a bit short on composition, this picture still strikes me. it's the result of a 160 picture downtown walk with the camera set to monochrome and a y2 yellow filter stuck to the end of my larger lens. i made rules for that walk in hopes they would illuminate. as i mentioned a few posts back, there's no scientific reason to set a digital to monochrome when photoshop (arguably but still most often) does a better job making things b&w. but then there's no good reason, scientifically, that a sonnet is a sonnet, but it is from within the rules of arbitrary structure that brilliance occasionally emerges, one that perhaps would have remained unknown were it not for the imposed structure that teased it out of the skull.

umm, again, to be perfectly clear, i don't utterly adore this photograph, nor do i compare it to a well executed sonnet. rather, i like elements of it, and maybe it's just the first step toward some measure of brilliance in the future. what i wanted to explore most was how to get the results from the y2 filter that i used to get in the application i originally bought it for, my beloved canon elan II 35mm using kodak's amazing c41 process 400 speed black and white print film, now in its BW400CN incarnation. hella film, man, hella film.

traditional use of a median yellow filter in b&w is to darken skies and increase cloud contrast. and yeah, it does do that. but what i also find one does is adds drama and contrast to everyday scenes, especially where shadow, midtone and highlight are getting all busy in the frame in some detail.

monochrome on a digital bw400cn is not, as often for better as for worse. thus, my adventure the other day was simply shooting a wide variety of scenes to discover how best to use a y2 on a particular body/lens set up in this particular modern era. lots of misses, a few hits, the best of which, though less than compellingly composed, what with lots of heavy black up one corner, is above. i'm half-tempted to ps the starship enterprise into that quadrant, but i have so far resisted.

and then there's the whole question of filters at all in this modern age of digital manipulation; even before reaching ps, i have the option of adding any number of filters and combinations thereof in camera, that is to say, not in secret but actually in the camera itself, as either a shooting mode or an afterthought. and besides, the use of a filter with an dslr set to monochrome hardly gives a hint through the eyepiece at the moment of exposure as to what the resulting photograph might be like, save you can be certain it's not going to come out all pissy yellow and slightly supernova the way it appears, as in the case of a y2. obvious exceptions here would be the too oft used and yet still undervalued polarizer varieties, infrared filters, which are a bitch, especially with digital, and yet still so tasty when done right, and neutral density filters, one of which is on my short list to add to my kit.

so where was i going with this? oh yeah, whenever the artist in you fails, it's time to get all technical. "how many megapixels?" "yes, i've heard that lens is very sharp, but not so much when you start to close it down." "i only use denatured virgin spruce wood alcohol i bought from a defunct laboratory supply in 1992 to clean my lenses." "iso 200? dude, that'll look like shit when you blow it up to the size of a house."

meanwhile, some six year old with a circa 1976 polaroid sx-70 is shooting your proverbial ass off.

but let's not fault the technical aspect, it is important, afterall. came up with an analogy the other day.

right now, i'm typing at you in macromedia's dreamweaver, as close to wysiwyg as you're ever apt to find in a web editor. in the olden times, you know, the 90s, i did everything html with a plain text editor. fact is, i know html upside-down, sideways, and every other which way html can be. but i use dw. dw allows me to produce without have to mess about with angle brackets. and 95% of the time, dw does just fine, maybe even cleaner than i'd do all plain text editor, certainly better formatted. the other 5%, dw fucks it up, and that's when my old editor skills really shine; what might take an hour or beyond forever to fix in a wysiwyg editor i can fix in seconds by editing the raw html. in photography, it's that 5% that separates a sometimes smart boy like me from those girls who really know what they're doing with a camera. i'm working pretty hard on getting that down to 3%.

but seriously, it's that 5% that separates the pros from the lucky shooters. another analogy, not mine, that comes to mind is something i read once by some famous poet whose name forever escapes me. he/she said something along the lines of, "every person has two good poems in them." i've seen the evidence, i believe it. but two poems does not a career as a poet make however brilliant those two were, and you know those two were surrounded by pages and pages of crap. if poetry could ever be considered a career save for the verismall number of the chosen few who somehow were recognised within a century of death. same goes for photographs. talent is a big thing, even so, few with talent ever get anywhere without lots of hard work, mistakes, critical hardships and an insane devotion towards self-promotion.

or, as a photographer, you can get good enough to shoot for the local newspaper or perhaps work at the photo "studio" at walmart, the poetic equivalent of writing greeting cards. that said, ansel adams whored himself regularly as such, yet still found time to make many photographs which to this day know few equals, helped define the then still-nascent art and the science thereof, and to this day does still for millions of budding artists decades after his death, regardless of the rapid learning curve provided by digital photography.

the other day i stumbled across a story about a newswire and sometime national geographic photographer who used exclusively the same camera i've been shooting the last two years and it's predecessor and descendant. advanced cameras maybe, and used by a pro, but still just point-and-shoots, and while as fast as any in their class, slow as the first toast of the morning. in the article, he discusses many of the ways he overcame their technical shortcomings, but far and away their biggest shortcoming was the reaction from other members of the press and his subjects to point and shoots around his neck. but what stands out are his actual photos, honestly for those he'd taken with my exact point and shoot i had to fetch mine from the shelf and hold it in my hands. it was a great big case of he-did-that-with-this? read, look, be amazed, cry; you're currently shooting a much better camera than he's using.

a gooder camera in the hands of a gooder artist will close to always make gooder quality images. but you can carry seven c5060s for the same weight and space of two eos-1D mark IIs bodies and two bright lenses, and that in and of itself, as you'll know if you've ever spent a day with one or two big cameras adventuring is a huge shortcoming of all of the most technically proficient cameras. and point and shoots, along with being more far more agile when shooting in a warzone, as the artist noted, with their noises turned off shoot silently so no subject need be aware.

chunky post. i've done my best to edit, but it still doesn't read quite so well. whatever, this is my blog and not the new yorker, and thank goodness for that.

sasha involver on the sr80 headphones, even after close to two years i still am amazed every time i slap these cans around my head. anyone buy a pair on my recommendation besides braeden? dude(s), you're missing out on heaven. time to sink into sleep. be excellent to each other. my thoughts these last weeks when about to fall asleep have been about the whole lebanon thing. no matter how hard i try, i can't figure out who's in the right. i have come to the conclusion that everyone is wrong.