Lawrence Ripsher's Photo Journal

Great Photographers on the Internet

I've always wondered how the classic shots from past master's would hold up in today's self imposed photographic standards of sharpness, sharpness, sharpness. Well, I now have my answer, and it's a good one. Today I found a hilarious, tongue in cheek article written by Mike Johnston.

Like many great comedies, the article has a lot of truth to it - scarily so in fact. Art and emotion has often given way to technique and equipment in today's online communities. The irony had me smiling wryly.

Follow this link to find out why Cartier-Bresson couldn't quite pull it all together and why William Eggleston has a lot to learn.

This is not a camel, by Lorin Niculae

It's been about a month since I checked out Pbase properly and left any comments. Now I'm back from my break, I quickly flipped through my favourite photographers list a day or so ago, looking for some inspiration. I thought I'd be easing myself gently back into things when I stumbled across a bizarre thumbnail with "Lorin Niculae" printed underneath. When I clicked on the image, I realised I was looking at the very definition of why we photographers, amateur or professional, take to the streets with our cameras. Lorin has always been a great photographer and like many of the best photographers on Pbase, does not partake in "vote trading" - a prerequisite for popularity it would seem these days. As such, his work will not always get the number of online viewers it richly deserves so this is my small attempt to correct that inbalance as "This is not a camel" is an almost iconic street photograph. Bordering on the surreal, it's the kind of shot a viewer can only wish he was the owner of. A camel in the middle of an urban setting (which we see just enough of to get the location context) alone would be enough, but add a girl leaning tentatively but irresistibly across to touch it and a man who looks on with the same bewilderment as us, the viewer, and you have the makings of a truly great image. Finally, that look from the camel - a pose you could not have bettered were it staged - completes this image so perfectly. Incredible.

It's rare that I feel both envy and inspiration from the same image... thank you Lorin! A link to Lorin's image follows:

This is not a camel by Lorin Niculae (click for larger version)

A Window - Revisted

I wrote recently about a small abandoned room a found which included a window with great natural lighting. Knowing it had potential for something great, I was keen to go back there. So when I was visited by Aloha Lavina, for a recent workshop, I decided we'd make proper use of it.

So, as has become customary for me with new locations, I spent the week thinking up possible scenes to portray in that location. In the end, I thought an image of me holding Akuri, with her suspended in my arms, would work very well. The key would be the interaction between us. Hints of sadness and desperation, but ambiguous enough to allow more positive emotions to creep in.

So during the late afternoon (the ideal time for that location due to the angle of the light), Aloha and I setup the scene. With her behind the viewfinder, she composed what is easily one of my favourite images this year. If it were my shot, it'd without question be among my best work.

Aloha's image follows:

By Aloha Lavina (click for larger version)

Now of course I'm salivating at getting back to that building and have been thinking about how I can make use of it for a series of shots. Will post back here with more details soon.

Photo of the Week, by Naoki Hayashi

Since my last post, asking for photo-of-the-week suggestions, I've now had the pleasure of seeing a number of great photos that are going to be able to this slot for a little while now so thanks for the suggestions (keep them coming tho). This week it's an image from a photographer whose work I've become a big fan of in recent months - Naoki Hayashi. Naoki, from Japan and currently living in California, is an exceptional portrait, street and landscape photographer. Every now and then he combines all three to create compositions that would make just about any of us envious :). This week, one particular image caught my eye. Created with his new Fuji S5 Pro (a camera worthy of a separate mention), this image is a modern day geometric marvel. If you get a chance, do check out Naoki's work - some fantastic stuff in there. Anyway, here's my pic for picture-of-the-week.

By Naoki Hayashi (click for larger version)

Picture of the Week Suggestions

With everything going on recently (and some new plans brewing), I've had little time to spend on Pbase this week. As a result, I didn't get enough time to pick out a shot for my regular "picture of the week". So, rather than risk missing giving someone a nice, deserved chance for exposure in the future, I figured I'd turn this to the floor for nominations.

So, if you ever come across an image during the week that you think deserves more attention, please send me an email to let me know and I'll take a look.

Touch by Jude MC

"Touch" by Jude MC, is my photo of the week from PBase last week.

I'm always very impressed when someone takes a well photographed subject and does it in a unique way, stamping their style all over it in the process. This was what Jude achieved with "touch". A fantastic image despite being under difficult lighting conditions and shooting through thick, scratched glass. Instead of fighting against these barriers, Jude used them to form part of the image and created a piece of work that comes at you slowly at first as the details slowly emerge and then remain permanently etched into the memory thereafter.

Beautifully titled and processed to perfection, this is a great one.

Touch by Jude MC, (click for larger version)

Near Crash

I was so busy last week / weekend that I didn't get a chance to post what is now becoming a weekly (and very enjoyable) entry for me. So this is a belated post for my "favourite image of the week". This time round it's Eckhart Derschmidt and his wonderfully titled "Near Crash".

Pointing the camera upwards towards the sky to capture a plane and its trail is not an unusual thing, I've seen it dozens of times in photos - usually with bright blue skies and so forth. Never have I seen it done in such an effective and melancholy way however... like the last breath of a shuttle, swan diving out of the upper atmosphere. The mood, the collision of elements and that great processing made this an easy choice for me this week. The shot is also a reminder of how a great title can make you look at a photo, see its name and then look at it in a totally different light. It's a enjoyable second take that makes you appreciate it all again.

Thank you Eckhart.

"Near Crash", by Eckhart Derschmidt (click to go to a larger version on Eckhart's site)

Unexpected Results

Sometimes things look like they're going to turn out worse than expected, only to surprise you in the end with a result you neither imagined nor hoped for.

That was what happened with a picture today.

The short story is that while shooting my Last Visit gallery, a talented photographer and great friend, Suwanee Lennon, picked up my old Olympus OM-1 and shot a few pictures with it. I had Kodak Portra 160 VC in it, which always looks great for those sorts of locations and was excited to see the film when developed. Which is what I planned to do today.

Unfortunately, for reasons I do not feel like dwelling on for my own sanity (and reputation :), the film got exposed to light before it was sent to the developers. I knew the last few shots would be ruined - which was a shame as I know a picture of me and Akuri was on one of them.

However, photography, particularly when you shoot with film, can be a funny thing. In a digital age obsessed with resolution, low noise and dynamic range, we sometimes need a reminder that it's not always the expected that impresses. And so it goes with that shot of me and Akuri. It was indeed horrifically ruined - exposed to sunlight for a fraction of a second too long. But Photoshop and persistence have a way of paying off when the original shows potential.

So what we're left with now, is a picture from Suwanee, which has quickly become our favourite picture of us both. Sometimes you can't explain things in terms of pure pixels - it's just how an image makes you feel. Suwanne, for that feeling, thank you (and your time machine :).

By Suwanee Lennon (click for larger version)

Ben, by Andy Farrington

My weekly post where I comment on and link to an image I found it hard to forget about... This week it's "Ben" by Andy Farrington. Andy is a British photographer whose work I found on Pbase within a few months of joining in 2005 and although we've never been able to meet in person, we've been friends online since. From that first day until now, following Andy's photography has been both a pleasure and education in studio and candid portrait photography. Without question, he is one of the best portrait photographers on Pbase and anyone who has not spent time on his site will wonder how they ever missed it after doing so. While like most photographers, Andy employs a variety of different equipment, it's the work from his Canon 5D and 85mm F/1.2 combination that I find to be so compelling. Super shallow DOF portraits which leave just the eyes in focus, excellent studio flash or natural lighting, fantastic post production work that is woven so seamlessly into the image, it's impossible to tell where the capture stops and the processing starts - these are all features of Andy's work. So this week, when he posted "Ben", I felt compelled to jot a few lines about the shot. Although knowing nothing about the subject or the situation, it's an image that epitomises his creativity with portrait work and shows you don't need anything but the photographer and the model to put together a memorable image. "Ben" is so cleverly done yet appears so natural, it borders on the almost graphic or cartoon, yet never feels overworked in the slightest. It's a great shot and one I'm delighted to include in this weekly post.

"Ben", by Andy Farrington

Critiquing the Critique Sites

Posting photos online for critiques and comments can be a joy for some, a torment for others.

Another way of looking at it would be to say that it’s useful for many and an obsession for even more.

For me, at various stages through last year, it’s been all four of these things. It started as a joy, quickly became a torment, then as I started to understand things better it most likely flirted with obsession for a short period of time. Now however, it’s become a simple but regular part of my daily online activities and is genuinely useful. An improved insight into your own work and others – these are the rewards if you take the feedback from critique sites and put it into the right context.

The three sites which I regularly contribute to are:

• Pbase
• Photo.net
• Alt Photos

This is a quick summary of all three, and what participating means to me.

Pbase
(my site on Pbase can be found here)

Pbase was not the first place I posted an image online to – that dubious honour went to photo.net. What is was though, was the first place I became a regular at and began investing in the community. Pbase has the following things going for it:

• Many good photographers. A few great ones.
• A great feature called “Favourite photographers” which is a link on your profile which allows you to keep tabs on the latest images of your favourite photographers
• Full resolution uploads (i.e. it doesn’t resize your photos – can display them at their natural resolution – in my case a preferred size of 800 x 533 pixels).
• A Comment summary which shows all the latest comments you receive
• Has great layout options such as allowing advanced HTML to make your galleries look great (or simple), and also has a nice tree structure allowing your gallery “Portraits” (for example) to contain another series of sub galleries (e.g. “Kids”, “Pets”, “Models”, etc). In my opinion it’s still the best community site to showcase a portfolio
• A simple to use UI (User Interface)
• A simple voting system

These things make it a great community site and that’s what I use it for primarily.

Comments / feedback on pbase tend to be encouraging but “gentle”. It’s pretty rare to get negatively critiqued and therefore is a great site for encouragement. But unless you go specifically asking for it, you aren’t going to get many in depth reviews about what you could do to improve your image. So this is a double edged sword of the encouragement but like many things, if you work at it – you can find a good balance of the two.

It also lacks some features which would make it much better. For one, a good mechanism for rating / rating pictures. You can be told your photo is “good”, but how good exactly is that? Is it a 10/10 good, an 8/10 or a 5/10 good? Introducing ratings (which some other sites do) is a great way of forcing both the reviewer and the reviewed to look at their work in a quantitative fashion. Now, Pbase does have a voting system which allows you to cumulate votes over time but it can be haphazard and you never know how many you receive. If you do get a lot however you can end up in the Popular galleries / photos section which is useful in helping discover talent. Having said that many correctly suspect that it can in some cases (but not all obviously) be as much a popularity contest as a photo contest.  I’ve been fortunate to regularly end up on the front page of “Popular Galleries” for some of my work although I’ll let others be the judge of whether that place is deserved as a result of the community I am a part of, or the images that I create.

All in all tho, Pbase is a great site with a wonderful accepting community and it’s where I spend the majority of my time commenting / uploading to.


Photo.net
(my site on photo.net can be found here)

Photo.net is an interesting place. It’s generally considered to be site which has the highest number of quality images. One look through its Top Photos gives significant credibility to that claim as you’ll see quickly some of the most stunning photography you’ll care to lay eyes on. Photo.net has the following main features:

• It’s based on a rating system. When you submit a photo for review, community members can vote on your image with two criteria in mind – Aesthetics and Originality. Both are marked out of 7 with 5 /7 being good, 6 / 7 being very good and 7 / 7 being excellent
• It drives lots of traffic and a lot of people browse and rate. Unlike many sites (e.g. Pbase), when you submit an image for critique / comment, you do not need to be well known to get a dozen or so people rank and rate your image. If it gets a high average, it’ll appear in the Top Photos which will in turn mean more people get to see your image
• The critiques are far more… critical. It’s not uncommon for someone to take your image, modify it and reupload it for you to show how they would improve it. Or to tell you in very clear terms why they didn’t like what you did. Depending on your personality and what you’re looking for, this is either a good thing or a bad thing
• Great statistical rankings. In Top Photos, there are dozens’ of ways to view the highest ranked photos (e.g. by Average, by Views, by Originality, by Category, etc)

As a quick aside, I’ve mentioned rankings a couple of times here and the reason for that isn’t because I consider photography or these sites to be a competition, or that I have an inherent need to be told a good photo is good. It’s more to do with the issue I raised earlier about forcing me to look at my work quantitatively. It’s also due to the fact that when someone else has produced a good photo, I think it’s great that it is seen by as many people as possible. The easiest way to achieve that goal is to have a reward system which ranks good photos near the top somehow. So I’m all for things which help showcase good work when it’s done well – as these are the pictures that I learn the most from.

OK so back to Photo.net… so it’s great for rating and getting rated, but what’s wrong with it? Well, the community is quite set in its ways as a whole. So while I’m generalizing here of course but a picture typically has to be “technically correct” for it to do well (which means sharp, in focus, etc). Photos that don’t follow this path are usually marked down – often quite severely. The same goes for photos which require too much effort to interpret. So if an image is pretty, or clever (but not too clever), it’ll usually rate pretty well.

And what’s high? Well 5.0 / 7 for originality and / or aesthetics is doing well. There are many great photos on there with this ranking and it’s a score to be pleased with in most cases. Going up a bit, 5.5 / 7 usually means you’re doing great – a photo that would impress all but the harshest critics. 6.0 / 7 is a stunning pic in most cases – capable of being a finalist or winner of a competition on many other sites. For those of you who know or rate my photography – and to put the ratings into context, I have around 10 pictures in my portfolio which average around the 6.0 mark or slightly below.

Of course, it goes higher too – there are 6.5’s / 7 – this is reserved for a specific style of photography I am not sure I’ll ever be able to (or maybe will ever want to) reach.

Of course, as objective as it supposed to be – the ranking system is not always accurate. There is talk of “bots” (software programs) which deliberately rank down other photos. Also there are photographers who “swap” votes with each other, ensuring their pictures remain with as high a rating as possible.

So the solution, like with Pbase, is to use Photo.net for what it is useful for – that is, getting interesting critiques you won’t always find elsewhere, getting quantitative feedback which is always useful and perhaps most importantly, learning what it is about a certain type of audience that makes it tick. Understanding why one photo excelled while another bombed - I think these are vital lessons in the feedback process. As I said before too – their “top photos” section is also the best place to quickly see a distilled version of the most technically impressive photography on the Internet.

Alt Photos
(my Alt Photos site can be found here)

A friend of mine introduced me to Alt photos and it’s been perhaps the most interesting of all critique sites. As the name suggests, the photography here is meant to be a little alternative. Glamour shots, pictures of pretty flowers, landscapes with sunsets – these are all photos you can expect to be ignored. Instead, images which carry meaning, dark or melancholy scenes, alternative / experimental portraits and contemporary art all do exceptionally well. The site layout is very simple and like photos.net, their feedback / ranking system relies heavily on quantitative feedback. It works like this, you upload a photo and check it for review and it gets placed in the Most recent pictures. There, people view it and if they like it, they give it 3 points (there are also 1 and 2 points they can give but no one does this). It becomes a binary choice – someone likes your photo, you get three, someone doesn’t like it – they just move on. Critiques are allowed but pretty rare and hardly ever detailed.

Instead it’s a simple system of feedback that actually works very well.

So if 15 or 20 people have rated your image you’re on a points score of above 50 which means your photo is likely to be on the top 50 or so for that day. Get a score about 100 and you’re probably in the top 10 for that day and on the front page for that week. The significance of this? Well, it means your photo is up there with probably the most creative work I (and many others) have ever seen online. Unlike photo.net, it’s not always the most technically perfect from a classical standpoint – but it’s very likely to be thought provoking, original and quite brilliant also. I am fairly new to Alt Photos but again, to put things in perspective for those of you who know my work, I have a dozen or so photos over 50, with my highest score being 99.

Alt photos is probably the place I spend the most time browsing the top galleries for inspiration.

Other sites

Other sites of note which I’ve tried at some point are:

• www.dpchallenge.com – DPC is known for its weekly challenges. I encourage anyone whose not seen this site to go check it out. It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything there as each month that goes by I find myself to be moving further and further away from the style it prefers but there’s some great quality work on there and the weekly theme idea is excellent
• www.flickr.com – I know a lot of people rate it but I could never get on well with flickr. Maybe it’s the massive amount of traffic it does that means you have to invest so much time in their groups or communities. I’m prepared to be proved wrong tho if someone is prepared to write up the reasons why Flicrk rocks in a comment below
• www.fotologue.jp – Check this out if you haven’t. Not necessarily the best site for rating / communities / critiques but it produces some of the best looking portfolios. I should spend more time there

OK so that’s about all I have to say on this topic for now. I have always wanted to share this information as I feel I have got so much out of the rapid feedback cycle that critique sites can provide and hopefully you’ll find this of some use too. Finally, as I mentioned before, like any kind of feedback – the trick is to put feedback in the right context and perspective, something I’m still always trying to perfect :)