sort of Linhof with a digital back. Wildly expensive. All she worried about was having a suitable focal length lens, enough Megapixels, and most of all, the light. Adding and subtracting as required. She made the Lurzers top 100? photographers, so I guess she knew what she was doing.
You wouldn't find here here, she was busy. Taking photographs 😁😁

Maybe not here, but she clearly was very technically skilled. With or without a digital back, a Linhof requires lots of technical expertise.

It is obvious that women do not lack for technical expertise. There are many brilliant women scientists, mathematicians, technical wizards, engineers - and photographers. There always have been, though they often failed to get proper credit. My point was, regardless of knowledge and skill level, women are not often found debating technology on a photography forum.

I'm sure some of the good folk on this thread who identify themselves as highly technical have engaged in technical debates on this and the previous forum. Think about how many of the debaters in those discussions were female.

Girls get better grades than boys do at all ages, including in math and science.
The thing that deters them from pursuing a career in engineering -- is men !

Marianne Oelund is a notable exception.

Your post brings up several points which strike close to home for me. My daughter is both an accomplished classical musician and an engineer. I have no doubt that women can and do succeed in the STEM areas. Sadly outside of medicine there just aren't that many women pursuing those careers and goals. They often fail to get support and encouragement in school and worse face a daily, uphill battle in workplaces that are almost entirely male.

Being assertive is another related issue. We did our best to raise our daughter to be confident and assertive. I don't think she has any difficulty debating technical considerations in her field. I have been lucky enough to work for a couple of women bosses in my technical field. All were assertive and took no guff.

Another point made is that even with the skills and with an assertive, goal oriented approach, many women fail to get appropriate recognition. Perhaps I am wrong but that seems to be changing, especially in photography. There have been quite a few women who are recognized as among the photography greats. Historically and even recently women have not received recognition in many of the arts. Hardly any of the recognized painters of the past centuries and even currently, have been women.

When it comes to this forum, I would certainly like to see less technology orientation, more artistic orientation and more women involved. I wonder what would be needed to change any of that.

techno-
word-forming element meaning "art, craft, skill," later "technical, technology," from Latinized form of Greek tekhno-, combining form of tekhnē "art, skill, craft in work; method, system, an art, a system or method of making or doing," from PIE teks-na- "craft" (of weaving or fabricating), from suffixed form of root teks- "to weave," also "to fabricate."

I think you are partially correct. We are trained out of creativity and spontaneity. Genuine artistic talent is, I think, a different matter.

Neither my mother nor my ex are/were the least bit artistic. My ex could follow a musical instruction set to play the accordion reasonably well, but she could not and would not create music on her own.

At a very young age I started drawing and painting with reasonable proficiency on my own. I am also self taught on the guitar and wrote my own music and lyrics. I also dabbled in poetry. I also learned after two years of arts study that I did not have the drive to spend years as a starving artist to maybe be able to make a living, so I turned to other pursuits to pay the bills.

I've also always been quite fascinated by technology which lead me to 15 years of technical sales and marketing and then a move over to the technical side.

In photography I am interested in how understanding the technical aspects can improve my artistry. Well, OK, I'm also fascinated by how we can pluck photons out of the air and turn them into recognizable images, but thats an intellectual pusuit.

I prefer this definition of Techno from Wikipedia. It's also a lot more fun:

*"Techno is a genre of electronic dance music[2] (EDM) which is generally produced for use in a continuous DJ set, with tempo often varying between 120 and 150 beats per minute (bpm). The central rhythm is typically in common time (4/4) and often characterized by a repetitive four on the floor beat.[3] Artists may use electronic instruments such as drum machines, sequencers, and synthesizers, as well as digital audio workstations. Drum machines from the 1980s such as Roland's TR-808 and TR-909 are highly prized, and software emulations of such retro instruments are popular." *

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno