Flickering away

Set up a Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertdanielullmann/.

That's Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, Face Book, Fine Arts America, ETSY, my own websites:
www.robertullmannphotodigital.com for fine art and robertullmann.com for the rest. All those new arenas to be ignored in.

And now to go off topic - way off topic - I got talked into watching Avatar. MY GOD! It had to be one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen. Unobtanium? Why not Cantgetanyatallium, or Impossibletodigoutofthegroundium? Never mind that it's the same plot as Pocahontas - I'm still trying to get my mind around sending someone out into an alien jungle without telling them what kinds of animals are there, and giving him a weapon that's useless.

And wandering off all curious to get chased by Hammerhead triceratops with flowers for faces?
Being adopted by things which look suspiciously like the jellyfish from Sponge Bob?

The military/corporate baddies spend bajillions on transplanting minds doesn't spend a dime on figuring out the mysterious "flux". I guess they were saving it for flux capacitors. Floating mountains with no explanation....

It also had the look of one of those computer games that won't quite run right in spite of everything.

Gah.

Photography Died Again

It happened again. Someone else has proclaimed the death of photography. It turns out that photography hasn't so much died as become far less profitable than it's ever been. Battles for rights, payments, royalties continue, with the artist usually on the losing side. This is really about how we, as a culture and a society, pay artists.

Painters really get the short end of it - sell the painting and that is it - no more money for that image, no matter how much it increases in value.

As a society we will spend obscene amounts of money redundant weaponry - we have an arts budget (NEA) that is less than the amount set aside for our military bands.

As long as artist (photographers, musicians, painters, writers, poets, etc.) are forced to scramble and scrape in this environment we are set-ups for being exploited.

Yes, we need better subsidies, more grants, more access, less expensive tools, more arenas to exhibit, perform, and publish. There is also no substitute for a live audience (I don't know about anyone else, but uploading images into the interwebz often feels, to me, like whistling into a void).

What would 1/10 of 1% of the defense budget pay for...

Updating my site(s) - newly redecorated my main site and am constantly uploading to Fine Art America site in the dim and growing dimmer hope that someone will buy a print...
Added Google stuff (ad words, ad sense, ad nauseum, ad lib) next pay pal links and if all else fails I know where I can get a good organ/monkey setup and start a new career as a busker.

Site is currently parked at www.robertullmannphotodigital.info and is supposed to switch over to .com any moment now.

Excuses Excuses

And now for some more (possibly unwarranted) ranting:

I have heard statements like "I go through a whole box of paper before I get a print I'm satisfied with", "if you get one good shot on a roll of 36 exposures you're doing well", "if I get one good shot on an 8 megabyte card I'm doing well".

In my not at all humble opinion, if you can't see what you're shooting before your push the shutter button, stop, put down the camera and stare at the subject until you know what you are doing. Great pictures are not stumbled upon or lucked into anywhere as frequently as you think.

I've been at this for thirty-five years so I have a damn good sense of what I will get when I shoot, read the Ansel Adam's books religiously, and went and looked at the work of Adams, the various Westons, Cartier-Bresson, et al., and most importantly absorbed the work of the great painters, as well as having spent countless hours printing in a wet darkroom under intense pressure to make reproduction quality prints from negatives that were underexposed and over-developed, and worked for editors whose standards were quite high, so I have absolutely no patience for the above statements.

The paper and film manufacturers probably loved the one-shot-in-36 and one-print-in-a-hundred-sheets part of the photographic community, but really, if we want to be considered artists, let's show some sort of skill that transcends luck as well as saves materials. Ink cartridge and paper manufacturers also do real well in the print yourself silly world.

Gary Winograd was an example of this sort of mind set. He shot endlessly, often without raising the camera to his eye, and when he died left a ton of unedited work behind (somewhere in the area of a thousand rolls of film). He rode the critical waves, disliked when alive, lionized just before and after he died, but also held up as some sort of example to the aspiring "street photographer".

Maybe it's a valid way of working, but it's wasteful and sloppy.

He also belonged to the "contempt for the subject" school of photography epitomized by Diane Arbus.

OK - I am a grouch.

Basics

Maybe this post should be called "Singing for Our Suppers"...

Am revamping my web sites to better reflect my current self. Pared away anything non-image related, and am uploading a whole new slew of stuff. Site should be finished and up in about a week.

The rough form can be seen at: www.robertullmannphotodigital.info

If anyone is reading this (which I tend to doubt since there aren't any cute cats) wander on over.

The more things change the more things change

Basic photographic technology has changed at a stunning rate in the past ten years - my first digital prints turned yellow within a few months, and now prints will last for decades and the color reproduction of today's printers is mind boggling.

The technology I grew up on had been in existence for seventy years (at least). Improvements came slowly, and sometimes were not improvements, but disasters waiting to happen - color prints made in the 1970s mostly turned orange and died. Films became faster and finer grained - Fuji 800 f\color negative film was a joy to work with. Cameras auto-focused faster and better, meters improved, but it was still a film/paper world.

Color permanence meant having separation negatives made, at great expense, of your color work; black and white prints had to be toned and washed for hours. There was also the matter of all of the hours spent in the darkroom. Seeing the print appear in the developer was magical. But - the hours in a dark, often hot, smelly, usually cramped space was only for those who truly loved what they did.

My first darkroom was the floor of my bathroom. Since I started shooting seriously in 1974 or so, this lasted for thirty years.

I now spend hours staring at screens, and doing what was once almost impossible, in minutes.
The changes that made digital photography more than a competitor for film has evolved in under ten years.

Do I miss the darkroom? No. I certainly don't miss pouring gallons of water down the drain so a print would last, or dealing with some of the chemicals. There were toners made out of some nasty stuff (like mercury and uranium), bleaches with cyanide in them, stuff that would cause contact dermatitis, or turn your fingernails black if you handled your prints without tongs.

Oh - and I used to smoke. I know, you should never smoke in a darkroom. Ha.

I'd come staggering out of a printing session with a bad case of the head staggers. When the prints were washed drying presented another set of problems. Do I air dry? Use blotters?
When are the blotters used up? Have I really gotten the damn things free of chemicals? If I use fast drying resin coated paper do I have to worry about permanence? Thousands of prints made during the eighties and nineties turned red in the highlights because there was developer in the paper emulsion (to speed processing). Will pollution turn parts of the print into a weird bronze color?

So the new world is preferable.

Tulips Everywhere

Tulips to the right of me tulips to the left of me - everywhere I go there are tulips in beds, in pots, in window boxes, around trees, and in pots on the street. Red, white, purple, red and white, yellow and orange... Growing from planters, in front of buildings, all over the parks and sold by the bunch at every fruit stand and florist. Is this really the only spring flower? Yipes.

Shouldn't really complain, this has been a gorgeous spring in New York City. I venture out to shoot dosed with generic Zyrtec, and still come up stuffy and sneezey (grumpy and dopey, too).