NOTE: If you like the above picture and quote, you can purchase Rick Sammon’s New e-Book: Life Lessons We Can Learn From Mother Nature. It not only has the pictures and quotes, but also notes about how the photos were made. This would be a great gift for photographers who want to learn more about the craft.
There is an interesting issue involved with personal privacy and photography nowadays especially when considering the popularity of street photography and recent attempts in some places to outlaw the art form.
Photographer Arne Svenson has created a project called “The Neighbors.” He has focused his lens on the lives of Manhattanites, apparently his neighbors, by photographing them with a telephoto lens through their open windows.
If this were you in the picture below, would you be offended? Would you feel that your privacy had been violated? If your face was identifiable would that change your opinion?
As a fan of Edward Hopper and other artists who depicted day-to-day life in a stylized fashion, I enjoy these photographs and appreciate the artistic vision behind them.
According to this post via PetaPixel, two of Svenson’s neighbors pictured in the project sued him claiming their privacy had been violated. For now, however, the courts have decided that the work did not violate NYC’s right-to-privacy law which prohibits using a person’s likeness for commercial purposes without permission. Svenson’s work was declared “art” and not used for “‘advertising or trade'” purposes.
The ruling may not be final as the door appears to have been left open much like the windows in the pictures. There is no easy answer here. Read some of the comments and you can see that this raises many issues which will only get more complicated as technology increases our ability to reach further into the world undetected.
Photography, as a powerful medium…offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.” – Ansel Adams
On the blog, Photographing the Great Outdoors, by Matt Kloskowski Matt shares his experience of photographing the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta near sunset. The stunning picture below was part of that shoot.
Read the rest of the story, see more fabulous photographs and learn about his experience with the Sony A7 II and the 70-200 lens.
I might be repeating myself here, but when I taught photography classes, I tried to impress upon the learners how significant even the most casual photograph is as it represents a moment in time which will never be captured exactly as it is again. That’s it! The scene is finished forever.
In 13 Mind-Bending Thoughts About Photography, Matthew Rycroft highlights several other interesting ideas concerning photography such as: “Before color photography, there was no good reason (I would say compelling) to take photographs of rainbows.” and “Before photography, many people didn’t know what they looked like as children.”
Listen to the other thoughts and watch the associated footage in the video below:
Here is Michael Zhang’s take on the same thoughts on PetaPixel. The photographs at the bottom, which are different than those of Matthew Rycroft’s, lend visual validation to the points.
Huw Alexander Ogilvie took this very interesting aerial picture of a rain cloud over the ocean returning the water back to mother earth. We don’t often think of this phenomenon so it is good to see it in action!
Years ago when my wife and I visited London, we found a camera on a train. Because the camera had a name and address on it, we were able to locate the owner and make appropriate return arrangements.
In this digital era, it would make sense to account for such loss. I came across an idea that I thought was a good one and one that I might implement myself.
If someone finds a camera, one of the first things they MIGHT do if they know anything about cameras, is to look at the pictures that are on the memory/data card in the camera.
Every time the memory/data card is initialized for a new outing, etc,. why not take a picture of the following information that is printed neatly on a sheet of paper?
THIS CAMERA BELONGS TO [ Insert Name ]
MY EMAIL IS [ Insert a valid email here ]
In the event this camera is found please contact me.
Thank You!
I do not advise including an address because if you are away from home, that might be able to be discerned from the other photos on the card and leave YOU more vulnerable. You might include a phone number if you think it is appropriate, but exercise caution.
We have had a number of out-of-town visitors so my posts this week have been somewhat abbreviated. Yesterday, however, I created an entry called “Why Photographers Do What They Do”, which links to a video about possible motivating and inspiring forces behind photography.
As citizens of a highly visual world, we might often overlook the importance of photographs in our lives and why many of us have shoe boxes, or the equivalent, of old photographs stored on a shelf somewhere in our home. I know that I have pictures of people that I must acknowledge remain strangers to me. They might have been important to my parents or grandparents, but are foreigners in my household and yet lie in repose firmly stacked among my closest of relatives.
Some of these pictures are only reviewed every few years or once a decade. The point is that they are looked at. Maybe a death in the family prompts the cobwebs to be wiped away. Why do we keep these photographs? Why are there dozens or hundreds of pictures that are only looked at periodically?
Missy Mwac might have the answer to the questions above in her revealing and poignant piece, “If You Don’t Think Photos Are Important, Wait Until They Are All You Have Left.” I encourage you to read her essay to find out why, we as consumers of visual media, do what we do.
What do you think about Missy’s essay and the thoughts above?
This video, The Calling, explains why David McLain is willing to put his life in the hands of strangers, leave his family for long periods of time and visit far away places to create photographic or motion images. This is what all photography is about whether you are an enthusiastic hobbyist, casual point-and-shooter or professional photographer. Creating the image of that unique moment is the reward.
Watch this beautiful and inspirational movie:
The Calling from SonyElectronics on Vimeo.
DIY Photography has a video that explains 9 Photo Composition Tip/Rules in a bit more than three minutes. The compositional techniques are listed below:
Composition is one of the basic building blocks of a good photograph. There are a couple of rules demonstrated that aren’t often explained such as “Center the dominant eye.” Watching the rules take form in front you brings home the impact of some of the techniques highlighted.
You can watch the COOPH (Cooperative of Photography) video below:
COOPH explains 9 photo composition tips with the help of Steve McCurry’s incredible photographs. Special thanks go to Steve McCurry for his time and permission to use his photographs in this video!
A follow up to this video is an article posted on PetaPixel, 9 Photo Composition Tips As Seen in Photographs by Steve McCurry, which carries the same video, but also breaks the rules down via still shots so that they are easily noticed and understood.
Watching both the video and reviewing the PetaPixel article provides good reinforcement of the concepts demonstrated.