Pet Peeves

Photo books, especially monographs, where images span across the fold; one clean uninterrupted image with border per page - or I'm not buying.
Yes! I still buy them, but I don't get it. I mean, I get it for people like Daido Moriyama in books like Farewell Photography, but yeah, I like to see the whole photo.
 
I wish more people would go to museums and see actual B&W prints made by great photographers; or at least buy and look at some good, well printed books. 90% of the B&W photos I see online look like crap. Flat, lifeless, muddy tonality. It comes from scanning negatives and subscribing to a silly ideology that editing the scans is somehow illegitimate or 'cheating.' No, it is not. Film scanners give a very flat image so that it can be edited without the scanner clipping the highlights and shadows; the files are not meant to be used as finished images.


dolls-raw.jpg

The file straight from the scanner; no editing except to resize it for the web.


dolls-done.jpg

The finished photograph. Look, real tonality!
 
I wish more people would go to museums and see actual B&W prints made by great photographers; or at least buy and look at some good, well printed books. 90% of the B&W photos I see online look like crap. Flat, lifeless, muddy tonality. It comes from scanning negatives and subscribing to a silly ideology that editing the scans is somehow illegitimate or 'cheating.' No, it is not. Film scanners give a very flat image so that it can be edited without the scanner clipping the highlights and shadows; the files are not meant to be used as finished images.


dolls-raw.jpg

The file straight from the scanner; no editing except to resize it for the web.


dolls-done.jpg

The finished photograph. Look, real tonality!
The dreaded "was that Photoshopped?" question. Of course it was! It's like asking "was that printed in a darkroom?"

While "Photoshop" or it's equivalents can be used to make "illegitimate" (however someone someone might construe that) alterations, most use it for much the same things that have long been done with photographs - as you say, tonality (plus lots of other adjustments previously considered "entirely legitimate" - which I think should still be: how am I supposed to convert the damned thing from RAW, anyway?)

...Mike
 
Intrusive ‘street’, wide angle, close, full of some emotion, but unclear which, and no context.

“Battery low”
”No image files”

Lingering too long on the last syllable of Cartier-Bresson, finishing on the ‘n’.

OK. You asked.
 
My pet peeve is the lack of standardized batteries. It seems like every digital camera has a specific size and associated charger. I’ve got a stack of the things from Nikon and Fuji. Will obsolete batteries put cameras out of commission after they’re no longer available?

Another peeve is the overuse of AAA cells in devices. They’re pricey and have less capacity than AA size. A small increase in device size would not be a problem for me.

And don’t get me going on all the different memory card formats, ah the price of progress….. o_O
 
Intrusive ‘street’, wide angle, close, full of some emotion, but unclear which, and no context.

Very specific. Other than "Intrusive" I would say that you've describe 90% of what I post at RFF.

I guess we all look at photography differently.

All the best,
Mike
 
My pet peeve is the lack of standardized batteries. It seems like every digital camera has a specific size and associated charger. I’ve got a stack of the things from Nikon and Fuji. Will obsolete batteries put cameras out of commission after they’re no longer available?

Another peeve is the overuse of AAA cells in devices. They’re pricey and have less capacity than AA size. A small increase in device size would not be a problem for me.

And don’t get me going on all the different memory card formats, ah the price of progress….. o_O
Small progress, but I think we can now thank EU bureaucrats for forcing through standardisation of USB-C as a charging port.
 
The only thing I can think of about my film cameras that irritates me is that I have a couple of lenses with slightly dented filter rings. Otherwise, I find every film camera I have to be a joy to use. On the other hand, the general complexity of my DSLR is a constant annoyance.

My real pet peeve in photography is YouTube videos with with titles like "Should you upgrade?I" (Usually accompanied by a photo of the YouTuber with a stupid stare of open-mouthed wonder at a new digital camera that miraculously autofocuses 3% faster than its predecessor.)

My other minor pet peeve is YouTube videos, blog posts, etc., asking whether the iPhone camera is "good enough." Seriously? The iPhone camera has been "good enough" for the general public for 10+ years, and if it's not good enough for YOU, you already know that.
 
I wish more people would go to museums and see actual B&W prints made by great photographers; or at least buy and look at some good, well printed books. 90% of the B&W photos I see online look like crap. Flat, lifeless, muddy tonality. It comes from scanning negatives and subscribing to a silly ideology that editing the scans is somehow illegitimate or 'cheating.' No, it is not. Film scanners give a very flat image so that it can be edited without the scanner clipping the highlights and shadows; the files are not meant to be used as finished images.


dolls-raw.jpg

The file straight from the scanner; no editing except to resize it for the web.


dolls-done.jpg

The finished photograph. Look, real tonality!
Exactly why I wrote my own software for the Leica M Monochrom! The originals are usually flat and lifeless. Change the Black Level (which is much too high in the DNG file) and change all the pixel values using a Gamma curve- much better.
 
Very specific. Other than "Intrusive" I would say that you've describe 90% of what I post at RFF.

I guess we all look at photography differently.

All the best,
Mike
Not singling you out at all Mike, and don’t see your photographs as you describe them. I wouldn’t do such a thing in a thread you’ve initiated. I see a very positive motivation of the photographer in your pictures. And at the weekend I went right through your car thread: the emotion there is clear. I was thinking of someone else in particular, it’s true, but not anyone here, and also of many war zone photographs and demonstration crowd photographs with the wailing person in the middle. There the context might be clear but the emotion is only implied. Photographs need not be the truth as we all know.
 
This thread makes me smile and sometimes laugh. Sorry and thank you all!
As for me, maybe the biggest is depending on a battery. When there is just one line left, the agony begins.
 
I guess I'm not a very peevish individual, I try not to let the small foibles and annoyances of things/people/life bother me. Of course none of my equipment is "perfect" ... nothing is so bad that I cannot accommodate it by working a little differently or adjusting my expectations slightly.

What other people do or say.. well, they're other people, and mostly I just find it better to accept that we disagree and continue on doing what we individually prefer to do.

If I work hard to figure what does annoy me on a regular basis, it's when I go out to make some photographs knowing exactly what I want to achieve and then mess up some obvious setting or don't pay attention to details in a shot that I know I should have done slightly differently. The annoyance is simply that I'll get all the gear together again and shoot the exact same thing yet again to see if I can do it right.

G
 
My pet peeve: people on RFF who who try to post the same image to as many forums as possible. Let’s say it’s Foma B/W film, has a street in the image, but includes people, cars, the ocean in the background and is blurry; heck, that’s at least seven forum categories, all wrapped up in one!

Tongue slightly in cheek. Keep posting, people!
 
My pet peeve: people on RFF who who try to post the same image to as many forums as possible. Let’s say it’s Foma B/W film, has a street in the image, but includes people, cars, the ocean in the background and is blurry; heck, that’s at least seven forum categories, all wrapped up in one!

Tongue slightly in cheek. Keep posting, people!
I have a related peeve: When I post a picture in a W/NW thread which has been dormant for months and five minutes after posting, someone else posts right after my post. This really happens, and it's almost always the same guy.
 
I'm old and crotchety at times, so my PPs are too numerous to list. Thanks to this threat, and purely for the fun of it, I may now compile a list of these, entirely for myself and as an amusing way to use up an hour or two hours of my time.

People who don't do their research properly (I fall into this category, so I include myself here) and post misinformation. At least when I do get called out for this, and deserve it I do indeed, I try to post an apology and the correct data. Which sort of lets me off the big hook, I hope.

Also, and I know this labels me as the grammar/spelling/syntax nazi that I am, people who abbreviate unnecessarily or shorten name's or term's...

But then again I too fall into the latter trap when I refer to my German TLRs as "Rolleis". I also have a German friend who for decades has called his 3.5F as a "Rolleye". Another friend, Aussie, talks about his "Neyekon" and his "Mameyea". So who am I to point the poisoned stick at anybody else?

My most recent blah! vote went to some twit who posted (I won't name the site) about "Ed Weston". I was greatly tempted to respond with something arch about this, but the OP didn't say anything especially memorable about "Ed" anyway, so I resisted the impulse.

I have now got this off my chest and I feel much better. Y'all feel free to write me off as a ranter and ignore...
 
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