Category Archives: Morning Musings

Commentary, Ideas, Morning Musings, Not Photography

Social Media and the Death of the Web (Morning Musings 9/27/14)

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Dan Mitchell 1977 Website Screenshot
Dan Mitchell 1997 Website Screenshot *

How many of us have considered the ways in which popular social media services — which admittedly are hugely appealing in many ways  — are doing an effective job of killing the world wide web and undoing the early promise that it offered of direct and open access, along with visibility proportionate to quality, and critical disintermediation?

A few years back there was this astonishing, exciting, powerful, accessible thing called the world wide web, on which virtually anyone could share their story, their creative work, their business — and we saw the beginnings of the great disintermediation as boundaries were broken and the middlemen who had stood between content producers and consumers began to disappear. This was a world filled with promise. Those who produced valuable and interesting content (as differentiated from those who simply channeled it) could connect directly with a world of people who found that content compelling, and those looking for content could easily find it and follow it. Word got around, and it did so fairly directly, with little or no intermediation by those who had controlled traditional media.

Social media applications are seductive things, especially during their start-up phase, when the typical approach has involved giving away (or at least appearing to give away) a great deal of access by means of what seem like very open platforms. In fact, many who jumped onto these platforms early on did manage to leverage their initial power to their advantage. However, virtually without exception, these applications have morphed in directions that do not enable our own control over what we see and who we connect to, but which instead take control out of our hands and determine for us what we will see, most often based on generating advertising revenue — an old model that takes us back to (to coin a term) nondisintermediation.

Continue reading Social Media and the Death of the Web (Morning Musings 9/27/14) →
Morning Musings

Only As Good As Your Poorest Picture? (Morning Musings 9/26/14)

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Yellow Buildings, Shadows, Moving Clouds - Night photograph of two large yellow buildings, shadows, and streaks for clouds moving across the sky above the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.
Yellow Buildings, Shadows, Moving Clouds – Night photograph of two large yellow buildings, shadows, and streaks for clouds moving across the sky above the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.*

Recently I was part of a conversation about photography, focused on some technical questions about equipment, in which one participant sought to define the issue by writing that you are only has good as your poorest picture.

Simple and direct sayings like this one may have the virtue of quickly clarifying an important concept or truth and (something I could learn more about!) doing so in few words. Unfortunately, there are often downsides, too. Because they are so declamatory, it is easy for some people to simply accept them without thinking. Being simple, they often don’t fit all cases. And sometimes they are just plain wrong.

In this case, this notion seems to me to be dead wrong and to not fit at all what we actually know and observe about photography. In fact, I think that the opposite is actually true — photographers are actually as good as their best pictures.  Continue reading Only As Good As Your Poorest Picture? (Morning Musings 9/26/14) →

Morning Musings

Marmot Poo (Morning Musings 9/25/14)

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Grass, Granite, Marmot Turd
Grass, Granite, Marmot Turd

Proof that I have to be able to laugh at myself sometimes… I spent 10 days photographing in the Yosemite backcountry at the beginning of this month. At one of the locations we visited there is a large and beautiful granite bowl with tons of potential photographic subjects. At one point I was high on a ridge above the bowl, photographing small features in late-day light, including exfoliated granite slabs, tiny trees growing from narrow cracks, colorfully stained rock, and more.

Partway through the evening’s work I found a little divot in the granite, in which a small clump of grass grew. It was surrounded by colorfully stained and glacially polished granite, with interesting cracks and texture cutting through it at various angles. The low angle sun raked across the short clump of grass and created a shadow that stretched across the granite surface. It seemed like an obvious photograph of the “intimate landscape” type, and I spent some minutes working it and making a series of photographs in both portrait and landscape orientation, and trying various crops of this little scene.

Although I had admired the file earlier while scanning through the hundreds of images I brought back from this trip, it wasn’t until today that I finally got to it for serious post-processing work. I opened it up, converted the raw file, brought it into Photoshop and began to work on it. I liked those angles angled cracks and the intense color of the stained rock, and the short blades of grass cast shadows across the polished granite in just the way I remembered.

But wait, what is that lumpy shadow below and to the left of the grass? NOOOOO! There is a marmot turd in the little cleft in the rock! You’d think that Your Intrepid Photographer might have seen that while composing the shot, but no…

Morning Musings are somewhat irregular posts in which I write about whatever is on my mind at the moment.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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.

Morning Musings

Backcountry Photography, Two Ways (Morning Musings 9/24/14)

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Peak and Tarn, Sunrise
Peak and Tarn, Sunrise *

The subject of selecting (and carrying!) photographic equipment for backpacking trips came up in a recent conversation. There’s a lot I could say about this, since I’ve backpacked for decades and often prefer to do certain kinds of landscape photography while traveling on foot, mostly in the Sierra. Actually, I not only could say a lot about this — I have! An extensive article at this website goes over a lot of important things related to combining backpacking and serious landscape photography: My Backpacking Photography Kit. Take a look at the article if you want a lot of details.

The main issues involve how to incorporate the weight/bulk of serious camera equipment into a load that also includes your food and shelter and much more, how to best make use of the photography equipment in the backcountry, how to approach the process of photographing “out there,” which equipment to use, and a few other things. Basically, unless you are young and very fit and willing to accept a great deal of pain from a huge load… you are likely to have to make some compromises and adjustments in both the backpacking equipment and the photographic equipment you carry. The good news is that the compromises are quite doable, and that you can still make fine photographs in areas that you probably can’t get to in any other way.

A related question had to do with a different way to get into the back county that I’ve used during the past two seasons, namely support by pack animals. Left to my own devices, I probably would not have tried this — at least not for a few more years! However, I’ve recently had the wonderful opportunity to join some other photographers who have been traveling into (mostly) the Yosemite backcountry for nearly 15 years every summer to make beautiful photographs. (See a video about them here and take a look at their beautiful book: “First Light: Five Photographers Explore Yosemite’s Wilderness.”) When they started, large format and medium format film cameras were the norm for this sort of serious work, more or less necessitating pack train support if they were to stay out for any length of time — and they often went out for a week or two at a time.

Last year was my first time being part of a pack train supported backcountry trip, and I initially felt almost a bit guilty about it — as a person who has enjoyed walking all over the Sierra backcountry for decades. Continue reading Backcountry Photography, Two Ways (Morning Musings 9/24/14) →