Never noticed this thread before. A lot of fun. And like many, makes me want to take the key out of the camera cupboard and leave it on the shelf. I miss Juan Valdenboro. He was right to struggle in getting the gist of this.
Instagram generates strong cliche themes - silhouetted figure in generous, tiny, negative space. Primary colours, main subject centered. Etc etc. It gets to the point where you’ll be so overloaded you’ll be wearily disparaging of some photos which in another context you’d say were excellent.
Looking at medium format on Flickr the rate of fine shots in black and white with Rolleiflex seems to be so much higher than with a Hasseblad: a sharp perfect fence and a clump of trees flanking some indifferent building, very sharp, seems only to serve the purpose of confirming, that yeah, I actually do have a Hasselblad.
Same with macro of insects and flowers. Either the technical achievement itself offers some revelation, eg a focus stacked image, or verging on nano detail, or a clever composition extracted from nature, or it’s banal. And the technical achievement has to be near perfect. I’ve tried this. A bee hovering near a cherry blossom, not quite perfectly focused. Why? I’ve deleted more of these types of shot than any other. With flowers I’m beginning to see that I want to get some mystery or emotion, or even motion itself into it. Mapplethorpe’s flowers are special. Most others are not.
Every photograph of something which only shows what that looked like photographed is a contender for this thread here, and the risk of showing one probably goes up if you’ve got a Leica or a Hasselblad. I remember photo.net there was a regular bunch ooing and aghing about each other‘s Leica shots. I just didn’t get it. Of course I hadn’t yet been schooled here by so many fine photographers. RFF is unique I reckon. The Gallery and weekly Gallery picks and Random Gallery picks reveal so much gold.
And I would claim that at least more than 50% of my bicycle shots held some extra factor justifying me not deleting them. I never photographed a chained up one, I swear. Or maybe one, with a bicycle, not of a bicycle, with the Hexar. It was still a good shot.
Sorry to spoil the Feng Shui of the thread.
