JCC Post your photography.

Alas. Even though I succeeded, I failed.

 

Beezel is making more sense than KW here.

 

Dude, everytime you post something you dig your grave even deeper. You have no respect for anyone but yourself. You respect no users or admins. You expect us to kiss your ass because you are an artist in art school. Dude, you are no different then the rest of us. Get off your high horse and learn to respect the rest of us. One of these days your high and mighty attitude isn't going to fly with the wrong mod and you will get a ban or worse. This isn't the Senate. You can't get away with that kind of attitude. And even there this kind of attitude won't fly with them.

 

Well technically he's not in art school, he's just in an art department for a state college.

 

Beezel, you aren't the Internet police. You're coming off a little worse than KW in the pompous stakes. Let's all go back to discussing the relative artistic merits of NG's selections rather than the personal attributes of posters, hmmmm?

 

Herberger College is an art school. Several of its programs are among the best in the country for any school (no matter the location), including the photography and printmaking programs, among others. The printmaking program may be its single best.

http://herbergerinstitute.asu.edu/

We have critiques, gallery shows, juried exhibitions, a variety of 2D and 3D programs and so on, just like any other art school. The only difference is the location.

 

The current tone of the thread reminds me of two experiences I had in Houston (at the Houston Center for Photography and a museum-wide piece on capturing dance on film). The first was my irritation at an installation piece of two TVs put face to face and looping two videos of a guy loudly making out with the camera (so he was basically making out with himself), and the second was a video of a guy dancing (badly) while naked in the snow. All I could think about with those two pieces was "Wow, that's not me." These guys were Artistes, and I'm just an artist. I don't get fancy capitalization, because I don't have heavy-handed or baffling symbolism in my stuff. Every time I have to write some kind of artist's statement I feel weird, because I just like playing with the camera and capturing something cool, and it just feels odd trying to dress it up as more than that.

 

I definitely understand that approach, and that's where I was not all that long ago. Seeing other people's work on a regular basis, doing my own work, getting feedback, and other things changed my perspective a lot. Photos of mine that I liked a lot a year ago don't interest me so much anymore, and there are photos I like a lot now that I discarded initially before. My favorite photo of 2011 was glanced over without a second thought when I first saw the scanned negative in August.

When you start asking the question, "what's happening here?" about a photograph, it changes things, or at least it did for me. I once disliked Garry Winogrand's work because it was too asymmetrical, and he was (in)famous for tilting the camera. Now I like his work a lot more, and don't mind the tilt. For me, it's less about the appearance of the photograph than its content.

 

[image=http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/ngmwinners_122011/bp10.jpg]

There is more than a pretty rainbow. In fact the rainbow isn't even that pretty.

 

I should say I am not trying to crap on yout view as some folks are doing for no better reason than their own ego(having spent far too much time with them in a chatroom I know this)

 

i don't understand why you always do this, montie. it seems like you're the one who is crapping on others just because of your ego. i'm sorry you got hurt. i am. but everything that has happened has been your own fault. and all you do now is hide behind these poorly veiled attacks ("SOME PEOPLE I KNOW"). you're kind of a coward, dude. and by acting like this, you prevent yourself from getting over it. you hold such a petty grudge over some stupid nonsense on the internet. why are you letting it kill you like this?

 

There was no need to drag your own personal issues into a photography thread, VLM. I want no more of that, and that goes for everyone else.

I shouldn't have to say this again after Marcus did. Back to discussing photography, or I'm going to start editing and banning.

 

Just speaking for myself, I came on too strong, and I apologize for that. I'm not so good at communicating my ideas, unfortunately.

I would like the monsoon image more if it wasn't in B/W and if the contrast was dialed way back. A friend of mine pointed out the Marlboro sign, which I think would be interesting in color. The rain in the upper right corner would also be more interesting, I think, if the contrast wasn't so heavy. But, I freely state that I'm biased against having a lot of contrast. That's a taste issue, and I don't have a corner on that market.

The beach photo just isn't my thing. The night sky image is somewhat more interesting, but ultimately not my thing either. Another friend observed that he's a sucker for stuff like that, which brought up how we all have both our indulgences and also things we're biased against. The heaviness of the contrast in the night sky photo may also be a mark against it for me. Were the contrast less intense, I could see myself going for it more than I do.

There's nothing wrong whatsoever for photos just to be good looking and nothing much more than that. I've seen more snapshots in the past year than for years before that combined. Amongst art photo people, you find a lot of snapshots taken just for fun or experimentation mixed in with more serious work. I take a lot of photos like that. Some of the experiments or non-serious stuff ends up turning out well, and becoming something more. Usually it's just nice to look at, and represents a memory or something we like to look back on.

So, to each their own. I just look for more than many, I think, and what drives me is probably not what drives most people here. But, I signed up for that, and I'm going where it leads.

 

lol @ Dani and co. coming in here one after the other crapping on someone's opinion. yawn. i'm with KW on this one. those pictures are just pretty, over stylised, should-be-on-a-windows-screensaver, dime-a-dozen snoozefests. it's OK if you like pretty pictures but pretty pictures are easy to produce if you have the time and inclination. nature is full of pretty pictures. KW is looking at it from an artistic viewpoint and good art shouldn't just be about pretty pictures. it shouldn't be so OBVIOUS. to a non-artist it doesn't really make any difference i guess but i'm surprised the like of SLG is against KW's view so strongly given she's an artist herself.

 

i really like the texture of this one with the layers of rain. it makes everything in it interesting to look at.

 

Seconded. This is the kind of print I like; I like contrasty shots.

 

lol am I.

 

I didn't make myself clear.

 

eh graphic designer, whatever. you draw. you have some kind of artistic sensibility. my point is that it's lame to crap on an artistic opinion, particularly en masse. whether he comes across as pretentious/smug or not.

 

[image=http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/ngmwinners_122011/bp14.jpg]

When I first looked at this it reminded me of manny D&D pirces of art over the years showing the tunnel-like streets of a fantasy city.

Someone tell me how altered this pic is. Was this the righ moment of the day and BLAMMO you get that?

 

lol appeal to authority

 

Montie - this is the part of photography that is lost on me at the moment. Quix sometimes says to me "I like the shot but you should do something with it." And I don't ever understand what that means. Can't a photograph be taken and unaltered? Does altering ruin the original photo? I think perhaps its me still stuck in the dark ages of print photography and hesitant to move into the world of digital (even though I have a digital camera) and I still want the shots to speak for themselves rather than me decide what the shots speak for.

 

if it was altered at all, it is definitely the least altered of the four you posted. it looks pretty natural to me, though. possibly some tweaking with the contrast in certain areas, but possibly not. sometimes you just get lucky.

 

Yeah, "Do something with it" isn't very clear; that's a fair point. The shot itself is part of the process; how it is printed/edited can be key, too. Ansel Adams talks about this in three of his books (The Camera, The Print, and The Negative); the final image that is produced is more than the sum of its parts. The real fun is looking at some of the unaltered negatives of some of his iconic shots and you appreciate how much effort he put into the darkroom. When I approach a monochrome shot, I still think about how it would look in silver gelatin.

I started in film (and still have all of my small, medium, and large format film cameras) and spent many hours hunched over a projector and stinking of fix. Since I started shooting digitally, I frequently tweak the contrast curves of my shots (a digital effect, but comparable to using higher contrast filters and paper in a wet darkroom), which makes them pop more. In the gorilla shot, I wouldn't do much (maybe increase the color saturation or contrast a bit, see what it looks like in monochrome, etc.). Compositionally, I love the shot, but I think the final image should be a bit more pronounced.