But is it Art?

During my recent winter of photographic discontent, I roamed around the internet looking at pictures of naked women. Which is pretty much all I saw, pictures. There wasn’t much art being committed. Which led me to the question of what exactly do I mean when I say “art” and how does it apply [...]

Top 10 List

It is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States.  Here is a list of 10 things we are thankful for here at this blog.  These are in addition to the most obvious and most important: family, friends, good health, shelter, pets etc.
10.  Women unwilling to take off their clothes for my camera.
9.    Hahnemühle Paper
8.    Adobe
7.    [...]

The Limits of Landscape Art

There is a new and fairly silly article about “landscape” in the current edition of Orion Magazine. You can read it here. It is by retired art critic Rebecca Solnit, author of several books including: As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001), River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge [...]

Hasselblad H3D-39 or How Mortals Can Go Broke

Today I received an email from Hasselblad extolling the virtues of its new H3Dii camera and imporning me to buy it. However, the email neglected to tell me how much it costs. For that I had to do a search beyond Hasselblad’s web sites. That explains Hassy’s new marketing strategy: “If you ask [...]

Terrorist Art Critic

History’s first, and probably only, terrorist who was also an art critic was Felix Fénéon. It was he who discovered and promoted the art of Seurat, an example of which I post here. The woman is not nude but she is certainly beautiful and mysterious and makes you want to see the rest [...]

Snapshots and Art

Snapshots as Art
In addition to an Edward Hopper show and the J.M.W. Turner show, the National Gallery of Art in Washington has a show of anonymous snapshots taken in the United States from 1888 to 1978. Sadly, the National Gallery still maintains one of the most boring websites you’ll attend this year and they [...]

Adobe’s Damn Dam, Part II

Harumph.  I see that Adobe, hard on the heels of its release of Lightroom and Photoshop CS3, has also just released Elements 6.  I haven’t looked at the new Elements 6 yet but woe betide those people if it has yet another DAM to learn.  DAM, for those of you blissfully ignorant of such matters, [...]

Free Speech and Photography

I mentioned in the very first post on this blog that I love living in a country where taking photographs is almost always protected speech under the First Amendment even if I don’t like the photography. But I was taken to task for not being more specific about First Amendment rights for photographers and [...]

Photographers will appreciate the cover of this old pot boiler’s cover. It isn’t great art, just as the story probably wasn’t either. But the artist did at least get the view camera in foreground right. The image of the model is upside down on the ground glass, just as it would still [...]