Embracing the Tradition

I always try to support (and preach whenever I get a chance) keeping our great film photography tradition alive.  I was really pleased to see this well done new website promoting large-format photography pop up on my Facebook feed yesterday, and thought I would spread the word by sharing it here: Eastern Sierra Center for Photography.

They also have links to a small collection of traditional film/large-format related videos on YouTube, and I found this documentary about Edward Weston to be just so good in so many ways.. a little old fashioned in style maybe, being 1948 and all, but everything is still so dead-on true and a perfect expression of what drew me to photography more than 35 years ago now.  Some, who only got into photography when digital cameras came along, will get a lot out of this and see how visionaries like Weston and Adams took photography far beyond what had been a simple documentary/recording process into the realm of fine art.  It's only a half hour and well worth your time.  Thanks to ESC4P for digging this up and please do visit their site.

For those of you that do Facebook and are interested, check out the "Large Format Photography" group, too.

Just for fun, watch the location backgrounds and see if you can spot this formation in Death Valley that I posted a shot of several years ago.
Hope you enjoy as much as I did!

Water Study (Part 2), and a New Series on Influential Artists

As promised in my previous Water Study post, here is another, completely different interpretation of the same subject, this time in color. Since it was a "local" subject and I was in no hurry, it was possible to spend more time than I normally might working a very limited area, trying to construct as many variations as possible from this little area of falls. It's not just one grand fall, but a series of cascades wandering all around the rocks and trees below a mountain lake, so there are certainly many different possibilities to be had. This type of "intimate landscape" leads me into a new subject I've been mulling over for a while: I would like to give mention to some of the greats of photography (and art) that have shaped my vision, as well as a few of the contemporary people whose work I admire. So I'm going to occasionally steer you to some different sites that I feel are worth visiting if you are at all interested in the masters that have paved the road to where we are today, or some current artists that are very worthy of attention.

Some of the people I have in mind are very well documented and represented on the web; at least one that I want to refer to is surprisingly hard to find, so I'll start with an easy one because I found an excellent website covering his work: Eliot Porter. Probably the first great color landscape photographer, his show,"Intimate Landscapes" in 1980 was the first one-man show ever of color photography at New York's Metropolitan Museum and he was one of the first masters to catch my imagination during my younger days in art school. I won't repeat a lot of info about him here, because this website is concise and full of samples.
I'll mention others as they come to mind, or seem to tie in with my own examples; probably mostly photographers, but some other types of artists too... as well as some fellow bloggers that I have found since I started doing this blog. I know that with photography in particular, lots of people have been taken up in a sudden fascination on the subject and haven't necessarily looked into the history of what got us here, so I hope I can turn a few of you on to some great work that might inspire you even further. And I would certainly love to hear back from anyone who has their own favorite masters or contemporaries that they would like to share.