Your favourite photographers

It's so easy I've never had to do anything special to work with children. Little children (babies and toddlers) need a little special effort behind the camera.

I don't shoot landscapes. What can I learn about the types of photography I do by looking at landscape and so-called "street" photography done by others?

It's a sign of dedication. I sign of respect and love, to a craft, and craftsmanship, that changed the world. It's a choice 99% of modern photographers won't make. It's not economical. It's not logical, but it's a magic that no amount of digital, as hard as I try, matches. It's kinda like fixing up old cars. There's no real reason to do so, but you know anyone who did, really cares about that thing.

I still remember Annie Leibovitz basically saying she treated cameras as a disposable expense. I always kinda took that as a knock at the craftsman who put in a lot of hard work, and as someone who saw things like the 5D as an out of reach expense, it was just kinda insulting watching her treat some thing that would be game changing to someone like me like it was a hunk of scrap metal. It's an expensive tool, have some respect for it just because most people can't willy nilly waste $3500 and do it again the next day.

Thoughts you wouldn't have otherwise.

I enjoy looking at photographs, both old and new, so my list of photographers whose work I find inspiring and interesting is long. Many of them are already listed in the other replies so I won't re-visit them. Here's some who I don't think have been mentioned yet. I don't try to emulate them but their work does have some impact on me I'm sure. My first love in photography was landscape large and small, and my second is story-telling.

Photographers Past
Clarence White
Wynn Bullock
Eudora Welty
Gordon Parks

Photographers Working Now
Guy Tal
William Neill
Michael Frye
Freeman Patterson
David Thompson
Alister Benn

By looking at the work of other photographers you begin to understand how they see the world. Most of us see pretty much the same thing. But a few people see special relationships of light, color, contrasts, patterns that everyone else passes by. They capture these little glimpses so that everyone else can examine them frozen forever in a photographic image. They are photographers.

Then some other people realize the unique "beauty" in those images. It may be the quality of the light, a pleasing juxtaposition of things, serenity, chaos, a pattern of light and dark or color or a simple realization that "I passed that scene a thousand times before and never saw the compelling nature of its existence until this image made me realize it exists."

Then those people are stimulated to be more observant and to learn to see things that they had been blind to before. And to make images themselves. And they become photographers.

Scenes like Brett Weston's Holland Canal may be all around you, making you think they are too common to be worthy of photographing. His image is truly beautiful to many people who probably realized they had passed such a scene many times without realizing it could be compelling. The way he caught the flat illumination of the sky in the water, the deep tonal values of the trees, the serenity of the scene, and a thousand other attributes resonate with many. It's a masterclass of scene recognition and printing for those who strive for craftsmanship in their craft of photography. It is achingly beautiful when viewed as an original print. You should take a trip to Carmel, CA where you can view a first generation print.

Ansel Adam's Moonrise is a scene of an otherwise very forgettable landscape that probably would not have caught his (or anyone's) eye a few seconds earlier or later or from a slightly different angle. But he was there, almost by accident, literally, at a magical single instant in time, that couldn't be repeated in terms of the Sun and Earth lining up, from exactly the right vantage point and managed to capture the remarkable lighting of the scene, the unusual cloud formation and the shape of the land.

The almost comical tale of his tumbling out of his car as he ran it into a ditch coming on the scene, setting up his large 8x10 view camera, getting a film holder in and calculating the exposure in his head (he got it wrong), an instant before the light failed is an interesting read.

He reprinted the image many times during his life to bring out more of the beauty of the light and his later prints differ significantly from the first. To many photographers who intimately know what it's like to create an image with equipment such as his, and to a much larger number of people who have never been inside a darkroom, Moonrise is a thing of incredible beauty.

Rich

I know most people don't understand this at all, but my top goals for photography do not include creating "beauty" in images. It's on the list, but pretty far down.

I also rarely (like, 1 in 1000) shot "scenes".

Those two images are not beautiful or interesting, in any way, to me. And I don't care a bit for what other people think about them. I'm the consumer of my images. One of my very favorite images is one I took, that others are a bit "ho hum" about (by the way, it's a "scene" with a person in it). I don't care. It's my image, and it's for me. I'm sure many of my favorite images would be boring or throw-outs for you, and that's fine too. I like them. They are special to me. I have my passions and scenery isn't among them. I'm passionate about airplanes. I'm sure many of the airplane images that mean a lot to me would be boring to you, because you likely lack the passion for airplanes that I lack for scenery.

I don't see what people like about grayscale photography. I've seen perhaps one or two in my life that I thought looked better in grayscale than in color. I'm fortunate to not be color blind, so I want my images in color.

What thoughts from Ansel Adams' images would you apply to this shot?

I think what this shows is that the subject matter of a photograph is often the main factor for some people in determining how interested they are in that photo.

Others may be more interested in the composition and other aspects of the image and less in the subject of the photo.

Tonality management.

I actually think you doth protest too much.

Would you be surprised to hear that I would consider your jet airplane photograph to qualify as art?

I would like to be privy to a discussion that might occur between you and a hypothetical someone who says to you, "I can't see any usefulness for your photography of airplanes. I don't think there is anything that such an effort does for our existence. I can look at airplanes with my own eyes. I don't need your photography to show any attributes of airplanes in any way. Airplanes exist, we can all see that. They are mechanical devices that are the result of engineering efforts and can be completely described by all the specifications that go into them. Why in the world would anyone take photographs of them? It's useless. It's just a waste of time and expense."

Your response of "I like them," would be completely unconvincing to that person. I think your further (understandable) efforts to explain the pleasure you get from your photography and the "justification" for it existing would sound pretty much like any discussion that ever occurs about the reason for the existence of "Art."

😉

Rich

No, lot of photographers think of photography as art. I just don't.

I didn't design, build, or paint that plane. I didn't control the lighting or the position. I framed, tracked and shot. That's a skill - accurately tracking such a fast object with a long lens - but it's not art, to me.

I'd say, that's fine, and since this is subjective, you're entitled to your opinion.

As anyone saying HCB or AA's images are to them is unconvincing to me.

My pleasure from photography has little or nothing to do with viewing the final images. For me, the pleasure is in the effort to capture something I wanted to capture. The value in the photos is either in documenting something I want to remember (like taking notes) or capturing something I couldn't see with my eyes, either because it was too far away, too fleeting a moment, too fast of a subject, too dim or some other reason. That is, when I'm not doing photogrammetry, which is purely about the numerical results.

Eye candy does little or nothing for me, in most cases. I've seen many beautiful images. They hold my attention for a second or two, if I like them.

How? I had no control over anything like that in this shot. The aircraft was moving at almost 250 knots and was only a few hundred meters away. The entire pass lasted only a few seconds.

That's funny. You denigrate an entire generation of kids, their parents and their doctors, and now you are resorting to namecalling. Snowflakes in full force? I only see one snowflake here.

Ha ha ha. I'm not the one trying to generate faux outrage, nor am I getting my panties all bunched up over it.
Think about it 😁😁

Yeah, you only get your panties in a bunch about pharmaceutical drugs and doctors when someone says that they are able to photograph children without bribing them.

You need better framing, better composition, and maybe try and wait until the planes pass clouds so the contrast is more stark in black and white, turn in black and white. Maybe leave the red in to make it pop. That's not Ansel, but that's Ansel and Pleasantville crossing paths.

Of course, I don't care for Ansel personally, so these thoughts through his work are framed from a very limited selection of his probably much larger body of work I am not very familiar with.

Ansel would probably say something about missing a chance to show scale and size too, because that guy loved to talk about size with his images.

Stop doing it then. You're never gonna get better than what you already are and no one will be able to teach you anything about it if you can't see the subjective qualities of picture taking as more than a cold idea.