The fire of photography

I just thought of this wacky simile.  Photography is like a fire.  Someone just put a bunch of fresh logs on - digital photography.  In the ashes are glass plates, daguerreotypes, tin types (though I saw an awesome exhibit Joni Sternbach's Tin Types at the Peabody Essex Museum this summer). The embers underneath the fire, still glowing, is film.

I've been playing around with cameras and film this winter. Here are some images from a trip to Joshua Tree National Park.



Film is great for trying to be more creative. You have less control of the process in a way, because you can't see immediately how your images turned out. You can either plan your shots more carefully. Or just look, see, and press the shutter, and move on.

3D to 2D

One of the weirdest things about photography for me, is thinking of how a scene will look after the picture is taken. Ansel Adams was big into pre-visualization - imagining the final print before pressing the shutter button. What makes this difficult is that we see in three dimensions, but an image is only two dimensions. This means objects get flattened out, and with the right lenses and lighting, it produces an interesting visual effect, like this image below:

This image is of a building with a curvy front facade along Wilshire Ave, in Beverly Hills. But, by using a telephoto lens, and removing other elements that might give perspective (like trees, or telephone wires), the image becomes abstract. It reminds me of a barber shop pole.