Two Favorites

 

There are a lot of people collecting vintage photo gear these days.  

Not many make the old cameras sing like these two:

 

Rick Drawbridge From NZ on Photo.net

SBA73  From Catalunya on Flickr

My Friend Flickr

 I came across this interesting post about Flickr on the Design Observer website in which Jessica Helfand heaps praise on the photo sharing site:

"... Flickr is a digital photo sharing website and web services suite that was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, Canada company founded in 2002. It's a utopian oddity — a culture enabled by a technology that in turn enables a culture — and it's a brilliant example of socially networked software because it's free, its easy, and it makes sense. It also capitalizes on the great strengths of mobile computing, which is to say you can engage in all sorts of computational activities while being, well, mobile. Put simply, Flickr lets you upload photos, then helps you organize them, sequence them..."

I was half way through the article before I noticed that it was written in 2005, early on in the history of the site.  In that same time frame, digital had still not totally steamrollered analog and Helfand pointed to one of the weak points in digital camera design then.

Helfand has produced an astounding number of essays about design issues over the years; I thought her last post on an exhibit about typography, Type is (More Than) Image, was particularly nice.

Flickr

The Flickr photo sharing service is used in a variety of ways.  I use the site to display what I consider the best of my own work.  I also enjoy the opportunity Flickr provides to curate my own viewing experience in following the work of other photographers.  With just a few exceptions, the 330 or so photographers I follow are shooting film.  That sounds like a lot to keep track of, but not everyone posts pictures every day; on most days I might look at a couple dozen photos.

One of the non-film photography accounts I have added recently to my follow list is that of the Biodiversity Heritage Library which provides several views daily from the collection of illustrations from natural history journals published in the centuries prior to the invention of photography.  The digital copies of the illustrations are presented at a high enough resolution to allow the making of good sized prints if desired.  I do not have a color printer any longer to take advantage of that opportunity, but I do occasionally save a copy to my hard drive to use as a desktop background.  My IMAC desktop is currently home to a wonderful drawing of a carp made in the 18th Century.

Flickr --> Smugmug

The acquisition of the photo sharing site, Flickr, by Smugmug has set off some alarm bells around the world.  I don't know how many users Flickr has, but I'm sure it is many millions.  The site is popular with bloggers and forum users because photos posted there are easily linked to, and there are no limits on uploads, even for free accounts.  How much of that scenario will remain the same is now clearly open to question.

Just to be on the safe side, I have downloaded all my pictures from Flickr.  I doubt Smugmug would engage in the kind of venal extortion scheme that was seen at photobucket given the value of the Flickr user base.  Given the lack of details available on the acquisition so far, however, a prudent course seems advisable.  Of course, I do already have copies of the pictures I've stored on Flickr over the years, but tracking down specific examples through an assortment of hard drives and usb sticks can be a tedious affair.  So, I have mirrored the Flickr albums as folders on my laptop, including ten subject folders and a big bunch devoted to my collection of old cameras and the photos each has made.  The pictures I have put in the care of the site represent my best work over the past ten years, so much of the value of the collection resides in its organization, which Flickr has facilitated.

Yahoo, the previous owner, allowed the Flickr site to deteriorate in many ways since the 2005 take-over.  Most of the discussion groups have fallen silent.  A lack of any effective policy regarding Flickr groups formation has resulted in a counter-productive proliferation of groups which serve no useful function.  For example, if you do a search for groups on the site using the term, "New Mexico", you will turn up about a hundred groups.  What you will find in visiting them is that they all have the same content because there is no practical limit on the number of groups to which pictures can be posted.

In spite of the current condition of Flickr it is probably still the most useful community on the web for exhibiting your photos on line and for talking about any aspect of photography.  I'm hopeful that the new owners will recognize that fact and build on it to realize Flickr's potential.

Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim

I've been making an effort recently to promote the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim group at Flickr. The little vuws is my all-time favorite point-and-shoot, and participants in the Flickr group have produced some of the most interesting images you can find on the big photo sharing site.  Like a lot of other groups there that focus on a specific film camera, the vuws group over the past year or so has seen a drastic diminution in participation.  I've blamed that mostly on the increasing scarcity of places to get film and processing, but there may be other dynamics at work in the ways that people make and share images.  Whatever the case, it seems worthwhile to me to support the survival of a virtual meeting place for people around the world who are still interested in shooting the little ultra-wide.

I have a lot of nice old film cameras which I've enjoyed shooting over the years.  I put what I consider to be my best pictures in my Flickr photostream.  The largest number from a single camera were made with my vuws.

undercover cadillac

Too many people, not enough cats.

I spend quite a bit of time looking at my own pictures and rearranging how they are presented in different venues.  Since most of my photo efforts involve making pictures with old film cameras, I often organize images according to which of my cameras they are made with.  I've done that with my image stream at Flickr too, but also have recently composed some additional image sets organized by subjects. Here are the lead pictures from each thematic group linked to each of the sets:

people

cats

cars

aircraft

balloons

When Flickr limited free accounts to 200 uploaded photos, I decided I would use that limit as a way to exercise some self-discipline in what I displayed of my work -- hopefully showing only my best pictures.  Now that there are no imposed limits, I have relaxed my selection criteria a bit.

People have assembled groups of photographs for a long time in many different ways.  Albums and scrapbooks were the media of choice up to about twenty years ago.  Computers and networks have facilitated storage and display, as well as allowing the reshuffling of image collections in nearly infinite ways.  The process is responsible for much of the enjoyment I get from my own image collection.  I also feel it helps me to evaluate my photographic effort and sometimes to see it in new ways.

(title contributed by Richard)

Questions

If you tell someone in the course of a conversation that you are a photographer, there are a couple of questions that are likely to follow.  The most common is probably "What do you like to take pictures of?".  Not very good English, perhaps, but that is usually the way it is phrased.

My answer to that question is usually "Anything at all"; sometimes I also specify that I never make family snapshots.  Those responses are clearly never satisfying for the questioner, but I'll guess they would be preferred to what I am really thinking about as a response, which is something like giving the person a wake-up kick to the shins.

 Another question I have faced -- of a more philosophical nature -- is "What makes a good photo?".

That question is asking for guidance as to how one might judge a photograph to be  "good" or "bad".  My response to that is usually something like a shrug of a shoulder.  I know that people are just mostly trying to make polite conversation around the topic.  Still, it is tempting to point out that the question of whether photography is an art has long been settled, and there are whole libraries devoted to what constitutes good art.

I suppose I should come up with some standard answers to these questions that are a little less bellicose and a little more representative of my actual feelings about the issues.  I have actually advocated more than a few times for the idea that critical thinking and communication about art is a skill that can be learned.  In that regard, I always cite the fine little book by Terry Barrett, Criticizing Photographs.

Speaking as a photographer rather than as a critic, however, I do not think it is really incumbent on me to provide explanations.  My role, as I see it, is to offer up the images.  The creation of those images is not, for the most part, the result of an analytic process.  Rather, the images flow out of a lifetime of visual engagement and expression.

A goal I set for my photographic efforts about ten years ago was to make the best pictures possible with each of the old cameras in my collection.  Many of the pictures that appear in my blog postings are illustrations of technical issues.  The pictures that I feel somehow transcend technical competence are posted to to the Flickr photo-sharing site.  So, people who might want to know what subjects interest me or what I think constitutes a good photograph are best advised to visit my photo stream at Flickr.

Christmas 1947

I've been trolling the web looking for the production dates of the Ansco Panda.  Present day references to the little box camera assign the production dates as somewhere between 1939 and 1960.  My guess at this point is that the camera was ordered into production right after WWII in 1946.  The earliest ad for a Panda I have found comes from the December 1947 edition of Boys' Life Magazine.

Today, somewhat by accident, I came across a set of pictures at Flickr from a Panda that were made that same year.  Laird Scott and his brother, Dick, each found a Panda under the Christmas tree, and they immediately made a set of pictures with their new cameras.  The photos are of quite remarkable quality and, since each boy had one, they also managed to capture pictures of both cameras.  Being able to associate photographs with a specific vintage camera is quite a rare event, and to find a set of such good quality that documents the camera as well is really bucking the odds.

Street Photographer

I only recently came across the street portraits of Sheldon Levy on Flickr.  I'm obviously late to the game because he's posted 114 pages of photos spanning five years on the site.  It is worthwhile to start from the beginning of his photo stream to see how his style has developed over the years.  What you see is that he did more color in the past, and that he uses it very sparingly now.  He has also gotten much closer to his subjects, cropping out everything that is extraneous to the moment.  I would give a lot to watch this guy work the street for a couple hours.

avyavy

This is the first photo posted in about a year on Flickr by the amazing "avyavy". I first became acquainted with his work through his Flickr pinhole folder, Transience. I was particularly taken with the painterly qualities of his pinhole images, but he actually pursues a similar style in all his posted work.

I generally have little patience with the efforts of most people who attempt to produce painterly effects with photography; avyavy is the one who gets it right every time. His Flickr photostream is well worth studying at length.