I Can See it For You Wholesale

Score! Been looking for a copy of this for ages.

Don’t ask me to tell you how much I paid for it. I bought it from the fourth-floor Moe’s sanctum sanctorum, where when you buy a book, they print you out an invoice, not a receipt. They also have a pretty hard time making change and zipping flies. Seriously, it’s a whole different universe of books. : )

Minor White is a photographer who really interests me, in part because he’s one of the greats of all time, in part because he’s a photographer who is strongly interested in the connection between photography and modes of religious experience, and in part because he is frequently identified as a “Zen” photographer, which I’m pretty sure is hogwash. (Based on everything I’ve read by and about him, he is defined far more by the I-Though modality of Western mysticism than he is by Zen, although he was certainly aware of Zen and had an interest in it.)

Anywho, this makes White interesting and an interesting problem, but finding primary or even secondary material on him can be a bit tricky, so I’m always happy when I my hands on more of the puzzle.

Librarything Entry

It isn’t easy for me to compose with the full frame. There are a lot of reasons for this. Some are basically ineluctable. My cameras don’t have 100% viewfinder coverage, and I wear glasses, meaning that it’s sometimes hard for me to see the entire viewfinder at once in the first place. I also shoot a lot of birds, and it’s very hard to fill a whole frame with a bird unless the bird is domesticated, taxidermied, or drugged. And when it comes to the black and white shooting I did for my class, I ran into trouble when I did fill the frame, because I was printing 35mm frames on 8×10 paper.

But some of my problems with full-frame composition have to do more with how I think and see than the physical and technological constraints placed on me by my body and my materials. I usually shoot handheld in a rapid-fire fashion, so that I can keep moving, avoid attracting attention from potential muggers, and maintain my flow-stateish condition of just seeing and shooting. Because of this, I’ve developed a habit of shooting to fill a comparatively small portion of the frame and then cropping rather severely in post-processing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this — I’m not sympathetic to the anti-cropping purists — but it does create possible issues of resolution.

This image was a case in which I could tell immediately that it was important that I determine my composition ahead of time. There are many compositional elements, and the whole ensemble was required for the image to work. It was critical that I include everything in the frame, and because of the peculiar shape of the overall composition, and the physical dimensions involved, it was also critical that I make sure everything was already in its place at the moment of capture.

So, I took some extra time, even though it meant briefly obstructing this driveway. I’m glad I did, too, because the first several versions of this shot — taken from a whole different angle — were basically unusable. In fact, it was only after I lost my game of chicken with one of the cars trying to use the driveway that this angle occurred to me. : )

via The Online Photographer