LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process Brooks Jensen

An interesting way to think about photographs is to perceive them as the conclusion of all the events that led up to the moment of photography, or as a beginning that will serve as a starting point for some as yet unknown destination.

We do not live in a perfect world, but if your only knowledge of life here on earth were from landscape photographs, you would naturally conclude that this is a perfect world. Or, it's opposite. So much of photography is either pro idealism or anti-idealism.

I visited Yosemite for the first time in 1983 expecting to find there the landscapes I had become so familiar with through the photography of Ansel Adams. That was my first experience in which I discovered that the realism school of f/64 photography was anything but realistic.

In books on the history of photography, there is no doubt that the quintessential outcast is William Mortensen. He represented a kind of photography that the f/64 group rebelled against most vigorously. But Mortenson had a point, and one that we should not ignore.

Not all blacks are black. There's some photographic media, for example platinum palladium prints, but have a soft black. Reproducing these tones in a printed book always present a unique challenge.

There's an old rule of thumb in video editing that for every 1 minute of finished video requires 9 minutes of editing and production. I'm not sure what the ratio is for still photography, but it's probably at least 9 to 1.