Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary, Equipment, Ideas

Megapixel Mania – An Extended Riff

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I read (yet another… ;-) megapixel rant somewhere online yesterday, and it got me thinking again about the fixation on megapixels as a measure of camera “value,” and the odd and sometimes irrational ways that people respond to this issue. It is well known that over the past decade or more, as digital photography technologies have become more and more prevalent (displacing film in many areas), camera technology has continued to advance in many ways. Among these advances is the ability to increase the number of photosites on sensors of a given size – e.g. give us “more megapixels.”

The responses to this tend to fall into three broad categories: Continue reading Megapixel Mania – An Extended Riff →

Commentary, Events, News, Photographs: Night, Technique

Night Photography With ‘The Nocturnes’

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Moonlit Stairway, Wall, and Window
Moonlit Stairway, Wall, and Window

Moonlit Stairway, Wall, and Window. Mare Island Naval Shipyard, California. February 27, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Once or twice each year I have the opportunity to do night photography with The Nocturnes, the San Francisco Bay Area night photography group mostly organized by Tim Baskerville and Susan Nichols. I like to join up with them for their expeditions to the historic Mare Island Ship Yard in Vallejo, and I’ll be joining them again later this week to shoot there. (Mare Island is where this photograph and quite a bit of my other night photography work has been done.) I’m afraid that this week’s event is currently fully booked, but Bay Area photographers looking for an introduction to night photography have a tremendous local resource in The Nocturnes, through their web sites, their promotion of outstanding night photography work, and through the workshops and classes they offer.

While I’m on the subject of night photography, I’d like to share a post I wrote some time back on the subject: Hints for Night Photography. While there is ultimately a lot to learn and understand if you will do night photography, and there are a wide range of techniques that you might employ for different subjects and ways of shooting, there are some basics that can get you a long ways towards creating interesting night photographs. This post is intended to be a brief list of some of those basics.

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Commentary, History, Ideas

No Post Processing? Really?

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As I do from time to time, I’m reposting a response I shared in an online discussion somewhere else on the web. In that discussion, a proposal was made to come up with some sort of enforceable standard regarding what post-processing could be allowed in photographs. (In the context of the original discussion – wildlife photography – the idea wasn’t quite as crazy as it sounds here, but still…) It seems to me that there are always a few notions underlying these ongoing discussions: that the issue is one that comes up with “digital photography,” that there is some ideal photography that is purely and objectively “accurate,” and that we would actually want to do such a thing.

Here is what I wrote:

It seems so obvious that I’m almost embarrassed to point it out, but does anyone actually believe that there is such a thing as an objectively accurate photographic image, free of interpretation? Which acknowledged “great” photographers can you point to whose photographs are purely and objectively accurate? If digital post is a problem, what about camera movements, contraction/expansion of space via focal length, use of artificial light and reflectors, polarizing filters, graduated neutral density filters, choice of film/paper/chemicals based on color or contrast preferences, selective focus via DOF control, allowing motion blur with long shutter speeds, any night photography, and on and on…?

As I wrote somewhere else earlier this week:

If the goal of photography was to make objectively accurate reproductions of real things… I wouldn’t bother.

Have an opinion on this? Feel free to leave a comment…

 

G Dan Mitchell Photography | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Email
Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

 

Commentary, Community, Photographers, Site News

New Additions to My Sidebar ‘Photographers’ List

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In the sidebar of this web site I have a list of some of interesting photographers who catch my attention for various reasons. I added a couple new photographers to the list today… but I’m not going to say which ones are new. This is my devious way of encouraging you to explore some of those links and the wonderful photography you will find if you visit them.

You can find the links on any page at this site – just scroll down to find them in the sidebar along the left side of the page. The links take you away from this site and to the web sites of the respective photographers. Enjoy!

G Dan Mitchell Photography | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Email
Text, photographs, and other post content are © copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.