Let’s burn Ken Rockwell at the stake!
Ken Rockwell is the photographer that “real” photographers love to hate.
Just consider a few of the things that have been written about him on the web recently:
Ken Rockwell doesn’t color correct. He adjusts your world to match his.
Ken Rockwell is a freaking moron.
His writing skills are that of a 12 year old.
Ken Rockwell is about as amusing as Daffy Duck on Crystal Meth …
And that is the stuff that’s printable in a family-friendly website.
What on Earth, you may wonder, could anyone do to so infuriate the high priests of photography?
That’s easy. Ken doesn’t subscribe to the dogma of the Church of Photography, whose creed begins “I believe in technical purity” and whose 10 Commandments were written down by St. Ansel when he dictated the Zone System onto silver halide tablets at the beginning of photographic time.
I find Rockwell amusing and occasionally compelling. He’s more interested in actual photography than most writers of photo websites. Best of all, he doesn’t take himself seriously. That’s why all the photographic Pharisees out there would like to have his head on a spear.
Shoot JPEG’s instead of RAW? Heresy!
Talk about how wonderful an entry level camera like the Nikon D40 is? He must be delusional.
And make money by running a popular photo website? Let’s burn him at the stake.
I’ll cut to the chase on the moneymaking issue here. Photography magazines used to look slimy because they were so much in thrall to the sellers of photographic equipment. Seldom did any magazine reviewer run into a camera he didn’t like. (And, yes, they were just about all guys. I can’t think of a woman reviewer right now off the top of my head…)
So along comes the World Wide Web to save us from the corrupt Main Stream Media.
And then, surprise! It turns out the web is even more corrupt than any newspaper or magazine ever dreamed of being.
That’s because most blogs don’t have any kind of diversified advertising base. Newspapers could afford to offend an individual advertiser because they have lots of other ones in different areas.
But websites: Even the big ones depend heavily — really, really heavily — on commissions from click through purchases at the big photo mail-order companies like B&H and Adorama. They also depend mightily on the good graces of camera manufacturers to send review copies of equipment.
As a result, there are very few photo websites that are about anything but buying expensive photographic gear. Photo.net, good in the beginning, has drifted into endless, medieval-sounding discussions of pixel quality and megabytes. Luminous Landscape is no longer about landscape, but simply about really expensive cameras. I could go on: dpreview.com, anyone?
About the only site that deals with photography much at all is The Online Photographer, a rarity.
And then there’s Ken Rockwell.
Rockwell manages to have it both ways. He is unabashed about pimping for the camera companies, pointing out that he supports his growing family every time someone buys a camera through a link on his site.
And he, too, finds very few cameras out there to dislike.
But buried in all the exuberance is a lot of common sense.
Last week he posted a fabulously good essay titled “The Secret: What Makes a Great Photo.”
In it, he doesn’t talk about Canons and Nikons or Leicas and Hasselblads.
Instead he jumps right in with one of the most important factors in a photograph: the value structure that serves as its foundation.
“Every image needs strong underlying compositional order so that it grabs the eye from a hundred feet away,” he says. He’s dead right.
From there he moves into refining composition, pointing out along the way that the subject of the photograph is often its least important attribute.
It’s an excellent guide to photography, one written by a person with a good, educated eye. Read it, absorb its advice, and your photography will improve much more than it ever will from buying a new camera.
photo: Burning man courtesy dr_evil at morguefile.com
(The photo of Ken Rockwell that orignally appeared here has been removed at his insistence.)
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