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| Orlando Foggy Morning |
I was down in Flordia most of last week. Work sent me down to Photoshop World in Orlando. It was a good trip, but there were things to gripe about, too. My body was still mostly used to temperatures in the 40s or 50s, and getting tossed into a swamp with temps in the 80s and dewpoints in the 60s made me uncomfortable and cranky.
There were a few things that caught my attention. The first was the sheer cost of everything down there. Knowing that most of the folks around where I was are attending conferences or going to visit The Mouse, prices are jacked up pretty high. Internet connectivity, as Davezilla points out in passing, sucks at high-priced hotels. And I still think that folks with no people skills really shouldn’t be in the “hospitality industry.”
- One of the people I talked to at the conference was John Paul Caponigro. He’s a good guy, and we had quite a bit to talk about. He was part of the Epson Print Academy session with Jeff Schewe and Andrew Rodney. John Paul’s artwork is highly regarded, but it doesn’t exactly wind my watch. He does more manipulation of the images than I like, whereas I try more to get things right in the camera.
- We talked about this following Ben Willmore’s talk on HDR. Ben tends to a more “illustrative” style of HDR processing and I tend to things that are more photo-realistic. On one of the photos Ben was working on, I said
I’d just stick a strobe with a grid in there, and save myself all the editing time later,
which got a laugh, since John Paul mostly shoots by available light. He also seemed to enjoy when I mentioned that I often shoot by “available darkness” and almost always want faster film/sensors. - It’s not that I don’t like illustrations, or even manipulated images per se, but there are many that seem to me to fall into a sort of uncanny valley, where they’re realistic enough to look like a photograph at first glance, but a second look shows that they’ve been manipulated, and I don’t enjoy that as much.
- When I got home, one of the things my TiVo had caught for me was the BBC’s Genius of Photography series. There was an episode which talked about the conflict between the pictorialists and the vernacular, which fit very well with the thoughts running around my brain after talking to John Paul. The show didn’t really change my mind about anything, but now I have the vocabulary to express what I’ve been thinking about. I’m pretty sure my photography falls much closer to the vernacular, and I’m okay with that.
And with all that in mind, the one photograph I brought home from Orlando is one that I ended up spending over an hour tweaking in Photoshop. Sigh. I guess I can’t be too hard on those who manipulate photos, eh?