Untitled (doglegs)
A good morning to you—
Quite an interesting day yesterday and not for any reason I could have foreseen, but having to do with whether people could see my shoe in the JPEG of the picture above where I intended the frame to be solid black. (You can't see it any more.) One thing that did occur to me was that although my monitor is calibrated, my eyes might not be—I've noticed in recent years that my dark tone discrimination when driving at night is getting worse and worse. Maybe some of you are seeing the shoe because you've got better eyes than I.
I did want to move on and talk about the "career" of a picture like the Doglegs shot after I've provisionally finished it. It's not out of the woods yet. My own photographs, in my view, have to age, like fine wine or cheese. When something's new, I almost always find it good to look at for a while—I'm pleased with myself and usually think what I've done is rather good.
But that's kneejerk. It's just patting myself on the back. And the passage of time puts paid to it, usually. With many of my pictures the sense of pride and pleasure just wane and wither away—until I wonder what I ever saw in the thing in the first place, or ever. So whether a picture really becomes a picture for me depends in part on its staying power—whether I still find it good to look at after some time has passed, and whether I still like it or remember it.
I'll tell you one thing I'm greatly looking forward to in my new office is getting back to printing again. I like making prints and I like looking at photographs as prints. It makes pictures much easier to live with in my view. The "sorting" process I'm talking about that happens after the picture is finished really happens best, most clearly, with prints.
Have a good day—
Mike
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