turning the corner

«wow and flutter»

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Amazing how much one can be sidelined while being sick. On the other hand, while typing was a bit futile -- too many typos and no clear train of thought -- I tried to turn the corner, as it were. Also, there is time required for normal work!

The first thing was to go through all the images that I have taken since I began with digital in 2001. I did an organization and sifting of images that I considered good enough for future visit. The temptation to re-work some of them also came up. The main thrust with this is to instill a good workflow, given what I have learned since then. I also spent some time learning more about Lightroom photo management capabilities, and working this into the new workflow. The big "revelation" is the use of stacks to keep all the versions of an image in "one place." The side benefit of this is how to back up based on "exporting binders" in Lightroom. I can see an ease to the back up madness.

One big sigh of relief is getting rid of the bloated/slow Bridge and going through Photoshop as a necessary step in making an image. Ideally, as it has been in the recent past, it is to go RAW->Lightroom->ImageReady (for JPG). Although the RAW and JPG image selections are done, now comes the importing to Lightroom, adding more useful tags, and consolidating with the previous work and versions. To help with reducing the work of this kind of re-organization, I am using flickr to delete images that are not worth keeping active. In other words, all the old work will still exist in a back up disk, but only a few (150 images or so) will migrate to the active library. I guess this is like the government's axiom: before you toss the original, make a copy.

I also thought that DNG offered significant storage savings, but that is not the case. So, I will just work from the RAW images now, since I do not have esoteric software or camera uses.

Amazon was promising deliveries of Lightroom to begin yesterday, but now an email says it will not be until early March. I may have to risk doing all the library management with the Beta version, or may be practice with the new images.

Speaking of new images, it has also been more than 2 weeks since I last worked on an image. The next image will be one of the very first images I took with a digital camera. Many of those images, I can now realize, are very "typical," but that is what happens when learning in a vacuum. That was going to be the topic of this entry, but it will be the next one: "how much one can see by watching^[1]"

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^[1]This is from Yogi Berra's endless streams of phrases

plagiarism vs. homage vs. ????

«your silent face»

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From a link provided by The Online Photographer:

Finally, the Zielskes have prompted relatively little scandal because most artists think it's impossible to plagiarize a photograph simply by showing up at the same place at the same time of day.

In a previous entry ("confinement"), I posit the hypothetical of what would happen if order is strictly adhered in photography. Another perspective on this is explored in Slate's article "Can Photographers be Plagiarists?" The article is in the form of a slide show to demonstrate both perspectives about inspiration versus copying. The genesis of the article is a recent controversy between the father/son team of Horst and Daniel Zielske versus Peter Bialobrzeski over photographs shot from the same vantage point.

As far as my point of view goes, with so much order/discipline to the technique, the first one to find a vantage point should get the credit, as I would suspect is normally the case. However, for Mr. Bialobrzeski to cry foul, well, that is going a bit far. It is sufficient to point out that he was there first with shot, and not try to sue, or stop an exhibit. Still, I think that if the Zielske made contact with Bialobrzeski prior to their photographs, that reference to that consultation should have been made public, just like a reference just like in published journal articles.

Above, is my feeble attempt at plagiarizing Hisroshi Sugimoto, even if the awareness was after the fact.

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