Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2007/02/10
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]On Feb 10, 2007, at 10:10 AM, Phillipe wrote: > (Tina) I almost always choose your wider crops because they include > social > information every time, which is less apparent in the crops. > And I do think that for these kind of photos, the social environment > is necessary. Phillipe, You raise an interesting point about the balance between photography as art and photography as an information source. Karen Nakamura teaches a course on Photoethnography at Yale which uses photographs as a means of presenting cultural and social information. In her web site she advocates the use of wide angle lenses as a way of including as much relevant information about the scene as possible. I once had an editor who felt the same way. He viewed the camera as the reader's surrogate eyeball and wanted the picture to show just what a viewer would see if standing in the same position as the photographer. On the other hand most photographers who aspire to creating images of artistic significance suggest concentrating and eliminating extraneous and distracting detail. In movies, the close crop has more emotional impact than the wide screen panorama. I have no answer. Talk amongst yourselves - - Larry Z