[HN Gopher] What the photographer who's taken philosopher portra...
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What the photographer who's taken philosopher portraits thinks of
philosophers
Author : Petiver
Score : 53 points
Date : 2024-09-27 03:30 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (aestheticsforbirds.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aestheticsforbirds.com)
| bbor wrote:
| Fascinating, thanks for sharing! I've gotta buy this book one
| day. The interview got a little goofy towards the end -- I think
| we can all sorta guess what professional photographers think of
| digital cameras and Instagram filters, and it kinda felt off
| topic - but overall very heart warming stuff. I do like thinking
| of philosophers as a family... wonder how true that is today, in
| the midst of intensely empirical + results-driven academic
| culture.
|
| Reminds me of the Adler quote; What binds the
| authors together in an intellectual community is the great
| conversation in which they are engaged. In the works that come
| later in the sequence of years, we find authors listening to what
| their predecessors have had to say about this idea or that, this
| topic or that. They not only harken to the thought of their
| predecessors, they also respond to it by commenting on it in a
| variety of ways.
| ygra wrote:
| > I think we can all sorta guess what professional
| photographers think of digital cameras and Instagram filters,
| and it kinda felt off topic
|
| I guess the camera is >>just<< a tool to the photographer. If
| their job requires certain things that can be done more
| efficiently with digital photography (e.g. sports - there was
| an article here recently about how photography was done at the
| olympics), then I'm fairly certain they tend to choose the
| better option.
|
| However, for more artistic things like his portraits, I guess
| it makes little difference. Probably similar to a carpenter who
| just _likes_ working with hand tools instead of power tools.
| Personally I like my SLR camera and dread going to mirrorless
| eventually (or I have to upgrade as long as DSLRs still exist)
| - at the current point I still feel weird about looking at a
| screen and not directly through the lens. I also like having
| all the settings and knobs to turn to control the exposure.
|
| And all that is more a preference thing because it's a hobby
| for me that's fun and I am not bound to any particular results
| or cadence thereof.
|
| There's a series on YouTube, Pro photographer, cheap camera. I
| was impressed at how usable photos can still come out of
| essentially trash cameras. But perhaps that's what a
| professional photographer's skill is: Taking a tool,
| considering what it can do (and what it _cannot_ ) and planning
| the shot accordingly
| throwanem wrote:
| Partly that, and partly the other thing. The tool can inform
| the work; I have a cheap junk Sears-brand lens from 1975 that
| does magical things with light and color, and I have shots I
| could not have _imagined_ making before I discovered what
| that lens could do. (I 'm studying lens repair just lately so
| I can fix its stuck aperture! This tool is worth a whole
| _skill_ to me, to keep working properly.)
|
| It isn't a professional photographer's skill, though, but a
| _photographer 's_ one. Anyone who tells you he's a
| photographer and can't talk intelligently about these
| tradeoffs, about the selection of constraints to fit the
| intent of the work and vice versa, he's lying to impress you
| and probably don't let him hand you a drink.
| keiferski wrote:
| You might be interested in what Nick Knight, a well-known
| photographer, thinks about cameras and other, newer devices.
| The TLDR is that he feels that "photographer" is increasingly
| an outdated term, and he ought to be called something like
| "image maker" instead.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPummP8Vfyk
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > ought to be called something like "image maker" instead.
|
| Surely that is what photographers always have been? A
| photographer in the sense of the article is an artist. The
| image is created by the photographer using the tools of his
| trade, the camera, the film, the dark room. Now a
| photographer uses scanners, digital cameras, and software but
| I don't see that the essence of artistic photography has
| changed.
|
| What would Knight call a portrait painter?
| keiferski wrote:
| He means a specific thing by "image maker," which he talks
| about in the video.
| caillou wrote:
| Strange. Why is every single one of these photos out of focus?
| freejazz wrote:
| They're not?
| vundercind wrote:
| I see what the poster means. Parts of each face/head are out
| of focus. I dunno shit about photography so don't know the
| term for what's going on, but it looks like the camera was
| set so only about an inch-deep section of the shot would be
| in focus.
| hyggetrold wrote:
| Yep, that's a technique in photography - common for
| portraits.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| The resulting image looks more intimate. If the photograph
| was 10 feet away and zoomed in, the face might have the
| same scale but the entire face would be in focus. The
| actual image was shot much closer with a shallow depth of
| field, which even without thinking about it is perceived as
| the viewer being very close to the subject.
|
| It is amazing how little of our field of view is in focus.
| Hold up your hand at arms length and look at your thumbnail
| so it is in focus. Notice that the part of the thumb
| immediately below the thumbnail is out of focus unless you
| move your eyes to look at it.
| fearmerchant wrote:
| Using a lens with a shallow depth of field to create a bokeh
| effect.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Being a little out of focus and rambling around is a
| philosophers thing.
| alistairSH wrote:
| The only portrait that appeared OOF to me was that of Susan
| Hurley. The rest look fine. Was there another one in particular
| you thought was OOF?
|
| The artist does appear to use a large aperture (or some other
| technique) to control depth of field. So there are portraits
| where the background is blurred, or in some, even parts of the
| subject (hands vs face). But, overall, they're mostly all in
| focus.
| bpshaver wrote:
| They're all taken by the same photographer and thus exhibit a
| consistent style
| justin66 wrote:
| This photographer is employing an unusually shallow depth of
| field in some of these photos. You gotta have a gimmick.
| keiferski wrote:
| _AK: You don't think that's true in the Arts? SP: Not in the same
| way. In the arts, a lot of the judging is outside of your tribe:
| curators, galleries, even museums. Philosophers are judged more
| from within. Also, much of philosophy is not for public
| consumption, or at least, it sort of is but sort of isn't. You're
| ultimately making things for your own family and they're the ones
| judging you. The Arts function in a different way._
|
| I have a degree in analytic philosophy, and this is definitely
| true. It's something I both miss and think is a serious issue
| with the field of philosophy, at least in the Anglosphere. It's
| very, very tempting to stay in the isolated, intellectual world
| of academic philosophy, where rigor matters and the petty
| sociopolitical problems of the world outside can be safely
| ignored. The vast majority of analytic philosophy doesn't really
| comment on contemporary ethical issues in the first place, which
| is ultimately where that buffer comes from, instead focusing
| largely on language, logic, and similar areas.
|
| But it also leaves you feeling like you aren't really engaging
| with the world and with everything that the field of philosophy
| has to offer, especially when contemporary times are IMO full of
| real-world problems in desperate need of philosophers.
| pfd1986 wrote:
| Thanks for the perspective. The courage to "face society" and
| write for the public is one of the reasons I've always loved
| (trying) to read Daniel Dennets work. He seemed to be writing
| for scientists and less to other philosophers. Not sure if you
| agree
| keiferski wrote:
| I'm not super familiar with Dennett's work but I do know that
| he is better known outside of academic philosophy than
| within, probably for the reason you mentioned.
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