I started off with b&w film, Pentax K1000 at school and a book to write down f stop and shutter speed for every exposure and away I went wandering through high school for a day or 2. Then dark room and spooled off the film to cannister to develop. Once developed, study each frame and choose which ones I would expose onto photographic paper and do test strips and finally pick the exposure I wanted. What a process!! What felt like 30 min in a dark room was 2 hours or more! I still have an old Nikon FG 20 and only recently during covid, sold my Bronica medium format, which now, I want to get another.
This is an excellent video. This discussion about what an illustrator is and what a photographer is is almost the same as what a visdev illustrator for cinema is. There are tiers of illustrators in regards to skill and the higher you go in illustration, the more your illustrations need to come from something outside of representational aspects. It becomes poetry and drama and artistic reflex which is then translated to visuals that enable a more animated/truer depiction of whatever representational aspect exists in the composition (not abstract design). Great video.
Excellent stuff Justin, always enjoy your point of view. I agree completely, being able to realize a scene in the moment it is happening and having the tools and the mind to capture the event is super hard and can only benefit the filmmaker\cinematographer! If your ever in Az give a holler i'm Tucson stylin. Cheers!
Yes! Ive been a photographer for a while but have only gotten into filmmaking recently. I definitely see the correlation between photography and cinematography! Having the same approach honestly.
Love Winogrand. You include compelling quotes of his. I certainly think you could make an argument that he valued effortless manipulation of the camera in his work. Footage of his street technique looks like a magic trick. You lose me when interpreting his angst against SLRs as some kind of skill issue though. What he's talking about is his own dogma. He has defined for himself what a photographer should be, because he wants to make a certain kind of art and values a certain kind of art. It might be worth coming to terms with his view on the "technician" vs "photographer" and what he really means there. Personally, his view does not align with mine. Using "Illustrator" in a pejorative manner is a hint. Illustration arguably has more in common with cinema that it does the kind of street photography Garry was doing, and so when I see his great work and hear these kinds of quotes I think there's a certain amount of interpretation that needs to happen and an honesty about the differences inherent in the various forms of art and storytelling.
idk, i think Winogrand was pretty straightforward in his way of thinking and speaking. To me it made sense the way i interpreted it, certainly as me being a working cinematographer for over 7 years before i was doing street photography. I thought it was pretty clear the differences he was making, he literally mentions how the newer SLR's are influencing the images the photographers were making. He was specifically talking about how being able to see the bokeh, and see what was going in and out of focus, was influencing the images that were being created when the SLR's were coming out. And that's what everyone suffers from today, IN MY OPINION. One of the greatest things about the rangefinder, TO ME, is not being able to see what the lens is seeing. And to me that's the point of what Winogrand was talking about. A great photographer doesn't need to be influenced by the technology to make a great photo. If the photographer himself is skilled by just his eye, then the photo will reflect that, he doesnt need to rely on the tools to make his art great. I'm pretty sure that's exactly what he was saying. But you should watch the entire episode, the video I pulled the clip from, it's really good.