Should I try to make an exceptional photograph of a commonplace scene or an ordinary picture of a memorable scene? What is normal and commonplace? Normal for me or normal for others?
UPDATE: My Fujinon MCEX-16 arrived on Saturday morning, but I didn’t open the package until later. I used the lens today, but it was too late to process and include photographs for the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge.
This past week's Lens-Artists Photo Challenge was indeed a challenge. I. J. Khanewala1 has asked us to lift "...the commonplace into the most extraordinary thing that you have seen". But what does it mean?
adjective
with no special or distinctive features; normal.
noun
what is commonplace or standard.
Should I make an exceptional photograph of a commonplace scene or an ordinary picture of a memorable scene? What is normal and commonplace? Normal for me or normal for others? Does it matter?
At first, I thought about I.J. Khanewala's onion photograph and her approach. I might play with light and shadow from the early morning sunlight coming through the kitchen window. I'm a weekend photographer, and it's October in New Jersey. The light comes up later and goes down sooner, leaving very little time for playing with sunlight in the morning. The skies have been cloudy all week; flat light. But I tried. I'm not too fond of the result. I looked around my home and realised I didn't want to photograph any of it.
As a primarily outdoor photographer, my real challenge is seeing beyond the "every day feels the same" struggle of self-enforced "mental survival" routines I created during the pandemic lockdown. Netflix, Apple TV+, HBO, Hulu, and Disney+ became my escape from the constant reminder that I could not do the things I wanted to do. But, these routines continue despite the "opening". Monday to Friday, I usually don't leave the house Monday to Friday, and some weekends, I don't leave the couch.
It's October in New Jersey, and some leaves on the trees have begun to turn yellow, but not enough of them. I finally gave up on the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge and went for an early morning walk in the Billie Johnson Mountain Lakes Nature Preserve in Princeton. The preserve is about ten minutes (6.3 km) from home.
I've hiked the Billie Johnson Mountain Lakes Nature Preserve many times over the last several years. It's a quiet place to sit, think, and get some low-effort exercise. The loop around the lake often has stunning fall foliage. I've photographed spectacular displays in early October, mid-October, and late October. But not today. It's too early in New Jersey. The fall foliage forecast in Central New Jersey has defied prediction. Perhaps next weekend?
I focused on photographing what was commonplace at this time.
Bhavana asked what photography challenge I was working on. I explained what I thought the challenge was about and why I struggled with it. I stopped to photograph some flowers, wishing I had a macro lens. The XF60mmF has been on my "wish list" since I both my Fuji (2018). But it's an expensive lens, and I have not convinced myself I would use it enough to justify the expense.
I recently re-discovered Fuji X Weekly's Nostalgic Negative Film Simulation. Ritchie Roesch created this recipe to mimic the Nostalgic Negative Film Simulation, which can only be found on the high-end and expensive Fujifilm GFX100S medium format digital camera.
Ritchie wrote:
Fujifilm stated that the Nostalgic Negative film simulation is based on "American New Color" photography of the 1970s. They studied photographs by William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and Richard Misrach in order to create them. Eggleston and Sternfeld largely shot on Kodachrome—II and X in the early 1970s, 25 and 64 in the late' 70's—while Shore shot mostly Kodacolor, and Misrach shot a lot of Vericolor. All of those are Kodak 35mm films but with different aesthetics.
The Nostalgic Negative Film Simulation recipe may not be an accurate facsimile of the true Nostalgic Negative, but I am an instant fan. All of the images in this blog post are straight-out-of-the-camera (SOOC) JEPGs captured using Ritchie's Nostalgic Negative Film Simulation with some cropping to suit my needs.
Who is I.J. Khanewala? I don't know. Unlike Patti and Leya, some guest bloggers don't post their first names. ↩
After spring, autumn is my most favourite of the seasons in the North Eastern USA. The cooler autumn air is a welcome respite from the heat and humidity of summer. Although it’s been a little unpredictable in recent years, the change of the leaves from green to various hues and shades of yellow, orange, and red provide a bright, colourful display.
After spring, autumn is my most favourite of the seasons in the North East. The cooler autumn air is a welcome respite from the heat and humidity of summer. Although it's been a little unpredictable in recent years, the change of the leaves from green to various hues and shades of yellow, orange, and red provide a bright, colourful display. Early autumn is also the time for beer fest and October Fest and dining on Weiner schnitzel, spaetzle, and red cabbage. It's the time of the year for glorious sunrises and sunsets. During COVID times, autumn was the time to share a pint of ale or a cocktail around the fire pit outside on the back lawn of the Brick Farm Tavern. Autumn is the time of year to take steam train rides through the Pennsylvania Countryside and explore quaint little towns. It's the time of year to walk around the Princeton University campus and watch kids playing the leaves. It's the time of year for early morning fog over Princeton Battlefield Park.
It's too early for autumn colours in the Garden State. According to nj HIking and nj.com, peak autumn colour is still two weeks away. Some of the maples on Blue Spring Road have a tinge of red but very very few of the mature trees are still showing green.
For the Lens-Artists Challenge #167: Colors of Autumn, I took a look at my Adobe Lightroom catalogue and older blog post for images to post. I looked through five years of October photographs to compile the set below. I photographed some using various models of iPhone, my long-gone Nikon D500, and my Fuji X-T2.
Yes, yes, I know, computational photography! Apple is leading here, they’re ahead of the competition, and so on and so forth. I’m simplifying here, but essentially computational photography is something created to take advantage of processing power and software to circumvent the hardware limitations of having small camera sensors, small lenses, and little physical space to operate within the chassis of a smartphone. And from what I’ve seen so far, the goal of having such advanced computational photography is to make your iPhone take photos as closer to reality as possible, especially when it comes to low-light photography.
I’m not arguing its usefulness or Apple’s innovative efforts on this front, at all. The philosophical problem I have with that is that most photography is not about reproducing reality with 100% fidelity. Every time I look at the photo samples Apple shows while touting the iPhone’s ever-improved camera system, the neutral, high-definition, surgically precise nature of such samples doesn’t appeal, inspire, or move me at all.
Bhavna and I had dinner at Brick Farm Tavern. We haven't had dinner here in a few months. After dinner, she asked me to schedule dinner here at least once per month.
I don’t use email to read newsletters or catch up with blogs. Email is for work-related messaging and personal correspondence, and notifications from banks, utilities, etc.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was offered free to the world 22 years ago on March 15, 1999. I started using it a few months after that. RSS has been the primary method for keeping up with any source that supports it (mostly blogs).
I’ve tried Feedly, River 2, Fever, Reeder, and several others, but I’ve used Reeder exclusively for several years. Reeder is cross-platform, running on macOS, iPad OS and iOS. The app team have provided a continuous improvement over the years, and I think the app is feature complete. I originally paid a yearly fee to use a feed aggregation service, Feedbin. The Feedbin service also provided the ability to sync my reading status across my drives. However, Reeder just started leveraging iCloud sync.
I have struggled with managing the feeds that are firehoses. Over the years, I’ve performed multiple spring cleanings and reorganisation of sources. Feeds that update frequently, mainly very popular Apple, cyber security, and photography websites, are corralled under the “news” category. Then I’ve broken down the lower volume photography feeds into “bloggers”, then Fuji, and finally film. The Fuji feeds, and the film feeds are low volume, so keeping up is easy.
I’ve had a Gmail account since the beta launched in 2004. But several years ago, I decided that instead of using a free service, where I’m the product, I would happily pay to host my email. Gmail is where all the low-value email goes. I was a big fan of all things Google, but as I became increasingly concerned with privacy, I started a move away from their services.
Why do some photographers continue to define images by the limitations of legacy print technology? In modern times, I think very few photographs are printed. Most photographs are shared online. For example, here are the non-print aspect ratios for Instagram and Facebook and other social media.
Instagram Landscape Photos have 1.91:1 aspect ratio
Facebook Profile Cover Photo have 2.7:1 aspect ratio.
Facebook Photo Post have 1.91:1 aspect ratio.
When will we let go of the past and free photographers from these constraints?
I just read the essay, The End of Nation-States by Tomas Pueyo and my mind is reeling. Tomas makes the interesting proposition that large multinational corporations and cryptocurrencies are disrupting the power of local governments and nation-states.
Historically, how did you trust that your cab was legit?
Because it had a license. From the government.
How did you know to eat in that restaurant?
Because it was certified to be safe. By the government.
How did you know your house was yours?
Because it was registered. By the government.
How did you know somebody was American?
Because they had a passport. From the government
You always needed a gatekeeper.
What about money: how did you certify you had money? You either showed the cash or you needed an attestation from your bank.
How did you prove you knew something? You needed to show a certificate provided by an academic institution.
How did you prove anything was true? You got a seal from a notary public. You always needed a gatekeeper.
Nation-states were the ultimate gatekeepers, because not only did they control their own services, but they also controlled the rest of gatekeepers via regulation. They drew all their might from this control.
Since the Bitcoin paper was published, that power is gone. We haven’t needed gatekeepers to certify most of these things. You don’t need the corruption, absurd regulations, and abuse of power that goes with it. We can build better solutions with more crowd-sourced feedback, faster feedback, crypto-oracle verification. We just haven’t built all these solutions yet.
My only counterpoint to Tomas' thesis is that the generation of cryptocurrency is at the expense of the environment. Cryptocurrencies require large amounts of energy, due to the computations needed for mining. According to one estimate, Bitcoin's energy consumption (118.9TWh/year) is similar to the power consumption of countries like the Netherlands (117.1 TWh/year) or Pakistan (125.9TWh/year).
Not all cryptocurrencies have significant environmental impacts. Many of them do not use mining at all. There are alternative, eco-friendly cryptocurrencies that inflict less damage on the planet.
Because the global pandemic has kept me working remotely, I am "seeing" this maple tree for the first time.
Under normal circumstances, at this time of year (fall) and at this time of day, I would be in my car or on a train on my way to work or already at work. By the time I return home from work, it would be dark outside. Because the global pandemic has kept me working remotely, I am "seeing" this sugar maple (Acer saccharum) tree in my backyard for the first time. I read that Sugar maples have a fall foliage colour range from yellow to orange to red, but this specimen is mostly yellow.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to using ALL the cookies. However, this website has no interest in selling your information. It does not explicitly use social media cookies from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Threads, Instagram etc. Read More
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.