The unpleasant aspects of the museum-going experience are pretty obvious: dealing with bad weather, traffic jams, parking, standing in line, trying to get an unobstructed view through crowds, having your feet stepped on, having the guards tell you not to get so close, backache from bending over to read descriptions three feet off the floor,… [Read More]

What has to happen before large numbers of people view mechanically reproduced images in preference to seeing the actual images on the walls of museums? In this post, I’ll talk about technology, and next time I’ll work on the social/business/legal issues. I expect the technical part to be easier. From a technical perspective, in order… [Read More]

In the November/December 2007 issue of Lenswork, Brooks Jensen wrote an essay on the implications of “the ongoing revolution in commercial printing technologies.” Jensen asserts, and justifies the position, that the best commercial printing processes can produce images equaling or exceeding the quality of photographic prints. He compares the rapid quality improvements in the commercial… [Read More]

In the last post, I considered the photographic process as linear, with a camera simply a tool that the photographer uses to make real a predefined vision. Most of the time it doesn’t actually work that way. Photographic visions don’t usually arrive fully formed and perfect, like the Kubla Khan did to Coleridge. We photographers… [Read More]

Our carried-over topic is the relationship between the greatness of a camera and the quality of the photographs produced by that camera. In his essay, Lane attributes to the Leica M-series line of cameras near-magical powers to produce great photographs. At a gut level, I don’t buy that. I think that the M-series Leicas are… [Read More]