It's getting better all the ti-i-ime –or is it?

chuckroast said:
I rather think that Sturgeon's Law still applies and always will: Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Excellence - in anything - is hard to achieve. The only thing different today is that standards for greatness are considerably eroded because: A) Taste in the arts of all kinds of fallen precipitously in the past hundred years and B) Everyone wants to think they are "great" so the bar just gets lowered (see "The Fountainhead" for a great novel about this very behavior).

As just one example - from the late 19th Century through today, music has been getting progressively simpler and simpler. I'm not talking about what we might like, whether it's Beethoven or Elvis. I am talking about the observable reduction in complexity and sophistication (on average) as we move from Beethoven, to Dixieland, to Big Band, to Beebop, to Fusion, to the Beatles, to hiphop, and end up at rap. Today's music (on average) lacks complexity, sophistication, nuance, or dynamics - it's overwhelmingly a study in droning percussion and lousy poetry (because the written word has also been afflicted with severe brain damage).

There have been some fine photographers in the past 100 years, but a lot of what gets waved around as great work is either political propaganda or stuff the East Coast arts elites pimped as being great when it really wasn't all that.


So, if the audience can't tell the difference between great work and dreck, then everything is ... oh, how shall I say it ... "Awesome!"
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Congratulations, chuckroast! You've earned the title of "Retro-Grouch"! Be very proud! However, I take issue with Sturgeon: ninety-nine percent of everything is crap.
 
chuckroast said:
I rather think that Sturgeon's Law still applies and always will: Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Excellence - in anything - is hard to achieve. The only thing different today is that standards for greatness are considerably eroded because: A) Taste in the arts of all kinds of fallen precipitously in the past hundred years and B) Everyone wants to think they are "great" so the bar just gets lowered (see "The Fountainhead" for a WRETCHED novel about this very behavior).
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Fixed that for you. She never could write a coherent sentence to save her life and that's why she ended up taking all that Government support she railed against all her life in the end 😉 I'll spare you the John Roger's quote 😀

The only eroding is that which we ourselves allow to happen. So if you think things are going to hell, that's on you.
 
Michael Markey said:
I thought your post was about your perception of photography in general rather than perceived difficulties in using a Leica ?
On the first point I think its more interesting and varied than it ever has been in its history .
As regards using a Leica , I don`t see how they are especially problematic .
I assume that you are talking about the rangefinders .
If you are finding them so it may help if you could be more specific "taken my picture quality back thirty years" .
In what way has it ?
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It rather seems to me that this OP is (as someone else has perceptively posted) more about what goes well with cheese and crackers...

I disagree that it's really all a matter of iPhones vs Leica vs Sony vs Minolta vs Pentax vs Nikon vs Nikkormat vs Contax vs Rollei vs (you select the camera).

We all fall into a rut now and then. It's part of being human and around (maybe too long, like me) and letting ourselves slip into set ways of doing and seeing and thinking.

The OP is maybe being too hard on himself and his photography. Or he may be overthinking all this too much. He should maybe reconsider his ideas about his cameras and his photography. We have given him some good points to use as starters.
 
If one firmly believes that Sturgeon's law applies, then it applies whether it's digital crap or analog crap (requiring development)...the result is the same! 😅
 
AndyCapp said:
Recently, I have spent a lot of time looking at photographs people post on public forums (fora?).
When I was into photography the last time –having bought my first 5D– real photographers posted their shots to show us what could be achieved.
I do not see much of that any longer. The talent and the imagination have gone iPhone.
Old geezers like myself find it difficult to kick our old habits and see the world with fresh eyes. Our eyes are not fresh.
With my new Leica M9, I am achieving about the same quality as I did with TX, D-76, and Agfa Portriga...on a good day. It sucks.
It cannot be that we are living in a ready-made world today.
I'd love to see some out-of-the-box visual artists you have spotted recently.
Could you please point some of them out for me?
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As I understand your post, you're asking a question and making a statement: (1) where can you find "out-of-the-box visual artists;" and (2) you're not happy with the quality of the photos you're getting from your M9 compared to what you got from a 5D years ago.

I'm not sure I have an answer to your question, but I can tell you where NOT to look. Do not look for "out-of-the-box visual artists" on any website with an algorithmic feed like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc. You won't find them. You'll be inundated by "content creators," the majority of whom couldn't create a compelling image if their life depended on it.

With regard to the unfortunate thread drift, I like Neil Gaiman's idea of replacing the word "woke" with "treating other people with respect." Neil Gaiman on The Sandman Being Called 'Woke' - 'That's Just... 'Respect''
 
chuckroast said:
I had much the same experience when I first tried serious digital photography after 40+ years of silver monochrome (which I still far prefer by many miles). Here's what I learned about digital (assuming a decent sensor and capture system):

  1. You have to expose like you're shooting transparancies. That is to say, you have to protect the highlights.
  2. A highlight weighted metering option is helpful in this regard.
  3. Some/most of the high end sensors will give you a slightly blurred image in an effort to manage noise. Unsharp masking is your friend.
  4. Most things require a very gentle post processing touch. I've seen many a fine digital image abused by excessive saturation and HDR fiddling.
  5. Digital is a more-or-less straight line HD response. It's never natively going to look or feel like film. You have to bend that curve into film-like shapes to make it so and even then ... it ain't film.
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Now that I try to adapt to the digital Leica world, it is surprising how the things I thought would be problematic are easy and vice versa...the things I had got used to in the Sony world are now difficult to find or non-existant. I really like the progress I am making. In a posting above, I was desperate because all the invesment I have made in time and money did not seem to pay back at all. But they do. This is a Leica, not a Sony.
I must treat it as such. The results are getting better after each outing. I just have to mobilize my old knowledge and adapt my practices with this camerosaurus. iI makes beautiful pictures. I never got anything of this kind with my Sonys.
 
chuckroast said:
I rather think if you actually went back and reread that book, you'd discover that it is a pitch perfect example of current culture. No, she wasn't a superb writer, and she was a flawed philosopher, but she was a keen observer of the ills of the modern mind, and for that she deserves credit.

The erosion is "allowed" to happen because the elites have poisoned the university system with their drooling lunacy, political hackery, and endless idiotic critical theories. This means that the academy is pumping out graduates with six figure loans who know nothing real but believe that "toaster oven" is a gender. that "intersectionalism" is an important idea, and that anything traiditonal or Western is evil.

The graduates are thus fundamentally incapable of critical thinking as a group and thus lap up the bottom of the sewer whether it's in the arts, in politics, or in culture. It's not their fault. They were miseducated by monsters who rejected the Western canon and replaced it with hallucinations.

You cannot know what art is good if you haven't studied good art standing on its own merits. You cannot make good art - at least art that is durable - if everything must be first filtered to modern pieties about equality, gender, racism, politics, structuralism, blah, blah, blah. I highly commend Roger Kimball's book "The Rape Of Masters" if you want just a little peek into the complete freight train of stupidity that is the modern university arts program. And it's well out of date now. Things are much worse. The woken-puken are running things ... into the ground.
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Interesting parallel: I cringe at some of modern sculpture vs. the timeless beauty of the Masters. Indeed - what happened?

 
Yokosuka_Mike said:
It's not the camera, it's the person behind it.

Mike
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When I was young, I thought it was all about the camera and equipment.

With some years of experience, I thought the camera and equipment didn't matter at all. I was an aaaaaaaaartist, by golly!

With the benefit of five decades of serious photography behind me, I've come to understand that it's both the person and the machinery. Yes, it's fundamentally about your ability, vision, and execution. But different kinds of equipment will influence how you work. I approach how I shoot with a Leica differently than how I shoot with a Nikon. I shoot VERY differently with a view camera.

Artists use different kinds of brushes.
 
The old guys know what's coming, they've seen it before. The young guys think they know everything.

“The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward."- Winston Churchill
 
I gave one of my young friends a Olympus Trip 35 that's been lingering in my "things to find home for" box for an eon. He, in turn, gave it to his girlfriend (he'd bought an Argus C3 for himself a little while back). They took the Trip 35 and the C3 on a nice 600 mile bicycle trip along the California coast last month. Last night he told me that both cameras are working great, and then showed me a bunch of photos.

Neither of them have spent much time taking photos other than with their iPhones. Both of them are delightful, bright, young enthusiastic persons. And as I flipped through the photos, I almost felt weepy with joy to see them starting, exploring, learning these ancient cameras and making a few very nice photographs as they started to get the hang of them.

To reflect on my dear departed buddy Don's words, I love young people: they keep me young. 😀 To see the world with fresh eyes, with new skills in development, without bias or prejudice ... Ah, I can't say anything bad about the dross in the mix—it's all part of the learning experience that all youth must suffer.

G

"Keep looking up."
 
Political discussion moved here:

Off the Rail Politics

Fixed that for you. She never could write a coherent sentence to save her life and that's why she ended up taking all that Government support she railed against all her life in the end ;) I'll spare you the John Roger's quote :D The only eroding is that which we ourselves allow to happen. So if...
rangefinderforum.com rangefinderforum.com
 
splitimageview said:
The old guys know what's coming, they've seen it before. The young guys think they know everything.

“The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward."- Winston Churchill
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I miss the times I knew everything.
 
Bill Clark said:
With my business, I’m retired now, I found that beauty was in the eye of the checkbook holder.

The rest and their opinions don’t matter to me.
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After much thinking, I concluded that beauty is in the heart of the beholder. We cannot define it, let alone measure it, but we can feel it.
What is the physiology of beauty?
Neuroscientists say that experiencing beauty activates the serotonin and dopaminergic pathways related to emotional reward. Ugliness activates the fight-or-flight adrenergic circuits, making you want to turn away.
BBC's take on the subject behind the link.
 
The Syntopicon of Brittanica's Great Books of the Western World has an excellent syntopical treatment of Beauty across the great thinkers.

I understand there’s controversy with this set - not being representative of women thinkers, people or color, and other representations - but it is a great set nonetheless.

I discovered Montaigne through the great books and still enjoy his essays and have learned a great deal about thinking and writing from him - among others. There’s a cadence, rhythm, and structure to his writing I find endearing (being a musician).

Same for the volume on America State Papers and especially, the writings of Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist.

One volume that I find absolutely impenetrable is Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History. Forget about it!

I think photography (like other hobbies or pleasures) feeds our dopamine feedback loops.
 
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