I Can See it For You Wholesale

I certainly don’t have any experience relevant to this issue, but man, if I were a world-famous photographer, I would really cringe at the idea of handing crappy shots to a retoucher. Just seems wrong.

Hopefully the retoucher got paid, though, given Leibovitz’s recent litigation problems…

I’ve had to turn a bunch of photos that had no sense of anything technical in to an image worthy of the brand name Leibovitz. Pieces that were supposed to fit had to be horribly distorted to match her post-shoot preproduction mockup made by a low res retoucher on her staff; many times she needed to use a tripod and did not; I also had to match images from different cameras and films together as well. Bottom line is, what is handed to the retoucher is a big pile of doo-doo handled by dozens of her staff—then have to produce images that look impeccable.

The Online Photographer: A Note From Underground.

In the last eighteen hours on flickr, it has been suggested that I am (A) god, (B) dead, or (C), a sentient webscript. Disappointingly, none have suggested that I am all of the above.

Update: I am also food.

Thomas Hawk has pretty much just dissuaded me from ever visiting SF MOMA in the future:

Recently I blogged about my excitement regarding the San Francisco MOMA’s decision to begin allowing photography in their permanent collection after years of maintaining a closed no photography policy. Directly because of this change in policy, I decided to purchase a family membership in order to support the museum, both with my artistic energy and financially. I was excited to begin spending regular time exploring and documenting the museum.

Unfortunately, I should have known better than to really believe that the San Francisco MOMA was serious about opening up the art and architecture entrusted to them to the general public.

Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection