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Man oh man, the difference between a good model, and an inexperienced one is pretty damned extreme. Being able to just tell someone a certain mood I'm going for, and them emoting it is wonderful. Trying to direct someone is a shit show (I'm sure better photographers than I get better results there)Quote:
Originally Posted by Kchrpm
Never said it was illegitimate, that was your term. I said it was a sham. It's perfectly legitimate, it just always ends up looking fake. I think there's a big difference between actors in a motion picture and models in still photos. I think in a way actors have the ability to much more effectively convey an emotion as compared to a model. With acting, you have all this time and motion with which to convince someone of a real emotion. With a model in a still photo, you get frozen in one instant in time, and anyone viewing the photo can freely study it for as long as they want, and I think that humans are good enough at discerning true emotion from fake to be able to pick up on the fakeness of a model almost every time when they can study something so closely. It's almost like the uncanny valley. It almost looks right, but on a deep level I think we can discern that it's not, and it ends up totally ruining it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Cam
As soon as it gets through to you that I'm excited about gear not because of what it is on its own, but because of the potential that it has to let me take the photos I want to take.Quote:
Originally Posted by Cam
Case in point... This photo was taken at f1.4 (wide open on that lens,) 1/60 second (about the slowest I can reliably go while hand-holding at 50mm,) and ISO 12800. Any lesser of a camera and lens would have made the photo nearly impossible to take, at least with any detail or quality. A lesser 50mm 1.8 prime would have put me at an equivalent ISO of about 21000, which most cameras would really not look good at, and even mine is borderline at that ISO. I simply wouldn't have been able to take the photo without really good equipment.
http://gtxforums.net/attachment.php?...0&d=1501302423
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I think what he meant was not that it is not a legitimate art form, but that the whole thing is a sham in that the emotions displayed are "not genuine".
However, and even in that sense, I still disagree with his characterisation of it as a "sham". It is possible to elicit certain emotions on demand from someone in a formal portrait session. But maybe he doesn't have the skills/tools to do so at the moment.
(sorry wrote previous post before I noticed thread had gone on to a new page)
Ah, models v actors and experience v inexperience. So maybe the real comparison is between one and the other in both senses, rather than between formal portrait photography and movies. What if you took formal portraits of an actor? And this doesn't even include formal portrait photos of people who are not models or actors.
I will comment quickly on the whole "better gear...better photographer" issue you guys seem to bring up on occasion.
Would putting Sterling Moss (in his prime) in a modern racing car make him a better driver? No. But he would be able do things with his talent that he never could before.
Just like modern movie directors. 30 years ago they could envision so many great things but technology at the time made it impossible to turn into a believable movie. Did technology make them a better director? No. But it allows them to finally express their imagination on screen in ways that was never before possible.
So...the gear doesn't make you better. It allows you to express your vision in ways that weren't possible years ago.
The problem is when people get hung up on gear and thinking they are better visionaries because they have better gear. It can also fool you into thinking you know what you are doing. 99% of the people today with expensive DSLR cameras just turn the dial to the green square and press the button hoping for greatness. They don't take the time to learn the craft because the equipment is so foolproof nowadays. My cameras don't have a magic dial with auto modes...I have to tell it what I want. Which is how I like it.
Yes! This is what I'm trying to say! Stanley Kubrick had to get that nutty 50mm f0.7 NASA lens to film those scenes in Barry Lyndon they way he wanted to because, from what I've heard, the fastest motion picture film you could get back then was ISO 100.
But, firstly, I haven't heard anyone call out Stanley Kubrick as being overly obsessed with gear instead of focusing on the art of what he was doing. Second, if you wanted to film something like that today, you wouldn't need to go to nearly those lengths, because we have digital cinema cameras that will cleanly go exponentially higher than ISO 100. I am not chasing after all of this good equipment because I think it will automatically make me better, I'm doing it because of what it could allow me to do, assuming I'm proficient at using it. People that say that it's all about the person taking the photo and not the gear, I'm sorry, but that's just not the case. The equipment has limits, and if what you envision or the conditions you want to take photos in exceeds those limits, you just simply can't take the photos you want to take, no matter how good you are.
Anyway, I'm sorry, but I'm not familiar with who you are or what you do.
Ok, but for the longest time all you said was "I don't deserve any credit for any of this, the camera did everything, I'm not even a real artist, I'm just a hack with fancy equipment."
You said that over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
And when other artists corrected you, you disagreed with them and explained why, in the process explaining why their art was not a result of their own talent, either.
So yes, when you post something praising your equipment, and still have rarely if ever given yourself, the artist, credit for the work you do in making your art, we're going to assume that you still have the viewpoint.
When you shit on other equipment because examples shown were created by tweaking RAW files more than one would normally, rather than just being straight out of the camera with no manipulation over even cropping (because cropping is cheating, according to you previously), yes, we're going to assume that you still have the same viewpoint.
If you can plainly, and repeatedly, say that the artist has at least as much, and commonly more, to do with the quality of a photograph, or any other piece of art, than the equipment, without qualifying it and denigrating yourself in the process, then people will stop believing that you believe the opposite, because you obviously did and said as much repeatedly.