The Men Who Took Pictures in Their Heads

"The Man Who Wrote Books in His Head" in Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/selected-stories-of-patricia-highsmith-patricia-highsmith/1100880575

I have noticed that many people who post in some forums on DPR (namely, the Ricoh forum, but not limited to that one) talk authoritatively about photography, lenses and other camera gear, but when it comes to posting pictures... well, sometimes there are none. Zilch. Zero. Nada.

Sometimes all they have to show are a few overprocessed pictures (usually in B&W) that could have been taken with an inexpensive P&S, but they'll go to great lengths to explain how their $2000 camera gear was put to good use on that particular shot, etc. And all you see is a shot of a door, or something of similar null interest.

Do they have the "perfect picture" in their heads? Or perhaps entire albums of "perfect pictures", all in their imagination?
I am puzzled...
--
Andrew
Panasonic LX3, Ricoh GXR w/ A12 28&50mm user

Pangloss said:

I have noticed that many people who post in some forums on DPR (namely, the Ricoh forum, but not limited to that one) talk authoritatively about photography, lenses and other camera gear, but when it comes to posting pictures... well, sometimes there are none. Zilch. Zero. Nada.

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I note that you do not post any pictures in support of your right to say that? ;-)

Some people do bluff, or parrot received wisdom in technical threads. Others may be genuine technicians first and foremost - experts in hardware, processing or whatever. These may or may not make any claims for their own photographic prowess, or may be diffident about showing their personal work for whatever reason. Nonetheless provided they have useful things to add to those technical discussions , IMO they are fully worthy of our respect on that basis alone - on the arguments.

And even the most talented and prolific photographer loses his or her authority to be heard pontificating on these matters, if unable to argue them in a coherent way.

A technical argument may be well made and valid, or not, regardless of the photography experience and talent of the person who has stated it, so IMO we don't need to see evidence of those things before paying attention to it.

On the other hand in a picture thread, each image is properly judged good or bad by the viewer, regardless of the photographer's ability to discuss technicalities, in for example, the English language.

Some people gain a deep understanding of lenses and cameras in the course of technical forms of photography, which they feel the rest of us might not enjoy looking at, or else in the course of work they are not free to show publicly. Or they simply don't feel like doing so; their prerogative.

So I am prepared to assess people principally on what they write here; in any case, we see the totality of nobody's work except our own, and our own work is the hardest to judge against others'.

RP

Hello,

richardplondon said:

Pangloss said:

I have noticed that many people who post in some forums on DPR (namely, the Ricoh forum, but not limited to that one) talk authoritatively about photography, lenses and other camera gear, but when it comes to posting pictures... well, sometimes there are none. Zilch. Zero. Nada.

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I note that you do not post any pictures in support of your right to say that? ;-)

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Neither does your post in support of your reply. But we both have easily found galleries with pictures we have chosen to post on the Internet, some of them(in my case at least) in support of arguments in the dpreview forums.

richardplondon said:

Some people do bluff, or parrot received wisdom in technical threads. Others may be genuine technicians first and foremost - experts in hardware, processing or whatever. These may or may not make any claims for their own photographic prowess, or may be diffident about showing their personal work for whatever reason. Nonetheless provided they have useful things to add to those technical discussions , IMO they are fully worthy of our respect on that basis alone - on the arguments.

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I got your point (and I agree with its general idea), but you didn't really get mine.

If you had read Patricia Highsmith's short story, you might have understood that I was really wondering about the people (men mostly, women rarely or never) who just don't reach the point where they show any of their pictures - whatever their motivation for that. Actually, some of them don't even press the shutter, even though they may have the $2000 camera gear in their hands and stand at the right place, at the right moment.

This is often associated, here in these forums, with some sort of "camera fetichism", where photographic camera gear is discussed at length without regards to its sole purpose: to take pictures, obviously. And the trend is that the more expensive or exclusive the camera, the more verbose the argument, and the less pictures are posted in support of it.

(the picture below is part of a series I am shooting about how people relate to the statues and the scenery in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles)





--
Andrew
Panasonic LX3, Ricoh GXR w/ A12 28&50mm user

What I find amusing is when DPR posters here think that just because some of us don't fill our galleries full of our own images or join every photo challenge that comes along, or that some of us don't have 'photography' websites, that we must not be capable of taking pictures and are discredited by them.

Myself . . . I store my images on my own web space and post links to them when I want to.

In otherwords . . . I show images when and where I want!

And if I really want to, I can shut off all of my images anywhere on the internet with one keystroke!

So, just because one doesn't use DPR as storage space for our own images doesn't mean that we don't have them to show.

And it definately doesn't mean that we don't know how to use a camera, either.

Interestingly enough, it seems that those who use the most storage space here and who shout the loudest about those that are modest about their images are typically the least capable with their gear!

--
J. D.
Colorado

• "If your insurance company tells you that you don't need a lawyer . . . hire a lawyer!"

Pangloss said:

And all you see is a shot of a door, or something of similar null interest.

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Some people do not refrain from shooting brick walls (!) before talking about not bricks, but pincushion and barrel.

--
Iván József Balázs
(Hungary)

"This is often associated, here in these forums, with some sort of "camera fetichism", where photographic camera gear is discussed at length without regards to its sole purpose: to take pictures, obviously. And the trend is that the more expensive or exclusive the camera, the more verbose the argument, and the less pictures are posted in support of it.

(the picture below is part of a series I am shooting about how people relate to the statues and the scenery in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles)"

Your series might be as interesting as door shots you badmouthed.

MusicDoctorDJ said:

What I find amusing is when DPR posters here think that just because some of us don't fill our galleries full of our own images or join every photo challenge that comes along, or that some of us don't have 'photography' websites, that we must not be capable of taking pictures and are discredited by them.

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That, unfortunately, is not my point at all. Photographers who don't show their pictures to anybody (for whatever reason) are like the "writer" in Patricia Highsmith's short story, who had all his novels in his head.

The difference really is that Patricia Highsmith wrote a piece of fiction, whereas here on dpr one sees a great number of real men who claim to be photographers with a similar affliction i.e. unable to show their work to anybody, much less to expose any picture on a public forum.
--
Andrew
Panasonic LX3, Ricoh GXR w/ A12 28&50mm user

MusicDoctorDJ said:

Interestingly enough, it seems that those who use the most storage space here and who shout the loudest about those that are modest about their images are typically the least capable with their gear!

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Agree
Empty Barrels make the loudest noise.

Pangloss said:

That, unfortunately, is not my point at all. Photographers who don't show their pictures to anybody (for whatever reason) are like the "writer" in Patricia Highsmith's short story, who had all his novels in his head.

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You are jumping to conclusions. Just because someone doesn't post pictures here doesn't mean that they don't show their pictures to anybody. This is primarily a discussion forum: people like to discuss.

Pangloss said:

The difference really is that Patricia Highsmith wrote a piece of fiction, whereas here on dpr one sees a great number of real men who claim to be photographers with a similar affliction i.e. unable to show their work to anybody, much less to expose any picture on a public forum.

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My, you do have a bug up your posterior about this don't you? Since when did anyone here need your permission to post a comment without including images in it? Like you have done on this thread...

--
Mike

Pangloss said:

If you had read Patricia Highsmith's short story, you might have understood that I was really wondering about the people (men mostly, women rarely or never) who just don't reach the point where they show any of their pictures - whatever their motivation for that. Actually, some of them don't even press the shutter, even though they may have the $2000 camera gear in their hands and stand at the right place, at the right moment.

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So you're assuming we've read this short story?

Maybe if you wanted to get your point across you should have said what it actually was.

carl english said:

MusicDoctorDJ said:

Interestingly enough, it seems that those who use the most storage space here and who shout the loudest about those that are modest about their images are typically the least capable with their gear!

Click to expand...

Agree
Empty Barrels make the loudest noise.

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That's a generalization, and it is both wrong and irrelevant. And in the particular case of your post, ironically it just shows an example of what I am trying to say.
--
Andrew
Panasonic LX3, Ricoh GXR w/ A12 28&50mm user

Once I had a room mate who sold high-end stereo equipment. Seriously expensive stuff. It took a while, but gradually she learned that most of her customers had no interest in music. They were into the technology of reproducing sound. They'd buy some exotic tuner with tubes and take it to work and run it through a battery of oscilloscopes. Instead of listening to music they'd play those stereo demonstration records. Toots, tweets, tones. That's the way it is with lots of people posting here. They don't shoot a lot of photos, they're into the technology. If it wasn't for people with this mindset we'd all be driving mule-drawn photography wagons like Matthew Brady, coating our glass plates in the dark and making 10-second exposures before the emulsion dries out. What if Jobs and Wozniak had been more interested in getting rich in Silicon Valley real estate than in building a personal computer? We owe the techno-dweebs plenty.

jedinstvo said:

Once I had a room mate who sold high-end stereo equipment. Seriously expensive stuff. It took a while, but gradually she learned that most of her customers had no interest in music. They were into the technology of reproducing sound. They'd buy some exotic tuner with tubes and take it to work and run it through a battery of oscilloscopes. Instead of listening to music they'd play those stereo demonstration records. Toots, tweets, tones. That's the way it is with lots of people posting here. They don't shoot a lot of photos, they're into the technology. If it wasn't for people with this mindset we'd all be driving mule-drawn photography wagons like Matthew Brady, coating our glass plates in the dark and making 10-second exposures before the emulsion dries out. What if Jobs and Wozniak had been more interested in getting rich in Silicon Valley real estate than in building a personal computer? We owe the techno-dweebs plenty.

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For me, an analogy in stereo would be for example the buyers of extremely expensive speaker cables, who argue violently on forums about the improved "sound" such cables provide.

I think we owe the techno-doers plenty (e.g. Jobs and Wozniak, and Oskar Barnack, and thousands of others). The most-hyped-product-late-buyers, not so much. And photographers that have all the perfect pictures in their head, nothing.

--
Andrew
Panasonic LX3, Ricoh GXR w/ A12 28&50mm user

It would seem you think everyone should be snapshotters instead of photographers. Most photographers I know visualize the image they want to capture, then proceed to make it happen.
--
http://www.efrench.members.winisp.net/

efrench said:

It would seem you think everyone should be snapshotters instead of photographers. Most photographers I know visualize the image they want to capture, then proceed to make it happen.

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Exactly. We all can claim we are visualizing an image in our heads. We may even effectively be doing so. But if you don't press the shutter, and develop it, how do you know if it's the image you wanted to capture? And if you don't show it to anybody else, how do you confirm that you are not deluding yourself, just like the character in Patricia Highsmith's short story?

"Most photographers I know visualize the image they want to capture, then proceed to make it happen."

And then sell it, if that's what they make a living from.

--
Andrew
Panasonic LX3, Ricoh GXR w/ A12 28&50mm user

So Pangloss . . .

What exactly is it you are after here?????

You ask us for our opinions . . . we give them . . . then you argue with each one of us that you are right and we are all wrong!

--
J. D.
Colorado

• "If your insurance company tells you that you don't need a lawyer . . . hire a lawyer!"

A very experienced photographer who exhibited in London suddenly stopped doing so, when asked why, he replied, I don,t print any more but simply visualise the image in my head.

Carl

carl english said:

A very experienced photographer who exhibited in London suddenly stopped doing so, when asked why, he replied, I don,t print any more but simply visualise the image in my head.

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Or perhaps it was because he just got tired of not being taken seriously because he was shooting with last month's new camera, which is no longer any good since the newest model just came out yesterday!

--
J. D.
Colorado

• "If your insurance company tells you that you don't need a lawyer . . . hire a lawyer!"

carl english said:

A very experienced photographer who exhibited in London suddenly stopped doing so, when asked why, he replied, I don,t print any more but simply visualise the image in my head.

Carl

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That's an interesting anecdote, but I wonder who that was? I'd be curious to look him up.

When an artist decides to only produce his works "in his head", he ceases being an artist.

Just like a poet who has great poems "in his head" or a painter who has great paintings "in his head", or the character in Patricia Highsmith's short story, who had all his novels "in his head".
--
Andrew
Panasonic LX3, Ricoh GXR w/ A12 28&50mm user

Yet.

My reasons are various but include the following:

a) my photography is strictly private and I have no interest in selling/distributing anything;

b) as an author (published writing), I have had material stolen and plagiarised in the past - and I just do not want to see my pictures - even if I could take a great one - being filched and used without my knowledge or consent;

c) I avoid negative criticism of other posters' photos - I mainly talk about gear and discuss ideas, such as whether we should post-process or not.

I do appreciate the pictures I see in here but just do not wish to upload my own.

I am sorry if that makes me appear selfish, but I am certainly not the sort of twit who tells others what they should be doing either.

Always respect,

Flashman