Sharp is the only correct

[Avotius]

One of the topics my photography teacher loves to laugh about is how so many chinese photographers (and I think maybe all over the world) subscribe to the idea that "sharp is a good image". At my photography school a embarrassingly little amount of time is spend on how to print, darkroom, photoshop, self development of film and all those things. Im talking about really short time...maybe a total of half a semester barely touching all of the subjects I just mentioned. In fact our total darkroom time was just one single class and a total about maybe 10 hours. Our photoshop class was one week long and it shows in many of my classmates who look on in amazement as I use the channel mixer in photoshop to change black and white photos or this magic thing called USM that makes your photos.....sharper!


I like a good sharp photo just as much as the next guy, but I dont believe you need to obsess so much about it. Recently in pingyao china I met a guy shooting with a contax 645 and a phase one p25 back. I asked him if he was a studio photographer. "No". Landscape photographer? "No". What do you shoot? "life snapshots" (loosely translated from chinese, the word means that he takes everyday photos the same as most people who go buy a small point and shoot use when they go out to eat, go on vacation, and the sort"). I asked him why in the world would he need such a large and expensive setup for shooting snapshots and he replied rather rudely "sharper is just better".


The other day I was in "computer city" here in my town and there was a guy in the camera store buying a 1dmk3. He didnt know anything about photography which as apparent by him asking the clerk why canon or nikon is better, what the numbers on the lens ment, why was the camera so expensive...but when the clerk took that camera out of the box and handed it to him the guys eyes lit up like a flash, it was big, heavy, and it made his ego run like crazy. Next he bought the biggest lens he could afford, a 70-200 2.8 IS and mounted the camera and took off happy as a clam, only to return a few minutes later to ask why he couldnt take any pictures, oh....he forgot to buy a memory card. He gets the biggest one they got then takes off again....low and behold a few minutes later here he is again..."the camera keeps shutting itself off, I think its broken" the guy starts getting hostile, the clerk explains to him that the battery needs to be charged up, best over night. The man gets very angry and says the clerk has cheated him and slams the camera down on the glass case breaking the lens hood off his new expensive lens and the glass case in the process. Anyway, I think you get the point.


This brings me back to my school where a teacher used our departments horseman 4x5 rail camera to shoot photos at a guys birthday then held an exhibition of these photos blown up to over 80 inches. The pictures were the kind you would see flipping though a friends birthday photos. Poor lighting, odd colors, lots of half blurred people drinking with those awkward looks on their face. When I approached the teacher and asked him about the necessity of using a 4x5 camera to shoot such photos around the table he said "the photos need to be sharp to be good" which I went on to ask how he could say that when most of the people in his shots were heavily blurred from moving after using such long exposure times with a slow lens, surely a big aperture lens on a digital camera or at least a flash could have helped a lot to which he replied "a digital camera isnt sharp enough to blow up so large and large aperture lenses are expensive, flash is not required, you can see whats going on." Well.....there is that "artists perspective" of course but not in what he was doing. Shooting snapshots of your drinking buddies around a table with no care to composition, lighting, effect, or even color balance doesnt cut it for me as art let alone huge gallery prints.. Using a 4x5 camera on a tripod at a situation like that is just annoying. Just.....why?


We have probably all ran into these situations or discussed them here and else ware but really, what do you think?

Well it comes down to this for me: So many photographers or wannabes are so obsessed with image quality that they dont realize what they have now is so much better then what most people had 10 years ago and that as technology marches on as with photography and much of the rest of the world, people have forgotten the values of what they are doing. We buy cameras to take pictures, recently I find myself humbled once more by my yashica gsn though a photo that I took over a year ago on a recently developed "lost" roll of film. For the very small few of us absolute image quality truly is necessary, for the others like hobbyist thats fine too, but for the rest (especially those folks over at the dpreview forums) who buy every evolution of a digicam or dslr or their "prestige" lenses and the complain about image quality and the such.....get a life. Image quality takes a huge step every decade from lens design to film emulsion to sensor technology, you never are going to see the end of it and the grass will always look greener on the other side so just live with it, and if you cant....take up botany.

[LocoDuck]

I like this ^. I don't really have much interesting to say in reply, but thank you for giving me something to think about.

[Steve B]

I love the mental image of a 4x5 at the party. Wow! But I bet he had very high res images of blurry people.
I think you have a good perspective. A good image is more than the sum of its parts, relative sharpness being only one part. And equipment overkill can be a really limiting factor. I just hope people have as much fun laughing at me as I have laughing at them.

[Chris101]

Ya. You what they say... Sharpness is for those who have nothing interesting to photograph.

[dnk512]

Everybody seems to admire a sharp photo. But, no photo endures the passing of time solely on sharpness.

I think sharpness has a necessary minimum, same as exposure, same as composition. As long as all those are within acceptable range, I can manipulate/improve them at print time.

Capturing the right moment, from the right point of view, has no alternative.

[c.poulton]

Great essay, Avotius,

I think that you should introduce your teacher to the Holga - that should get his head spinning.:D

[buckpago]

`Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.` Henri Cartier-Bresson

[pvdhaar]

Sharp has got nothing to do with a good picture.

The key word is 'focus' ..

[Chaser]

Maybe the teacher with the 4x5 was trying to be like Eggleston and his 5x7. Though sounds like the teacher forgot the strobes and assistants.
http://www.mensvogue.com/arts/books/slideshows/2007/01/william_eggleston

[varjag]

Is your photography class mandatory?

[maddoc]

... and only the latest ASPH glass is good enough for snap-shots... ;)

Good essay ! Carrying a 4x5 camera to a birthday party and taking "snaps" of the drunken bodies to get some large prints made me smile. Personally, I do not care so much about "tack-sharp" photos, good composion and contrast / tonality are more important for me.

[Paul T.]

There's a great photographer called Bill Steber,. who shoots what looks like reportage using a Hassie. Does he do it because it's sharper? No! For him, it's simply the lovely tonality you get, which to me makes more difference than any improved 'sharpness'.

If you have no aesthetic sense, and have no idea if a photo is good or not, you can still comment on whether it's sharp. Hence the attraction.

[StuartR]

I agree that sharpness is not a be-all end-all in photography, but the converse is also true. That is that being blurry for the sake of being blurry isn't any good either. If you don't have a good reason to make a photo blurry then it shouldn't be blurry. Sharpness and blur are just aspects of photographs, not ends in and of themselves. If you don't have a clear idea as to what you want your photograph to be, then all the sharpness or softness in the world won't save you.

As for the 4x5 80 inch party photos...it sounds like a wonderfully surrealist venture. Glorifying the banal party photos that we always see. Of course, he probably did not mean for them to be that way, but who knows.

[Pherdinand]

technical quality will never compensate for lack of emotions, or valuable content.

[mfunnell]

Well, this isn't sharp but I like it:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/127/405407131_a339946fd3_o.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mfunnell/405407131/)
[Hexar RF; M-Hexanon 35/2 @ f5.6-ish; Kodak BW400CN, lab scan]

I like this too, but its even less so:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2268/1588768606_8a3684688c_o.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mfunnell/1588768606/)
[dSLR, so look at the EXIF]

This is sharp enough to look sharp (scanned then printed at A4):
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1401/1433476318_87a9574197_o.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mfunnell/1433476318/)
[M3, (modern) Elmar 50/2.8 handheld at 1/5th f2.8 so probably not ultimately sharp, but sharp enough]

Hmmm... There are things in all of the above that are, in fact, sharp or at least "sharp enough". But only the last has the ostensible subject as the "sharp" part.

So if "sharp is the only correct", then which bit is supposed to be sharp?

...Mike

(I hope its obvious that the question is general, rather than directed at the OP.)

[Finder]

I think it was Adams who said there was nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy idea.

[lZr]

I am not sure I want all sharp. Sometimes I use my Lensbay lens and I like the results

[Gabriel M.A.]

One of the topics my photography teacher loves to laugh about is how so many chinese photographers (and I think maybe all over the world) subscribe to the idea that "sharp is a good image".
I like your teacher already.

[varjag]

Wait.. it's not the same teacher who printed wall-sized party snaps?

[chikne]

Everybody seems to admire a sharp photo. But, no photo endures the passing of time solely on sharpness.

I think sharpness has a necessary minimum, same as exposure, same as composition. As long as all those are within acceptable range, I can manipulate/improve them at print time.

Capturing the right moment, from the right point of view, has no alternative.

Oh dear :p

[hans voralberg]

As long as I can see what's going on, or make and educated guess on an A4 print then well it's sharp enough. I agree that composition and tonality is more important

[M. Valdemar]

I like interesting content AND sharp:

http://www.shorpy.com/node/1782?size=_original

http://www.shorpy.com/files/images/1a35204u1.jpg

[nikonhswebmaster]

A lot of people are confused about large digital prints and pixel resolution. They confuse print CMYK dpi results with inkjet dpi results.

It you shoot an image which is native at say 5120x2880, the image size at 24 inchs x 42 inches will be 120 dpi. If you look at the image at "actual pixels," and like it on your screen it will look the same in a print. Which at such a large size will actually be pretty amazing.

I do it all the time, and they rival Cibachrome prints I made 20 years ago, using 4x5 internegs, at 24 inches wide, from 35mm positive film.

[Avotius]

Is your photography class mandatory?

yes, im a photography major


...As for the 4x5 80 inch party photos...it sounds like a wonderfully surrealist venture. Glorifying the banal party photos that we always see. Of course, he probably did not mean for them to be that way, but who knows.

No he did not, and thats a pity.


I like your teacher already.

You would, he is a great guy, I introduced him to tequila one night in a bar on a class trip, we both stumbled home that night after discussing the finner points of art vs journalistic photography and the equipment involved in both.


Wait.. it's not the same teacher who printed wall-sized party snaps?

No, my bad, different teacher.


I like interesting content AND sharp:

http://www.shorpy.com/node/1782?size=_original

http://www.shorpy.com/files/images/1a35204u1.jpg



Now THAT is very funny. At our school we have a place called the Tank Loft which is like a huge studio area for teachers made from the old tank storage facilities by our school from back during the japanese war. Parked out in front is this awkward looking tank that just doesnt seems perportioned quite right....

[Pistach]

I think one should start from his own motivation and orientations. It all depends on one’s goals.
Otherwise it all discussions become messy.
I am a hobbyst but the mentality is the same of my profession, in which it is usual to state in advance one’s purposes.
Consider Art. Would one say that the late Gaugin work is ugly because he painted very little detail? It depends. If you like that form of art, and hence accept his approach you won’t mind his poetic simplification .
Actually my motivation and goal is image, whatever the technique to produce it, that has esthetic values, and achieves beauty, while taking constant aim at our visual world or, more precisely, at our visual perception, to which technology lags far behind and which has still some mysterious facets, that are the topic of extensive research.
Now, it is a fact that our visual system has an extremely high resolution.
So I declare shamelessly not only that I am sharpness maniac, but also that I consider dreadful defocused areas. Because if I look out of my windows I can see some brick less than a meter away some trees a few meters away and then a landscape that reaches almost one hundred kilometers, all in sharp focus. In practice our visual system never defocuses. Defocused areas are an artifact: one has to faint to experience an out of focus vision. Also shallow DOF give me a dreadful look of “emerging from water”. I remember in Popphoto in one of the many “pros teach you how” a proudly posted portrait with one eye in focus but other eye nose cheek ears all heavily out of focus.
Does that means that I criticize bokeh maniacs? Does that means that a sharp image is per se beautiful?
No and no. On the first count we have different aims. I respect theirs, but I think the (hard) quest of sharpness deserves respect as well. On the second count sharpness is only one of many components of image quality. These components can be only defined in connection to our visual perception and are necessary condition to start talking of esthetic values, from my peculiar and specific point of view.
What I like are beautiful images that, at the same time, make our visual system resonate. I like Gaugin, but I am aware that he followed quite a different path to art, compared to classicism, for example. One cannot judge in absolute terms. First we have to put the question in point in proper context. Decide what is the gauge to measure quality.
I would like to add a few more observation to the first post (but we have here matter for a long essay and I want to make here a long story short), and also express my appreciation to this whole thread.
It is not true that sharpness will improve forever. There are, fortunately, physical limits, like diffraction limits for lenses (congratulation to the photo teacher, if he did not mention that). So eventually technology will more or less plateau in this respect, and they will have to invent some new marketing buzzwords (recognition of dangerous faces maybe?).
Frankly I hope to see that plateau as soon as possible, since sticking to film, is increasingly becoming a nightmare, albeit the plateau is already her in this case. Film rarefies and so are serious processing labs. Film scanner are a bet, my own (a Minolta) is the product of a company that has quitted.
Companies that still produce film cameras should understand that one cannot sell a jewel to his customer and leave him/her stranded in using the camera.
And similarly today’s digital is a nightmare. How can one invest huge money on cameras that have the performance of amateur cameras of tomorrow?
Regards
Paul

[RML]

That same mentality you talk about, Aviotus, is what killed me at the photo club I tried to be part of. Sharp, sharper, sharpest. Or big, bigger biggest. Or film, filmer, filmest. Or digital, digitaller, digitallest. I didn't give a crap and never bothered to return there. My dinky, digital R-D1 with Carl Zeiss Planar T* (one of the best lenses available, IMO) wasn't quite what they had in mind for a "worthy" member.

And the (Chinese, Indian, wherevertheyarefrom) nouveau riche don't know jack sh*t about what makes a person respectful and respectable.

[lushd]

"Sharp" is attainable through mastery of craft skills and spending money on high quality gear. The road to achieving beautiful, moving or imaginative images is less obvious.

The two ideas are often seen as separate roads and one is certainly making a great mistake in confusing one with the other. Technical excellence alone is not enough to make a picture great and great pictures are not necessarily technically excellent.

But the two often depend on each other and the Leica 35mm rangefinder seems to me to express a wonderful example of the benefits of recognising this. It contains enough of the obsession with technical perfection and also the passion for making pictures to be the camera of choice for many great creative photographers and an object of love for those who admire engineering and optical achievements.

[ruben]

You may not like this pic, but had it been sharp you had liked it even less :D

Cheers,
Ruben

[sirius]

I think it is all relative. Both sharpness or softness can ruin a picture. For example, my mom doesn't like it when I use the "sharp" lenses...Now I'm working on learning how to use sharp/soft to the best creative end. I know that I want the best tool for the job I want to do and if a photo needs to be sharp, a soft lens just won't cut it.

Alec Soth (magnum) uses medium to large format for his street projects and it works great. Have a look at his inspiring work.

[keithwms]

Perhaps there was something lost in translation. If I understand correctly, the photographer with the p25 was implying that he needed to use the pricier gear to get more detail. The nuance may not translate well, because I have heard similar comments before when I was in Asia, and it turned out to be an issue of ultimate detail, not of sharpness alone.

By "detail," I mean sharpness + resolution + tonality etc., or in other words, total information recorded. Some people think "sharpness" is all there is. They are wrong.

As I recall, the P25 has 16 bit per colour depth or 48 bit overall; the Canon 1dsmk3 is 14/42 and, for comparison, the Rebel XT is 12/36... So there is difference in tonal range that has nothing to do with "sharpness" per se.

Maybe the dude with the p25 knew this and maybe he didn't. Of course, there are plenty of people who do use very expensive camera systems and don't really know why. Actually, this phenomenon existed long before digitals, but I think I'll leave that subject alone. I'll just say that people who drive lamborghinis on city streets don't make sense to me either.

Of course, successful photographs do not need to be sharp in the sense of focus or blur, but any photographer worth mentioning knows that already- it's a trivial fact. And any of Weston's "fuzzies" will sell for more than any of my "sharpies."

[otaku]

I had some wonderfully sharp photos out of my minilux this week and some wonderfully blurred ones all great photos though in their own right.

Personally sharpness isn't just over rated but generally I find it less appealing in most cases such as with digital to me it just seems less life like

[Rhoyle]

Actually, I think I like the idea of making 80 inch prints of my buddies drunk at a birthday party. They should then be sent to their wives, posted up at work, church, etc.

BH

[Uncle Bill]

Here is an out of focus shot that got a decent response from friends.

[Michael P.]

Donald, I know what you mean. I used to work at a camera store whose manager valued sharpness above all else. In her mind only the most expensive lenses and finest grain film were worth using at all, and ISO 50 was always better than 100, etc. How people get that idea in their heads is beyond me.

[sjw617]

Personally sharpness isn't just over rated but generally I find it less appealing in most cases such as with digital to me it just seems less life like

Could you explain this a bit more for me? I do not understand this at all. How can sharpness be over rated? For me blurry out of focus shots generally (95%+) get tossed immediately.

Steve

[endustry]

I just got through looking at "Worldview" by Leonard Freed and his images are a combination of immaculately focused and not-focused-at-all. All of them are amazing.

[Gabriel M.A.]

Could you explain this a bit more for me? I do not understand this at all. How can sharpness be over rated? For me blurry out of focus shots generally (95%+) get tossed immediately.

Steve

This has "out of focus" "blurry":
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1140/1444939921_e61d096747_o.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gabrielma/1444939921/)

And everything is sharp here:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2033/2053650326_35767f5274_d.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/z_piotr/2053650326/)

Does the "sharpness" make it wonderful? Does the first photo need to be "tossed immediately" because it has "blurry out of focus"?

[amateriat]

Does "sharpness" in an image always mean the absence of "blurry?" (At least in a halfway-decent image?)

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=49086&stc=1&d=1188499363

(Yes, this is a wholly rhetorical question to you guys.)

Thanks for the think-piece, Avotius...and, like the new avatar!


- Barrett

[sjw617]

Gabriel,
I am guessing that you meant to take the first picture - chose the f stop and figured that it would turn out at least somewhat like it dd. If I put film on the light box and saw that image first, I would be very nervous. I would assume I screwed up and would be worried about the rest of the roll. Since I shoot mainly f22, I assume tack sharp images will appear on the light box. Yes, I would have thrown out that image.
I still do not understand how sharpness is " less appealing in most cases such as with digital to me it just seems less life like ". Sharpness is less lifelike? less appealing? I find short depth of field that isolates an object generally very distracting. As an effect it can be usefull but as a shooting style I do not understand it.

[Joe Brugger]

Donald, I know what you mean. I used to work at a camera store whose manager valued sharpness above all else. In her mind only the most expensive lenses and finest grain film were worth using at all, and ISO 50 was always better than 100, etc. How people get that idea in their heads is beyond me.

Camera club syndrome, where the quantifiable always trumps the concept.
My dad's cousin used to do wonderful, lush, up-close flower photos -- really warm, emotional photos. This is back in the late '50s and '60s and she was routinely criticized for their "lack of depth of field . . . " Being one of the few women in the club probably didn't help.
Sharpness is one of the possibilities, certainly not the only one, though Tillamook Extra Sharp Cheddar is pretty good cheese.

[StuartR]

Gabriel,
I am guessing that you meant to take the first picture - chose the f stop and figured that it would turn out at least somewhat like it dd. If I put film on the light box and saw that image first, I would be very nervous. I would assume I screwed up and would be worried about the rest of the roll. Since I shoot mainly f22, I assume tack sharp images will appear on the light box. Yes, I would have thrown out that image.
I still do not understand how sharpness is " less appealing in most cases such as with digital to me it just seems less life like ". Sharpness is less lifelike? less appealing? I find short depth of field that isolates an object generally very distracting. As an effect it can be usefull but as a shooting style I do not understand it.

At f/22, I hope you are using a large format camera, otherwise you are LOSING a lot of sharpness that you seem to like. Most Leica and most rangefinder lenses are at their sharpest from f/4 to f/8.

Anyway, I think Gabriel's image is great, and certainly better than the second one. I think that life like does not have to mean pin sharp. I understand the idea that softer images can feel more authentic and more life-like at times. Memory and feelings and emotions soften the images we recall. Thinking of a place we know or person we remember does not always mean recalling the cigarette butt on the ground 20 meters away or the pores on the person's face. The good photo is the one that brings about an emotion, thought or feeling. The problem with super sharp photos is that often the only thought they bring up is, "Yep, that's _____ alright". In other words they are a completely literal representation with no input from the photographer. Through intentional softness, manipulation of depth of field and composition, a photographer can more easily convey an idea. By having only one part be sharp draws attention to it, softness can give the image as timeless character and so on. Sharp is just another technique...as Joe just said!

[hans voralberg]

Gabriel,
I am guessing that you meant to take the first picture - chose the f stop and figured that it would turn out at least somewhat like it dd. If I put film on the light box and saw that image first, I would be very nervous. I would assume I screwed up and would be worried about the rest of the roll. Since I shoot mainly f22, I assume tack sharp images will appear on the light box. Yes, I would have thrown out that image.
I still do not understand how sharpness is " less appealing in most cases such as with digital to me it just seems less life like ". Sharpness is less lifelike? less appealing? I find short depth of field that isolates an object generally very distracting. As an effect it can be usefull but as a shooting style I do not understand it.

Matter of taste, but to be very honest, out of hundreds of people Ive met, you're the first one to shoot mainly f22 ? I though diffraction(??) would make f22 less sharp than f16, for example ? and for most case that would include every single bloody thing in the frame, which frankly is rather distracting, unless you shoot landscape

[Gabriel M.A.]

Anyway, I think Gabriel's image is great, and certainly better than the second one. I think that life like does not have to mean pin sharp.
To be fair, the "sharp" sample isn't "great", regardless of sharpness. I really wanted to find one of those "very sharp" photos of old, hyper-wrinkled people that seems to wow everybody, but none of my search criteria worked. Thanks, in any case.

What I was trying to "prove" --which it doesn't, of course, depending on your point of view-- is that "sharpness" isn't what makes a good image.

And a lot of people confuse "camera shake" with "blurry out-of-focus area" aka "where bokeh lives". These views depend on photography philosophy and personal practices and tastes. But everybody falls into the trap of broad-stroke generalizations: "sharpness is necessary for a good image"; "if the photo has blur, it's useless".

And what Stuart and hans say is true: all the evidence I've ever needed is shooting my Canon EOS glass at apertures smaller than f/8 (or up to f/11 in some cases) and you can certainly see some degradation in acuity.

[sjw617]

My main camera is a 6x17 and I shoot mainly landscapes. I do understand people have different shooting styles so I guess my main tool would be composition since softness and manipulation of depth of field are put aside with f22. Composition IS input from the photographer. "Literal representation" seems more real / lifelike / authentic to me. I do not see with major out of focus areas - but age is playing with that.
Yes, we all have different shooting styles and use the camera (and even film) to help achieve end results. Not all out of focus is bad. Barrett's image has the girl slightly out of focus, but that is due to closeness to the camera. (I would keep that image) Even my f22 has 'softness' out to 7 or 8 feet. I use composition to avoid most things within that area.
Sharpness alone does not make a great image - you are right Gabriel. But bokeh alone does not either.
I do realize that I am in the minority here on RFF. I shoot landscapes, I shoot color and I like sharpness. Polls on the site tell me most others shoot street or portraits, use black and white and love sort depth of field. Some people also shoot from waist level while I focus to a fault or use infinity.
Still wondering why a picture may have a focused object in the center and a majority of the image out of focus. Why not have the object larger in the frame or crop the image to 'remove' so much out of focus area?

Steve

[tomasis]

Shooting snapshots of your drinking buddies around a table with no care to composition, lighting, effect, or even color balance doesnt cut it for me as art let alone huge gallery prints.. Using a 4x5 camera on a tripod at a situation like that is just annoying

I'd like to confront you why one has to make perfect color balance, lighting etc? If sharpness is not important for you. It is whole point that one can get different picture with one feature but lacking other at the same time. I think that teacher is more clever than he seems to be ;) You expected some rules following but he break the rules to annoy you until you get the point of the whole process.

[hans voralberg]

Still wondering why a picture may have a focused object in the center and a majority of the image out of focus. Why not have the object larger in the frame or crop the image to 'remove' so much out of focus area?

Steve

Taste, Subject matter and Emphasis. Depends on the degree of blurryness, give an idea of the surrounding enviroment without it poking in your eyes. Like someone say before, you dont need to see a cigarette butt 20m away.

[amateriat]

What I think this all boils down to is this: we all have our favorite images from other photographers. Think about those images, then ask this: gently deconstructed, which "rules" do some of these images adhere to, and which do they break, based on your own standards? It's one thing to have standards for one's own work: "sharpness rules", "sharpness is vastly overrated", etc. But is it not true for a lot of us that some of the images by others that have often moved us, left their indelible mark in our memory, have technically gone at right angles with those standards?

Plus, recalling the words of my one and only formal photography teacher, you can't effectively break any aesthetic 'rule" without understanding that rule from the get-go. Photography has gone through phases just as other creative mediums have, though perhaps at a somewhat faster pace. It pays, IMO, to pay attention to all of them, and perhaps go beyond personal like/dislike and dig a little deeper. Sometimes, in some work, there truly is no "there" there, even if all the "rules" line up, while some work grabs me by the collar and doesn't let go, even though the crossed-t's-and-dotted-i's part of my brain might briefly wince and say "damn, this thing's a mess."

Without patting myself too hard on the back, I like to think that I've absorbed enough of the "rules", golden or otherwise, to pretty much not think about them, whether wandering around a gallery or meandering behind my own lens. The deconstructive stuff comes a good deal later, if it comes at all. Of course, as Woody implies, that doesn't make me a genius by a long shot.

A great Thanksgiving to you all!


- Barrett

[sjw617]

Taste, Subject matter and Emphasis. Depends on the degree of blurryness, give an idea of the surrounding enviroment without it poking in your eyes.
Taste I understand and emphasis I can see. Subject matter... what subjects would be good examples?

Steve

[mfunnell]

Taste I understand and emphasis I can see. Subject matter... what subjects would be good examples?All subjects would be good examples, I think. The emphasis you place on different aspects of your chosen subject, guided by your own personal taste pretty much accounts for how photos are constructed.

If there is some magic rule, based on subject alone, saying "all landscapes must be shot with wide DOF" or "portraits must use narrow DOF" or whatever, it immediately cries out to be broken.

...Mike

[peter_n]

My main camera is a 6x17 and I shoot mainly landscapes. I do understand people have different shooting styles so I guess my main tool would be composition since softness and manipulation of depth of field are put aside with f22.Many members shoot close-up or in the street as you point out Steve. There manipulating DOF is a useful tool becuase you are so close to a scene with a number of planes of focus. Often the wish is to isolate a part of it, to make a figure/background to help the viewer to more easily see what you saw. Also in many cases composition is set aside to capture a fleeting moment because that is what a street shooter is looking for.

[GoodPhotos]

http://www.goodphotos.com/images/grove/albanelfed07.jpg

Not sharp at all. I like it though. It says exactly what I wanted it to.

[Gabriel M.A.]

I'd like to confront you why one has to make perfect color balance, lighting etc? If sharpness is not important for you.
Remember to count 10 paces before you turn around to shoot your opponent during this confrontation.

[mfunnell]

Remember to count 10 paces before you turn around to shoot your opponent during this confrontation.Hmm, at 20m total distance, what focal length would you recommend? :D

...Mike

[Gabriel M.A.]

Shooting snapshots of your drinking buddies around a table with no care to composition, lighting, effect, or even color balance doesnt cut it for me as art let alone huge gallery prints.. Using a 4x5 camera on a tripod at a situation like that is just annoying. Just.....why?
I wholeheartedly agree. Having this view is nowhere in conflict with the view that "sharpness" doesn't have to be the only correct criteria attainable or "pursued" by a photograph. ( ::blech:: )

I know what shots you're talking about, and I have a few photographers in mind. That is their style, and it works for them. It works for their fanbase, too.

What really rides my t*tt*es and roasts my goat is seeing how much lack of skill and talent is over-compensated by their cranberry-limenade approach to contrast, and the lure of the lit cigarette on somebody's face. All "hip shots" that aren't really, just shots from a randomly-aimed drunken or too-busy hand.

But that doesn't mean that the photographs can't be good. Some photographers actually spend time cropping to give better sense to the entropy they caught in their film-loaded apparatus; these are the ones that make the cut.

But that is now more of a personal criticism, and really, what do I really know about how a specific photo was achieved?

But your sentiment is understood (at least by me): little or no thought going into a photograph has as much merit as calling somebody a Nuclear Physicist just because, to paraphrase George Costanza (from Seinfeld), he "found Plutonium by accident". If somebody has a "nose" (so to speak) to know how to luckily always come up with Plutonium and Eisteinium often enough to get rich in the metal exchange market, then that's another skill, just not acquired through the Institute of Technology, but perhaps at seminars of The Road Less Travelled.

OK, rant over. That was very sharp banter. ;)

[Gabriel M.A.]

Hmm, at 20m total distance, what focal length would you recommend? :D

...Mike
Depends. To get a cool shot of the barrel of the gun, I'd say 180mm at f/2.8 :D

If such details aren't important (oh, the irony) perhaps a 15mm at f/16; everything will be in focus. Whether it'll be "sharp", that's up to your film speed and steadying skills ;)

[Vido]

Capture the story, carry forth the emotion, keep the viewer mesmerized. Sharpness is accomplishing all the above.

[amateriat]

Capture the story, carry forth the emotion, keep the viewer mesmerized. Sharpness is accomplishing all the above. There is the "context thing", however.

In this (http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=50413) thread, I bring up the matter of viewing a movie, shot in a medium that doesn't register all that comfortably in my mind's/heart's eye, but nonetheless doesn't get in the way of my absorbing the power of the story being told (and what a wallop of a story). Knowing your way around a particular medium, breaking through it, knowing it till you can forget it, is sometimes more important than the medium being chosen. But few people are capable of this. Some (most?) will make a hash of things regardless of medium. Some are good enough to transcend whatever medium is at hand. (Lumet comes damn close, but I still sort of wish he'd ad least gone Super-16, yet he's the old master, not me).

Al I'm (still) saying is: get to know your chosen medium, its strengths and limitations (and thay ALL have limitations), and work it as hard as you can to bend it to your mind's eye. That's all.


- Barrett

[nikonhswebmaster]

Matter of taste, but to be very honest, out of hundreds of people Ive met, you're the first one to shoot mainly f22 ? I though diffraction(??) would make f22 less sharp than f16, for example ? and for most case that would include every single bloody thing in the frame, which frankly is rather distracting, unless you shoot landscape

There are two thoughts on that. Lately I shoot everything at f8~11 because I want the "realistic" quality of everything in focus. The fashion photographer's look, of isolating the subject by using a long lens, can get rather odd if you are not careful, we do not see that way.

Our brains combine what we see, making us believe everything is in focus, we have to ignore our brains to "see" like a still camera. My thought is if something is distracting, how bad can that be?

Just for the record, I am just not a big fan of out-of-focus backgrounds, I know some seem to love it.

[Gabriel M.A.]

Just for the record, I am just not a big fan of out-of-focus backgrounds, I know some seem to love it.
For the record, I don't not like either. I do think, however, that discarding one over the other is as silly as saying "if it has sugar, it's good, if it has salt, I get rid of it" as a rule of thumb.

If the only thing you make is butter, using sugar doesn't make much sense. If the only thing you make is sugar cotton, using salt doesn't make much sense. If you have a palate that can allow you to eat both apple pie and fillet mignon, then you don't go around discarding ingredients out of fundamentalism.

[Gabriel M.A.]

Taste I understand and emphasis I can see. Subject matter... what subjects would be good examples?

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/54/155603133_cfcc2e587a_o.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gabrielma/155603133/)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/130/323573158_816607dab2_o.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gabrielma/323573158/)

If I were close-minded about using one or the other approach, I wouldn't have come up with the "all-in-focus/sharp" image and the "blurry/selective-focus" image.

Many shades between white and black.

[nikonhswebmaster]

For the record, I don't not like either. I do think, however, that discarding one over the other is as silly as saying "if it has sugar, it's good, if it has salt, I get rid of it" as a rule of thumb.

If the only thing you make is butter, using sugar doesn't make much sense. If the only thing you make is sugar cotton, using salt doesn't make much sense. If you have a palate that can allow you to eat both apple pie and fillet mignon, then you don't go around discarding ingredients out of fundamentalism.

You totally lost me there...

But I don't see myself as a photographer, I just use cameras as part of my work.

[Gabriel M.A.]

You totally lost me there...

But I don't see myself as a photographer, I just use cameras as part of my work.
That's ok; none of us are perfect. I use my work as part of my camera enabling ;)

[GoodPhotos]

There is a difference for me between motion blur, selective focus and out of focus.
I use motion blur a lot...
http://www.goodphotos.com/OneAWk/01wk7a.jpg
(taken with my first digital...a FujiLeica Digilux Zoom!)

I'd like to get a lensbaby to play more with selective focus, but I also try to keep my images in focused on at least some plane within the photo.

[sjw617]

Gabriel, I thought you meant specific subjects fit better - now I see you are really saying it is a per subject choice. Each subject must be judged on it's own.
I guess our styles are quite different at times. The second image of the hand is VERY interesting.

Mark, motion blur can be good but can also be distracting.

Peter , I think as I use f22 others use f2-ish as their main set up. "Also in many cases composition is set aside to capture a fleeting moment because that is what a street shooter is looking for." Kind of surprised to see you say that.

Steve

[Paul Jenkin]

Don't know who said it but I believe that 'Perfecton is a very narrow goal'. Moreover, very few of us ever achieves this very narrow goal.

Maybe I'm a bit misguided but I do try to get my shots within what I regard as the acceptable limits of sharpness or what's the point of having a focusing ring? If I'm taking a 'planned' photo of someone, I can't think of an instance where I would deliberately not make it as in focus as I possibly could. That said, I might use the lens wide open to take out the background.

If it's a grab-shot, I'd rather capture the moment or the essence of what is going and it not be critically 'sharp' than spend time getting the focus spot-on and miss the shot.

Paul.