Wrapped Up © D.A.Wagner

Photography is a very physical business: the act of shooting can involve a lot of physical activity, as well as setting up and striking sets, carrying cameras, lights and grip equipment, climbing ladders, loading trucks, and working with Photoshop (okay, maybe that’s going too far). Is that a fitness regimen, manual labor or self-flagellation?

According to John Medina in Brain Rules, our ancestors walked about 12 miles a day in the search for food, water and safety – and that developed “Olympic-caliber bodies” that supported that wet stuff between our ears (you know, our brains – duh). We learned while we were on the move.

Medina is convinced that we humans need a comeback and exercise is as close to a “magic bullet” that exists, as it has a big payback in intellectual and health rewards, keeping us out of the doctor’s office and increasing our cognitive skills.

Does that mean that photographers are smarter and healthier than our sedentary counterparts? A 1988 News Photographer Magazine survey of 2000 photojournalists (hey, that’s the most recent info I could find) showed that health-wise, even though we smoked less (probably didn’t have the time to pick up the habit), we had more dry skin, eye, ear, throat and sinus problems and miscarriages than the general public, most likely from darkroom chemistry – something most of us have left behind for digital processing. However, back pain was the most common ailment reported (see my post on back pain), which is no surprise considering how physical our jobs can be.

As for smarter–I didn’t find anything on this one. So to give photographers the benefit of the doubt, I’ll say yes, we’re smarter. I’m saying that based on the fact that so many of us are entrepreneurs and inventors. And since we have to think on our feet, as our ancestors did–often in the presence of an audience (clients versus saber-tooth tigers)—we’re great at creative problem-solving.

There appears to be very little research and even fewer hard facts on how smart or healthy we are, but in my own conclusion, yes, we are a smart, healthy bunch – even if we are stressed out.

Detail - Water Tank and Smart Wash

There’s nothing I love more than discovering the textures, reflections and character of stuff in front of my lens, yeah, even if it’s a product. And, even though I may have trouble remembering faces (just ask my students), I can remember the curves and folds, texture and reflectivity, color and smell of nearly everything I touch or shoot. Hell, I can even tell you about the knots in a piece of wood I worked on 20 years ago.

It might be a progressive disease, I don’t know, but it’s definitely different for still life shooters. We spend years of our lives checking for dust and looking at fine details, studying every little thing in ways most people never do and then shooting it. I clean the chrome on my kitchen sink the same way, as if I was putting it on set. But I may be revealing too much here.

Maybe only art directors, writers and clients can appreciate this behavior.

But, hey, it works for me.

Russian Writers - Ivan Goncharov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Dimitri Vassilievich Grigorovich, Alexandre Vassilievich Drujinin, and Alexandr Nikolievich Ostrovsky by Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky

How did painters react when Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky won the first ever gold medal awarded for a photograph at the Paris Expo in 1849? It might have looked like this:

October 7, 1849

Jules Breton

http://www.FrenchPaintersOnLine.com/Landscapes/JulesBreton

This sucks! I spent months finishing my landscape for the Expo. I worked so hard my fingers bled. The Count? How come he gets the gold? He puts his camera on a tripod and presses a button. Then, some dude in a white jacket slogs over in the mud to a wagon twelve feet away, mixes chemicals and makes a contact print. He was done in a couple of minutes. This isn’t fair, it hurts our business. It’s just too damn easy to take a photograph.

Hmmm.

Levitsky was also known for his use of decorative backgrounds in photography and posing his subjects in different poses and changes of clothes instead of the standard of the day: taking one picture. He was already retouching his negatives to enhance features and remove blemishes. He also proposed the concept of using artificial electric light in studio photography long before it was practical.

Now, how about guys like Levitsky? What might he have said when George Eastman created the Kodak camera already loaded with film and later, the Brownie camera, prepackaged film and ready-to-mix chemistry, taking photography to the masses. Here’s my take:

June 10, 1885

Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky

http://www.HireTheCount.com

Wow, this is remarkable! I just got my Kodak and shot 40 rolls of the Russian Imperial Family in my St. Petersburg Studio. And, since I got the electric lines in last week, I closed the skylight and used my Edison light bulbs for the first time. It looks like the electric light bulb is finally worth bringing into the studio. Awesome! Every frame had consistent lighting and I really got time to talk with the Prince for a change instead of dealing with the cloudy weather. My painter friends just got Kodaks, too. Check out everyone’s results on the Flickr, St. Petersburg shooters page. Great stuff!

BTW, I just let go of my chemist and printer. Sorry to Kostya and Pavel. Things change. You can pick up your checks on Monday.

Okay, so maybe it hurt Kostya and Pavel to find out they were fired on the Count’s blog. But, overall, what’s the point?

Flickr and Photoshop CS5 aren’t hurting the photo business – it changes the business. That’s all. And changes like this have been happening since 1849.

So, what’s the big deal with Flickr, or the new version of Photoshop CS5 for that matter?

Embrace the change. Sergei did.

Nastutium + Tomatoes

I’ve been trying to match a hundred or so photographs from my Shooting from the Hip series into complimentary pairs. A lot of questions came up regarding color, texture, light, camera angle, and a myriad of other qualities. But the one overarching question was, what makes two photographs viewed together, side by side, visually more interesting than one?

That lead the discussion back to my last posting, where Feature Integration Theory was mentioned. Okay, I’m not out on the street taking in the sights (or in caveman style, looking for food or danger), but sitting at a table with a carpet of two inch thumbnail prints I’m jockeying around like a board game. Intuitively I arranged pairs of little prints on the fly – instantly, they either matched or didn’t. Of course there were some gray areas where I couldn’t decide. In many cases however, I simply took two images I had glanced at and instinctively paired them, left and right.

In Feature Integration Theory, “Preattentive Stage” is the first stage of seeing, when we recognize color, shape, direction of light, etc. I researched this a bit, but didn’t find anything substantial online about differences in perception between the left and right eyes when viewing two different images. But I have to think there is something in our brain that definitely favors seeing a particular color or shape on either the left or the right. Probably has something to do with predatory animals attacking from our left, because they are mostly right-pawed or something like that.

Maybe I should have been a researcher so I could get funding and figure this out.