Bob Keefer
Is a writer and photographer who lives in rural Oregon. This is an informal blog with no particular purpose other than to give myself something to do with some of the welter of photographs I take each day.
For more considered work, see my hand-colored photography at BobKeeferPhoto.com.
You can email me at bob/at/bkpix.com.
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Tag Archives: art
The Rodriguez photo, improved…..
Someone out there, inspired by the essential cheesiness of the Jose Rodriguez wolf-jumping photo, fixed it up! It’s now got all the elements that the original, New Agey, made-to-be-an-inspirational-poster “nature” shot lacked: A full moon and two more wolves!
Let’s hope the benighted contest judges take notice….
Shabby judgment
The news is out that Spanish wildlife photographer Jose Luis Rodriguez has been stripped of his first place title and £10,000 award by judges in the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest run by the British Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife Magazine.
This is a sad state of affairs on so very many levels.
According to articles published yesterday, the judges said it was “likely” that Rodriguez used a tame wolf for the dramatic photo, titled “Storybook Wolf,” in violation of contest rules. Other photographers had complained that the wolf strongly resembled a tame wolf named Ossian who lives at Canada Real, a wildlife preserve near Madrid. And you can find a photo on the web taken at the preserve that vaguely resembles the background of the winning shot.
Rodriguez, though, strongly denies any impropriety. He has specialized in just this kind of highly lit nature photography for years.
The weird thing is that neither side has provided any concrete evidence to support their cases.
The contest judges have branded Rodriguez a pariah in the nature photography community and banned him from their contest for life based on something they call “likely” without offering specific evidence.
Rodriguez, for his part, has offered no specifics to substantiate the authenticity of his photo.
But the weirdest thing is, the winning photograph is awful. Whether “real” or staged, it’s utterly cheesy, the kind of demented nature porn that has come to dominate the nature photography market around the world. Who cares if it’s a picture of Ossian? It’s boring, overwrought and melodramatic.The judges knew this when they picked it, referring to its “fairy tale” qualities.
The judges should be fired, both for choosing the photograph in the first place and then for their handling of the complaints about it.
photo: Storybook Wolf, courtesy NHM/BBC
Ken Rockwell update: Not that much of a sense of humor, after all
Well, I got a voice mail from Ken himself just now. He sounded friendly but called for only one reason: To demand that I not use his photograph on my blog.
To which I say, are you kidding?
“I wouldn’t steal your work,” his voice mail message said. “And you may not use my work without authorization.”
Relax, Ken.
First off, you can post all the Web-sized photos taken from my website that you want. I don’t consider it stealing.
Second, I’ve already taken your photo off my site.
Third, I guess I need to take back all those kind things I said about you. What an oddly ungenerous response to a flattering post.
Well, there you go.
photo: Clown image courtesy blackpixel at morguefile.com
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.)
Amazonia
I got a sneak preview this morning of the “Amazonia” photography exhibit that opens January 17 at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.
The show contains about 60 large color inkjet prints of film images — yes, film! — shot over the last six years in the Amazon headwaters by National Geographic photographer Sam Abell and Danish wildlife photographer Torben Ulrik Nissen.
It’s quite a show. What I like best is that Abell and Nissen declined to shoot the usual wildlife pictures we’ve all come to expect. There are no glowing, golden-hour portraits of beautiful big animals. There are no close-ups of animals, period, with the possible exception of a big snake (a boa?) that they nearly stepped on before being alerted by their guide.
I’ve complained in the past about the dismal, dishonest state of nature photography today.
This show does it right, with photographs that are quiet and engaging.
photo: Three toed sloth with baby. By Sam Abell