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The Daily Whim

The Daily Whim

Piling Pixels For The People

Thu. Mar 18, 2004

It's All Been Done Before

It’s All Been Done Before – Ray says, ”One of the few really good photographic publications on the web has redesigned, and updated their submissions guidelines (28mm.org).”

”Their guidelines for what is not suitable for display on their magazine is a list that all web photographers should read, and re-read until it is burned into their engrams.”

· Snapshots of family and friends [Guilty: repeat offender]
· Plain street scenes [Guilty]
· Holiday snapshots [Guilty]
· ”My first camera” photos [Guilty]
· Uninspiring nature shots [Guilty]
· Snapshots of a pet [Guilty: Google recognized repeat offender]
· Subject too small or hidden [Guilty]
· Blurry and unsharp (unintentionally) [Guilty]

”This list, if taken seriously, would wipe most of the cruft off the web [...] Let’s face it, every kid with a blog and a digital camera takes pictures of family, friends, and their city.”

OK, I see the generic point, especially as it relates to submissions at 28mm.org, but, not every kid with a blog and a digital camera has the same family, the same friends, or lives in the same city. Each person provides a unique viewpoint, even if their subjects are things you consider boring. To them, they have an entirely different meaning.

And that’s why they put them on the web. Not for you. For them.

Taken to its logical extreme, this would mean people should shoot a lot less. It’s been done before, therefore I shouldn’t do it. You can go to Yosemite, and damn near put your tripod in the very same holes that Ansel Adams did. Does that mean that you shouldn’t bother shooting it, or waste our time putting it on the web?

The truth is, it’s all been done before. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t shoot pet pictures, or a rose on piano keys, or any other ”photo cliche.” Because each person brings something unique to the party. I know a zillion people have shot a rose on piano keys. But I haven’t. And it’s just possible I might do it differently than before.

For certain, I’ll never know if I don’t even try … simply because it’s been done before.

”You know what, kids? 28mm is right. Your town is just as butt-ugly and boring as mine is in winter.”

Not true at all, Ray of Canada. Of course, that may have more to do with latitudes than attitudes.

P.S. That lens you want, Ray? Got mine yesterday. Therefore, you can’t get one. It’s been done.

Later: Since the proprietor at JimForumZineBlogThang doesn’t do Trackback, I’ll mention the discussion has continued in one of his entries-articles-essays-tortured-brain-dumps. Or whatever it is he’s doing these days. Just go here, and then enter the office pool on how long that permalink will last.

Posted 3:40PM, Thu, Mar 18 2004 in · · 2 Comments below


Peanut Gallery

1  Matt McIrvin wrote:

This applies to more than just photography; it's really the philosophy of personal Web pages in general. Since the early 1990s, people have been complaining that 90% of the Web is just boring little vanity pages with pictures of babies and kitties on them; the new version of the complaint is that they're vanity blogs filled with adolescent personal observations. What the complainers don't understand is that it those irritating pages are not for them; they are for a small target audience consisting of the author's friends and family, and possibly people who just like to look at pictures of cute kitties, no matter how amateurish. The intended viewers like them fine, which is part of the reason why they keep appearing. People e-mail me and ask me to put up more pictures of my pets! They don't ask me to put up pictures of something more interesting. We're coming out of the age in which public electronic communications consist mostly of slick commercial material produced for a mass audience. People who have the skills to produce that stuff tend to have correspondingly high standards, and scoff at amateur-hour stuff that wouldn't make it in the mass media. But there's no reason to restrict communications to standards created for limited upstream bandwidth any more.

Comment by Matt McIrvin · 03/19/04 03:37 AM
2  Matt McIrvin wrote:

Oh, yeah, and: Then there are people like you, who actually do have the skills, but also understand that subjects of personal interest are interesting to somebody. This material would have been completely buried in an earlier age.

Comment by Matt McIrvin · 03/19/04 03:42 AM
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